What is a black start of the power grid?

I mean in theory that research involves understanding how best to layer the rocks to prevent erosion, shifting or flooding of the foundation of a new section of the factory.

We were taught the basic physics of the Newcomen engine in school as part of history on the industrial revolution, but nothing about geo-engineering for land reclamation.

with the mods: how do you start that process at all?

the steam engine is the only (early) way to produce electricity, and the pump needs electric, and the steam engine needss water

(I tried googling for the mod but came up short)

> (*) In the base game the water pumps magically work without needing electric power

The bigger magic: hand crafted belts work for transporting goods reliably over long distance without any energy supply. Quite some engineering there.

In the games where I've reserved spare coal capacity, I kept burning loaders there, so if there is an issue with the main coal line, it can restart.

There's a game called Satisfactory that I've played that is kind of similar. When I played, there was no way to automated those breakers so I'd cut the lines to my power grid when I had an outage. I'd then have to fire up my biofuel generators to kick start everything including the coal miners. lol. Loved that game.

You did need to power the water pumps and it sucked depending on the distance.

My initial setup is to use burner inserters (which don't need an electrical connection to move) to feed the boilers, combined with priority splitters so that the ore smelters only get whatever coal the power doesn't get. Combined with overprovisioning of steam power, it means that the factory will start shutting down before the power grid gets overheated to the point that it can't keep itself up.

Later, I move to nuclear power, where fuel use is such that even glacial low-power inserters can keep the facilities fed through a power spiral. Although my massive 12-reactor facility did rely on pumps to keep the steam moving fast enough through my flowmeter to regulate power... but when you have a 12 reactor powerplant, power death spirals take long enough to occur that you will have ample time to fix them before things start needing black start.

Unrelated but fun fact: some heavy duty air-brake trucks can also use compressed air to start the engine, but what if your tank is flat? You can hook up one of the tires and use that to start the engine! Really neat.

Also, many trucks have both an electric starter and an air starter. I one day aspire to those kind of redundancies in a vehicle I own.

Sounds like the hand crank would be better as bicycle pedals

Very much reminds me of the stories of my dad how they'd have to start really big bulldozers back in the day of draining german marshes. You'd first hand-crank a small generator to fill up a small battery for the electric starter motor. Once the battery is sufficiently full, you'd engage the starter motor, which in turn spins up a flywheel at higher torque than the crank could. Once that flywheel was up to a certain amount of speed and momentum, you'd engage that with the main crankshaft of the big old engine and hope it had enough power to push the big engine through one or two strokes. That's what it needed to start running on its own. Otherwise you'd have to start over.

Big machines and complex startup machines are surprisingly fascinating.

I don't get why you need to hand pump a bunch of air just to start a small generator/air compressor when I can pull a rip cord and have 10kw of power in seconds and use that to bootstrap the remainder of this startup process.

It would seem you only need to do a bunch of pumping to startup a larger engine where the smaller starter/pony motor is not working. I wouldn't describe such an engine as 'small' though.

So if I'm understanding the description above correctly, the chain is:

  turn crank -> bootstrapping air compressor -> air tank 1 -> 1.5MW emergency generator -> bigger air compressor -> air tank 2 -> 7MW main generators

Pretty rube goldbergian.

Here's an interesting parallel: the process that a computer goes through when it booted is itself an incredibly complex, intricate, and rube goldbergian process. Unlike a power station black start, this process happens completely automatically every day when someone turns a computer on, yet it is no less rube goldbergian and in many ways probably more so.

The boot processes of computers have always fascinated me for this reason, and I suspect black start processes fascinate me for much the same reason. It's not unlike why people enjoy watching videos of rube goldbergian contraptions.

It is similar how planes starts. First small turbine engine (APU) starts. When APU fails to start, they use specialized airport cars with compressed air. Then the turbine helps to start first main engine. Then the main engine helps to start second main engine. Repeat until all main engines are started. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzhdxSsoT0g)

This is the main problem with a black start; you never get a chance to test it until you're in a black start scenario.

And since it is never tested, it's almost guaranteed to fail in some unexpected way.

And since that's the case, almost anything is better then getting yourself into a black start scenario, including shedding load in any possible way.

Which leads to it never being tested, and more things being unknowingly broken.

The first thing that comes to mind is ENTSO-E's Power Flow Tool. It had a number of simulations of Europe's power grid with typical demand scenario's, prompting you to take care of grid balancing when a power line suddenly failed during peak load.

Unfortunately I just discovered that they removed it from their website somewhere this year. I've asked them to restore it. For now you can play with this copy in the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20220124003709/https://www.entso...

The generators have safety systems in place when the grid tied frequency deviates too much from 50 or 60HZ - they then "trip" and disconnect themselves from the grid to prevent damage.

Powering them down to a complete stop is a rather long process taking hours.

One silly technician left a spanner in one turbine after maintenance, and it took about 2 years for a replacement part to be installed.

Black start is just that: powering up the whole grid from blackout. It requires stuff you might not think of like the gas turbine stations need a big spark to light the flame so a diesel generator isn't enough if the station breaker is open, you need a hv DC transformer.

Not all power plants can self-feed the power they need to keep generators working. Often this is a diesel generator on the plant because the only other source of power is 20MW generators that simply can't be tuned down enough to handle the few kilowatts it takes to keep the generators turning.

Almost all plants will trip from the grid if it gets bad and remain idling for some time. But if that happens, the grid is still dark and the black start generators are the best equipped to bootstrap the grid. You can't start with the big generators too, so you can initially only bring in small plants until the grid capacity is big enough to not trip out when the big generators come online in a wrong way.

There is a good chance that by the time the grid is stable, atleast some power plants will have had to shutdown entirely and spin back up from a black start with only external power.

Nukes will shut down in blackout conditions because of the two independent power feed safety requirement. You *really* do not want your nuke plant to run out of power (that *will* Fukushima) so when the number of available sources drops too low they shut down so as to reduce the damage should they actually go dark.

It's frustrating that the article doesn't mention what remaining power plants can restart the grid with this power station gone.

We now up to Stage 6 as we call it.

I will have no power from 6pm until 8:30pm and then again from 10pm until midnight.

Fortunately, we got a gas cooker/inverter for my ONT/Router/WiFi.

SA is screwed. Stage 6+ load shedding on the reg means cable theft / looting is skyrocketing; there's not going to be any coming back from that.

Onsite solar and storage is the big issue. That's why most solar plants come with a peaker gas plant.

It's cheaper to provide additional demand via fossil fuels than to rely on storage solutions. You need a huge amount of storage.

Parts of Australia have this. They have so much rooftop solar (and reliable access to plenty of sun) and battery there that effectively centralized power is less and less relevant there and quite a few parts of especially southern Australia effectively run on solar and battery for most of the time. It has indeed made the grid there more reliable; not less. Decentralization is mainly bad for centralized power companies as it erodes their monopoly and forces them to deal with the notion that their power is too expensive most of the time.

Intermittent scarcity and over supply of energy (both are a thing) also leads to different consumption patterns. People valuing cheap energy when it is scarce invest in batteries that they charge when there's a surplus. Others buy at a premium or simply shift when they consume their energy. Demand shaping is also something that can be incentivized financially.

Of course that works great in Australia but other parts of the world have other options like wind, geothermal, hydro, nuclear, etc. Which is why places like Norway and parts of Canada are also mostly running on clean energy at this point.

The key is actually not isolating but interconnecting. Norway is part of a connected grid that spans most of Europe with a market where you can sell energy and buy energy. Norway is an energy exporter at this point and there are plenty of countries importing their power to supplement their own generation when it falls short. That's why countries like Germany are now predominantly wind and solar powered and yet doesn't have blackouts when there's no wind. Like today (gloomy winter day with barely any wind here in Berlin). But there's still plenty of wind elsewhere. Germany imports almost as much power as that it exports each year.

Solar and batteries have some challenges about maintaining frequency and syncrhonization. When using spinning magnets (wind/steam turbines) the frequency is related to power draw. As demand spikes, the generators get slowed down. Effectively the rotational inertia works a bit like a buffer.

Balancing the grid is hence a matter of 'maintaining frequency'. Which makes the frequency very stable.

Solar and batteries are inherently DC. They have converters that take a reference AC signal, and output their energy synchronized to that reference. Incidentally, this makes it difficult to run your house off solar during a black-out, because you lack the reference. Even in smarter converters that don't need a reference to match the frequency, they still need a reference to synchronize the phase.

When we move to more batteries and solar for generation, that will put more strain on the spinning-based generation for short-term fluctuations. Less spinning mass means less buffer. At some point, any flaws in behavior of DC converters might start dominating. If they happen to resonate with each other, we might see some weird things.

YES!

Also, I'm absolutely baffled why there's never been a civil defense initiative to get even a small baseline of solar/wind power at nearly every household. Even having just 1kW in every household would be enough to keep running basic communication, refrigeration, heating systems (i.e.. starters & blowers for gas/oil/etc. not elec furnaces), etc. In a major extended blackout situation, this would enable society to be sustainable for weeks to months or even indefinitely, instead of only days in winter as we have now.

Another huge concern is availability of transformers, which hafe a huge lead time. The attack on substations in Moore County NC [0] may be only a very successful test run. I've read reliable reports indicating that not many such attacks in the correct points on the grid could cripple the entire grid, and could also take out many transformers on the way down. Current production rates could take years to replace. Yet it would cost something like $500 million to stockpile them (shelf life is measured in decades), and AFAIK this has not been done. Why? Seems like just ordinary political oversight - it isn't sexy, even though it could be critical.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/12/05/1140775417/north-carolina-sub...

The video is also embedded at the top of the page, front and center and 100% obvious.

Nuclear is not cheap base load, unless you are given the power plant for free.

I could be self sufficient for 10 months a year as a house with solar and batteries for about 10% of the cost of the house, and obviously would be able to opt out of consumption during high demand on the grid.

Yet we still allow new houses to be built without powerwalls or similar storage systems.

Only 50 years away!