Solar and batteries aren't consumables, so they're not particularly vulnerable to supply chain disruption. If we lose our supply of batteries, we'll have ~10 years or so to find an alternate supply. We won't be able to do new installations during the disruption, but existing installations don't stop working.
Unlike a fossil plant when the supply of fuel is disrupted.
They will, albeit slowly.
What's the use in turbines? Most generators associated with turbines don't use permanent magnets.
Ukraine is an excellent example of why centralizing your grid energy source is a bad plan... but not just for war situations. If you have an agile, adaptable modular grid you can recover for any form of disaster (natural or man made) very quickly and cheaply.
I really feel this is an under valued aspect of electrification and greening of the power sources we use.
With fossil power plants, the bigger plants were more efficient. This lead to centralization. We now find ourselves in a situation where you can end up with a lot of small/local generation.
What happened in Ukraine can probably happen in almost every developed country today as this was all built/planned in a different time.
It's a sub 15 minute actual grid engineering for lay public explainer video (I know, I'm not a video fan either)
A better duller title might be: How Australia's Grid is being adapted to Solar Boom
00:00 Introduction
01:23 The Problem with Too Much Solar
03:29 Batteries Change the Economics
05:40 What the Grid Actually Needs
07:04 A Cautionary Tale – The 2025 Iberian Blackout
08:21 Australia’s Secret Weapon – Experience with Weak Grids
10:08 The Genius Technical Fix – Grid-Forming Inverters
12:25 The Perfect Partner - Batteries
12:58 From Mechanical to Software-Defined Stability
13:42 Conclusion – Fixing the Grid Before It Breaks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qavFbOpt4jABut yes, grid following alone does not provided the required stability - synthetic inertia etc needed
With enough voltage range that wouldn't even need the tricky loops of voltage regulation common in incandescent-targeted legacy AC grids.
It looked to me that regulators wanted to make solar the scapegoat for political reasons.
The report indicates to me that different operators were using a random monkey theory to make changes until the grid stabilised (they clearly didn't have a handle on the root cause of the instabilities). The regulator screwed up: they are supposed to engineer the network so it can be stable (even in the face of political pressure).