The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
The past few years has also had Solar continuing to decrease in price so its increasingly going to be the primary choice. On top of that battery prices have been plummeting too so that now Solar + battery is cheaper than other options like Nuclear and especially Gas. Most of the EU will be running on Wind and Solar in the coming years, its a change that is now rapidly occuring based entirely on the rare economics. Solar and Wind are half the price of anything else.
Not most of EU but geographically large and diverse and low-latitude countries will. Spain has winds from three different sea areas and is known sunny, so they are in a good position.
> Damian Cortinas, chair of ENTSO-E’s board, told the Financial Times that “the issue is not about renewables” but about the grid’s ability to manage “fast voltage variations” that can destabilise the system. Unusual oscillations triggered a cascade of plant disconnections, and grid managers lost control. The real lesson is not that Spain has gone too far on wind and solar,
YES THEY DID, they went as far as making nuclear power plants shut down due to negative prices so their reliable stable power wasn't a pacemaker anymore and it blew up in their faces. And this was a topic on TV shows with several experts alerting of this FOR MONTHS before the blackout.
Sure, there are new technologies to stabilize solar and wind's fluctuating outputs but they are no just plug and play. Those are very, very complex systems that take years to set up properly. While there are nuclear power plants are just there collecting dust because the EU pressured Spain to make them unprofitable to maintain so they would be shut down.
Luckily, the US-Israel-Iran war made the EU leadership turn and now they want nuclear. I hope it's not too late.
No that's not the case:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...I agree with you on a few points:
1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.
2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.
When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.
I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.
Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.
I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.
Old power station turbines can be repurposed as inertia services via a stability market. Example in the UK: https://www.neso.energy/news/deeside-power-station-begins-wo...
Spain's blackout was exactly 1 year ago, no other blackouts since. And the mix of nuclear stayed almost the same.
That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.
No blackout for a year: nothing to see here.
People didn’t do what they said they’d do: No problem with the system it’s the people that didn’t do what they said they would do.