Confronted by an unprecedented and alarming situation, it can be hard to resist simplistic explanations.
Blaming thunder and lightning on warring gods, as the ancients did, misses the real reason: that clouds can build up electrical voltages thousands of times higher than you would find in a power line.
It is a similar situation with the problems that can occur in power lines themselves. When Spain’s grid experienced a massive blackout in April, the knee-jerk response — that the country’s rapid buildout of renewable energy was responsible — had the virtue of a clear narrative and a ready cast of stock characters.
Illustration: Yusha
The heroes were hard-headed realists at think tanks and on social media, telling the unpalatable truth that the transition to clean energy has to slow down. The villains were idealistic environmentalists and bamboozled local officials, whose good intentions would drive us all to a world of outages and poverty.
“Net zero blamed for Europe’s biggest power cut,” the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing British newspaper, wrote the day after the event. “It’s Okay to Notice When Wind and Solar Fail,” the Breakthrough Institute, a US think tank, added a few days later.
There is just one problem with that picture: It was not true, as reports last week from Spain’s grid operator and an official commission of inquiry detailed.
To the Mackinac Center, a US free-market think tank, Spain’s high share of wind and solar had made the system vulnerable and should be limited to about 40 percent of generation. However, the Spanish government inquiry and the grid operator Red Electrica said this was not the case.
What actually happened was that a minor instability, possibly caused by a solar farm, spiraled into a bigger problem when conventional generators (most of them gas-fired) failed to supply the grid-balancing services they paid for.
That in turn caused swaths of power plants to disconnect to protect themselves, similar to what happens in your home when the fuse box trips. Fixing this would largely be a matter of changing regulations and giving renewable generators a bigger role in grid balancing, the inquiry recommended.
Believe it or not, a strikingly similar set of events occurred on the other side of the world nine years ago. A series of minor issues in the state of South Australia triggered a cascade of events that led the entire grid to fall over for eight hours in September 2016, as opposed to the 19 hours in Spain.
The heroes and villains back then were the same: I remember being told by one of the state’s biggest power consumers that grid stability would be impossible unless the share of renewables was wound back. The opposite has happened.
Back in 2016, wind and solar comprised about 42 percent of the South Australian grid, strikingly similar to the 43 percent in Spain last year. However, in the most recent 12-month period, that share rose to 75 percent. Far from being halted by the 2016 blackout, the state’s energy transition has only accelerated.
Integrating vastly more wind and solar proved far more straightforward than the doomsayers predicted. Elon Musk built what was then the world’s largest battery at a wind farm 200km north of the state capital, Adelaide, helping to provide the stabilization services normally supplied by fossil generators.
A change to the settings that wind turbines use to protect themselves from power surges did another slice of the work. Updating regulatory rulebooks and allowing grid managers more freedom to step in and fix abnormal fluctuations fixed most of the rest.
Many of the anti-renewables arguments in Spain and South Australia said that the blackouts were caused by a lack of inertia, a characteristic of large conventional generators that helps maintain stability, and that wind and solar are not well-equipped to provide. That is a red herring.
“The incident was not caused by an inertia problem,” Red Electrica bluntly concluded last week. Far from adding conventional generators since 2016 to provide extra inertia, South Australia has found that it can actually afford to have fewer connected.
Perhaps this has all come at the expense of system stability? Not so, said Andrew Bills, chief executive officer of SA Power Networks, the South Australian electricity distributor.
“The oversimplification of the energy debate has led to this misconception that it’s one thing versus the other,” he told me. “That’s not right.”
To Bills, the major threats to reliability now are not to do with integrating rooftop solar, which routinely powers the entire state during the middle of the day, but more humdrum issues such as power lines getting shorted out by roosting bats and falling eucalyptus branches.
With apps allowing householders to determine their hour-to-hour energy usage, there is more than enough capacity already within the system to manage a cleaner grid without problems of affordability or stability.
To non-experts, the solutions proposed by Spain’s government last week might seem perplexingly minor compared with the scale of the April blackout, full of baffling jargon about “voltage control” and “reactive power.” Such confusion is fertile ground for misinformation, even when it rests on absurd assumptions — for instance, that Spain’s regulators, politicians, grid managers and engineers are so in thrall to net zero religion that they are prepared to risk the stability of the power system for the sake of their beliefs.
South Australia’s example should serve as evidence that such conspiracy theories are spurious. Grids shifting to a new source of generation might occasionally trip, but the effects have always been short-lived and easily fixed. The future is already here, and it is clean.
David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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