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Net Zero’s Spanish Blackout – Special Guest Kathryn Porter
In this episode of Energy Realities, energy expert Kathryn Porter of Watt-Logic joins David Blackmon, Tammy Nemeth, and Stu Turley to break down the Spain and Portugal blackout and what it reveals about the vulnerabilities in Europe’s power grid. From root causes to policy missteps, the panel explores how the push for Net Zero may be impacting grid stability and what needs to change. Don’t miss this episode it’s a must-watch for anyone concerned about the future of energy and grid reliability.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:01 – Introduction
03:15 – What Happened in Spain?
07:50 – Grid Design Problems
12:00 – Cross-Border Dependencies
18:30 – Misaligned Policies vs. Engineering Reality
23:40 – Gas and Dispatchable Power Still Needed
28:30 – Demand-Side Measures and Smart Grids
33:50 – Media Misunderstanding and Energy Illiteracy
38:10 – The Cost of Poor Planning
43:15 – Insights on Resilience Planning
48:50 – Energy Market Design and Capacity Markets
55:40 – Final Thoughts on Net Zero and Realism
01:01:30 – Wrap-Up
Net Zero’s Spanish Blackout – Special Guest Kathryn Porter
Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.
David Blackmon [00:00:11] Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Energy Realities podcast. I am stuck with the duty of trying to moderate this panel discussion this week. Uh, unfortunately, Irina Slav, our regular panelist, uh, is not able to join us today, but as fortune would have it, we have Kathryn Porter as our special guest from watt-logic.com. Kathryn is an energy expert, an analyst based in the UK, who does wonderful work there at WattLogic, and everyone should follow her on X and link up with the website. And Kathryn, how are you today?
Kathryn Porter [00:00:53] I’m very well, thank you. We have a public holiday in the UK today, so we’re kind of enjoying a little bit of spring sunshine.
David Blackmon [00:01:00] Well, that’s wonderful. I heard it was just a massive heat wave there in the UK. That’s what the Met was saying, right?
Kathryn Porter [00:01:06] Well, so last week we had what they call a horror heatwave, which shows you the hyperbole of reporting these days. I’m sorry, I just prepared my little temperature conversion here. We had 26 degrees in London, which was the peak last week.
David Blackmon [00:01:21] That’s about 78. Okay, 79.
Kathryn Porter [00:01:25] Just by contrast we would, our highest temperatures in the summer might get into the low 90s.
David Blackmon [00:01:32] Well, in Texas, we call that fall, late fall weather.
Kathryn Porter [00:01:36] So that’s just to provide some context. It’s a bit unusual to get temperatures like that in May but in the context of the year-round temperature it’s not that dramatic but to look at the reporting you’d think that we were all about to die from the heat and haven’t helped those people in Dubai for example where they might get 50 Celsius and you know it feels like a hairdryer in your face when the minute you set foot outside. But oh no, last week was a or a heat wave. For all of two days. A lot of our temperature sensors are, either they don’t exist, so the temperature data the Met reports is just interpolated data, or they’ve kind of built concrete walls and put generators near to the sensors, the one in Regent’s Park, in St James’ Park in central London they’ve done that, so obviously that massively distorts the readings. So yeah, it was warm in London on Thursday, but it wasn’t like horror heat wave warm.
David Blackmon [00:02:31] Yeah. Well, in the Dallas for Metroplex, um, where I live, we, uh, measure our temperatures on a runway at DFW airport. So it measures a little warm too, right next to it, right next to your runway. Uh, also with us today, uh I should say before we get going is Tammy Nemeth also in the UK. How are you today?
Tammy Nemeth [00:02:54] I’m good. Thanks. Enjoying the holiday
David Blackmon [00:02:57] Yeah, what’s the holiday? What exactly is that?
Tammy Nemeth [00:03:01] Uh it’s it’s a bit the may bank holiday i don’t know Kathryn what what is that just what it is is the maybank holiday
Kathryn Porter [00:03:11] Yeah so, Like the rest of Europe, we used to have our public holidays on what a Catholic, holy days of obligation. But after we became a Protestant country, that was decided it wasn’t really cool to do that. So I’m the sort of The story is that the holidays were determined by some guy at the Bank of England who was a massive cricket fan and this coincided with key days in the cricketing calendar. I don’t know whether that’s really true or not but it’s a nice story anyway. So we actually get two in May, the first and last Mondays of May.
David Blackmon [00:03:42] Yeah, that’s why we need to make Superbowl, the day after Superbowls Sunday, a holiday here in the United States, you know, I’ve been advocating that for decades now, Stu Turley is also with us too. You are in.
Stuart Turley [00:03:55] Oklahoma to this week. I’ll be in Abilene next week
David Blackmon [00:03:59] As always, Stu is shuttling between his various houses in the States and in his Lamborghini and going all over the place.
Stuart Turley [00:04:07] I wouldn’t go that far backhoes don’t go in a Lamborghini
David Blackmon [00:04:14] Well, today we are talking about last week’s major event, the blackouts in Spain and Portugal, uh, which we’re not supposed to blame on wind, but somehow it always keeps coming back to that. Right. I mean, um, Spain’s grid is, you know, it’s overloaded with, with wind energy and solar energy. I shouldn’t say wind it’s mainly solar really. And Portugal has a lot of renewable energy on its grid, it’s interconnected into France. France’s grid, which in turn is interconnected into much of the rest of Europe. And on Monday of last week, the Spanish grid suddenly lost inertia, which I’ll allow Kathryn to explain that concept here in a minute. And went into a pretty significant and very rapid blackout situation, lost 60% of its generation. On the grid within five seconds and came very close to, well, also resulted in major blackouts across Portugal. And some reports claim been pretty close to causing blackouts that could have spread across the continent. Didn’t, luckily, very fortunately that didn’t happen. Initially the grid operator in Spain said it might take up to 10 days to restore power. Very fortunately, that was not the case either. They had most power restored by the next morning. And now everyone’s trying to figure out exactly what happened and why. And of course, you get mixed messages from both governments of both countries and the grid operators. And it seems to me anyway, with my conspiracy minded thought process that there’s been a lot of… Defuscation and blame deflecting among other officials in both of those countries and they don’t really want to talk about what really caused everything to happen. And fortunately, Kathryn is here with her perspective on it, which is a lot more expert than mine. So Kathryn, why did we have major blackouts in Spain and Portugal last week?
Kathryn Porter [00:06:29] And so I should also add to that, that it did affect the southern the southwestern corner of France as well. They had a brief outage there. But as for that spreading across Europe, although there were some effects felt more broadly, France actually has a very high inertia system because they primarily have nuclear and hydro. And so the chances of a blackout spreading across Europe from Iberia via France is actually really low. Because the French grid is very strong and so that was never really that likely and actually we saw that the impact on France was extremely limited it was very contained and power was restored to that region extremely quickly which really highlights the importance of inertia on the grid. Now we don’t actually know the original cause I think this idea of a temperature atmospheric temperature oscillation that the Portuguese one of the Portuguese energy companies. Postulated, I don’t think any of you really believes that, and in fact that’s subsequently been attributed to a misreporting by a Reuters journalist, and perhaps you misunderstood. Oh, that never happens, that couldn’t be the case, could it? Well, it’s very difficult to see how, there was nothing particularly unusual about the weather in Iberia, it would have to be an extremely localized and significant air temperature fluctuation, and really we’re scratching our heads thinking about how that could happen. I think there are two leading theories in terms of what caused the initial fault. One is that there was just some sort of really mundane grid fault, there was some fire reported in the area, in the region where the fault is believed to have occurred, and smoke can obviously affect the air resistance around the power lines and cause walking. And if that would be enough to trip off the power line, if you lose a couple of major circuits, then that would do it in a low inertia system. The other, I think, slightly less likely hypothesis is that you are getting inverter-based oscillations where some small voltage fluctuations are effectively bouncing between inverters and being magnified on each occasion, setting up this big oscillation. Now, that does happen. We have. That going on in Scotland really on an ongoing basis because Scottish inertia is now very low since they closed Longana, which was their big coal power station. National Grid is in the, well, at least so as we call it now, is managing to contain that. But, you know, it can happen. Whether it was the cause in Spain, they’re not saying. I would say with a very high level of confidence that they know the cause. They’re just not really willing to tell us. And I suspect that’s really because they were running the system in an unsafe way, violating their equivalent of license conditions, and they simply don’t want to look bad. There are reports that at least six people died as a result of this incident, so there will be consequences for this.
David Blackmon [00:09:39] So how would people have died due to a blackout that only lasted less than a day?
Kathryn Porter [00:09:47] One person died in a house fire from the use of candles and the rest was all associated with people using medical equipment in the home. So three people apparently died because the generator they had to power medical equipment was faulty and gave out carbon monoxide and so they suffocated. And then the other two people. Their generators failed. And so their ventilators stopped working and they also suffocated, unfortunately. So this is one of the challenges when you have such a high dependence on electricity, people do start to have much more sophisticated home medical equipment right up, including ventilators. And so if your backup generators don’t function or don’t functioning correctly, then obviously that puts those people in jeopardy.
David Blackmon [00:10:39] Well, I want to, before we go on, I just want to remind everyone you can submit questions, comments as we’re going through here and we’ll try to get to all of those. Tammy, why don’t you step in? Do you have any questions,
Tammy Nemeth [00:10:52] Well, thank you so much for that summary, Kathryn. That was really good about explaining the point about the oscillations and the inertia. And I think the point you made at the end there about people who died because of our dependence on electricity, this should be a key moment for policymakers to be focusing on how we maintain stability, what are the redundancies, What are the backups? How do we prevent this from? Happening again or even becoming worse in the future. And I’m wondering what would your recommendations be to policy makers to ensure that this type of grid stability can be stable rather than make us vulnerable to these types of occurrences?
Kathryn Porter [00:11:42] So I think one of the problems we have had in Spain is that they’ve been really rushing to demonstrate that they can run a very low carbon grid. A couple of weeks ago, they actually did run the grid on zero carbon generation, because in addition to solar and wind, they’ve got hydro and some nuclear. And so my suspicion is that their pursuit of this net zero ambition has just led them to push the grid outside of its stable limit. And again, that feeds into this idea of why they haven’t told us the cause. I think the cause of the initial fault was something that you would normally expect to be able to manage. But the fact that it cascaded so widely was because they were running on such low inertia. They had under one gigawatt of gas running at the time. So simply the way that Iberia can correct this is to run more gas and make sure that they don’t have. Too many of their synchronous generators on maintenance at the same time, because that was one of the things actually that impeded the restart, was that some of their black start hydro plants was on maintenance. Too many of them actually, quite a high proportion. So they do have the capability to run with higher inertia, they’re just choosing not to. And so I think this will be a lesson within Spain and more widely that the system has limits, these electricity systems have limits, they’re designed. To generate alternating current, you have to maintain the frequency of your current and voltage within those parameters, operating parameters that you have. And there are limits on how far you can push the system inertia. So this is, I think, going to be a wake up call. And you notice in Australia, they frequently curtail solar and run gas purely for system support. Not because they need the energy from the gas generation, but because they needed the stability. And I think they maybe need to look at doing that more in Spain.
Tammy Nemeth [00:13:38] Great Point.
David Blackmon [00:13:38] Stu?
Stuart Turley [00:13:41] Um, I’ll tell you fantastic points, uh, Kathryn, thank you very much. Let me go ahead and share this one article, uh and bring it here to the screen. This article was from, uh Jean Nelson PhD and, uh he has some outstanding points. Oh yeah, I saw that. Uh, absolutely important. Uh, in the United States, our frequency is 60 Hertz or 60 cycles per second in the U S and I’ve been doing a review, Kathryn and Tammy and David on our grid and the United states grids in trouble. We’ve Texas Urquhart seems to be okay for the next few years, but it is just an amazing, uh, frequency. He goes on to say. Uh, in France, the international standards group has been developing electric power grid standards since 1921 and Kathryn, you’re spot on with what it seems to have happened. Uh, and I, you could almost rule out the cyber attack, um, uh, as on, on the, uh. They were saying, Oh, it may have been a cyber attack. If all these things are made in China, yeah, you might as well rule that as a possibility. But I don’t think that was what happened, if that makes sense.
Kathryn Porter [00:15:09] I don’t think it was a cyber attack, but it could have been, and I think this is, so we had an incident in Britain a couple of weeks ago where we had a very big substation fire and it actually took out Heathrow Airport for a day, and so I think these two incidents should really be sounding a warning to system operators and to regulators that our grid infrastructure, our legacy grid infrastructure is actually very vulnerable both to accidental failures and to You know, we saw that Heathrow incident. It was a single transformer caught fire. Then it was a 1960s model. The adjacent transformer got heat damaged because nobody had ever built a blast wall between them. And this was able to take out a significant piece of critical infrastructure. So a single substation took Heathrow out of action for a day. So I think that and clearly they didn’t learn the lessons from Atlanta 2017 where they’d had a very similar incident and the American airports all took that on board and built in much greater resilience. So we can see that both physical and digital infrastructure is actually vulnerable and we need to be upgrading our legacy infrastructure. I think this is true in the US as well as here in Europe that our grids are old. And the priority has been to connect to renewables and not to refresh the legacy grid. And so if you don’t do that, you’re also pushing ancient kits into operating ways that they were not designed for. And so there will be problems resulting from that.
David Blackmon [00:16:50] So if I remember the Heathrow incident right, and excuse me, I have a faulty memory sometimes, what happened there was, yeah, the transformer caught fire. Main system went down, but then the backup generators did not come on properly, correct? Oh, no. So they have backup generation, but they didn’t, they didn’t fire up.
Kathryn Porter [00:17:10] No, no. What they were referring to was backup transformers that were also affected. So they do have backup generation at Heathrow for critical safety systems. We don’t have the four-hour rule which the FAA has in the US, but the diesel generators that power critical safety around the ILS runway lights and controlled how it all worked, they were fine.
David Blackmon [00:17:34] Okay, they did, okay.
Kathryn Porter [00:17:35] There is a small biomass plant. I mean, this is ridiculous. They go crazy about air quality, and then they build a wood pellet biomass plant in the middle of wet London. But that relied on grid power to work, so that didn’t work. But it was only for HVAC for a couple of the terminals anyway. The backup really was that they had two other grid connections, but their internal configuration was so poor that it took a whole day for them to switch over from the primary substation that caught fire. To the other two supply points that they had. And as I was mentioning the incident in Atlanta, after that, half a dozen US airports put in a backup generation that they could run for up to three days fully off grid. I mean, JFK has 110 megawatts at gas CHP. And a bunch of other ones put in auto-switching between different grid supply points so that they can cut over pretty quickly and maybe have some batteries or so on just Cover the couple of minutes that would take. Berlin Heath wrote to them the whole day, and that was on purpose. That was their contingency plan. Clearly inadequate, and clearly they didn’t look broadly enough when thinking about that, because they talked about this particular incident a few weeks ago as being unprecedented, when obviously it’s not, because you had the Atlanta situation in 2017. So there’s been more than enough time to deal with that. But from the grid side, That substation had been running at 106 percent of capacity for some years. And they were 1960s transformers. And they didn’t. They had two very close together. One was a bit further away. So the middle one caught fire. The adjacent one suffered heat damage. So they both need replacing because they didn’t t put any blast walls. So it’s just inadequate infrastructure and inadequate planning.
David Blackmon [00:19:27] So this is all very foreseeable stuff, right? And we see that all over the place, really. And it brings up to another question that I always come back to where the grid’s concerned is. We have this issue related to sourcing transformers, right. I mean, it’s been relieved somewhat, I understand here, over the past year or two. But a couple of years ago, I interviewed the head of a major trade association for power producers here in the country, in the US. And it was taking up to four years to source these high voltage transformers that you have to have on every transmission system. Now I understand, What’s that?
Kathryn Porter [00:20:07] That was still true a year ago.
David Blackmon [00:20:09] But I’ve talked to another person in the industry here a few weeks ago and they said it’s getting better, still not great, but it’s getting better. So apparently, somehow it’s improving. I don’t know how. But it’s it just, you know, it just highlights that we paid so little attention to ensuring our legacy grid is up to standards and up to the standards we need, especially at a time with this rapidly rising demand for electricity. Coming from a number of different sources, data centers, EVs, all these new technologies that will hog more and more energy. And it’s not just isolate, I think the point I wanna get to is not just isolated in the United States. These issues exist all over the free world, not so much in China, I guess, because they’re able to just command and control their system. But in Europe in the…
Kathryn Porter [00:21:02] Well, there was a…
David Blackmon [00:21:04] What’s that? I’m sorry.
Kathryn Porter [00:21:05] It’s not part of the free world.
David Blackmon [00:21:07] Right, exactly. So I mean, all over the free world, it’s a big problem. And in Africa, of course, South America, that aren’t necessarily parts of the free world in some of those countries. So it’s, it is a worldwide problem. And I wonder about Spain and Portugal, their transmission system, because we, we have such a pressing need for rapid expansion of the transmission system here in the U.S. And I wonder. Do those countries, is that a problem in those countries as well?
Kathryn Porter [00:21:39] I mean, it’s a problem all over Europe. We have, as I said, prioritized the connection of renewables. We haven’t really prioritized the ability to bring that electricity to demand centers because, I mean particularly with wind, it’s located far away from demand quite often. The GB grid is actually really similar to ERCOT in this regard. We’ve got lots of our wind power in the north, you have it in the west, and then the demand sense is somewhere completely different. And this is true around Europe. I mean, in Iberia, obviously, they’re a much more solar heavy system. And so that’s more distributed around the country, but it’s still pretty challenging. And the Spanish grid is not that extensive actually when you look down to it. So yes, I mean this is an issue everywhere. And all our grids are a similar age, we all started building them at broadly the same time and we haven’t just kept up with that maintenance, we’ve just stretched out the lives of stuff so you know a couple of years ago National Grid that owns the transmission system in the UK, they were given permission to extend the lives of their transformers from 40 to 60 years and this was really because they weren’t falling over so they were like oh well it’s obviously fine to keep fixing them. And I don’t know how scientific it was. Clearly we’ve seen there are limits to that. We’ve had a number of substation fires actually in the last few weeks. North Hyde was the most dramatic because it had the widest impact but there was another very serious substation fire last week and we are reaching the limits of this infrastructure and although there’s been this whole concern about the cost of living which I think has been why the regulators have said okay well we want to prioritize connecting renewables and then that really takes up all the I am now I think that they really need to think again about that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:23:34] Yeah, that’s a great point. Stu, can you bring up the comment by Tevin there? It’s the second, yeah, that one. I have Javier Blas’s little snapshot that he took on the day that the thing went out. And at that time, combined cycle was 3.3%, cogen was 4.6, and nuclear was 11.6. So it was, to combine it was less than. 25% of I suppose you could say traditional turbine generation. It was 72% was solar and wind and solar thermal was 5%. So when you look at it in terms of mechanical rotational turbine generation, it was below the 25% mark, at least according to what the snapshot was on that day.
David Blackmon [00:24:34] Yeah. 78% was coming from solar wind, whatever form of solar you’re talking about. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, that’s a pretty high percentage. And someone above made a comment, you know, we need a diversified power grid in modern society. And that’s true. I don’t think anybody here is saying otherwise. The point I think from, from what happened in Spain and Portugal is yes, you need a diverse grid with, you now made up of a variety of different generation sources. You have to manage it properly. If you don’t manage it, properly, you’re going to have problems.
Tammy Nemeth [00:25:10] Kathryn, if I could ask you, I mean, one of the arguments I’m hearing is that this can be solved for the future by having better algorithms. So what would your response be to that defense?
Stuart Turley [00:25:27] Better algorithm.
Kathryn Porter [00:25:28] Algorithms aren’t managing this, so I know some people have said that maybe trading algorithms have been responsible, which I definitely don’t agree with. I don’t think anybody’s trading European power on that basis, but the system operators aren’t using algorithms to manage the system, they’re using human beings and these human beings monitor constantly in real time what their data are telling them and then they react to the information that they receive. Now, there is some automation around frequency support, where batteries have automatic response instructions. So they won’t wait to be told what to do. Once they’ve participated in the frequency response product, they’re essentially programmed to respond to certain frequency signals. But other than that, this is human intervention. I think what people are really talking about are grid forming power electronics, where the inverses themselves will start forming the grid. And you’ll have less of a need for rotating mass. But the technology on that is developing really slowly. AMO in Australia has been actively pursuing this since 2019. And although people say, oh, well, the technology exists, there’s no standardization. OEMs are very reluctant to share their IP. System operators are very reluctance to be transparent about what they need. So there’s a bit of a trick in an egg situation. Nobody’s yet come up with compelling economic propositions for this and around procurement. NISO has done quite a lot of work on that as has AMO, but we haven’t really moved beyond the point of a few small trial installations of grid forming power electronics. There is quite a long way to go before they’re going to be really deployable commercially. There are other challenges around maintaining headroom as well, because if you want to be able to provide that sort of response from your wind and solar you’re going to have to curtail your output in real time in order to leave headroom that will allow you to respond to certain instructions. So obviously that has an economic impact and they just haven’t squared the circle yet. So I think we’re actually quite a few years away from having grid forming power electronics making any sort of meaningful impact on our grids. So until then we’re going have to keep using rotating mass whether that’s actual generators or synchronous condensers. We’ve got synchronous condensers here in Britain. AMO’s installed them in Australia. And in fact, there are some solar farms that can’t get a grid connection unless they have a synchronous condenser as part of the project. ERCOT’s been installing both synchronous condenses and peaking gas plants to support the grid. So these are well-understood approaches. The sort of the futuristic approaches around sort of electronic solutions are some way away.
David Blackmon [00:28:21] Stu has an interesting video clip of, you know, I, I’ve been to Spain several times and always been amazed at the number of wind, wind towers, wind farms, all over the place out there. And so it was a little surprising to me that see, see that solar is so much bigger than wind in Spain because winds everywhere and Stu, uh, Stu has a little video clip to play for us here.
David Blackmon [00:28:47] We’re not seeing it
Video Speaker 1 [00:28:49] I’ve stopped on the motorway because I’ve seen something remarkable. These windmills, as far as the eye can see. As far as you can see hundreds of them hundreds of them are doing absolutely nothing they’re not turning they’re generating anything. I don’t understand any of this anymore, this none of it makes business sense or common sense.
Stuart Turley [00:29:41] I love this guy, I believe he’s absolutely a hoot.
Stuart Turley [00:29:51] You know, some of the comments that were from Spain, the folks that were 100% off the grid didn’t realize that there was a problem in the peninsula and they were just off the grip. Microgrids are becoming a major thing. You know. I have Javier Blas’s graphic. Let me show you this as a mix.
David Blackmon [00:30:16] Oh yeah, the mix at the time of the blackout.
Stuart Turley [00:30:19] Yes, just take me half sec. I think this is the right one.
David Blackmon [00:30:29] Javier, if you’re watching, we love you. You’re a great source and we steal your stuff all the time.
Stuart Turley [00:30:33] Yes, we do. And that was a, I’m wondering why it did not show. Oh yeah, there it is, there’s the next. There it is. I’ll try to get that here in a sec.
Kathryn Porter [00:30:49] So I can share it with you actually if you can tell me how to share my screen I can because I’ve got the original link to the Spanish to the REE website also.
Stuart Turley [00:30:59] Um, go to present. I think you can do that and present share your screen.
David Blackmon [00:31:08] I like R.A. Clark’s comment that at least if the wind turbines aren’t turning, they can’t chop the birds.
Kathryn Porter [00:31:14] Well, while I’m waiting for that screen to load, I could show you this one. Could you see that? No, OK.
David Blackmon [00:31:23] Technology is our friend.
Kathryn Porter [00:31:26] Present. Oh, hang on. Yes. I’ve got to give it permission again. OK, it doesn’t seem to want me to. I’ve got the image. Yeah, here we go. Can you see this? Yes, there we go. This is from a company called Amira Technologies. And this is the large scale wind output on the GB grid. So the blue on the left is the last two weeks and the green on the right is the forecast. And the scale up on the y-axis goes up to 22 gigawatts.
David Blackmon [00:32:11] Oh, we’re not seeing that.
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:13] No, we are not seeing. That was the.
David Blackmon [00:32:14] There we go here this we go.
Tammy Nemeth [00:32:17] Oh there it is, okay.
Kathryn Porter [00:32:18] Can you see it now?
David Blackmon [00:32:20] Yes.
Kathryn Porter [00:32:21] Okay, so we’ve got historic as the blue on the left and the forecast for the next two weeks is the green on the right. The scale goes up to 22 gigawatts. We’ve actually got more than 30 gigawats installed and you can see that we’ve had some really low output. So on the 30th of April it went all the way down to 500 megawatts. Right now we’re at five gigawatts and it’s gonna be pretty much below five gigawatts for the next 10 days. We’ll get up to seven and a half. So, you know, a quarter of our installed capacity in another week or so. So it’s very, we install all of this wind and yes, it’s not delivering. And our capacity boxes are really low.
David Blackmon [00:33:09] That’s Great Britain, correct? That was Great Britain.
Kathryn Porter [00:33:12] And here’s the chart you were referring to about Spain. And so we can see here the big drop off when the fault happened. The data to the right of this, that is fake data. So RE has clarified that this was based on schedules rather than actual because it went down to zero. This implies that it stayed at about 10 gigawatts. It didn’t. The system went to zero So they haven’t retrospectively cleaned this up, but really everything to the right of the black line until you get, well, until you get towards the end of the day, maybe out to here, it should be showing a zero because the whole system collapsed. You had zero. The transmission system stopped working completely and they had to do a full black start.
David Blackmon [00:34:04] Wow. And they were able to do that so quickly. That surprised me because in Texas, if we ever go to zero, it’s going to take quite some number of days to restart the system.
Kathryn Porter [00:34:18] So they felt it was slower than they would have liked because it turns out that some of the Black Star hydro plants were on maintenance. Something like 2 thirds of them apparently were on the maintenance. I don’t have the exact numbers to hand. And so that was difficult for them. And also then they had to manage the fact that they were getting all of this solar still coming through. From what I understand in Spain, they actually don’t very good capabilities to centrally curtail. Solar, I think that’s something they’re going to have to start putting in. And so obviously that was interfering quite significantly with their restart efforts because you really need to get rid of anything that’s asynchronous. So unless it’s capable of synchronizing, it’s really going to get in the way of you restarting the grid because the most important thing is to set up or 50 hertz we have here in Europe. You’ve got to set up that waveform. If you can’t do that in a clean way, then it’s just going to keep tripping.
David Blackmon [00:35:18] 50 Hertz for inertia.
Kathryn Porter [00:35:21] They’re 50 hertz for the grid frequency and our turbines are spinning at 3000 revolutions per minute rather than 3600 the way you all do in the US.
Stuart Turley [00:35:30] Yeah, so we’re at 60.
Kathryn Porter [00:35:33] Yeah, exactly 60. 3600 revolutions per minute gives you 60 cycles per second.
Stuart Turley [00:35:41] So you know when you sit back and we take a look at this, we’ve got a massive subsidy problem in the United States. The average life cycle for our wind turbines, we have 79,000 wind turbines in the United States. Of those, the average life expectancy is four years. After four years they’ve been replacing those turbines and this is hard to get this information. So some of this is speculative based off of insider information that they use to get their additional money to nameplate update these things. We’ve got all this land reclamation in the United States when the subsidies go away they’re not going to be wanting to put those in, and Warren Buffett in 2014 said, There’s no reason to invest in a wind farm unless you’re getting the subsidies. Well, the subsidies in the United States are going away. Who’s gonna pay the average $350,000 to $950,000 per wind turbine to get the land reclamation done when the company’s bankrupt? We got us a problem here in the Unites States.
David Blackmon [00:36:54] And nobody, I mean, the taxpayers are going to put the bill for that because there’s no, unfortunately in the United States, none of the states have real, uh, robust regulatory requirements for reclamation. Once these wind farms in their useful life and that costs two sided doesn’t include removing the foundations for the science things, which are just partial gigantic and only three feet below the ground. And all that’s going to get left in the ground.
Stuart Turley [00:37:25] How’s that in the UK, Kathryn and Tammy?
Kathryn Porter [00:37:29] I think it’s broadly the same. So the only generation technology that has to do any upfront work on decommissioning is nuclear. And they have to have fully funded decommissions programs before they’re allowed to build anything. No other generation technology needs to pay any attention to decommisioning, really, at any time. There are some general planning rules that say you’re supposed to reinstate the site to its previous condition. But so far, that’s really untested where wind is concerned. But our subsidies are getting bigger. The most recent auction for wind subsidies had its highest price in years, and now the government is just digesting the results of a consultation into extending the subsidies from 15 to 20 years. So our expectation is the next subsidy round is going to come out materially higher than the previous one. And interestingly, the previous AR6, the inflation adjusted results for that were 83 pounds per megawatt hour. Which is higher than the current day ahead price and it’s roughly where your average price for a year would be. We get lower in the summer and higher in the winter and so this whole idea of renewables being cheap is just blown out of the water and yes our energy secretary and that I’ve started calling Mad Miliband because he wants to spend public money to dim the sun at the same time as spending public money on solar panels. Is still persisting in this fantasy, but there we go.
Stuart Turley [00:39:00] I would like to interview him, honestly, and what I’d like to do is give him a copy of Turley’s Law. Turley says that the more money that is spent in wind and solar and hydrogen, the more fossil fuels will be used. And that is holding true.
Kathryn Porter [00:39:17] Well, the only way you’d ever get an interview with him is if you pretend that you really, really, really believe in the whole Renewables are Cheap Net Zero narrative, you’d have to persuade him that you’ve completely drunk the Kool-Aid, and then he might deign to give you an interview. But this is a man who avoids like the plague, anybody who might give him any contact with reality.
Stuart Turley [00:39:39] So Kathryn, we won’t expect him on the energy realities podcast or my podcast.
Kathryn Porter [00:39:45] Not necessarily brand as a massive cheerleader for wind and solar.
David Blackmon [00:39:51] So we can rebrand fantasy podcast and maybe we’ll have a chance.
Kathryn Porter [00:39:58] unicorns and rainbows podcast.
David Blackmon [00:40:03] I hate to, uh, change the subject, but we’re 18 minutes left on this show. Do we want to go to our articles for the week or just continue this discussion for the rest of the hour?
Tammy Nemeth [00:40:15] Well, I’m wondering if we can just address the one comment there about curtailing output. So the LinkedIn user is asking curtail in output. Isn’t that the same as demand response? I would say no, it isn’t. Kathryn, what’s what’s your
Kathryn Porter [00:40:36] Demand voluntarily responds and you put in place some economics for them to do that. Cattailment is when the system operator instructs you to turn down and so it’s not necessarily voluntary and in fact in GB it’s definitely not voluntary. If the grid operator needs you to turn down because of stability issues then you have to do it. You get compensated for it but you don’t really get the choice. It’s done for system security reasons. We had quite a big storm in January, I think it was storm Eowyn, where we had demand was about 35 gigawatts and we had nine gigawattes of instantaneous shutoff risk with wind farms, because once wind speed goes above a certain level, the turbines simply turn off and it’s a binary thing. As soon as the speed goes higher, they feather the turbines. So you lose whatever output they had instantaneously. And so our system operator did about four gigawatts of anticipatory curtailment. It just simply said, we think you’re going to shut off. So you’ve got to turn off to protect the grid. And they compensated them. And then they had a similar amount of gas running on spinning reserve so that they could come on really quickly. And again, they get paid for that, but it’s not really their choice whether to curtail or not they get instructed.
David Blackmon [00:41:58] So they get paid to turn off. They’re not required to pay into the system when they don’t deliver. That’s the other side of this.
Kathryn Porter [00:42:06] So if they don’t run because it’s not windy, they don’t get paid anything. But if they could generate and they’re instructed not to, because they only get the money under the subsidy when they’re generating, if you tell them they can’t, then they expect to be compensated for that. And they are. So they get made whole. And it is getting to be quite a scandal because then October 23, we opened a wind farm called Sea Green. And in 2024, that was curtailed. Twice as much as it generated so its contaminant volumes would double its generation volumes and because it was built behind a constraint and this is what I was saying earlier that the whole priority has been connecting the wind turbines with no real thought given to can you use the energy that they’re producing and what impact are they having on the grid consumers are just paying for this nonsense they paid a massive subsidy for it to get built and now they’re paying all these containment fees. They pay a gas power station downstream of the constraints to generate the electricity they actually use. And then they pay some spurious curtailment fees to the wind farm upstream of the constraint because it just can’t be, the output can’t delivered.
Stuart Turley [00:43:18] Kathryn, in the wind turbines around the world they normally require a power source to spin them up to get them to a certain amount of speed no matter what the wind is doing. So do they have to pay for electricity or like in Scotland I think it’s pretty funny they took down millions and millions upon trees to put in their wind farms up there and then they use diesel engines. To turn the turbines to spin them up to get them to speed before they can produce electricity. I think is that the same case in the UK?
Kathryn Porter [00:43:56] I think most of the time, if they can take electricity from the grid, that’s what they do. That’s the pretty conventional way for all power stations to get themselves up and running. People don’t use their black stock capability unless they actually have to. I don’t see actually why you would have any wind turbines needing to use diesel, because if they’ve got a grid connection for the outputs, then they can use that same grid connection to the input.
Stuart Turley [00:44:21] That’s why I found it funny that Scotland was using diesel generators to fire their wind turbines.
Kathryn Porter [00:44:28] I mean maybe for ad hoc but I wouldn’t have thought so normally because it would just make no sense for them.
David Blackmon [00:44:36] We have one comment here, a pair of comments from Blanc. Um, Rick Rule often says global investments in renewable energy reached 728 billion in 2024 with emissions down only 1%. Yes. And to reduce emissions substantially, the world would need to invest hundreds of trillions of dollars. It would seem not just as it would seem. We have studies, uh, indicating that we need to invest 300 trillion dollars. By 2050 to achieve a substantial reduction in emissions. I mean, those are real world numbers, not a supposition.
Stuart Turley [00:45:19] And we’ve built this system, um, and I, that was a McKinsey study, by the way. Sorry, go ahead. We’ve built the system over several hundred years. You know, the, the Texas grid’s a hundred years old. Uh, and Texas is the most important state in the United States. Cause we both happen to live there, but you know, you know we’re egotistical maniacs. God bless Texas. Since I got my cowboy hat here in the corner. But, you know, because we are the most important state in our own minds and legends, but we sit back and think. And now we’re adding wind turbines in the last 20 years, and they’re destroying the stability grid stability with the David, you had a wonderful article on the solar debacle that is now a wasteland in the, was it Nevada?
David Blackmon [00:46:14] Oh, yeah, the thermal solar project.
Tammy Nemeth [00:46:16] The laser?
Stuart Turley [00:46:20] They cook all the birds. I mean you could
Tammy Nemeth [00:46:23] just like poof, I mean it was crazy. Well, you know what’s interesting with respect to the UK, I was looking at Keir Starmer’s speech to the IEA Energy Security Summit, I guess it was about 10 days ago or so, and GB Energy is creating a supply chain investment fund with 300 million pounds startup money I guess to have the wind and solar supply chains come to Britain and I don’t know. How that’s gonna work. Kathryn, do you think there are actually, the production will shift to Great Britain for those things?
Kathryn Porter [00:47:06] Well, I mean, this is a perfect example of the lack of joined up thinking within this government, because, you know, last year we saw the closure of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot. They’re just trying to figure out what they can do at Scunthorpe, but those two very old blast furnices at Scuntthorpes are our final blast furnances in the UK. So quite how they think they’re going to do this. They’re talking about putting electric arc furnaces in at Scunnthorp, but they can’t get the grid connection until 2032. And they go on and on about, oh a virgin steel capability, we want to reinvest in defense. Scunthorpe never produced military grade steel anyway, so if they really wanted to keep a virgin military grade steal capability they needed to keep Port Talbot open. So they just don’t have the first clue to be honest, they have no idea. When they passed some legislation a few weeks ago to force the Chinese owners of British Steel to keep operating the furnaces because basically the Chinese were trying to force a coal shut down, they stopped procuring raw materials because the government wouldn’t give them a bailout and so the government came in on a Saturday, they recalled Parliament on a Saturday during Easter recess and they passed this piece of legislation which was five pages long, and then. Dozens of Labor MPs are all over Twitter talking about how they saved British steel and they’ve nationalized it. They didn’t do anything of the sort, it’s not been nationalized. It’s a five-page piece of legislation that literally anybody can read in 10 minutes and they didn’t nationalize it, they just passed a law to say you’ve got to keep running it and we’ve already spent something like 50 billion pounds to enable them to do that using coal from Australia via Japan instead and coal from mines in Britain.
David Blackmon [00:49:00] That’s one of my favorite stories of the year the coal from from Australia via Japan.
Tammy Nemeth [00:49:05] Near Japan.
Kathryn Porter [00:49:08] The really stupid thing is that everything in the press was about Whitehaven in Cumbria which Miliband denied a permit to and then it was all like oh no but that’s high sulfur coal you can’t use it well you can if you blend it but that was all a bit of a red herring because we have two other producing mines in Britain, Midlothian in Scotland and there’s one in Wales that both produce low sulfur coking materials, coal in Scotland, and anthracite in Wales that be used in those blast furnaces. So there’s absolutely, A, no need for a new mine in Cumbria, and B, no needs to be buying Australian coal that’s come via Japan. The noise and the nonsense around all of this is just unreal. They’re just crazy that they have no idea.
Stuart Turley [00:49:49] And net zero means net zero, means no output, and there were 7,823 tons of fuel spent in carbon output to get that shipment from Australia via China.
Kathryn Porter [00:50:07] And the crazy thing is, if they did install electric arc furnaces at Scunthorpe, that would cut their product set by around a quarter to a third. They would not be able to make some of the stuff they make, particularly the current specification of rails they supply to Network Rail, our national rail company. So those would have to be imported, most likely from China. So, the carbon savings that you might secure. By replacing your blast furnaces with electric arc furnaces would be massively reduced by the fact that you then have to import these products that you can no longer make. And keep in mind that the UK steel industry is responsible for 2.4% of UK emissions which in themselves are 0.8% of global emissions. We are really splitting hairs here.
Tammy Nemeth [00:50:56] Well, and then by 2027, they’ll have a carbon border adjustment mechanism, and somehow that will solve the problem by making all those imports more expensive.
Kathryn Porter [00:51:06] I don’t think that’s going to actually happen. If you look what they’re starting to say in the EU, I mean, even as early as January, the EPP, which is sort of the pan-European parties, had said that they wanted a rethink on the carbon border adjustment mechanism. It’s not due to come in until 27 and it’s going to be extremely inflationary. And so within the EU, they’re starting to get cold feet, which I thought would always happen. And I just didn’t think it would be this early. Now, there’s always the danger that Mad Miliband wants to do it anyway, but the rumors are that he’s not going to keep his job very much longer. And so we all have to hope and pray that’s the case, because otherwise, I mean, we’re likely to have quite a major recession in Britain before the end of this year. And if they start doing stuff like that, then we’ll never get out of it.
David Blackmon [00:51:57] Do you think the local elections that were held last week in the UK will have any sort of mitigating impact on the Stormer regime? Just in terms of maybe taking a step back and thinking, hey, maybe our policies had something to do with this awful election outcome, or are they just impervious to
Kathryn Porter [00:52:19] So I think they’re largely impervious. And if anything, they’re talking about doubling down. I think the big problem is that almost everybody in the cabinet is either a lawyer or a career politician or trade unionist. None of them have any experience of business or the real world. So they just simply don’t get it. Their policies are extremely naive. You know, you look at the way they’ve just, they’ve increased business taxes and also employment costs at the same time. And so that’s forcing a lot of businesses to close. We’re now at sort of business closure rates that we haven’t seen in years, if not decades. So there’s not really a sense that the government knows what it’s doing. It talks about its plan for change. And unfortunately, the change is all for the worse. The big problem that we have though with our electoral system is that local elections are not really that meaningful. We have a highly centralized system of government. Local authorities, local councils, these unitary mayoral authorities they’ve created, they really have very limited power and we’re still four years away from the next general election. And that’s a really long time in politics. So people saying that, you know, or reformer proving that they could win a general election, they’re not. The choices that people make in local elections, given that local government has so, such few powers. Is not representative of what happens at the ballot box in a general election. And so I think there’s an awful lot of noise around this at the moment. That’s really just that, it’s just noise. We’re three years away from having any clue what will happen in the next general election, although I think it’s pretty safe to say that unless labor does something quite significant, they’re going to get just eliminated in the selection. They’re attacked on both sides, from the left and the right, because they’re pleasing nobody.
David Blackmon [00:54:21] So it occurred to me that looking at those election results that the Tories could do the country a favor, a real favor, by disbanding.
Kathryn Porter [00:54:32] I just don’t agree with that at all.
David Blackmon [00:54:34] Oh, really?
Kathryn Porter [00:54:36] I mean, you have to have some of them
David Blackmon [00:54:37] I mean, you have to have some alternative to labor, and the Tories are no longer any kind of viable alternative, it seems.
Kathryn Porter [00:54:43] No, I disagree with that. I think they’re trying to get back to small government conservatism, which is their core and that is the route for success for them. They’re being quiet at the moment. I’m actually working with them quite a bit around energy. They sort of get it that got it wrong before that net zero 2050 and they’ve announced that they’re no longer supportive of that. They’re taking the time to work out what they do think, which is smart because we’re four years away from the next election, there’s no need to hurry out with policies now. And I think although people are getting all very excited about reform in Faraj, are they a credible potential government? Do we really think that what they’re saying on policy is remotely practically Do we really think that when people are in that voting booth they’re going to put their cross next to people who are really untested and who, again it’s very slogan politics, it’s not serious politics, they’ve really got to get a lot more serious before their credible potential government. So I don’t agree at all that the Conservatives have no use I think. They have a very proven track record of government. They don’t always get it right. But they know what they’re doing, which you cannot say of reform. They have no track record at all. And we’re four years away from an election, and a lot can change in that time. So I completely disagree on that, I’m afraid.
Stuart Turley [00:56:19] Alright, let me let me bring this one in here from Tiven. I’m not sure I like his name here Um, I wonder how the wind generation in Finland appears to work. Well, well Finland has Uh 38 nuclear 23.9 wind 16 hydro bio is 10. So you sitting back and look at that balance They got a balance of nature going on over there. So that makes all the difference in the world and also like this one.
Tammy Nemeth [00:56:55] We also need to start hardening our grids in anticipation of the next Carrington event, which is increasingly likely into the 2030s with the Earth’s weakening magnetic field. Well, I think that it should be hardened in any event, but it goes back to what Kathryn was saying that, you know, we have this aging grid. There’s really not much. Um it doesn’t appear that there’s much thought being put into how do we make it more resilient and with the resiliency that would be hardening it to ensure that we’re upgrading it in an appropriate way but everything like some of the comments had said is it’s kicking the can down the road where it’s like we’re going to extend this already old infrastructure for another 20 years because hey it looks like it’s doing okay instead of what do we need to do to make sure that it’s resilient and we’re not going to cripple our societies with blackouts or brownouts.
David Blackmon [00:57:52] Yeah, I mean, it’s obvious, certainly in Texas, that our grid didn’t have much resilience in 2021. And I think that’s improved somewhat, thanks largely to some really good policy changes the legislature’s made, but we still have some pretty significant weaknesses. And I know we’re probably in better shape than some of the other grids around the country. So yeah, it’s a big problem everywhere. We are Harrington event, of course was, that was a major solar flare, right? Mid 1800s.
Tammy Nemeth [00:58:26] But before we close, I just wanted Kathryn’s opinion about interconnections, because quite often when people are talking about this, it’s like, well, the interconnection with France allows the more stability for Spain or whatever. But then when we look at what’s going on in the UK, all this talk about expanding the interconnects as a way to have, you know, if you have to Connections. To sort of compensate for that. What are the risks in relying too much upon interconnections for grid stability? Is that something they should be doing or something that they shouldn’t be over reliant on? What’s your view?
Kathryn Porter [00:59:12] Well, I mean, they definitely shouldn’t be relying on them, because most of them are direct current now, so they don’t really help with grid stability anyway. So the interconnections question is very interesting. In 2021, our regulator Ofgem wrote a paper in which it determined that when you become a net exporter, which everyone in policy in Britain is firmly convinced will be a net export in the 2030s, then interconnections represent a consumer disbenefit. Although you get overall benefits accruing to generators, they don’t feed through to consumers, and therefore you have this disbenefit to consumers. So last year, when there was a big new authorization round under the cap and floor regime, All except for one of the projects was rejected on the basis of this potential future customer disbenefit. So I had a meeting with the Director of Infrastructure at Zofgem a few months ago in the wake of our near miss blackout on the 8th of January. And they said, well, we definitely need a cooperation between countries on interconnection and we can’t have people being selfish. Because Norway is very clearly signaling that they are not happy with their interconnector with Britain, that they have parliamentary elections coming up in September and the front runners in those elections all want to renegotiate the interconnector deal with Britain and also a similar deal they have with Germany. And they have interconnection with Denmark, the Skagorak lines, which are coming to the end of their lives in next couple of years. And now it’s pretty widely agreed that they won’t be renewed and that’s going to cut cross-border capacity between Denmark and Norway by up to a third. There are different reports on how much it actually is. So and that is huge, you know, Denmark, Norway cutting cross- border capacity with Denmark, that’s really significant. So when all their leading parties in their elections say they want to renegotiate the deal with GB, that is definitely on the table and if they can’t negotiate it, they might just put a tariff. So you’ve got these two things. And I pointed out to Ofgem that it’s all very well you’re talking about not being selfish, but you just declined all of these projects on the basis of this consumer disbenefit. So you’re doing the exact thing that you’re saying other countries can’t do. And they were like, oh yeah, yeah, we did do that, didn’t we? And this is, you know, this is not. A shock in fact. Norway has identified that it’s harming their consumers exporting so much electricity, that that’s imported volatility into their grid, and it’s actually very unpopular. There’s, you know, people in the streets have an opinion about it. It’s become a hot political topic. So Norway is just ahead of the curve here. They are much more transparent in their dealings than other countries. In 2022, when we had all the concerns about energy security in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, the German CSOs were saying to their peers sort of behind closed doors, that if we have a problem, we just won’t export. So we don’t care what they will say, we just want to do it. And so, no, you can’t rely on interconnectors. And given that so many countries are following the same wind-led transition strategy, particularly in Northern Europe. We all share similar weather, you know, we all experience low wind at the same time, so where’s that, where’s the electricity coming from for these?
David Blackmon [01:02:45] Nobody ever thinks about that part, right?
Kathryn Porter [01:02:47] You’ve got Norwegian Hydro, but they’ve already said then they’re losing interest. And then you’ve got French nuclear, but the French fleet is getting old. The French fleet has really aging. And so, and twice in six years, they’ve had to take large parts of the fleet off for testing. The regulator there said, it won’t be the last time. As they age, they’ll find systemic problems within different classes of reactors. They’ve got maybe half a dozen different reactor types in France. They’re all aging at the same time. So you find an age-related flaw in one reactor design, they’re going to take all of the reactors of that type offline to test for the same problem. And when those, on those two occasions when that happened, France became an importer. We were importing large amounts of electricity to France in 2022. In 2016, which was the previous time it happened, we got lucky because some ship had taken out half of the cables. So the cross border capacity was half. During this key time when we were exporting, which was hugely helpful for the British grid. So no, I think relying on interconnectors is a hugely dangerous strategy.
David Blackmon [01:03:56] With that, we’re going to have to shut this episode down. I know Stu’s got a schedule he has to keep and we’re four minutes over time. Kathryn, I can’t thank you enough. This has just been fantastic. Really appreciate you taking the time to do this with us.
Kathryn Porter [01:04:12] My pleasure.
Tammy Nemeth [01:04:14] Yes, thank you for sharing your expertise. This is phenomenal. Thank you.
David Blackmon [01:04:19] Just a reminder to everyone. Kathryn is at watt-logic.com go find her. She’s also on X has a very robust presence on X and I assume LinkedIn as well.
Kathryn Porter [01:04:31] Yes, I’m on LinkedIn as well.
David Blackmon [01:04:32] Yes. All right, everybody. Thank you so much. We will be back same time.
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