With Laurent's segele end from London and Gerard Reed from Berlin.
This is redefining.
Energy today on refer Energy JR. Finally, that's episode on Blackouts The Blackout.
Yeah, looking forward to this one. Ron obviously highly.
Topic, but first of well, from our partner.
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Back to the show, there's been so much things written, including you, so we put the link in the show note what did you sing in yourself stack?
Well, ultimately what I said it was all about the playing game, just nobody putting hands up and taking responsibility. I mean, there was a series of mistakes made, so best thing to do is put your hand up, say made mistakes, can learn from move on. Didn't get that from anybody and that's very concerning.
Yeah, there was a series of reports and every report was puaranting in the other guy's direction.
So it's the grid operator, it's hyber droller, it's solar, it's it's the friendships, and everybody would get blamed.
It's just mad. You could only laugh at it.
Just sorry, sometimes you make a mistake. Put your hand up, say it made a mistake.
So all of a sudden, there were hundreds of expects of blackouts. But I think we need to go back to the source and job. We bring you an extraordinary guest.
Yeah. Absolutely. We bring in a guy known many years called Steve Berberish, and he was formerly the head of the system operator in California, and he's lived through a lot of stress. Can imagine. Just I think we see this all the time as the stress in the California grid because of climate wildfires, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So no better a person to come in and hear that. And also, by the way, so I don't forget the California grid. It's just full of soul. Right sent to Spain.
Right, Okay, let's bring Steve on the show. Steve, it's great to have you on the show.
It's a pleasure to be here. I've looked forward to speaking with both of you for some time now, and the provocative writings you've been doing a drawer or I think spurring a lot of conversation. So it's great to be here.
So Steve, we're going to talk about blackouts, and you were yourself at the head of Kaiso into A twenty and you experience blackout. So can you remind us a bit what happened and how do you manage to get yourself out of it?
I can. I think it's important to understand that all blackouts are different. There are some common themes. In our case, we dropped about five hundred megawats of load on a Friday night and a Saturday night in August of twenty twenty. Enough, it was the midst of COVID, but it was a very very hot time in California, and there's a lot of things that came to ahead, which is thematic across
most of these blackouts. The principal issue was there was not enough supply to meet demand, but it's also a lack of adequate planning, and I think in a lot of cases there's a theme across these blackouts a lack of adequate planning. And let me set the stage for you.
California has and had been importing twenty five percent of its power from out of state resources, and over the last few years leading up to twenty twenty, a lot of the resources, big thermal resources like coal had been retired or were retiring, so California could not lean as much on the West as it had when there might
have been some gaps. The second thing is that California has a very high portfolio from a renewable perspective, and obviously there's a significant ramp out of those resources in the evening. So if you have a very hot period in California, so then you have air conditioning load that hangs onto the system into the evening, you have no solar, you have to count on the rest of the West. Well, when you get a big heat domb over the West,
you now have competition for all that power. And there simply was not enough power across the West for California to lean on the West to bring in the power that it had, So we were forced to shed load because we simply did not have enough power to serve the load. However, There was not an issue of instability, frequency deviation, voltage VLAD or anything like that. It was simply a matter of supply and demand.
On the top of that, you had the nuclear plant was supposed to be there or was not there anymore.
Well, that kind of goes back to the resources. Sant and no Free is the I believe the nuclear plant you're referring to, Santa No Free had retired several years before this incident, so it did not play a role. However, it is consistent with the fact that resources across the West had been retiring and there was less to go around that and combined with large coal plants that were also retired in the West.
Steve and I mean you, I ask you to talk a little bit about the so called Duck curve, maybe to explain to people what.
This is and how you dealt with it, because I think this is also a critical part of preparing for a future.
Exactly right, And it's an interesting The Duck curve was an interesting theme. As the grid operator, what we had done and I was the CEO when the Duck Curve came to be, what it was trying to do was
illustrate as you add renewables onto the system. What other resources do you need around those renewables, And what it highlighted was that, of course we all know, when you have a high solar portfolio, you're going to have a very high rate operate in the morning, and then you're going to have a very high out ramp in the evening.
And if you look at that in the inverse of that, it basically shows the non renewable resources going down very deep into the belly and then coming back up very much in the ramp in the evening, which gives you the duck. The duck also tells you something else. It shows that when you have these resources, you need the ramp in the evening. They need to be on during the day so they can do that. That adds power onto the system. That ultimately leads to overgeneration, which ultimately
leads to significant curtailment. And the curtailment numbers in California have grown astronomically over the last several years as solars have been added to the system. But it is thematic of the fact that you have to look at the system as it is and then assess the resources you have. And another example is that the head of the duck
where the big ramp is in the evening. We assessed continually whether the system had the necessary ramping resources to be able to do that, and the ramp would give as extreme as about thirteen or fourteen thousand megawatts per hour in the evening, so it's a very very significant ramp. A lot of people thought that the Duck curve was anti renewable and that we were pointing out the issues
with renewables, which I couldn't disagree with more. The fact is, what we were trying to do is show how the renewables behaved so that we could very clear mindedly plan the system.
So what solution were found in the past five years to change the system? Was it regulatory? Was it putting more thermal backup? And of course we're going to talk about batteries, So how did the system evolve?
In California's case, largely it has been solved with batteries, and I believe the last count they had about ten thousand megawatts of capacity of batteries. You can see on the California ISO website when they're charged and discharged. And it's an outstanding marriage with the DUC chart because in the middle of the day, when you would be otherwise curtailing renewables, you can soak up those low cost green electrons and then discharge them into the ramp into the evening.
So it's actually a very very good marriage. Large scale storage is a critical enabler to decarbonizing the grid and deploying large scale renewvals.
And Steve can I ask that about the whole need for backup generation and inertia and all that.
Can you explain it a little bit about what you have to do there.
I don't want to get into the technical details of operating the grid too deeply, but Jared, what you're referring to is there are a number of things you have to do to operate the grid so that it's stable, and one of the things you refer to is inertia. Now, inertia is sort of the horsepower that you ump into the system to keep it stable, and you traditionally got
inertia from spinning masses which come out of power plants. However, there is a concept of synthetic inertia that you can get from inverters, and in fact, inverters are much faster at reacting to system events. And the example I give is having a table that's held by one leg. Obviously, three legs is better, four is better, yet five is better.
Yet.
From a stability perspective, and the more inverters you have out there, actually you're more stable than if you would have just a couple of thermal resources at hand. From an inertia perspective, you need to make sure you have that reaction potential, but it can also come from inverters.
So these are the famous Greek forming in rets because first the sort out, you are Greek. Following now they are great forming. So can you explain a bit what it is because we hear that a lot, but nobody explained it.
Well, I'm not an electrical engineer, so I'm not going to go too deep into it. But inverters can provide reactive power which will manage the voltage on the system. And I know, let me fast forward to the red electrical issue. They had some issues with voltage that was spiking on their system. But you can use the inverters to boost and back, which are voltage terms of the system. So they basically can provide the same kind of resources.
The other side of that is frequency, and an inverter can very quickly increase its frequency or decrease its frequency, depending on what's going on with the system, and can then smooth it and it can have roughly the same counter response as you would get from spinning resources.
Okay, let's go to Spain. Now, if I look at all the black out the past ten years, whether it's South Australia in two sixteen, so your you're blackouts in two or twenty, well, Louisiana earlier this year, and of course winter storm jury and in Ireland. They're all are linked to very severe weather events, whether it's storm, winter storm, heat waves. But in Spain apparently the weather was okay. So Jad, you just wrote a report on Spain. Can you remind our listener exactly what happened?
Well, I'll be one hundred percent clear and say we're still not one hundred percent sure what happened.
But what is clear is that you had a.
Litany of mistakes.
And it starts, for definitely, with quid planning, and one mistake led to another mistake, so led to another mistake, and then you.
Had a problem.
That's sort of what happened.
But again it did start with bad planning, and the fact about it is there are no batteries in the system, there's not enough back of power in the system. I mean, there's a whole pile of reasons you could look at it, but it certainly does seem to lay most of the blame with Red Electric because the reality is just because one SOLDA plan goes off. Great Steve, you just talked
about it. One plan goes off. I mean, that's your job to go make sure there's enough power there to match that, or you rejuiced.
To minda whatever. They didn't do their job.
I mean, that's the reality, Jared, I completely agree with you. You and I had a conversation shortly that, you know before, and I had seen at least the frequency readouts and voltage readouts of what had transpired, and I told that I didn't think Red Electrica was operating the system correctly, and that's what led to it. And what Jared's I agree with the hundred percent is usual a mistake upon
mistake upon mistake that caused the problem. But there are some things I can observe from it that part of its planning, part of it was system operation. And let me give you some examples. I saw that there were significant oscillations on the system. A grid operator's job is
to make sure that doesn't happen. Now, what was causing those oscillations, I don't know yet, but there are ways to control them, and there are ways to mitigate them, and they probably should have had more resources on the system to make sure they could respond to such things. And that's a grid opera's first responsibility is to run the grid securely, secure from loss of resources, from resource issues,
from loss of transmission. You do a regular I know in California we did in every five minute review of where we stood, and that's the secured operation of the system. So I don't know what was causing the oscillations, but the oscillations, in my opinion, led to the blackout. And the first thing that happened was a large solar resource of the system dropped off. And let me explain why that might happen and draw this back to California experience
as well. Inverters have got to be properly programmed to be able to ride through a grid disturbance or they will drop off. And in one case, we actually had where a much larger system in California than Red electricas is, so we could absorb it, but we lost seventeen hundred megawatts of solar one time because we had a grid disturbance.
And then we went about analyzing that and figured out that the inverters could be programmed to ride through these issues much better than they are, and so we did that. Now we shared that with the international community, and Frankly red electrically as part of that international community. We shared it with. What I don't know is if those inverters could have been programmed better and then you would not have the oscillations, but you would not have lost that
large chunk of solar. That's my hypothesis. I don't know that for fact, but if the inverters were operating i'll call it within parameter, they would not have dropped off, and in fact, they would have provided some help in dampening those oscillations. So that goes to planning. First, you got to plan the system. Do I have the resources or they programmed correctly? Can they operate in these various scenarios one is an oscilling scenario or other kind of
grid disturbance. Once then the solar dropped off the system, it was a classic blackout, which is frequency collapses all the generators drop off the system because they're automatic generation control tries to protect them, and you get a classic blackout, and that's what happened. I believe the blackout could have been arrested with appropriate planning and finding. I still don't know what caused the oscillation. We got to get to that. The final thing I'll say is if they could have
solve this with additional thermal commitments. I don't know what else they had to thermally commit that would have provided some resources for care operation. Or they could have deployed batteries which they don't have. But this goes back to you cannot just throw renewables onto the system. You have to plan the system around the rubles, make sure you have the necessary voltage control, make sure you have the necessary synthetic inertia, and make sure you have quick reaction resources.
If you're going to retire thermal plants gas plants as an example, you're going to have to have batteries.
You made a very very varied point. In Spain there are thirty giga out of gas plants. I know there have been policy question about capacity payments, which have been shelved and are planned again. But when you don't have batteries when your interconnection are weak. Because the interconnection is only with France, and you have thirty giga out of ccgts, you need to run those ccgts thirty gigawaut You're not
going to run all of them all the time. But look, id of know you're you're the experts, So what do you say again?
There are multiple ways they could have operated the system more securely, and you're touching on one of them. Always when you're the grid operator, Do I have the necessary ramping or out ramping in the case of renewables on the system at all time? Do I have enough to respond to voltage issues? Do I have enough to respond to loss of resources whether it's transmission or generation all the time. So this is a constant evaluation of the system.
And my perspective is they either miscalculated or they aren't doing that on a regular basis, because if they had, they probably wouldn't needed to commit more of those ccgts to make sure they have the resource to fall back on. And Lauren, to your point, it sounds like they had them, they just weren't committed. And the problem with a CCGT is it takes a while to get spun up anyway, and again that's a good comparison to a battery, which
can come on in sub second and respond. So batteries are actually very, very very useful when you have a large renewable space system.
So Steve, I suppose just asked to reflections on it, what do we need to do across the world that to make sure that this type of blackout doesn't happen in the future, Because Lauren said earlier on is we're definitely seeing more extreme weather events right across the world double one. And you could also say, just from a let's say a national security point of view, it is.
Just unacceptable not to have electricity. The society falls apart without it. So what do you think we need to do to make the system more resilient.
Fundamentally, we need to take the politics out of it, because when a grid operator like myself or what I used to do, I'd say that renewables are intermittent, you know, and then people would say I'm anti renewable. Well, no I'm not. But the fact of the matter is they're intermittent. Solar comes up, ramps up very heavily in the morning, and ramps down hard in the evening. That's not anti renewable. That's how it operates. And then I take that and I say, okay, if that's how it operates, how do
I then design a reliable system around that? And there are ways to design a reliable system around that. One is operating the system securely knowing the intermittence that's inherent in them. That goes back around to your point. Then I gotta make sure I have the necessary backup resources committed, or I design something like batteries that can come to my rescue in cases where I don't have enough thermal
backup and I can do something else. But I think people need to take the politics out of it, because let's not lie to ourselves. Renewables are intermittent.
They are.
That's okay, that's not bad. You just need to plan around it. And I think that's the thing that people miss is they get too political about it and then they forget about the planning around it. But there are a few fundamental things I need to do. One is, obviously you have to fill in around the intermittency. The second thing you have to do is make sure you have fast response resources to respond when things go south.
Can I ask you about one other thing, which is this whole area of dunkel flout. In other words, when you've got no win, no soular for three days in winter months, what do you do?
What's the solution there?
The best solution there is operate regionally, and I think that Europe has actually does a much much better job than the US does. And the key to that is make sure you have enough interconnectivity between the regions to share resources. Because generally, generally, if you have I don't know the German term you used there, but I presume that means the calm winds and there's cloudy guys. So that's going to happen, but it may happen in Germany, but it's not going to happen in Spain and France
at the same time. And so regional collaboration I think is absolutely the most important thing, and I think that Europe does it better than the US. I think the US US gets very political about who controls what and do all those kind of things. The West, as an example, in the US has thirty eight balancing authorities. That's crazy, it's inefficient, it cost people money, is bad for renewables.
So my perspective is the best answers to operate regionally and Lauren, perhaps even a transmission line or from North America to Europe.
Oh, yeah, definitely. It's as you said, it's all based on the fact that the peaks are not aligned and the wind doesn't blow at the same time. So the economics of a trans at antique into connectors are fantastic. Really, technically it's going to be difficult, but the strength is going to bring to both grids is phenomenal.
Well, let's just go back to Spain again. If they had had additional connectors, they probably also wouldn't have had the problem. So there are multiple ways I think they could have avoided this problem.
Look in Front in two twenty two, they lost thirty five gigawad of nuclear never had to blackout because they are in the middle of the continent and every country came to their rescue.
It's the same way Jorge was just talking about in Germany. How does Germany survive the know when no solar days. Well, they're heavily connected to other parts of Europe, which I think is very very important.
Well, Steve, it was a great to be on the show. Explain us the blackouts. It more here than all the reports I've seen and all the Inner Shack expelled on LinkedIn all of a sudden. So thank you very.
Much, thank you Laurn, thank you Jared. It was a pleasure to be with you guys, and I'll look forward to further conversations.
Thanks a lot.
Steve brilliant.
So Luren, what do you think?
Well, first, I'm happy that we make this show so we have the capacity to invite such great guests as Steve, and frankly, I learned more in twenty minutes of discussion with him than reading those hundreds of pages of reports.
I agree with you that, and also it's just very direct. You know, he's coming from his experience as well. I thought that was an interesting point where you talk about the need for new different types of inertia. He answered the question very well, but he's also very modest about himself.
You know. It just great.
You know, I'm not really an expert in that area.
Both of course your expert there you rather Grid.
Great guy.
Great, great to have a character like that, lout.
You know, okay, job, before we go, there's this earlier report that goes out. We just want to suvute them. It's the former VP Statistical Review called the Energy Institute, now, isn't it. Yeah, it's the Energy Institute. So they just put out their seventy fourth edition with Kenny and KPMG and I'm gonna summarize, but it's a look, it's a very good I bought. It's important it goes out every year.
No, absolutely, it's the in terms of statistics, the Bible of statistics. In around global energy.
The findings are win and solar combined grew up by sixteen percent, but half of it was from China. Win and sola grew nine times faster than total energy demand, but forssil fuel also grew one percent, So emissions on the top. Basically everything's on the top, you know, col oil, gas, renewable hydro. But thanks God, most of the heavy lifting in terms of growth now is done by renewable. So
overall it's so full. Of course, it's not going fast enough, but this is Earth we're talking about, so it takes a bit of time. Shut us, shut us, okay, my friend, great and with thanks Steve and I took you next week. Look border bye, thank.
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