Spain’s Blackout and the Miracle of the Modern Power Grid

You are listening to ShiftSki, Heatmaps weekly podcast on decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, we are talking about the Spanish and Portuguese blackout. What might have caused it? How do these Concepts in grid management, frequency, voltage, inertia become the nuts and bolts of keeping a grid alive. Did renewables make the blackout worse? And could they solve the next blackout problem? It's all coming up on ShiftKey after this.

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Hi, I'm Rob Sameyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News. And I'm Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. And you are listening to ShiftKey, Heatmap's weekly podcast on decarbonization and the shift away from fossil fuels. On this week's show, What caused the blackout in Spain and Portugal?

We're gonna talk about this giant electricity grid event that happened in the past week, what we know about it, what we still don't know. It's kind of an excuse I think for me to abuse my co host's deep knowledge of Electrical engineering, what you actually study and work on.

And get into the nitty gritty not only of this event, but like of grid management broadly and how this modern Marvel, the electricity grid, which we all use every day and I think largely don't think about, but which is core to like Basically everything, the comforts of modern life, the modern global economy and also this. thing we call decarbonisation. It's like central to all of them and most of the time we ignore it. But it is The center of the story.

We don't think about the magic and engineering required to keep it running with such a high degree of reliability that we're used to in places like the United States and Europe. Because it is a big machine. And I feel like one thing we're gonna get into today and one thing that the Spanish and Portuguese blackout, the Iberian blackout really drives home is what

a machine it is in an industrial sense. We think of it as electricity coming into our house, but it is actually a massive synchronized Machine. That's the way I describe it in the beginning of my intro to the electricity sector course at Princeton is it's the world's it's the largest machine humans have ever built.

And by that we mean that the entirety of the alternating current grid across continent scales is all a synchronized, harmonized, jointly controlled piece of all sorts of connected mission components that are all acting in concert and as we saw with the

Blackout in Spain and other recent events, the whole thing can come apart in a matter of seconds if it's not very tightly regulated and controlled. And so that's a modern marvel, is that the grid stays up Anyway, any of the time, when you start to unpack what's behind it, you start to realize the incredible work that engineers and grid operators are doing all the time to make sure that this giant machine operates the way we want it to.

Before we even get even more into this, can we just say What is the unit for frequency and what is the unit for voltage? The unit for frequency is hertz, that's how many times something cycles per second. So if it's fifty hertz, that means it flips back and forth fifty times per second, that's the frequency in Europe. Sixty Hertz is the frequency of the grid in the United States.

And voltage is measured in volts. Something is high voltage equipment is usually in the thousands of volts or kilovolts. So 345 kilovolts is a typical transmission line you might see running down the highway next to you. That's 345,000 volts. If you plug something into your wall that's usually consumed at 120 volts or two hundred and forty volts in your home, right? So much smaller scales. So yeah, volts and and hertz.

Okay, cool. And there's just one more thing to add, which is when we recorded the bulk of this conversation on Monday afternoon, the Spanish grid operator had disclosed that there were two power plant failures, two generator failures. In the immediate run up to the blackout. You'll hear us talk about this, how anomalous it is for two things to go wrong at the same time.

We now know it was an even more unusual event than that. On Monday evening the Spanish grid uh operator disclosed that in fact there had been a third loss of power generation about nineteen seconds before the blackout. This doesn't change the rest of our conversation, but now you know this is an even more anomalous event than the grid operators were prepared for, an even rarer event. Anyway, let's go now to the main conversation.

Let's just start, I think, Jesse, with what we know, with the bare facts of this event, right? On Monday, April twenty eighth, twenty twenty five. The Iberian grid, the grid in Spain and Portugal, at twelve thirty three Central European time, suffered a critical failure. Now, if you look, there are unsubstantiated reports that at nine thirty AM Central European time there was a voltage fluctuation on the grid. There's another report, and I think you can see it in the data that around noon

C E T there was another brief oscillation in voltage. But the big one is that at twelve thirty three, the grid went from supplying twenty five gigawatts of electricity to customers across Spain and Portugal to supplying zero gigawatts. Yeah. A full system blackout across eight. A full system blackout. The grid in the Iberian Peninsula disconnected from the rest of the European grid, from its interconnections in southern France, and it remained out for the next ten hours.

meaning that anyone n nobody could get electricity in across Spain and Portugal. trains, electric cha trains came to a a halt. People had to be evacuated from the subway in Madrid. My favorite secondary consequence of this is that parts of Greenland lost connectivity. A total connectivity with the outside world because their communications terminal runs through the Canary Islands and Gran Canaria. And so it is.

Grand Canary, the Canary Islands are powered by an offshore cable connected to Spain. And so when that offshore cable lost power This part of Southern Greenland also lost connectivity because of this antenna. So kind of spiraling global consequences of this one blackout. Jesse, the power's now back on. You are our in-house grid expert. I can really like abuse your expertise here. So just like when you look at an event like this.

W what do you think of where should we start what should we start to think about and where did your mind go when you saw an event of this magnitude happen? Yeah, I mean the first thing I noticed just how fast these things happen. The grid experienced a loss of two generators in the southwest of Spain. We still don't know the grid operator's not specified which specific generators or how large they were, so we don't know if they were

solar farm or a wind farm or a a thermal power plant like a gas plant. But within one point five seconds, two generators went offline very quickly. So boom, boom. Then it didn't take more than three and a half additional seconds before a full cascading failure led to the complete blackout.

So this entire cascading failure happened in the course of five seconds. And that's because power systems operate basically at the speed of light, right? They're operating at electromagnetic waves that are spanning across national continental scales extremely quickly. And so I think that tells you two things. One, it tells you how quickly things can fail. You know, there's no time for a human to intervene in that process.

And it tells you how fast the control systems need to be to prevent these kinds of things if we want to be resilient to those sorts of events.

And we can talk later about what are the technical limits and how tight they are and and some of the strategies used to automatically control generation and batteries and demand and other things in order to keep within those limits. And that I think tells us that we need to I think that tells us that we need to have a set of control systems in place that can handle all kinds of different disturbances.

And w the reality, I think what we know from the high degree of reliability of the grid is that we do have systems that can handle a very large degree of disturbances. They are quite robust. but they can't be prepared to handle everything. And this is one of those things that it clearly wasn't prepared to handle. It's a we call it an N minus two contingency, meaning there were two components that failed in this system basically simultaneously.

And most grids are designed to operate under an N minus one contingency, meaning like any one large component of the system could fail. And the grid is supposed to be resilient to that. But when you have multiple correlated failures that are happening right at the same time, it can't always survive that kind of event. And so I guess then that leads to the next question, which is a who done it?

what caused those two generators to go offline? And unfortunately we still don't have an answer to that question. We probably won't. matter of days or even weeks as the investigation continues. So it's still a little bit like an unsolved murder mystery at this point. We know that there's two dead bodies on the floor, but we don't know what killed them or what caused these generators to drop offline. We can speculate, we can talk about some of the possible causes.

And I intend to speculate. We're going to use this episode to speculate. I mean It's like a it's like a true crime show now, right? Exactly. This is gonna be like it's like the movie Zodiac. Um let's just back up and start at the basics.

On a day to day basis. How does grid management work? How do grid operators keep this vast machine running Successfully at all times. So it's really a balancing act that they're constantly playing between electricity supply and demand. And there are two extremely tight tolerances that they have to meet. And for both of those they're basically modulating either supply or demand to try to keep things in balance.

The first is the frequency of the grid. So we use an alternating current grid, which is different from a direct current that you might see in a electronic device like you might have your cell phone or a computer where the current is always running one direction in a in an endless loop. We use alternating current grids because as Tesla and Edison showed us 150 years ago, it's very easy to raise the voltage of alternating currents much easier than it is than for direct current grids.

And the higher the voltage, the lower the losses we experience when we transmit power over long distance. In fact, it goes down with the voltage squared. So as we increase to high voltage levels, we have extremely low losses to transmit power over hundreds of miles or kilometers. And so we have a high voltage grid that is running on alternating current. And that means that the polarity or direction of the travel of the current goes back and forth.

Once every either sixtieth of a second, so sixty hertz in the United States, or fifty hertz, so once every fifty of a fiftieth of a second. in in Spain. And so we might picture in our minds like electrons flowing through a circuit, but it's actually not like the electrons are not moving. They're just jiggling back and forth. And you can think of it more like one of those sort of cat's cradles or Newton's cradles that you might have seen on a desk where

You've got all the balls and you pick one up and you drop it and it hits the middle balls and then it the force gets translated through three or four of them and then the one on the other end pops up, right? The ones in the middle don't move at all, but the force gets transmitted through.

Or if you were like standing in a line and you elbowed the person next to you and then they fell over a little bit and ran into the person next to them and it went down the line that way and then somebody elbowed you on the other side'cause they were mad that you ran into them and then it went back the other way.

Can I ask a question as someone who struggled with eleventh grade physics? Is that the difference between A C and D C? Like A C is the wave is propagating through the medium of electrons, but the

Uh no, in the case of D C it's still the same that the electrons are bumping into the next one. It's just they continually do that in the same direction. So it's a little bit like shuffling forward in a queue or a line. You know, like you have to wait for the person ahead of you to move, then you can move a little bit forward.

But there's always people going up the front of the line and coming into the back, right? And so the it's still the electromagnetic magnetic wave that is transferring the energy that we need and that moves at the speed of light. The electrons actually move much slower than that. It's called drift velocity.

And it's quite slow. And in an alternating current they don't really go anywhere. They just go back and forth every sixty of a second. And so it's really that kind of elbowing your neighbor that is what transmits the force down the line. of the cable. And alternating current kinda goes back and forth, a direct current goes consistently in one direction. I feel like you're halfway to describing it, but can you just fully flesh out for people what voltage is?

There's a kind of partially useful metaphor, which is to think about like water flowing through a pipe, because we can probably all picture that. We've all had a garden hose and we've put our thumb over the end of it, right, and changed the pressure of it, or we've turned on the tap. The current is like the volume of water flowing through the pipes, or in this case, the electromagnetic energy flowing through the through the wires. And the voltage is like the water pressure.

So it's kind of how hard is it pushing? And so when you combine those two together, voltage and current, that's what gives you power, like the force of water. Right. If I want to knock somebody over with a spray of water, right, you either can increase the pressure or you can increase the total volume of the water. Or both, right? And that's basically voltage and current, or current is the volume and voltage is the pressure.

the metaphor breaks down because it's not actually like a mass flowing through the wires or the electrons are not moving, but Right. And in fact we just talked about how it's more like an elbow. This is why I was Exactly. But that's the r I think that's the mental model to think about. So I introduced it in my class is a partially useful metaphor of water flowing in a pipe. And then resistance, which is the kind of how hard it is to push the water through the pipe or what the like friction is.

on the edge of the pipe, that's also an important component. And that's what drives losses in transmission lines as well. And we do lose some of the energy to resistance because we Have to push energy against the resistance of the conductors. The conductors aren't perfect conductors, even though they're quite good. And so some of the energy is lost to heat.

or an alternating currents to creating magnetic fields around the wires. This is what happens when you energize the wire. Uh and so we're also pushing against these magnetic fields. That's called reactants and also contributes to losses. I feel that by asking this question in order to simplify things that we're going to do. We have not some of those things.

So there's voltage that you have to manage across the grid. What else do you have to Yeah, so there's frequency and voltage. Those are the two key tolerances. And so because the grid is oscillating back and forth. We need to keep it oscillating at that fifty hertz frequency in the in Europe or sixty hertz in the United States across the entire interconnected grid. And so in the case of Europe, that's all of continental Europe and North Africa.

In the case of the United States, we actually have three interconnections. We have one that's like it's basically east of Colorado and another one that's west of kind of Colorado, right? The eastern interconnection and the western interconnection. And then as we've talked about in our last episode, Texas. Has decided to have its own isolated interconnection. But basically, we have two giant grids, right, in the United States that span roughly half the country each. The European system has.

400 million residents in it. It's an enormous machine. And all of that has to stay in perfect synchronization. And if it if that frequency tall moves by more than one hertz, so it goes from fifty to fifty one or fifty to forty nine, and it stays there for more than like thirty seconds. It can trigger generators and other devices that are synchronized to disconnect from the grid to protect themselves from physical destruction or damage.

And that's what causes a cascading failure. Because the basic dynamic is if supply and demand are perfectly balanced, frequency stays the same. If supply generation gets a little bit above demand, then the frequency speeds up. It's a little bit like when you're pushing a merry go around around. And then somebody jumps off the merrick around and all of a sudden you start going much faster because it's the same amount of force but less mass if you're Playground character.

Um yeah, exactly. And so what happens is the generators that are all synchronized to the grid are these big spinning masses of magnets. and copper wire that are connected to a gas turbine or, you know, falling water that's moving uh hydroturbine. These spinning masses, right, uh have their own physical inertia. And they start to speed up if the force they're pushing against collectively on the grid, which is the load or demand for electricity, drops.

And this is one of these things that I find unbelievable of the grid is that across the eastern side of North America, across the European continent, all of those giant building sized generators are spinning not only at the same frequency, but exactly together. That's right. They are exactly unified at sixty or fifty Hertz. Exactly. As well as any electric motors that are directly connected to the grid as well, induction based motors.

Which you'd see in all kinds of industrial processes, right? Where you're using electricity to drive some kind of motor that drives a conveyor belt or compresses something or whatever else you're doing. All of those devices are also synchronized with that exact frequency as well. And so that yeah, that's the kind of combined device. Actually all the lights, if you're using older incandescent lights, those also used to be actually flickering, but at a pace that our eyes couldn't see.

Right, because it was every sixty of a second, every fiftieth of a second. Now with modern LEDs and computers and EVs and other things, we have a lot of direct current devices that are connected through converters that convert from A C to D C. That's the power brick that you would use to

plug your laptop into the wall or plug in your cell phone charger, that's converting the alternating current grid coming out of the plug in your home into the direct current used in those sort of modern semiconductor based devices.

So this actually gets to a big supply demand question, which I feel like haunts my understanding of the grid. Which is that, you know, you go to the PJM website, you go to the New York ISO website, you go to the Keso website, any you go to your grid operators website and you can see the curve of demand for the day. Right. And if you get into this as a nerd, you know that that curve looks different depending on what time the season is.

In the summer there's a big afternoon peak. If it's the winter there's kind of two peaks through the day or there's a big morning peak. But that curve looks very smooth from the graph. And yet when people talk about it, they say the grid is constantly managing supply and demand. And so one question I have as a normal electricity consumer is that when I turn on the lights or I plug in my iPhone or I turn on the microwave or something, is the grid actually supplying exactly as much.

additional power as I needed at that moment, or in the great morass of supply and demand out there in the grid. Basically as every time I turn on the lights, that like exactly equalized by someone else. somewhere in in New York turning off their lights at the same moment. And so really as long as you just broadly follow the curve, the grid operator is fine. Or no, is the fact that the grid actually really is adjusting every single time I change the electricity use in my

Yeah, it's actually adjusting every single time. And maybe maybe you get lucky that somewhere exactly at the same time as Rob flips on the light, some I turn off the light. But again, this all moves at the speed of light. So this is happening, you know, instantaneously effectively. And you can't create or destroy energy. You can only move it around or conserve it. And so if you need more energy coming off the grid, somehow we gotta be sticking more energy into the grid.

And this is where the physical inertia or spinning mass of these generators that are or in some of the large motors that are all interconnected and synchronized comes into play. Again, it's sort of like what happens when you're on a merry ground that's spinning at a certain speed and then somebody jumps off of it and all it everybody else is still on there, it starts going much faster.

You have some kinetic energy there in the movement of those physical spinning chunks of copper and magnets. And so when you ask for more energy. The immediate response is that some of that kinetic energy gets transferred into greater generation. And what that means is that the generators slow down a little bit. So you're pulling some of that inertia, that kinetic energy out of the generator.

And the generators, you know, uh little tiny bits of all of the generators that are synchronized to the grid slow down a little bit because you've taken a small little amount of their Kinetic energy out. Now a light is a tiny little bit of electricity, and so it really is an infinitesimally small amount of kinetic energy spread across hundreds of generators that are synchronized. But say what happens when a nuclear power plant trips offline or a data center connects.

And you lose or add a city's worth of electricity, then that's a lot of kinetic energy. And the generators start to slow a lot. So that's the immediate response. If demand increases or supply rapidly decreases relative to demand, then the inertia of the physical generators contributes a little bit more energy and the generators slow down.

If generation is exceeding demand, because say a data center turned off, then they actually absorb a little bit more kinetic energy because they're producing more energy than they need to power the grid. And so they get a little faster. And they and that they get they speed up or slow down around that fifty hertz or sixty hertz mode.

Exactly. And that's instantaneous, right? And so that is critical because nobody can sit there and be like, Okay, Rob, turn on the lights. Now go. Right. It's too fast even for that kind of control signal. So we actually need physics or There is a possibility that we can use power electronics in, say, inverter connected devices like like solar or batteries fast enough to also supply a similar response at the speed of light by just detecting the local frequency.

shift and then supplying a little bit more or a little bit less energy. That's not commonly done today, but that's what's called synthetic inertia and it's the kind of thing we might need in a future where we're running mostly on wind, solar, and batteries. Maybe we can park that for later. But so that's the first thing that happens, right? Is this instantaneous physical response. But then if the grid is f speeding up.

it can't stay faster than fifty hertz or things might start to go poorly. If, you know, you you turned on your light and then I turned on my light and then somebody else did, it would continually get slower. or if we turn them off, we can suddenly get faster. And again, that tolerance range is just one hertz. So if it goes to fifty one or forty nine, we're in trouble. And so the next response

is a local distributed control signal. Again, there's still nobody at a switchboard saying go faster or go slower. It's actually a local measurement of the frequency right there at the generator. And the generator says, Ah, I'm slowing down. I need to turn up the flame in my generator to run my gas turbine, or I need to add a little more water in. That's called governor control or automatic generator control.

And that's the opposite response of the frequency. So frequency is going down because I'm losing kinetic energy. I want to add a little bit more power from my combustion source or my water or whatever is providing the energy to the generator. And if I'm speeding up, I want to provide a little less energy.

And that immediate response takes a couple seconds to monitor what's going on and to add more energy to the system. And so without that, immediate inertial response, the grid would fail all the time. And this is why people bring up the importance of inertia in in power systems for their stability, because right now that's the kind of the physics behind how we can absorb these little small changes. Once the generators are producing a little bit more or a little bit less

They might if they're producing more, they might be starting to exceed their nominal capacity. It's like redlining a car. You're going a little bit above the RPMs you should be. And so then we wanna what we wanna do, and this takes a little bit longer, is take some generators that weren't producing at their maximum output level.

and turn them up a little bit. Or if we we need to lower the frequency, we turn them down a little bit. And that's called a frequency regulation service. And for that we schedule generators would otherwise be producing right at their maximum.

And we say, no, hold on, stay two to five percent below your maximum so you've got a little wiggle room. And we're gonna send you a control signal that says go up a little bit, go down a little bit, go up a little bit. And this is where we start to get finally a centralized control. uh where the system operator themselves is sending out a frequency regulation signal that those uh reserves, those kind of backup generators that have a little spare capacity, are responding to.

And that could be batteries. Batteries are really good at that. They're really fast at responding to those control signals. And so a lot of the frequency regulation we get now in modern grids is from lithium-ion batteries. And I maybe I should add just finally that th that r scheduling of sufficient reserves, that happens usually a day ahead of re of when we want the power. So it's just sort of c cascading. Now we're talking about we went from light speed

Right, to seconds. Inertia is physics at light speed. Then we have the governor response, which is a few seconds, then we have the frequency regulation, which is making second by second adjustments, but we schedule the capacity for that hours ahead of time. And then you gotta plan enough generators to have on your system. That happens years ahead of time. So it's this sort of cascading series of planning decisions, scheduling operations, and physics.

that all combine to make sure we have enough flexibility that when you turn on your lights, I can immediately supply more power. If you turn it off, I can immediately supply less. And we can keep the grid operating in that really tight, tight range.

And this is beginning to get from questions of electricity engineering to questions of grid policy, right? Like this is now where How much reserves do you want? How much are you willing to pay for that? What's the day ahead market? Did is the power grid struggling because the day ahead market, uh, which is a feature of many grids across the United States. forecast much less power demand than actually happened because maybe the day turned out to be way hotter than we thought it would be.

Yeah, exactly. So this is where yeah you get into the nature of the grid operators scheduling and operations of the grid, and this is what this is the primary job. of your grid operator, whether that's in the US a regional transmission organization like our like PJM or a local vertically integrated utility like a Southern Company or in Europe, they have a number of transmission system operators that typically operate at a national scale.

And so in Spain it's Red Electrica de España or R E E that is the network operator there. And there's a similar one in Portugal. And so they're in charge basically of operating and staying keeping the frequency within their boundaries. And then all of those system operators are working together to make sure that the whole continental grid stays within balance. I remember Ukraine did this right after the invasion. It switched its its generators from being synchronized to

the Russian and Eastern European grid to the EU grid. Um I think that's also helpful because it like scales up inertia, which is a physical property, to something that matters across balancing the entire grid. Something that happened right after the Iberian blackout happened is that a lot of people across the internet started talking about uh people with a stake in grid policy, noticed that Spain had a very high percentage of renewable resources online.

at the moment of the blackout. And that's in part because Spain has, I think, more solar than any other country in Europe for understandable reasons, if you think about the geography. And it was also plenty of wind and it was twelve thirty PM, right? Yeah, on a mild spring day, right? So it's not a high demand day. Some of the nuclear plants were off for maintenance. You weren't scheduling all of your gas plants, et cetera. Yeah.

solar penetration into a grid as you could get for the particular for the Spanish grid at this particular moment in time. So a number of people started saying, oh, this is actually caused because there wasn't enough inertia on the grid that Spain flew too close to the sun, let's say, and had too many instantaneous resources that are metered by inverters and not by these large mechanical generators attached to its grid.

Some issue happened and it wasn't able to maintain the frequency of its grid as needed. How likely do you think that it? What do you think about that theory, I guess? Yeah, so I don't think it's plausible as the precipitating event, the initial thing that started to drive the grid towards towards collapse. I would say it did contribute once the Iberian grid disconnected from France.

So let me break that down. When Spain and Portugal are connected to the rest of the continental European grid, there's an enormous amount of inertia in that system because it doesn't actually matter what's going on just in Spain.

they're connected to this continent scale grid. And so as the frequency drops there, it drops a little bit in France and it drops a little bit in Latvia. And all the generators across Europe are contributing to that balance. So there was a surplus of inertia across Europe at the time. Um What once the system in Iberia disconnected f from France though, now it's operating on its own as an actual island.

And there it has very little inertia because the system operator did only scheduled a couple thousand megawatts of conventional thermal units of gas power plants and nuclear. And so it had a very high penetration on the peninsula of non uh inertia based resources like solar and wind. And so whatever is happening up to that point, once the grid disconnected, it certainly lacked enough inertia to recover at that point.

from the kind of cascading events. But it doesn't seem like a lack of inertia contributed to the initial precipitating event. Something we don't know what yet caused two generators to simultaneously disconnect. And we know that we've s observed oscillation in the frequency, meaning something happened to disturb the frequency.

in Spain before all this happened. And we don't know exactly what that disturbance was. There could have been a lot of different things. It could have been a sudden surge of wind or solar generation. That's possible. It could have been something going wrong with the control system

uh that manages the the automatic response to changes in in frequency. They were measuring the wrong thing and they started to speed up or slow down or something went wrong. That happened in the past in the case of a generator in Florida. that turned on and tried to synchronize with the grid and got its controls wrong and that caused oscillations of frequency that propagated all through the Eastern Interconnection as far away as North Dakota, which is like two thousand miles away.

You know, so these things happen. Sometimes thermal generators screw up. There was a similar event that caused the Northeast blackout where a a gas power plant in Ohio did something wrong with its controls and then that started to cause a problem. And this is where the controls come in because As I mentioned, if a local generator sees the frequency dropping, it'll try to speed up a little.

We have to synchronize all of that action across all of the grid so that everybody's speeding up at the same moment just enough to restore things. If one generator overshoots and speeds up too much, now it's gonna have a local over frequency or over voltage, we can talk about voltage later. It'll be producing too much energy.

And so then maybe it's some generator next to it says, oh, okay, now I gotta back off. But then the frequency drops again, and you can get this swing in frequencies between two locations. So one of them is too fast and the other one's going too slow. And if they're not synced up. The frequency can whip back and forth across the continent at different speeds. So they might both be at 50 hertz, but they're out of sync.

And maybe locally at one point it's a little too fast, maybe it's a little too slow somewhere else. And so if something went wrong with the control signals and the response to those controls, that could cause an oscillation. And that looks like it was occurring a couple times during the day before the 1230 blackout. And again, we don't know exactly what caused that, but it is one of the possible precipitating events.

That might have caused the generators themselves to trip offline in southern Spain. And if you get a large enough Difference in the frequencies, so they're out of sync. That is probably what triggered the French interconnector to disconnect because it was trying to basically protect France.

from a broader cascading problem. And so it basically said, We're cutting you off, you do your own thing. We're protecting ourselves. That's how the grid's supposed to work to prevent a continent wide blackout. And so then that maybe caused the sort of cascade that happened after that. So that's one possible precipitating event. Yeah, it does sound though like it is true that Spain once it was islanded, once Spain was cut off from the rest of Europe.

It was having this issue. And it was more brittle as a system because it happened to have this extremely large share of renewables at the time.

I I think that's plausible. And again, there are solutions to this, right? There are conventional solutions and there are more advanced solutions. Ultimately, the system operator intends to operate their system with at least n minus one contingencies so that it could lose a transmission line or lose a generator. If this was worse than that, if it happened to be that something was going wrong that caused more than one large generator disconnect.

they may not have had enough local response to deal with that. And then that could have triggered a broader blackout. Once they're on their own, they certainly didn't have much inertia left because the system operator didn't schedule much of their existing thermal generators.

And there are different solutions to this. Like as I said, we could use inverters themselves to help control these and in some parts of the world they're starting to do that, like Ireland and Hawaii, these literal islands with very high shares of wind or solar. are having to come up with creative ways to use inverter based resources to help in that control scheme.

The trick is to get it right. So again, you're not causing oscillations. You're not overcompensating by injecting too much power too fast or too little And we haven't designed the control schemes for that in a way that are unified and seamless. We've done a lot of offline simulations, but no one really wants to do a live simulation with the actual grid.

So the traditional response is you just commit more gas generators or nuclear generators and you have them running at their minimum output level just to provide inertia. But that's not free, right? Now I've got a generator that's burning fuel that's sitting there when I had free wind and solar power that I have to curtail off to make room for that generator. And so it's an insurance policy, it makes the grid more reliable to have that inertia there, but it's not free.

And it in Europe they've been coming out of a massive energy crisis, right, that saw a huge elevation in energy prices and a lot of price sensitivity and politics, just straight up highly salient politics at the national level around energy costs.

And so there's an argument that the system operator has had a lot of political incentives to cut back on the role of reserves to both integrate more renewables and to lower costs for consumers. And maybe they cut it a little too close, right? Maybe they should have committed a bit more. Longer term, you can also install what are called synchronized condensers.

Which is basically the spinning hunk of mass of the generator without the combustion turbine or the coal pip boiler or whatever else that was supplying energy. You can actually convert old coal plants to do this. But you basically just have a bunch of magnets and copper spinning around. They provide inertia.

And they can very quickly compensate for changes in voltage as well by supplying or consuming reactive power, which we'll I guess have to explain. But that's something that has been in process. One of the coal plants in Spain is being converted into synchronized compensator or condenser.

that's what they're talking about in Ireland as well, is just we'll pay for some of those. I reviewed a thesis for Melbourne, a PhD student in Melbourne, Australia, where again in Southern Australia they have high shares of renewables and so they're thinking about this too. where he was modeling what a fully decarbonized grid would look like and how we would supply the inertia for that.

And found that even if we don't start using the inverters themselves, which are important, we could do that and lower costs, that even if we just installed a bunch of synchronous condensers and had to commit some gas turp for inertia sometimes, It would only raise the cost of the grid by about two percent.

So worst case we're talking about a couple percent for a fully renewable power decarbonized grid, and we should be able to do better than that by taking advantage of power electronics, which are really fast too, and could supply this service at a lower cost.

They also can change how strong the magnetic field is around the generator, which is one of the ways in which we can control voltage, which also has to stay within very tight tolerances of about plus or minus five percent. of the nominal rated voltage of a line or a piece of equipment. And that's another possible source of this whole cascading problem as well, is it could actually have been a local voltage problem, totally separate from j from inertia or from frequency.

And voltage is a much more localized thing. You don't share it over broad areas. You have to control it at every point in the grid. And that is another area where renewables both make things more complicated, but also provide potential solutions because inverters can be very good at voltage control if we let them. So v let's back up and say we've been talking about frequency for a lot of this episode. We saw frequency fluctuate but we did see voltage fluctuations across the Spanish grid before

the right before the blackout. And in fact, just to clarify here, it is the voltage fluctuations that force France to disconnect as far as we understand, right? Or is it frequently? Well uh it's that's unclear to me i whether it was a voltage fluctuation or the frequency getting out of sync because of a frequency oscillation. Either of them could have triggered both generators and the interconnectors to disconnect because

if they're out of those tolerance ranges, the only way to protect devices is to instantaneously turn them off, right? Because things can move really fast, right? This all happened in five seconds or less. So unless you're willing to c pull the plug immediately.

to protect a device, it could go bad really quickly. And so if either voltage or frequency get out of that tight tolerance band, Devices start to disconnect, generators start to disconnect, electric motors at factories start to disconnect, interconnectors between countries start to disconnect.

And again, that all happens as an automatic response. There's just like a protection device that's measuring locally what's going on and if things get outside of its tolerance, it it opens a switch or opens a circuit and turns things off really quickly. We've been talking a lot about this frequency, you wanna stay within one Hertz, but like what's the bandwidth on voltage?

Yeah, so voltage, we step up and down voltage at different points during the grid. We want it at really high voltages for transmitting things over long distances, but we consume power at two hundred and twenty volts or hundred and twenty volts in our homes.

So we want to step it back down again at the end. So different devices in the grid are at different voltage levels. And we use transformers, not the kind that are robots in disguise, but the kind that are like on your pole that are the cans that are on the top of your light pole that are connected to your house. There's

Inside there, there's basically a magnet with a bunch of copper wires around one side and another set of copper wires around the other side. And we can basically induce sym sympathetic currents that are at the same frequency but are at different voltage levels on either side of those loops.

There's big ones at substations, there's small ones on your power line poles. But so those are raising and lowering voltage all over the place. But whatever the voltage is supposed to be for that device, they basically have to stay within five percent, plus or minus of that. So if you have a

three hundred and forty five kilovolt transmission line. That's three hundred and forty five thousand volts. That's a standard typical transmission line you've probably seen running along the highway next to you sometime. If that goes up or down by five percent above that or below that three hundred and forty five kilovolts, then something is wrong and the system will start disconnecting things to protect devices as well because there's too much power coming in or not enough power coming in.

So you control voltage fairly similarly to the way you control frequency, but it's much more local. Basically if you inject power into the grid, voltage goes up, and if you withdraw power from the grid, voltage goes down. It's a little bit more complicated in high voltage network because it's actually not real power. The power that we're using in our devices, it's what's called reactive power.

which is the portion of the power that's used to create the magnetic fields that exist around any current, around any conductor. Uh you might remember this in physics, the right hand rule that if pass electricity through a copper conductor or something like that, there's a a loop of magnetic field that is generated around that runs, I think, clockwise around the outside of the conductor. If you're running a direct current line. That magnetic field is established once.

right when you energize the line. And it uses in the grand scheme of things an infinitesimally small amount of energy. But if you're continuously creating and destroying that field because your alternating current line is reversing back and forth every sixtieth or fiftieth of a second. It actually takes a bit of power to continually create and destroy that magnetic field that you need to transmit real power down the line. We sort of by convention call that power reactive power.

It also capacitors, things that build up a capacitive charge between two things, those also counteract that. So we can have reactive power that's positive or negative depending on whether we're creating magnetic fields or creating electrical fields. But we don't actually use that power to power our devices. We just need it to move power through the grid.

And it's that change in reactive power injection or withdrawal that actually contributes the most to voltage at the high voltage level. Whereas at our low voltage grids, where power is supplied to our homes or within our homes, actually real power changes are what control voltage. So in either case, it's still as delicate balancing act of okay, voltage is too high, reduce the amount of reactive power or real power. Voltage is too low, let's inject a little bit more.

The big difference between voltage and frequency is that in for frequency I can call on all the inertial mass of all the generators across the whole continent scale grid. But for voltage, I have to do it locally at the location where the voltage deviation is or very close to it because it's something that doesn't propagate, you know, broadly across everywhere. I have to change point source injections and withdrawals basically.

I see. So unlike with frequency, where it's frequency is like a property of the whole grid, but Voltage is happening at every substation with the wires to your house. Yeah, every transmission line, every transformer, et cetera. So the traditional way we control this is we have a few generators and the generators can change how much reactive power they're producing by basically creating a stronger magnetic field or a weaker magnetic field around their generator. It's called excitation.

If they get more excited, they consume more reactive power, which would lower the voltage if they're less excited they supply basically supply reactive power, which would raise the voltage. So by tweaking the way our generators are set up, our thermal generators that's spinning around, we can also supply voltage control. But there's only a few of those large generators, right, located at specific points in the grid. So we also use capacitor banks and other devices like synchronized condensers.

Scattered throughout the grid to do this. But we could use them. We don't use them today, right? We don't use synchronized They do. That's that yeah.'Cause you do sometimes you say you have a long transmission line and you don't have any generator in between.

You need something to control the voltage in the middle of the line and you might then have to install a capacitor bank or use a synchronized condenser or something like that. So that does they do use them. And again, that adds cost, right? That's just a hunk of hardware.

that's sitting out there to try to control voltage that's not used to actually provide you with energy. And so we try to minimize that. So now you add a bunch of distributed renewables, right? If you look at Spain, it's got solar and wind scattered all over the country. i at utility scale and distributed. I think they have something like seven or eight gigawatts of distributed solar now in addition to tens of gigawatts of utility scale solar and wind.

And each of those devices, its output is going up and down, right, as the wind and solar output change, and that's affecting local uh voltage at all these different points in the grid. And so it does make it more challenging. We should be clear. Having a distributed grid makes it in some ways more challenging to control voltage because you have a lot of new sources of changes in voltage as the wind and solar go up and down.

However, the solution to that problem is sitting right at the inverter connecting those devices as well, because inverters can basically at will shift how much reactive power they're supplying or consuming just through the power electronics of the inverter itself. And so if we were to set up a control system, again, that those inverters were allowed to provide voltage support. then they could solve their own problems very locally. It's just that we have to evolve how we manage the grid.

Twenty-first century grids demand twenty-first century control strategies. And the conventional way to connect an inverter to the grid is with what's known as a fixed power factor. So the amount of reactive power supplied is fixed in proportion to the real power. So if the sun is coming up, you're providing more reactive power, the voltage is going up. If the sun is going down, you're providing less just proportionally to that solar output, which would cause the voltage to drop.

So we need to basically let the inverters free up how much reactive power they want to supply and to respond to local changes in voltage in order to provide their own voltage support. And if we did that, we would have all the distributed control solutions that we needed out there in the grid at exactly the points where the generators that are causing the issues are located too, because the inverters are right there where the solar is injecting to the grid. Does that make sense?

Why would voltage vary from solar panels? Is it because just because if they have a fixed so if they have a fixed what's known as power factor, which is basically how much of the energy they produce is real power versus reactive. Then as the sun comes up, they're producing more real power, which also means they're proportionally producing more reactive power and that reactive power will increase to. It really is that the sun is not a good thing. Yeah, the sun changes, the clouds pass over.

I don't know. Speed changes. And unless you allow the inverters to change the ratio of real and reactive power to control the local voltage, then the voltage will simply go up and down proportionate to the solar generation or the wind generation.

And that's what's happening in most grids today, with the exception of again of a few places like Hawaii that because of their very high penetration levels have had to try to solve this problem and have started what started using inverters as smart inverters or voltage supporting inverters to control the voltage locally and basically solve this problem, which is very inexpensive because the inverter's already there.

You don't need to install a new capacitor bank or a synchronized condenser, right, just for voltage support. The inverters are already installed that connect the DC solar panel, direct current solar panel to the frequency of the alternating current grid. It just happens that that device can also, if it wants to, supply or consume reactive power to help change the voltage. Why isn't that standard in how we install solar?

It's a matter of what's the right control signal so that we don't cause oscillations. So that somebody doesn't provide too much and then somebody else down the line fights against that and provides too little and they're constantly going back and forth.

If you were to grab a rope and one person, you know, whips one side of it, the way will move down the rope. It's very hard to keep that in sync. So you need the right standards and control signals in place and you need the right measurements locally to be able to respond to. I that is available now. It's just not widely adopted as part of the grid code in many parts of the world.

we would simply have to s pass new standards basically for interconnection that require inverters that are able to perform this function and are able to respond to the right to or implement the right control scheme.

Okay, so those are all things that can go wrong. And is part of what happened then in Spain, insofar as we can tell right now, that kind of once you get off on the wrong foot in voltage. So to speak then just like your other variables you start losing control of them and with little backup or ability to withstand multiple shocks across the system, it just You kind of have to take everything offline or everything p disconnects itself to protect the grid.

Yeah, I think that's right. There's basically I think a few different scenarios you could spin out here that are plausible, right? One is something caused a voltage spike in southwestern Spain. Maybe that was a solar farm rapidly producing output. Maybe that was a large consumer rapidly turning off, right? We don't know what that was.

And if that voltage spike then caused generators nearby to disconnect to protect themselves. And that's what maybe triggered the two back-to-back disconnections in Southwest Spain. Then you've got a cascading set of problems because now I've got too large of an event. I don't have enough contingency enough to respond to that within seconds.

And so as a safety measure to protect the rest of the grid, the French interconnection disconnects and then basically you've got a cascading problem in Iberia and the only thing to do is to turn it off and turn it back on like when your computer freezes. Right? Gotta restart the thing. It could also have been that something, again, we don't know exactly what, caused an oscillation in the frequency. It caused the sort of things to get out of sync between Iberia and France.

That oscillation itself may have triggered those generators to disconnect.

Or it could be a coincidence. It could be that just multiple things went wrong at once and you had a frequency oscillation that was already happening, then you lost a couple generators for some other reason, and then things are really out of control and then the French interconnector disconnects and now you're on your own and you don't haven't have enough supply it to stay online and and everything disconnects very quickly.

Again, we don't really know the initiating causes of either the frequency oscillation or the loss of generation and whether those are causally linked or the voltage spikes that seem to have been observed at different parts in the grid as well. So What caused this at the end of the day we still don't know.

Could we have pr could we have prevented it? Absolutely. There's available solutions to do it. We could have had more gas generators committed. We could have had inverters contributing synthetic inertia or voltage support. We could have built synchronized condensers. Is that free? No. Does it require proactive effort to keep up with changes in the grid? Yes. These are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about. How much are we we willing to pay?

How much r how resilient to multiple things going wrong at once do we want to be? And how proactive are we going to be at getting ahead of this rather than responding retroactively. And I think this event is a wake up call that y we need to rethink those things. Everybody should have an answer to that question in different parts of the world and we can't just have it go unstated and kind of stumble forward into this changing grid.

Right. We do actually need an account. I mean, Europe will now investigate what exactly happened in Absolutely. Every time an event like this happens, even a close call that didn't trigger blackouts, they investigate it. It's kind of like a nuclear power. They do the same thing. Everybody shares all this information broadly. Everybody's learning from this around the world.

And so it is one of those events that we will learn a lot from and system operators will adapt and improve based on what they learn from this event. Um so if there's a bright side here, it's that we will all learn from this and we will all get better at operating our grid.

It does remind me so much. I mean at this point everything reminds me of logistics, but it does sound like a version of and in some ways it's quite analogous to logistics, right? You have flows of Yeah. It's just all moving it's logistics at the speed of light. Exactly. Yes. But there is this trade off that we encountered during the pandemic that we're probably now going to encounter again, which is that we have these just in time delivery systems.

require basically very large scales to operate efficiently and become more efficient at the larger the scale, and require instantaneous delivery of whatever we're talking about. I mean most case supplies intermediate goods. Inputs into finished products or the finished products themselves. In this case, we're talking about electrons, and we have different ways to talk about that.

But it there is just a trade off, right? I mean, w ultimately what we're getting at here is that okay, you don't like just in time logistics. You think it expose you think it it makes the system brittle. That's fine. you can hold that point of view, but ultimately you're gonna wind up holding more inventory or staging more inventory in more places. And that's gonna increase your costs. Yep. And so there is ultimately a final trade-off between resilience and efficiency and

Yeah. It all comes out in the prices. It does. And I do think it's worth pausing and noting though that in this case The costs are not that significant. Remember the example I mentioned from the study from Australia. It's two percent. You know, if you look at the bill right now, and maybe we can post this in the show notes of what I pay in PJM for these services.

All of these ancillary services, all of these products that we use to provide that resilience, that little bit of inventory that we can absorb the shocks, it's a f it's like a couple percent of my total bill, probably less than a percent of my total bill. So I could double how much I throw at this to be twice as resilient, and we would barely notice it in our build.

And so I do think this is an area where we do need to pause and think about how valuable electricity is to our lives, how disruptive power outages are, and recognize that we might want to pay a very small amount more in the end of the month to have a more resilient grid that better harnesses twenty-first century solutions to deal with the nature of a twenty-first century grid, which has distributed generation.

Batteries, gen thermal generators all working together in more complicated ways than in the past. And so I worry that if it was true that the Spanish system operator under committed reserves'cause it was trying to save money or appear as though it was trying to save money, that would be an unfortunate consequence of the politicization in Spain of energy costs.

Because if you're looking for where to save costs, it's not in these ancillary services, not in these reserve products that help make the system more resilient. Those are really quite a small overall cost. And it's probably worth it to invest a bit more. And you get what you pay for, right? If you don't invest, You're not going to get a more resilient grid.

It's worth saying that this is like a different sort of problem too than the one I think that we've started to anticipate in the American context. I feel like a lot of US electricity policy right now obviously we're alert to these problems, but it feels to me like what we're anticipating more so than an issue like the one we just saw in Spain. And you should correct me if this isn't correct, is gas is closer to what happened in Texas, right? Where

the gas system gets really oversubscribed. We don't have the gas reserves when we need them.

And either in the middle of the summer up here in the northeast or in the middle of the winter anywhere in the country during a cold snap, suddenly we actually run out of resources to deploy. This is a different problem, it seems to me. Is that I mean not that this sort of thing couldn't happen in the US, but when we talked about electricity reliability in the US, this is actually what happened in Spain is a different sort of issue than what we're worried about happening in the US.

I mean, I think we need to be aware that this can happen in any grid anywhere. I mean, there was a frequency oscillation event that caused a a blackout in the UK not that long ago. We have had the large blackouts in the US as well. caused by frequency related issues. So it is possible that this can happen here if the right combination of multiple things all going wrong at once happens. The big difference I think is that it's pr again, pretty inexpensive to solve that problem.

by again committing a bit more reserves or using synchronized condensers or using the capabilities inverters to their fullest extent. The solutions to making the gas supply more resilient in the winter are a lot more expensive, burying every gathering line in the Texas Permian. expanding the capacity of pipelines so that we can simultaneously meet peak winter heating and power generation needs, right? Those are just big capital expenses that cost billions and billions of dollars.

And so they're both threats that have the risk of causing cascading blackouts, right? Having system wide failures that are really, really problematic. So the risk is the impact and the risk are similar. The cost of fixing it and avoiding those risks is just so much smaller for these kinds of frequency and voltage issues.

than it is for gas supply vulnerabilities. And so I would put more emphasis on figuring out ways to mitigate the gas risk if I had to choose. But we don't have to choose. We can do both. We can afford to be smarter about how we tap inverters and how we locate, you know, generators in our reserves.

to avoid these kinds of challenges in the future from voltage and frequency. But we also need to figure out how to make our system more resilient to cold snaps and extreme weather and the risks that poses from a gas dependent grid. Well let's Leave it there and we'll come back with upshift down shift right after this.

And now it's time for Upshift Downshift, our weekly look at climate news. Each week, Jesse and I bring one item of climate energy or decarbonization news in to share with the class, if it's making us feel more upbeat. Then it's an upshift if it's making us feel more pessimistic about the energy transition that week. It's a downshift. There's been a lot of downshifts lately. Jesse, what do you have for us?

Well, as the saying goes, there's no energy transition without transmission. I mean, some people say that. You might not say that. But I love that. That's because expanding electricity transmission is critical to keep up with demand growth, which is soaring now with data centers and electrification of vehicles and advanced manufacturing and everything else coming to America.

And it's necessary to tap into the best renewable resources, particularly wind power, because you gotta build wind farms where it's windy and that doesn't typically where a lot of people live. So we need to r dramatically expand the pace at which we are building out the transmission grid. And I would say that different grid operators around the country get different scores for that in terms of how proactive they are about this.

But one that has been consistently pretty good at looking ahead at the scale of transmission expansion needed is the mid continent independent system operator, MISO. which runs the grid that serves a lot of the Great Lakes region, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North South Dakota, Iowa, et cetera, as well as parts of the south all the way down through Arkansas and Mississippi and Louisiana.

They have now released an updated long term transmission plan that includes an investment of over twenty one point eight billion dollars in expanding regional transmission in the northern portion of their grid. So the Great Plains and Great Lakes portion.

Including a new ultra high voltage, seven hundred and sixty five kilovolt. There's our kilovolts we were talking about before. A seven hundred sixty five K V backbone grid. That's the highest alternating current voltage that we typically have in the grid today. And there's only a few parts of the US grid where we have a big high voltage backbone like that. Think of it sort of like the interstate highway, like superhighway.

for power. They plan to build a new backbone grid that spans across the northern portion of their system, as well as a number of upgraded or new three hundred and forty five KV lines. All that's expected to help connect about a hundred and twenty gigawatts of new supply

and save substantial amounts of energy by improving reliability and resilience to outages and other kinds of events. It's a lot of new transmission investment. It's gonna move forward to actual specific project planning and development. They hope that these lines will be online in the twenty thirty to twenty thirty two time frame.

So these should very quickly progress if they want to do that to specific projects. Some of these I think have already advanced further than others in terms of permitting. But it's the kind of broad region wide scale of planning that we need to see. In fact, we really should be seeing This type of regional planning extends beyond the boundaries of an individual grid operator like MISO and across the country, right? Across the entire interconnection.

This is not their first large long term transmission plan. They've actually recently completed a tranche of multiple projects all intended to work together. to expand grid connection as well over the last decade. And so more coming down the line in MISO. And I hope that other grid operators start to lean in the same way that they are.

I mean it's that's the whole thing, right? Someone once explained to me uh uh w w back when I reported on the Sanzia uh transmission line in Arizona and New Mexico. In some ways it's just which is obviously in the southwest, but like The whole question of the transition arguably is there's all this wind and solar resources in the middle of the country and there's all this demand on the coasts, or at least along the I five and

I ninety five corridor and and through Texas, right? But Texas is its own system. Can we get All the abundant energy resources we have in the middle of the country to the coast. That's like the whole question and the only answer w is trans transmission.

that. Yeah. And I mean the challenge right now is can we even get it to Minneapolis, Saint Paul and Chicago? Right. And then from there let's try to get it further east as well. And so the MISO grid at least focuses on that challenge, right? Of how do we get it to the major load centers in the eastern portion. then the nice thing would be if we could then expand that power transmission grid all the way to New Jersey or New York. on the coast.

Is there a significant transmission between Chicago and the East Coast, the mid Atlantic? Because they're in the same grid operator, but they're not really. Yeah, there is so a uh American Electric Power AEP that operates out of Ohio and other similar states.

does have a seven hundred sixty five KV backbone grid as well in the PJM system. That was built out a long time ago and it has not expanded it much recently, although they are talking about it now with a lot of data centers pushing demand for that area. There is east west interconnection, but it is consistently constrained, um, basically across the Appalachian Mountains. There's only a certain number of places where you can build transmission lines across the Appalachian.

range and those lines are at max capacity. And if we want to bring more power from the Midwest to the East Coast, we're going to have to expand some of those east west paths.

It's the Blue Ridge. It's the front range in the Rockies. It's the Blue Ridge in the Appalachians. Okay, so I have an upshift. I have a little upshift. It's from Heatmap's own reporter, Jayel Holtzman. She reports that the Bureau of Land Management has now Permitted? A renewable solar project in Yuma County, Arizona. It's permitted the Leeward Renewables, Elizabeth Solar Project. in Yuma County. It's also allowed another a separate solar project also in Arizona to proceed. These are the first

renew renewable permits granted by the Trump administration and granted by the Bureau of Land Management. And they're significant because if you remember Donald Trump came into office and immediately paused all renewable permitting across the country. Uh since then I would say the Trump administration has been hostile, especially to offshore wind. Especially hostile to offshore wind, incredibly hostile to offshore wind. In fact we should talk about that more. But it has quietly

begun to approve these solar projects. And that's significant because a lot of the Progress. A lot of the decarbonization that proceeded under the first Trump administration happened in solar. And a lot of it requires these agencies to to just do the basic yeoman's work of government and approve these projects that come before them in a normal, non prejudicial way. And I think this is the first evidence that that is now gonna happen under at least in BLM?

It is, I would add, sort of interesting. BLM is a sub agency of the Department of Interior, which is overseen by Secretary, former Governor Doug Bergum, who has said more amenable things about energy production and He also Including wind power, right?

Including wind power. He also yanked permits. He also yanked permits from a offshore wind farm a few weeks ago. So you know, I hesitate to be too complimentary, but I think you do see I think this is a sign that after some of the initial pandemonium of the Trump administration for large scale solar specifically things are a little bit back to business as usual for some of these agencies, you know.

receiving, reviewing and approving large scale solar permits. We also know from jail's reporting that there's some interest in putting increasing solar on public lands and so I think it's an upshift. I think like it's not an upshift as compared to the baseline of a year ago, but it's an upshift as compared to the baseline of january twenty first, twenty twenty five, and so I'm gonna call it an upshift.

Yeah, I appreciate that and yeah, did want to note how low a bar it is when when a federal agency simply doing its statutory obligated duty of permitting projects proposed in a timely and reasonably neutral manner. Is an upshift. But you're right. And I think the big question I still have is what about onshore wind?

uh both on public lands and also private lands in cases where it does engage with the federal government where it needs an environmental impact statement or crosses a federal highway or a water body or something like that that needs some kind of federal permitting. We can do a lot with solar and batteries. If you look at the bulk of planned expansion of new supply on the US grid, it's

It's solar and the bulk of the new capacity is batteries. But we really need wind to be pulling its own too. It is an important American energy resource. It historically is the largest contributor of the renewables to our mix. It's about ten percent. So half as much of our existing nuclear fleet, more than hydro combined.

And if we're gonna take wind off the table because Trump doesn't like it or some other ideological reason, it really does limit America's ability to keep up with demand growth in the most affordable way. And that could really constrain our role in the AI race globally, it could strain our ability to meet data center demand. It could raise energy prices for consumers.

Matter for electricity raises. This is the crazy thing about the whole all the Trump administration energy policy that like still doesn't quite chuck out, but I guess it's a good sign on the solar, is that Trump, in his second inaugural address, talks about the importance of the U.S. to a manufacturing base of having low electricity prices. It seems to be one of these core tenets of energy policy that he grasps, or at least that someone in his immediate circle grasps.

And yet when you look at the energy policy the Trump administration is doing, it's like, let's export as much gas as possible. And let's try to constrain which raises gas prices and which therefore has a second order effect of raising electricity prices. Although it doesn't always it depends on the ability of the gas.

Well let's actually back up, right? When you look at Trump energy policy as a whole, it's let's encourage OPEC to drill m more oil, which reduces US oil production, which reduces US natural gas co production because right now we produce a lot of natural gas as a byproduct of oil drilling. What that means is it makes the median price of US natural gas go up.

which causes more like US natural gas drilling. At the same time we're trying to export more natural gas. And in fact we know that regardless of what happens during Trump's term we're gonna bring on massive new amounts of US natural gas export potential. So we know gas prices are going up. through a number of factors or we would expect them to go up through a number of factors regardless of what else happens.

At the same time, we're constraining all sorts of other sorts of energy production that would reduce the strain on the gas grid. It's like a recipe for higher electricity prices, even though the president has talked about how important low energy prices And low electricity prices are specifically to his

to his dream of reindustrializing the US. And that's setting aside how much the US was already embarking on a project of reindustrialization that his his agencies are now throwing into question because they don't like the IRA or they don't like these uh bipartisan projects that came out of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which was passed by a bipartisan Senate. I mean, there's just like you can keep it it's like fractal in coherence.

As as an energy policy, right? It's like wherever you drill it doesn't quite make sense and the recipe is higher prices kind of everywhere. But Uh at least hey, you know, Jesse, at least they approved this one solar project. We'll take it Bank the wind so we can get'em Okay. Let's leave it there. Let's leave it there.

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