Motordoc Reveals the True Story of Spain’s Power Crisis

Howard Penrose, President of Motordoc LLC, returns to discuss the complexities of modern electrical grids. The conversation covers the inaccuracies surrounding the Iberian Peninsula blackout, the intricate functions of voltage and frequency control, and systemic issues in grid management. Penrose explains how renewable energy sources like wind and solar, alongside energy storage, play crucial roles in stabilizing the grid.

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Howard, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? It’s been a bit, a lot has happened since we last spoke. I, I wanna speak about the Iberian Peninsula problem and the blackout that happened in April. Because there’s been a number of inaccuracies about that situation, and you’re actively involved in the groups that look into these situations and try to understand what the root cause was.

That the, the, the Iberian situation is a little complicated. The CNN knowledge, the Fox News knowledge is that solar was the cause of a problem. Yeah, that is far from the truth. You wanna explain kind of [00:01:00] what this, how it progressed over time? It started around noontime Spain and they had a couple of wobbles there.

You want to kick it off? 

Howard Penrose: Yeah. First, first my comment is, I like how journalists become experts in, in literally everything, um, from 30 seconds to 30 seconds, right. Basically. The problem had been going on for a little while and, and the grided there had been operating much like it had been for a little while.

And, uh, you know, for years actually, uh, even with the application of alternative energy, we’ll, we’ll call it alternative energy for this, um, you know, so that we don’t bring in that political end of calling it one thing or the other. Alternative energy is what we called it in the 1990s. So, um, in any case.

Uh, they had a number of issues with voltage control, meaning large loads would suddenly drop off and then the voltage would float up [00:02:00] and then, uh, and then they would have to do something to bring it under control. They’re at 50 hertz, so their voltage is 400 kv. That’s their primary grid voltage. They have an alarm trip voltage, meaning an emergency trip voltage, where they strip the line at 435 kv.

So, um, what happened now, the final event happened in 27 seconds, but leading up to that, they had an event where they had voltage float up. And they were bringing that under control. And then down in the southern part of Spain, and we don’t have anything set up like this here in the states, luckily they had all, uh, a whole group of, um, solar uh, plants as well as a gas turbine plant feeding a single distribution transformer.

And the, uh, auto taps on that failed on the low voltage side on step up. So it basically dropped out. So, uh, something like, I, I’m trying to remember off the top of my, my head, [00:03:00] but it was either 300 or 800 megawatts just offline now. It was a lightly loaded day in Spain ’cause it was a beautiful day outside.

Uh, so that makes matters worse. It makes it unstable and really easy for voltage to flow up where people start to think that that, uh, alternative energy was a fault was because we were at 40%. Of the power supply was solar as the morning progressed, so it had climbed up to about that there was a good percentage of wind.

Um, but they had a nuclear power power plant online and several others providing synchronous protection for any type of inertia. They lost one of those plants. The voltage floated up, uh, to um, about 415 to 420 kv. Yeah. Then there was a whole bunch of control issues. So the operators started switching lines.

There was a connection to France. They, they started seeing some oscillations because they were [00:04:00] oscillating against, uh, Europe. And, um, so they switched lines and that caused the voltage to float up again. And they had no, no, none of the equipment. Whether it was solar, wind, or even the synchronous power was set to do, uh, var control, meaning set to do voltage control to bring the voltage back down.

It was all set up for frequency control, meaning that they wanted to control against it, not the, not the alternative energy. Those were set so that they did a straight, what’s called power factor, so they were set to just put out. Exactly what they were supposed to put out. They were not there, they were not set to correct anything, even though they could have been.

And, um, so, uh, at, at about 420, uh, thousand volts, other plants started tripping offline. And as it went up further, even the nuclear plant tripped offline. And then France dropped [00:05:00] offline at about the same time, all across the 27 second period. 

Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So this is a unique problem and I think the Iberian Peninsula really raises this issue on a number of levels for the general consumer out in the world.

The grid is actually pretty complicated, but there’s really two things you really want to control there. Voltage, you have to control frequency, you have to control. If you control those two. Pretty much everything else will work the way it’s intended. If either one of those gets outta whack, there’s safety protocols that go into place to protect the equipment, but there’s also other piece of equipment that are trying to bring it into regulation.

When the regulation doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, yes, you can get the voltage outta whack. You can get the frequency to go outta spec, and then clunk, clunk, clunk. Everything starts to disconnect. Like what happened in Spain. My first question about that is it’s a complicated system and there’s a lot of pieces [00:06:00] connected to it.

Who is checking in the US or in Europe or anywhere else who’s checking that? Those control settings are in the right place. They were actually set per the requirements. Spain was talking about in some of their publications that there, the settings weren’t set right. They were, we were, they were not properly set per code.

Who’s checking that? 

Howard Penrose: So, so grid code here is set by FIR and nerc. And it sounds like a curse word, a set of curse words, but FERC is the federal side. NERC is actually private. Um, so they set, they set the rules for safety, for power, gener, you, you name it. So, um, and they set the code. Now as an operator, you’re supposed to be, you know, the power generation side.

They still even here, have to do things to meet code. Okay. Is there anybody checking it? No. Uh, the, it’s a site responsibility. Each area, um, goes out and they [00:07:00] forecast expectations. Um, and then, and then of course, within that expectation, you have a lot of companies and cities municipal that will all bid on how much energy they’re gonna consume, right?

Uh, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, so everybody agrees to it. And then, and then, um, the operators have to determine the reliability. And the availability of energy based upon certain conditions within that grit. Like what, what plants are gonna be, uh, in maintenance and everything else. And, and that’s important because the actual generation companies can’t talk to each other.

They’re not allowed. Okay. Otherwise, it could be considered collusion. So our own laws fight against us. 

Allen Hall: The Iberian situation leads into some discussions. What happens in America, because we’re in America and there have been a number of brownouts blackouts, uh, ERCOT has have a couple of situations where they’ve had sort of regional [00:08:00] disconnects of, or larger scale, like a cascading.

Effect, uh, due to, um, control systems that are not happy with one another. So one system knocks out another and then it, everybody goes into safe mode and there’s just this sort of cascading, disconnected that happens. Those events are a little scary to me, just with a, it feels like we’re not talking to one another, and what you’re saying is we’re intentionally not talking to one another because we can’t.

It talk one power producer to another power producer. 

Howard Penrose: That’s what the operator’s for. So the, the grid operator is there to take all that information in. Most of it’s run via software. What’s been interesting is, say Ercot, because of the event that happened in 2021. What, uh, happened was everybody went back and looked at it and said, how can we fix it?

It turns out that alternative energy was the way to stiffen the power system. So, um, they’ve now made adjustments to how the, [00:09:00] to, to take more advantage of the capabilities of wind and solar that they didn’t have before, as well as all the new storage systems, uh, including, you know, course battery, which is the, the big buzzword now.

Right? Bess? Um. So battery storage in order to stiffen up the system. A year ago, there was a 16% possibility of a blackout throughout Oliver Ercot. This year it was 1%, even though we have a higher demand this year, and it had nothing to do with traditional systems that had to do with wind, solar, and energy storage, big discussion data centers, right?

As a matter of fact. We already decided at this meeting, we’re not gonna talk about wind and wind storage, wind, uh, solar and energy storage. Next year, PPES, now it’s gonna be power Engineering Society, by the way, the ones who actually do that stuff, right? Uh, it’s gonna be all about data centers because a data center is the most [00:10:00] dangerous thing on the grid.

So remember I mentioned, uh, you know, but somewhere between 300 and 800 megawatts dropped offline and it caused an entire country to lose power. You have to remember, these things are 500 megawatt to 1.5 gigawatts, which is by the way, more than a DeLorean and a data center doesn’t, if it trips, it doesn’t just gradually come down.

It means you lose 500 to 1.5. Um, yep. Like that. Gone. 

Allen Hall: Well, I, I think as a, most people are casual users of the electricity grid. They don’t realize how much is planning is done ahead of time. So there are 24 hour forecast and actually year long forecast. You’re looking a year ahead in some cases of what the energy requirements are going to be.

The, the daily forecast for tomorrow are, are the big ones. So you need to know how many generators to have ready and who’s actually gonna be there and they gotta commit, and all these different things have to happen. [00:11:00] That is a really critical feature of the grid. You would think that most, I think most people would assume that there’s just a bunch of coal fire generation.

There’s a number of, uh, gas plants that are up and running. They’re always spending 24 hours a day, and then maybe a little bit of wind, a little bit of solars thrown in there. But for the vast majority of it, that is not the case at all. Like, it’s complicated and, and the, as you have mentioned. It’s planned.

It’s, it’s, it’s planned to some crazy detail and putting something on the, on the system that is megawatt size, okay? Not so bad. Gigawatt size is a problem. Is a problem ’cause that system is not designed to handle that. And yet we’re, we’re going into this in the next year or two or in kind of now honestly, where we’re putting, gonna put these big data center loads on this old system, which is looking 24 hours ahead.

But as you pointed out, data centers can be on, data centers can be off the grid. Can’t [00:12:00] manage that unless there’s something else that can react as fast as the data center does though, there’s only two things that I, well, three. Solar, wind and battery are the only things that can react at that electronic speed of which a AI data center is operating at.

Howard Penrose: Yep. They have electronic controls. 

Allen Hall: Right. A, a gas fire turbine can’t do that. 

Howard Penrose: Yeah. You have to counter the electronics with electronics and we actually need to have enough of it to counter what’ll happen, you know, like data centers are supposed to be able to island. Meaning island means they get cut off from the grid and they can run on their own.

And, and usually that means they have generation behind the meter, which for those who are watching, you don’t know what that means. That means that you know you have a meter at, say your house, right? So you, that’s what, that’s what the utility looks at to decide how much you’re gonna pay. If you have a generator at your house that is behind that meter, you pay for the fuel for that.

And [00:13:00] if you’re really lucky, you’ve negotiated something so you can put power back through your meter and reduce the amount of power you pay. Right. So the, that meter is the deciding point. It’s a point of common connection between, you know, the grid or that, in this case we’re talking about the local distribution part of the grid versus the grid, which is all those gigantic power lines that are going everywhere that can get as high as.

I think we’re at 750 kilovolts now, uh, for some of them. And we’re talking about going to over a million to reduce the copper, the amount of copper needed, so, uh, or whatever material we’re gonna use at that voltage. 

Allen Hall: So the way that ai, Dana setters are, uh, adding to the system in terms of load, the only way to counter that from a gas turbine standpoint or a coal standpoint, or even a nuclear standpoint for that matter, is you have to have.

These systems running 24 7 [00:14:00] just in case Elon decides to turn on the switch, you would have to be burning gas pretty much all the time. ’cause to get that rotating mass in those gas turbines to be able to do that, that is crazy expensive to do. That’s why we deregulated the 1990s. Exactly. So the, the issue gets down to, if we’re gonna have grid stability, you actually need.

Wind, solar and batteries to respond to those instantaneous changes that occur on a system that’s has gigawatt loads plugged into it randomly. And, and second. By the time, if you wanted to make a, a gas turbine world, like it sounds like the administration does at the minute. Those gas tournaments are burning fuel all the time.

Expensive fuel all the time. Your electricity rates to do that. If you have an AI dentist sitter in your area, you’re gonna be paying through the nose to keep that thing running just because, just so that Elon or [00:15:00] Mark Zuckerberg can do their thing. Actually, 

Howard Penrose: it’s worse than that if you have a data center in your operating area.

Okay. Which means a lot of states, right? Water and wastewater for the entire nation takes up less than 2% of the energy consumption. Electrical energy consumption, okay? Electric power, just to give you an idea. So flushing your toilet, drinking your water, getting your water bottle, you know, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff, all of that energy is 2%. We are right now at over 8%. For, for data centers by 2030, we’re supposed to be at 15%. By 2040, we’re supposed to be at 25% of all electricity produced. The utilities, all of the grid scale and everything else, the fastest they’ve ever had to build anything other than some of the initial stuff is 2% a year, two to 5% a year.

Okay. Is what they’re used to adding to the grid. Adding power generation. In order to meet the demand, [00:16:00] they have to double present conditions every other year. That’s 50 to a hundred percent growth per year, which nobody globally has ever done. We don’t have the materials, we don’t have the equipment, we don’t have the people, so we don’t have the skillset anymore.

What does an 

Allen Hall: efficient grid look like going forward? Howard? And with the constraints. With the constraints, that there’s gonna be limitations on the growth of transmission with the constraint that the current administration is, I’ll say anti wind, anti-solar, or they’re not just level playing field, they’re like actively trying to damage it.

What does the grid look like then? 

Howard Penrose: That’s the big challenge. Nobody’s quite aware how we’re going to do it. Um. That’s, that’s all of the conversation now. What does it look like? And the direction [00:17:00] has been changed from a political standpoint so much. It’s like, it’s like going to a company and saying, we’re going to change the direction of the company to 180 degrees.

We’re, we’re no longer gonna build cars anymore. We’re now gonna build, um, stuffed animals. 

Allen Hall: I, I think in the electrical, uh, power industry forever. Uh, and I’ve been around a lot of engineers that were involved in the early phases of that, and I used to work next to one of the places where GE built Transformers forever.

So there’s every day around power people. It was a scientific, technical effort driven to provide society a better living. That’s where. All the focus was on the engineering and the technical community and the scientific community. That’s where they were going. They, they made money at it. Yes, they did. If they produce a good product, they would make money at it.

But if you look at [00:18:00] the rigor in which the engineering was produced, it’s a very high standard, very high standard IEE articles written in the 1920s and thirties, even in the seventies and the eighties, and through the nineties, I’d say pretty much. Solid stuff. Not a lot of crazy stuff, not a lot of politics.

Hard. You just wouldn’t see it. You can, I’ve read thousands of papers in my lifetime you wouldn’t see it. I have seen a more recent shift because politics is electrical distribution at the minute. It’s somehow, it, it’s morphed into this other thing, which is, uh, I would say more like oil and gas was in the 1960s and seventies and, and earlier too, where it was a lot of politicians and a lot of money changing hands.

The electrical generation world was not, never really in that, at that level. And it feels like we’re being, uh, uh, uh, we’re taking on, uh, methods and policies and behaviors of other industries, and that’s not gonna be healthy for [00:19:00] that electricity grid. 

Howard Penrose: No, no. I, I, the, the stuff that has to happen is big, scary, long-term stuff.

Um, and, and it’s bl and, and solutions are being developed. And, and don’t get me wrong, not everything is, is horribly bad when, when they do what they’re doing, uh, we’ve seen some great innovations coming out, but they’re not going anywhere because as soon as they come out, we change direction. You know, we we’re trying to do something that takes decades based upon the political wins, which are every other week.

You know, think, think about a topic that happened two weeks ago and are they talking about it now? No. And, and it’s just like the power generation stuff. Uh, as soon as they need a distraction again, then you’ll hear something from either side, you know, oh, we need to get rid of this. We need to add, you know, we need to, you know, so the war is, is, you know, politicians and people [00:20:00]without the background to make these decisions when politics decides to get involved.

In infrastructure to the, to, to the micromanaging detail. That’s the problem is they’re micromanaging and, uh, I, I blame 2020 for that. I really do. ’cause uh, prior to 2020 I’ve been calling on the hill ’cause I was the region for energy rep. So it’s a 10 Midwestern states in 1993 through 1995, I, I, I was part of the discussion related to deregulation.

I was not a fan of it for electrical power because we had nowhere to store anything. So it was like we need to, we need time to deal with how it’s going to occur because a large power generation we have is not designed to do what we’re about to make it do, which is turn off, turn off, vary and load. Used to have a big generator, and then you had what was called spinning reserve.

And the spinning reserve [00:21:00] was there so that when you needed sudden power or you needed to absorb something, all of the bumps and grinds that we’re trying to deal with now was sitting there and you were, you were just burning through fuel just to keep the thing turning. It wasn’t actually doing anything other than turning and, um, you know, we survived it.

But it ended up with what we warned about in 1994 for IEE, which was the. Blackout in the northeast in 2003, that was directly related. It was predicted that that would happen because we couldn’t get the relays and controls in place to, to deal with it. So, um, now we’re heading down the path and it’s a much more serious issue.

The, the demand growth is growing extremely fast. Um, we were trying to hold back demand in the 1990s during all of this through the Energy Policy Act in 92 and dealing with, um, demand side management [00:22:00] was the big word. Remember we were trying to do more energy efficiency, reduce demand so that we could use the power we had.

Now we’re saying you don’t wanna do the exact opposite. Use more and more power, um, use it efficiently, but use more and more of it. And, and that’s, that’s the big challenge. 

Allen Hall: Howard, it’s been a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. I really enjoy these discussions about the grid, uh, and about keeping, uh, renewables up and running and all the things that motor dock and you are up to.

And, uh, if you haven’t followed Howard’s LinkedIn page, you need to do that. Howard Penrose. Also Howard, how do they get ahold of Motor Doc? How do they get a you Via the web? 

Howard Penrose: Um, motor doc.com. That’s M-O-T-O-R-D-O c.com. Uh, or LinkedIn. Uh, you know, we, we watch both. Um, I, we’ve added a lot of people recently, so, um, [00:23:00] uh, so yeah, it’s easier to get ahold of myself or my people now.

So, um, that’s, that’s basically it. That’s probably the easiest way to do it. 

Allen Hall: And if you want to see Howard Rant on YouTube, how do you see that? Where, how do, how do you find you on YouTube? 

Howard Penrose: Oh, just look up Motor Doc on YouTube. Um, uh, you’ll see something having to do with Sasquatch, I’m sure. So, but, uh, yeah, yeah.

I, I, I don’t go by my own name on, on the internet. I go by, uh, usually motor dock. Which is a nickname I got in the Navy, by the way. It’s from a, from the, the captain of an aircraft carrier when I ran his motor repair shop. So, um, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s been a lot of fun again. 

Allen Hall: Yes. And your, your video series, uh, caffeine and Chaos, there’s a ca, chaos and caffeine are brilliant.

Howard Penrose: The chaos and caffeine end. Yes. You’re going to hear about. The coffee I’m drinking. ’cause we, I actually have people now set. [00:24:00] I just got somebody ship me a set of coffee up from Guatemala. So that’s what we’ll be doing tomorrow. Um, and uh, you know, we, we, you know, I started with the veteran coffee and stuff like that, so of course.

But, um. So we’ll talk about that for, and then I’ll spend, I try to keep it down to 10 minutes, but knowing me, I like to talk. So sometimes I’ll hit 30 minutes, but I try to keep it at a conversational level on stuff that’s going on. So the, the next one I’ll do will probably be the sixth one, and that’s gonna be me kind of ranting about, um, you know, what we were just talking about.

I did do one on the Iberian Peninsula. It’s a little more. Um, you know, general public level stuff. So, um, you know, the, that it wasn’t this and here’s how and here’s why, and here’s what the timeline looks like, type thing. Uh, which I did, I think along with, um, um, [00:25:00] aerial resupply coffee. Which was, uh, was good stuff.

Don’t mean to sell him on here, but he, he’s a lot of fun to follow on, on, uh, on LinkedIn as well. Well, thanks Howard so 

Allen Hall: much. We enjoy 

Howard Penrose: having you and we will talk to you soon. Absolutely. Thank you very much.