Electrical outages. cyber attacks ?

Can't read the Times article as it's behind a paywall and I'm too cheap but it's interesting to compare the event last week with the ostensibly similar event of 2008, wherein 2 generators tripped within approx 2 minutes of each other, between them about 1.6 GW resulting in a frequency dip. Back then, a mere half a million consumers lost power from the pre-programmed load shedding, which continued for several hours... It should theoretically have been far more as less than half of the DNOs' relays operated!


If it turns out that it was indeed a similar story, then I expect the batteries currently operating under EFR, FFR and STOR contracts will have been rather welcome additional reserve capacity. I won't disagree that we've lost significant inertia but because batteries can respond very rapidly - far quicker than rotating reserve plant, and easily sufficient for the timescales of the 2008 event - they are strong contenders for the stability services National Grid has been tendering for lately for this very reason. These are competitive markets (albeit weighted against batteries due to lobbying from existing plant) so that surely demonstrates the viability of the technology.


Meanwhile, back in 2008 a large chunk of embedded generators tripped out on under-frequency as per then applicable G83/G59 settings. New settings were rolled out to HV connected plant over the last few years which will have enabled them to ride through last week's event but I don't think the roll-out to LV G59 customers has started yet; I'll be interested to see how much disruption, if any, was caused by secondary tripping revealing "hidden loads", and whether this causes Ofgem to accelerate the programme!


Lastly, in all this it's worth noting that after the 2008 event, the investigation report ended up concluding that yes, it would be theoretically be possible to contract additional (conventional) reserve capacity but no, it was not economically worthwhile to do so for what they considered a 4-5 year event (11 years ago). No supply is 100%, hence backup generators and UPSs for essential supplies! To me the question is why so much basic infrastructure (rail and road signals) didn't appear to account for this and took so long to recover, when the actual Grid appeared to work as expected and was back within the hour...

Can't read the Times article as it's behind a paywall and I'm too cheap but it's interesting to compare the event last week with the ostensibly similar event of 2008, wherein 2 generators tripped within approx 2 minutes of each other, between them about 1.6 GW resulting in a frequency dip. Back then, a mere half a million consumers lost power from the pre-programmed load shedding, which continued for several hours... It should theoretically have been far more as less than half of the DNOs' relays operated!


If it turns out that it was indeed a similar story, then I expect the batteries currently operating under EFR, FFR and STOR contracts will have been rather welcome additional reserve capacity. I won't disagree that we've lost significant inertia but because batteries can respond very rapidly - far quicker than rotating reserve plant, and easily sufficient for the timescales of the 2008 event - they are strong contenders for the stability services National Grid has been tendering for lately for this very reason. These are competitive markets (albeit weighted against batteries due to lobbying from existing plant) so that surely demonstrates the viability of the technology.


Meanwhile, back in 2008 a large chunk of embedded generators tripped out on under-frequency as per then applicable G83/G59 settings. New settings were rolled out to HV connected plant over the last few years which will have enabled them to ride through last week's event but I don't think the roll-out to LV G59 customers has started yet; I'll be interested to see how much disruption, if any, was caused by secondary tripping revealing "hidden loads", and whether this causes Ofgem to accelerate the programme!


Lastly, in all this it's worth noting that after the 2008 event, the investigation report ended up concluding that yes, it would be theoretically be possible to contract additional (conventional) reserve capacity but no, it was not economically worthwhile to do so for what they considered a 4-5 year event (11 years ago). No supply is 100%, hence backup generators and UPSs for essential supplies! To me the question is why so much basic infrastructure (rail and road signals) didn't appear to account for this and took so long to recover, when the actual Grid appeared to work as expected and was back within the hour...