VuK Newsletter #34 – Progress is being made

A lot has happened again in recent months.

Several times in 2019 a threatened collapse of the European power supply system was averted. Of nine events ranging from security-relevant to critical (German), eight took the interconnected grid to the limits of its stability. Another incident caused the main and backup systems of European electricity trading to fail for several hours (German).

In June, Germany’s neighbouring countries prevented a collapse after large amounts of power were missing because of faulty behaviour by balancing group managers. Almost three times the reserve capacity held available was needed to cover this power gap. Once again the interconnected system proved itself and showed its positive side! But this must not obscure the fact that such incidents had never happened before. They should therefore be taken very seriously as “weak signals”. As before, the grid operators did an excellent job of preventing worse. But it is becoming ever more difficult and costly!

Still, we should be clear that there are things that can happen even if we do not want to believe it beforehand. The serious major disturbance in the British power grid on 9 August 2019 (German) showed this once again: more than a million customer connections had to be disconnected automatically to prevent a blackout. The resulting power cut lasted between 15 and 45 minutes for the customers affected. The knock-on disruptions in other areas, however, lasted considerably longer. Hundreds of trains were affected, and for 30 trains service technicians even had to come out to the stranded trains and restart them manually. All in all, the incident ended relatively well, even if the investigation reports repeatedly stress: This, again, should not have happened. The chain of events was triggered by a lightning strike at a substation – basically a routine event. The regulator ordered three companies to pay a total of 12 million euros.

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For years I have been publishing extensive analyses of what happens in the event of a blackout on my website. Since 2019 also in cooperation with GAIA: my newsletters are also published here.

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