There were more than 2,000 active generation interconnection requests as of April 30, totalling 411,600 MW of capacity, according to grid operator ERCOT. A bill awaiting signature on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk, S.B. 6, looks to filter out unserious large-load projects bloating the queue by imposing a $100,000 fee for interconnection studies.

Wind and solar farms require vast acreage and generate energy intermittently, so they work best as part of a diversified electrical grid that collectively provides power day and night. But as the AI gold rush gathered momentum, a surge of new project proposals has created years-long wait times to connect to the grid, prompting many developers to bypass it and build their own power supply.

Operating alone, a wind or solar farm can’t run a data center. Battery technologies still can’t store such large amounts of energy for the length of time required to provide steady, uninterrupted power for 24 hours per day, as data centers require. Small nuclear reactors have been touted as a means to meet data center demand, but the first new units remain a decade from commercial deployment, while the AI boom is here today.

Now, Draper said, gas companies approach IREN all the time, offering to quickly provide additional power generation.

Gas provides almost half of all power generation capacity in Texas, far more than any other source. But the amount of gas power in Texas has remained flat for 20 years, while wind and solar have grown sharply, according to records from the US Energy Information Administration. Facing a tidal wave of proposed AI projects, state lawmakers have taken steps to try to slow the expansion of renewable energy and position gas as the predominant supply for a new era of demand.

It is received wisdom in pro-nuclear circles that sinister fossil fuel interests are partly if not largely responsible for nuclear's abject failure to live up to its remarkable promise. To examine this premise, we must divide fossil fuel into coal, oil, and gas. There has never been much overlap between coal and oil and, until recently, surprisingly little overlap between oil and gas. //

Jack Devanney
Dec 8, 2022

US nuclear died in the early, mid-1970's. There were only a handful of orders after 1975 and none after 1978 in the 20th century. Given the promethean promise of nuclear, we need to know what caused this demise. Some say it was Big Oil. But Big Oil was making a big investment in nuclear during this period. Gotta be something else. What happened in the last 15 or so years is irrelevant to to the question on the table.

We have been fed two lies about nuclear electricity by the nuclear power establishment.

The Negligible Probability Lie

The probability of a sizable release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is so low that we can just assume it won't happen. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie

Any significant release of radioactive material would be so catastrophic that it cannot be allowed to happen. //

Nuclear power emerged at just about the most difficult time possible economically. In the early-mid 1960's, the real cost of oil was at a all time low. The majors were buying oil in the Middle East at about a penny a liter. Oil was so cheap that it was pushing into electricity generation, the long time preserve of coal. This in turn forced the price of coal down, so it too was at an all time low. This was the cutthroat market that a technology that did not exist 15 years earlier, a technology that was just starting down a steep learning curve, had to enter and compete in. Amazingly it did so. Thanks to nuclear's incredible energy density, these fledgling plants were able to produce electricity at 0.37 cents per kWh in 1965. That's less than 3 cents/kWh in 2020 money.

But the cost of nuclear power escalated rapidly. In the boom of the late 60's and early 70's, nuclear lost control of its costs. This was accompanied by regulatory attempts to ensure we would never have a release. These attempts led to ALARA, the principle that any exposure to radiation is unacceptable if the plant can afford to reduce it further. In other words, there are no limits. //

The Intolerable Harm Lie is false. LNT is not a realistic model of radiation harm. The dose response curve is highly non-linear and critically dependent on dose rate. Cell based laboratory experiments, extensive animal testing, and human study after human study detected no statistically reliable harm unless the dose rates are well above the natural background dose rates in the highest background areas. At very low dose rates, LNT is off by orders of magnitude.

Perhaps the most compelling background radiation study was done in Kerala, India. //

For the US nuclear establishment, abandoning the Intolerable Harm Lie would be suicidal. And as long as you are promulgating the Intolerable Harm Lie, you need the Negligible Probability Lie to stay in business.

In 1982 and 1983, recycled rebar, containing Cobalt-60, was “accidentally” used in the construction of 180 apartment buildings in Taipei. Most of the buildings were completed in 1983. The problem was discovered in the mid-1990's, and full scale investigations started in 1996 after a kindergartener whose classroom was in one of the contaminated buildings died of leukemia.

The Chen 2004 Study
The first study was led by W. L. Chen of the National Yang-Ming University. //

In 2006, Hwang et al published a competing study of the Taipei apartment exposure. //

The Taipei apartment data emphatically contradicts LNT. Hwang's methodology in attempting to refute this conclusion suggests that we are dealing with defense lawyers, not scientists.

The Hwang paper was designed to shoot down the Chen paper and reestablish LNT. //

The Hwang numbers may not demolish LNT as dramatically as the Chen figures; but they clearly meet Feynman's criterion for "one ugly fact", although in this case, the fact that a providential Nature has endowed us with a radiation damage repair system which has no problem with dose rate profiles such as Figure 2 is far from ugly. It's humanity's salvation.

Here's a truly ugly fact. The promoters of LNT can't show us one situation, not one, where people have received a very large dose spread more or less evenly over a protracted period where LNT does not screw up completely. It's quite remarkable that a 100 year old theory that is based on an assumption --- radiation damage is unrepairable --- that we now know is flat wrong, and is always orders of magnitude in error on the kind of dose rate profiles that will be incurred in a nuclear power plant release has survived.

EDF is building a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in England. EDF proudly requires that each of its plants have a tombstone like Figure 1 at the main entrance, a point it emphasizes in its advertising. EDF is not alone, you will find the phrase "safety is our overriding priority" in various forms repeated over and over again by the NRC, INPO, and the rest of the nuclear establishment. For example, INPO has a monomanical focus on safety culture which it defines as “an organization’s values and behaviors that serve to make nuclear safety the overriding priority.”

Hinkley Point C(HPC) will cost at least $18,000/kW and take over 12 years to construct. //

Table 1 shows the overnight cost in 2024 USD and build times of the six lowest overnight cost plants built in the USA. When I lived in the Florida Keys, I enjoyed some of the cheapest electricity in the country, thanks to Turkey Point 3 and 4.

If you repeat the Figure 2 calculation for Turkey Point 3 at $795 per kW, the LCOE is just under 3 cents/kWh, about 4 times less than Hinkley Point 3. //

Over the 3 year, 2022-2024 period, the EIA finds that Turkey Point 3 had a capacity factor of 95.2%, about 5% above the USA average, and ranking it 15th among 92 reactors, In 53 years of operation, Turkey Point 3 and all its elderly brethren have harmed exactly zero members of the public. Most of these plants will still be operating in 2050. Turkey Point 3 and the other five plants in Table 1 were designed and built before the current regulatory apparat became organized. There was no independent regulator. //

We made a disastrous, tragic, colossal, brobdingnagian blunder. We set up an omnipotent bureaucracy whose overriding priority, as it so clearly states, is nuclear safety. While Congress declared "public health and safety" to be just one one of its goals, it created an apparat for which nuclear health and safety was effectively the only goal. The NRC would be judged on its ability to prevent a release. Period.

Bureaucrats are not saints. They reacted according to the incentives they have been given, just as we would. And since we have given the last word to these souls we have misguided, it is their priorities that rule, not society's. The regulatory structure that the AEA/ERA setup is inherently inconsistent with the stated goals.

The result has been an auto-genocidal increase in the cost of nuclear power for no apparent benefit. There is nothing in the actual harm data that suggests the oldest plants are less safe than the newest. When Three Mile Island 2 melted down in 1979 and produced the biggest release in the US so far, it was the youngest plant in the US fleet, and subject to the most stringent regulation. //

vboring
May 13

Grok estimates that the choice to implement "safety" regulations for nuclear energy in such expensive ways has killed about 840,000 people in the US so far.

Safety first! is a strict lie.

https://x.com/i/grok/share/H38COlrdT1VvfBrjU0rlLv3HE

Or why I hate costly nuclear. //

Poverty has a Lost Life Expectacy(LLE) of the order of tens of billions of years per year. And we reject should-cost nuclear for fear of an occasional release that worst case, Chernobyl, properly handled, will have a public LLE of less than a 1000 years? This makes sense only if we assume a malthusian level of selfishness. But that is precisely where the nuclear establishment is. //

Jack Devanney
May 19
Edited

I rarely compliment the choir, but I do want to give a shout out to the choristers for whom nuclear's main attraction is its low CO2. For them, this was a very tough sermon. It was a call to change focus, metanoeite if you will, from what nuclear can do for the climate to what nuclear can do for the poor, and for all humanity. That's not an easy switch. For one thing, it implies that costly nuclear is not good enough. It's immoral. We must have should-cost nuclear, and that will require a complete rethink about how we regulate nuclear.

I expected something like a 5% subscriber cancellation rate. Instead we lost 7 of 2900. I thought that was impressive.

Here's your reward. If and only if we push nuclear down to its should-cost, not only will nuclear push fossil fuel out of power generation except for a bit of peaking and backup fo r unplanned outages and do so automatically, not only will EV's now be very attractive economically, but now we can talk seriously about synfuels starting with synthetic methane.

If LNT is biological nonsense, how did it ever get accepted? The Hamlet in that tragedy is Ed Lewis.

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Genetic Scare. //

Hundreds of scientists could have pointed out the glaring inconsistency. But as far as I know none did. Moreover, fractionation, dividing a therapeutic dose into fractions, delivered a day or so apart to allow healthy cells to recover, was universal medical practice. If LNT is valid, fractionation makes no sense. Even Lauriston Taylor, a towering figure, who called LNT "a deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage" did not speak out until 1980. He was about 25 years too late. Were all these people grasping creeps?

Of course not. They were petrified of the bomb. If LNT could end bomb testing, then I will have to abandon scientific integrity, just this once. Look at Taylor's strange wording. You don't normally call a model, a "use". He knew LNT had been accepted not because it was correct, but because it was a tool, a tool for controlling the bomb.

https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Apr-25-ARC-Scorecard.pdf

Adding together the above numbers yields the following affordable, reliable, and clean total scores, with lower scores being closer to perfect power sources and higher scores being least compatible with the affordable, reliable, and clean ideal:

Natural gas - 3
Nuclear - 6
Hydro -7
Coal - 8
Biomass - 12
Wind - 22
Solar - 23

The Trump administration has canceled $3.7 billion worth of grants for multiple climate-related infrastructure projects, the majority of which were approved in former President Joe Biden's lame duck period after he lost the 2024 election.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright made the announcement on Friday and said the 24 projects failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.

The department said that after a "thorough and individualized financial review of each award," it found that nearly 70% of the awards (16 of the 24 projects) had been signed between election day on Nov. 5 and Biden's last day in office on Jan. 20. //

The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions is claiming a loss of $4.6 billion in economic output, along with the loss of thousands of jobs, and it would be roundly interesting to see them show their work on that estimate. That loss of economic output, of course, requires that there is some profit somewhere along the way. If any of these enterprises were profitable, if any of them actually generated any economic output, they wouldn't require millions or billions in taxpayer subsidies.

There is also a storm of whining about how these cuts and others like them under President Trump "stifle innovation." Horsefeathers. If there is a profit to be made in any of these technologies, someone will go to the effort to develop them.

President Joe Biden, with strong backing from environmental lobbyists and a last-minute defection from West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, pushed through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Bill. These measures allocated billions of dollars in federal credits and loan guarantees to favored industries, all under the banner of environmental protection.

What followed was a Soviet-style industrial strategy in which a handful of Washington bureaucrats determined the winners and losers of America's energy future. //

Biden's green agenda had another critical flaw: financing. Much of it depended on borrowing from China—ironically benefiting Chinese companies dominating the very industries Biden sought to boost. Since the launch of China's "Made in China 2025" initiative, Chinese firms—heavily subsidized by their government—have taken over more than 85% of the global rooftop solar panel market. Battery components for solar installations have even higher Chinese market dominance. In effect, Biden borrowed money from China to finance the growth of Chinese companies that sold solar products to U.S. installers.

The new House bill aims to dismantle this entire framework in one stroke. It eliminates the trading of green credits between corporations, revokes low-interest green loans, and entirely phases out subsidies for renewable energy initiatives.

To those who claim this approach is irresponsible, we pose a simple question: How many more decades should the green energy sector rely on government aid to stay afloat? Sustainable energy and transition projects are essential, but they must prove their viability in the open market—just like oil and gas companies do every day. This is classic Adam Smith-style capitalism: let competition and innovation—not government favoritism—determine success.

Trump also supports nuclear power, one of the cleanest and most efficient methods of generating electricity. //

By issuing appropriate permitting waivers, Trump aims to unlock this potential, even if a modest federal investment is necessary to overcome ideological resistance from the Left.

‘You can’t reuse turbines, and there are now thousands upon thousands of blades just sitting there in warehouses already … It’s an environmental disaster.’ //

While green advocates commonly use the terms renewable, sustainable, and net zero to describe their efforts, the dirty little secret is that much of the waste from solar panels and wind turbines is ending up in landfills.

The current amounts of fiberglass, resins, aluminum and other chemicals — not to mention propeller blades from giant wind turbines — pose no threat currently to local town dumps, but this largely ignored problem will become more of a challenge in the years ahead as the 500 million solar panels and the 73,000 wind turbines now operating in the U.S. are decommissioned and replaced.

Greens insist that reductions in carbon emissions will more than compensate for increased levels of potentially toxic garbage; others fret that renewable energy advocates have not been forthright about their lack of eco-friendly plans and the technology to handle the waste. //

“Globally, we produced 20-25 million tons of solar panels in 2023. They will come offline in roughly 20 years. That is 20-25 million tons of solar waste a year in 2045.”

The International Renewable Energy Agency puts the potential mountain even higher, pointing to studies that put the 2050 figure at 78 million metric tons.

For now, 90 percent of this detritus goes to landfills. And the panel fields and towering turbines must be dismantled, trucked away, usually by diesel-powered vehicles, and then sent to landfills or ports, where they are shipped to poor, developing countries. Fossil fuels may foul the air, but renewables may pollute the ground. //

In many cases, when highly regulated power companies look to build a new plant, laws require them to set aside money in bonds or escrow accounts to cover or defray decommissioning costs, Mills said. That is not always the case. A recently decommissioned coal mine in northern Louisiana may cost $300 million to break down, according to the Alliance for Affordable Energy, which says those costs will probably be borne by ratepayers. But Isaac and Mills believe financial decommissions requirements have been either ignored or insufficiently funded in the renewable market. ///

Compare the millions of tons of renewable waste that is not renewable and the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that is mostly reusable: nuclear waste is easily manageable and won't be scattered all over the landscape.

To use the heating BTU calculator, you will first need to measure the place you want to heat up. You need to know if you’re heating up a 1000 sq ft, 1500 sq ft, or a 3000 sq ft home, or a 400 sq ft room, for example.

Secondly, you need to figure out what climate zone you live in. That will determine how many BTU per square foot you need for heating (more on that later on). The United States is divided into 7 main climate zones or regions. Example: Miami, Florida, is in Climate Zone 2 and requires 35 BTU of heat per sq ft. Chicago, Illinois, is in Climate Zone 5 and requires 50 BTUs of heat per square foot.

https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

Climate Zone BTUs Per Sq Ft
Climate Zone 1 30 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 2 35 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 3 40 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 4 45 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 5 50 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 6 55 BTU per sq ft
Climate Zone 7 60 BTU per sq ft

We presuppose the standard ceiling height of 8 ft. For every additional ft above 8 ft, you need to add 12.5%. So, for 9 ft ceiling, you need to multiply the BTUs by 1.125 to get the most adequate estimation.

chart covering all 48 propane tank sizes with average dimensions and tare weights

The mainstream economic narrative in the USA would have us believe that power blackouts are always a bad thing – just think of all that lost productivity! Think of the effect on the GDP!

So I was curious to see this video about the recent blackouts in Spain rack up millions of views on Instagram 👇

I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity. //

That's one of the things about living in Alaska that we all put up with, and most of us are willing to do so because, well, we live in Alaska. But we don't like it. It doesn't help us bond with our neighbors. There's no joy in a 12-hour blackout. No, we just hunker down, fire up our generators, light some candles, and stoke up our wood stoves to stay warm.

In other parts of the country, though, most people don't have generators or battery backups. These folks are just blacked out, and I can guarantee you that they see no "joy" in it.

Virtually every prescription from the climate-scold left involves us giving up something. They want us to give up our rural homes, they want us to give up our pickups and SUVs, they want us to give up our reliable natural gas and nuclear power plants for unreliable and low-density solar and wind power. They want us, in short, to surrender our prosperity, our modern technological lifestyle, all to prevent some fraction of one percent of a degree of warming over the next century. And now they admonish us to find joy in this? That's going to sell about as well as Kamala Harris's "campaign of joy." //

PubliusCryptus
3 hours ago

I think it resonated with people because it points towards a new narrative for society and the economy – one where joy & connection are prioritized over economic productivity.
Joy and connection? I see hunger and privation. //

Quizzical
3 hours ago
Whenever the power goes out for very many people, someone dies. Literally. Some people in relatively poor health are literally dependent upon electricity to keep powering the machines that keep them alive. Literally killing people is not something to be glossed over as no big deal. //

Peter Mohan
2 hours ago
As a retired NYC Firefighter I personally witness the joy of the 1977 blackout. Four deaths, hundreds injured, thousands arrested and 1600 buildings destroyed or looted.
Many of the businesses never returned to the poor neighborhoods that they had served. I’m looking forward to a heart attack so I can meet the dedicated doctors and nurses in the nearby emergency room.

This is truly bananas: all of Europe appears to have been seconds away a continent-wide blackout.

The grid frequency across continental Europe plunged to 49.85 hertz — just a hair above the red-line collapse threshold.

The normal operating frequency for Europe’s power grid is 50.00 Hz, kept with an extremely tight margin of ±0.1 Hz. Anything outside ±0.2 Hz triggers major emergency actions.

If the frequency had fallen just another 0.3 Hz — below 49.5 Hz — Europe could have suffered a system-wide cascading blackout.

At that threshold, automatic protective relays disconnect major power plants, and collapse accelerates.

And it's disturbingly easy to imagine multiple scenarios where that could have occurred...

SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW

From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.

"What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.

At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric shock. What exactly does "shake" mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:

1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or destroyed. This is called that "opens" a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.

2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.

3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.

What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.

Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off —very sensitive to frequency variations—, 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it was It collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a "0 MW" nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country off.

To ignite a completely dead network again, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.

BREAKING NEWS: Spain and Portugal Celebrate Historic Achievement: First Renewable Blackout Festival™ a Roaring Success

In a stunning victory for progress, major cities across Spain and Portugal plunged into darkness today… a bold, equity-driven milestone being hailed by experts as “a necessary recalibration of oppressive light privilege.”

Government officials, cloaked in the safety of candlelit diversity councils, were quick to assure citizens that the blackouts had absolutely nothing to do with their relentless obsession with renewables, socialism, or Marxist energy redistribution initiatives.
Instead, they blamed “unexpected atmospheric challenges”… otherwise known as night time.

“This is what success looks like,” declared Iberian Minister for Sustainable Equality™, Juanita de Powerless. “Zero emissions. Zero industry. Zero functioning infrastructure. Welcome to Net Zero: where zero means zero.”

Sources confirm that during the outage, critical DEI teams remained operational… bravely identifying which marginalized communities were being most equitably electrocuted when traffic lights failed.
“True social justice,” noted one Gender Energy Equity™ analyst, “is making sure everyone gets hit by a bus equally.”

Meanwhile, local media proudly reported that while trains, phones, and emergency services collapsed, Spain’s Ministry of Feelings achieved its monthly KPI by holding an inclusive brainstorming session on how to decolonize electricity.

Critics foolishly tried to link the blackouts to decades of grid neglect, mass immigration-fueled demand surges, solar panels that don’t work in the dark, and a population conditioned to think work ethic is colonial violence™… but were quickly fact-checked by experts who graduated with double majors in Critical Energy Studies and Queer Wind Turbine Maintenance.

As night fell over the silent streets of Madrid, citizens were reminded that “decarbonisation” is not just an economic transition… it’s a spiritual journey… into medieval living.

Welcome to the future. Hope you brought a torch… and a towel.

Chris Wright: Absolutely. We are refilling the Reserve now and we will continue to refill the Reserve the whole time I'm in office. You know, that was just such an irreponsible action to drain that reserve so quickly for electoral reasons, and in fact it was drained so fast, it did some damage to the facilities. So right now we can only fill two of the four major salt caverns that we have. So, we're doing repair work on the other two, we're slowly filling the other two, and I'm trying to get some funds through Congress that will give us a longer strategic runway to fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve at the fastest rate we can.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is the world's largest stored supply of crude oil, with a capacity of 714 million barrels, and is intended to serve as a reserve stock (hence the name) in the event of a national emergency. The petroleum is stored in four massive salt caverns along the Gulf of America, and as Secretary Wright pointed out, two of these are not only drained but also damaged by the withdrawal. //

C-K anon-y65w
a day ago
The walls of the salt caverns are under tremendous pressure while holding all that oil. The pressure must be released in a controlled manner to avoid damage. The equipment on one cavern was down for maintenance when Biden ordered the release to prop up his poll numbers. The other caverns were drained too quickly to meet a political timeline resulting in damage to two of the caverns. //

emptypockets
16 hours ago
''Crashing the system''...that was and remains the Left's intention so they can raise their soc-com system up from the ashes to take control for good.

But to crash it means also remove ALL safety nets while continuing to overburden all systems including the safety net programs. Draining the SPR had a dual purpose, both short term gain [though miniscule] and contributed to fulfillment of longer term agenda. The left behind Biden the Face, the autopen potus, both strangled oil and nat gas and coal production while also depleting any stored capacity and overregulating to strangulation any access to more...except what was bought from enemies to finance endless wars.

Major power facilities require power to operate, and there's lots of unmet demand.

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

It's possible to manage some of this with power brought in from neighboring grids outside the blackout zone. But this also requires that the grid interconnections be isolated from the demand on the blackout side of the connection and send their power directly to idle power plants.

Once sufficient plants are online, a small subset of the grid will be powered, and the plants can manage the synchronization of their alternating current outputs to a single frequency. At this point, it's possible to start meeting demand.

But demand can be massive. Grid failures tend to happen when the grid is stressed by unusually high power demand, such as when heat waves drive high levels of air conditioning use. This means that a lot of the hardware that would be using the electricity is connected and switched on, just waiting for the electrons to appear. Letting all this hardware make demands at once would likely lead to an immediate grid failure and return to blackout conditions. //

While the grids in Spain and Portugal are connected to each other, they have limited connections to elsewhere. The only sources of external power to the grid come from France and Morocco, which are small connections, but they could be used to help black start some plants. Both blacked-out countries have significant hydropower, with Spain seeing it cover 10 percent of its demand and Portugal 25 percent. That's useful because hydro plants need very little in the way of an external power supply to start operating. //

Solar is not an ideal power source for black-starting the grid, given that it's unavailable for a significant chunk of the day. But solar panels produce direct current, with electronic systems matching it to the alternating current of the grid. With the right electronics, it can play a key role in keeping frequencies stable as grid segments are repowered. In productive areas, wind can provide black start power to other plants and doesn't need much external power to begin operations. It's unclear, however, whether the local wind hardware is equipped for black starts or if the local weather will cooperate (a quick check of the weather in various cities suggests it's relatively calm there). //

j
jsully2549
On wind and solar providing black starts, the facilities need grid forming inverters. Most will not be equipped, having grid following inverters instead. While RE black starts have been demonstrated, it's quite uncommon.

Less so in the future, as grid forming inverters provide other capabilities that will be needed as spinning generation disappears.
April 28, 2025 at 10:43 pm. //

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
Practical Engineering's video on Black Starts is well worth a watch. //

You might think that a power plant could easily start generating power, but in reality, only a limited number of facilities have everything they need to handle a black start. That's because it takes power to make power. Facilities that boil water have lots of powered pumps and valves, coal plants need to pulverize the fuel and move it to where it's burned, etc. In most cases, black-start-rated plants have a diesel generator present to supply enough power to get the plant operating. These tend to be smaller plants, since they require proportionally smaller diesel generators.

The initial output of these black start facilities is then used to provide power to all the plants that need an external power source to operate. This has to be managed in a way that ensures that only other power plants get the first electrons to start moving on the grid, otherwise the normal demand would immediately overwhelm the limited number of small plants that are operating. Again, this has to be handled by facilities that need power in order to control the flow of energy across the grid. This is why managing the grid will never be as simple as "put the hardware on the Internet and control it remotely," given that the Internet also needs power to operate.

It's possible to manage some of this with power brought in from neighboring grids outside the blackout zone. But this also requires that the grid interconnections be isolated from the demand on the blackout side of the connection and send their power directly to idle power plants.

Once sufficient plants are online, a small subset of the grid will be powered, and the plants can manage the synchronization of their alternating current outputs to a single frequency. At this point, it's possible to start meeting demand.

But demand can be massive. Grid failures tend to happen when the grid is stressed by unusually high power demand, such as when heat waves drive high levels of air conditioning use. This means that a lot of the hardware that would be using the electricity is connected and switched on, just waiting for the electrons to appear. Letting all this hardware make demands at once would likely lead to an immediate grid failure and return to blackout conditions. //

While the grids in Spain and Portugal are connected to each other, they have limited connections to elsewhere. The only sources of external power to the grid come from France and Morocco, which are small connections, but they could be used to help black start some plants. Both blacked-out countries have significant hydropower, with Spain seeing it cover 10 percent of its demand and Portugal 25 percent. That's useful because hydro plants need very little in the way of an external power supply to start operating. //

Solar is not an ideal power source for black-starting the grid, given that it's unavailable for a significant chunk of the day. But solar panels produce direct current, with electronic systems matching it to the alternating current of the grid. With the right electronics, it can play a key role in keeping frequencies stable as grid segments are repowered. In productive areas, wind can provide black start power to other plants and doesn't need much external power to begin operations. It's unclear, however, whether the local wind hardware is equipped for black starts or if the local weather will cooperate (a quick check of the weather in various cities suggests it's relatively calm there). //

j
jsully2549
On wind and solar providing black starts, the facilities need grid forming inverters. Most will not be equipped, having grid following inverters instead. While RE black starts have been demonstrated, it's quite uncommon.

Less so in the future, as grid forming inverters provide other capabilities that will be needed as spinning generation disappears.
April 28, 2025 at 10:43 pm. //

View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
Practical Engineering's video on Black Starts is well worth a watch. //