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Sorry, my memory was off a bit; it had nearly happened before, in 2021, and the report came out 2022. Here’s the report. Neoliberalism, not renewables.
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Wind and solar are great because they generate electricity directly, minus all the inconvenient and inefficient faffing about with enormous heat engines and all the trouble that comes with them.
Batteries don’t really have much capacity. They’re just amazing for electronics and communication, but feeble for heating your house in winter. But we don’t need gigawatts for lighting, computing, communication, etc. It’s heat we need gigawatts for, so why not store heat instead? Phase changes can store vast quantities of heat.
I like low tech and/or simple tech methods. I can’t call solar panels or inverters particularly low tech, but they are simple and low maintenance once set up. Wind and solar are also locally independent for their working life; not reliant on depleting fuel extracted in distant lands, nor global trade, transport, finance, or war.
TRIGGER WARNING – I’m going to say something political here.
Solar and to a lesser extent wind power put a little of the means of production (Marx) into the hands of many ordinary people. Those people gain some autonomy – the electricity company can no longer cut them off completely, they’ll always have enough to run lights and charge phones, and enough for refrigeration in summer when there’s plenty of daylight. Villages and communities pooling their resources and coordinating their demand could do even better, they might have to buy electricity very little. No wonder the old establishment hate wind and solar so much, and project so much propaganda against them!
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My own perspective is that renewables should not be used in an attempt to continue the current “perpetual economic growth at all costs” lunacy mass-extinction project, which is bound to crash and burn relatively soon no matter what energy it runs on. All renewables can do is buy us some time, and help to contrive a softer landing.
Fossil fuels are depleting, they become more and more demanding to obtain. Since 2001 particularly, fossil fuels have demanded war after war to control reserves and keep the price down, and fossil fuel economics currently demands the arming of Israel in its genocide of the Palestinians. How long would the USA support Israel if it wasn’t next door to the oil fields?
I don’t like these big, barren solar farms. There’s still loads of roof space that’s already barren and could have solar. But it’s the “big companies vs. lots of little independent operators” thing again; governments tend to gratify well funded lobbying.
There are also arrangements that suspend a chequerboard of solar panels some metres above agricultural ground, semi-shading and sheltering it, which is useful for some livestock and crops.
Being rid of the big heat engines has massive simplicity appeal. Just look at those big, horrible lumps of dirty, self-degrading complexity you’d no longer need! Combustion chambers, flues, scrubbers, feed belts, evaporators, condensers, heat exchangers, fans, filters, cooling towers and pumps, pumps, pumps.
Just stick a turbine at the top of a tower and the wind will blow it round.
Just put this panel in daylight and it’ll produce power.It’s like magic – if you can handle the intermittency.
I suppose that’s what Labour are really up to with their Net Zero policy. Labour and Tory agree; governments shouldn’t own stuff or do things directly, government should set policy, and leave provision to some sort of market. So by saying “net zero by soon”, the government effectively sets high oncoming levels of intermittency, creating an investment market for storage. Thus do battery farms get built. When the Tories get back in, the wind-solar-storage market has become more competitive against the Tories’ old gas and oil. Thus do factions of the elite compete.
My research shows that Entso-e is the self regulatory body for power and energy suppliers in the EU area, who report to the European Commission and Member States through the Electricity Coordination Group, but is not itself part of the EU structure.
They do however like to employ a lot of ‘experts’, in fact it seems it is stuffed full of ‘experts’
Their report from 2022 seemed to advise the equivalent of putting higher rate fuses in a plug to prevent power loss! It has the look and feel of a can kicking exercise.
This is their production for the current investigation. It is a grandly titled “ENTSO-E expert panel initiates the investigation into the causes of Iberian blackout” What is a panel if it isn’t an ‘expert panel’
It doesn’t give any hint of what they suspect caused the blackout, it only refers to “different generation trips” and “frequency” decreases accompanied by “voltage” increases happening. It then gives a précis of how they got things back to normal.
It doesn’t provide any evidence of experimenting with a grid being tested to see how it reacts to increased amounts of renewables in the system. It just doesn’t discount such suspicions either. So we wait, for “the experts” findings…_
