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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

(www.newyorker.com)
353 points dmazin | 1 comments | 09 Jul 25 12:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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markus_zhang ◴[10 Jul 25 10:32 UTC] No.44519407[source]▶
I recall that other power plants such as thermal power is still required to provide “inertia” for the whole system, as solar fluctuates a lot. The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

I don’t really understand inertia in power plants but I wonder if it helps to push nuclear as primary and solar as secondary?

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1. otherme123 ◴[10 Jul 25 11:45 UTC] No.44519901[source]▶
> The recent Spain-Portugal outage showed that there is not enough inertia in the system.

At the moment it showed nothing, because it's still under investigation. You might be referring to the FUD campaign that started the same day of the blackout.

But it is true that inertia is provided mainly by conventional power plants, and they are being removed from the grid. It is also true that, if finally the lack of inertia is confirmed as the cause of the blackouts, there are alternative ways to provide inertia in the system: synchronous condensers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser) like the one in Moneypoint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneypoint_power_station).