Calls to limit solar and wind power projects to avoid another blackout
MINISTERS should impose limits on the construction of new wind and solar farms to help avoid a nationwide blackout, according to a former director of National Grid.
Colin Gibson, who was power network director from 1993 to 1997, claimed that some existing turbines and solar panels may have to be disconnected, and new developments restricted, to “secure” the system after major power cuts earlier this month.
In an analysis co-written by Dr Capell Aris, a former grid engineer, Mr Gibson states that the system failure revealed several “serious problems” with the operation of the national electricity network, which require an “immediate, independent, expert review”.
Their intervention comes amid a government inquiry into the outage, which occurred after the Little Barford gas-fired power station in Cambridgeshire and a major wind farm off the Yorkshire coast both temporarily stopped producing electricity. According to the Financial Times, a provisional report by National Grid suggested that the wind farm may have tripped offline seconds before the Little Barford power station.
The blackout affected a million people in London and the South East, the Midlands, the South West, Yorkshire, the North East, Cornwall and Wales.
National Grid has insisted that unpredictable wind power generation was not to blame. But, in an analysis of public data on the electricity running through the grid on the day of the outage, Mr Gibson and Dr Aris claim that the failures of the two plants resulted in a loss of frequency – a measure of energy intensity – five times greater than historic slumps.
The significant loss of frequency was down to a fall in system “inertia” – the energy provided by conventional generators that effectively acts as a shock absorber to prevent sudden frequency changes, the analysis states. Renewable plants, such as wind and solar farms, which generate power intermittently, do not provide inertia.
“To avoid a repeat of this incident, which could be much worse, it will be necessary to manage system inertia,” Mr Gibson and Dr Aris state.
They call for limits on specific types of generation, such as wind and solar, for any given day, based on predictions of system inertia on each day.
“For the longer term, there are various actions that should be considered that will recover lost system inertia… It is necessary with immediate effect to limit the amount of new, zero-inertia generation plant, such as wind and solar, and even new interconnectors, that is connected to the grid. ”
A National Grid spokesman said: “The UK has statistically one of the most reliable energy networks not only in Europe, but anywhere in the world. This was a rare and unusual event, an incident such as that has happened only three times in 30 years, and it was the first time since 2008.”