{"id":59269,"date":"2021-09-11T07:16:29","date_gmt":"2021-09-11T12:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59269"},"modified":"2021-09-11T07:16:29","modified_gmt":"2021-09-11T12:16:29","slug":"a-problem-shared-is-a-problem-doubled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59269","title":{"rendered":"A problem shared is a problem doubled"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A problem shared is a problem doubled<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of\u00a09 August 2019<\/a>, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid.\u00a0 This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea wind farm in the North Sea, taking another 799MW of power from the system. \u00a0Fortunately, regulations at the time required that the Grid operator keep 1GW of back up capacity for precisely this kind of emergency.\u00a0 And so standby turbines at the Little Barford gas power station were started.\u00a0 However, the system failed, taking 244MW of Little Barford\u2019s power offline too.\u00a0 This loss of power tripped a further 350MW of distributed generation bringing the total loss of power to 1,481MW.\u00a0 Within the next minute, 900MW of National Grid\u2019s 1GW of backup capacity was brought online, stabilising the frequency at 49.2Hz.\u00a0 Seconds later, however, the gas turbine at Little Barford failed; bringing the loss of power to 1,691MW.\u00a0 At this point, National Grid had consumed all of its 1GW backup capacity and had no resource to cope with further power losses or frequency fluctuations.\u00a0 Then, half a minute later (16:53:50) the frequency fell to 48.8Hz; triggering the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme and automatically disconnecting 1.1 million business and household consumers.\u00a0 In response, and for yet to be discovered reasons, (16:53:58) a third turbine at Little Barford went offline bringing the total loss of power to 1,878MW \u2013 nearly double Ofgem\u2019s stipulated backup capacity.<\/p>\n

Network Rail was among the large industrial users in the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme, so that at the peak of the Friday evening rush hour, a large part of the UK\u2019s rail network was brought to a halt…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A problem shared is a problem doubled At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of\u00a09 August 2019, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid.\u00a0 This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[154,644,1574,30640,31360],"class_list":["post-59269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-complexity","tag-power-failure","tag-power-grid","tag-the-consciousness-of-sheep","tag-tim-watkins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59269"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59270,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59269\/revisions\/59270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}