That sounds like someone explaining why the solution is so bad, before describing what the solution is.
Electricity markets and electricity networks are designed by the regulator.
Incentives are planned by the regulator so that individual stations or companies have the correct incentives to have capabilities that the network grid needs.
One example is financial incentives to provide black start capabilities. Another example is incentives to provide power during peak loading (peaker plants). There are many more examples of incentives designed so that the needs of the whole network are met.
If an operator is incentivised to act selfishly in such a way that the grid will fail, then that is a failure of the regulator (not the individual operator).
Blaming individual people or companies for systemic faults is generally a bad thinking habit to form. There are too many examples where I see individuals get blamed. Fixing our systems is hard but casting blame in the wrong places is not helpful. It's difficult to find a good balance between an individual's responsibilities and society's responsibilities.
Not quite. They are _influenced_ by the regulators.
And Europe has been incentivizing trash-tier low-quality solar and wind power, by making it easy to sell energy (purely on a per-Joule basis) on the pan-European market.
Meanwhile, there is no centralized capacity market or centralized incentives for black start and grid forming functionality.
There absolutely is. Look up terms like "Frequency Containment Reserve" and "automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve". The European energy market takes transport capacity in account, and there is separate day-ahead trading to supply inertia and spare generating capacity. Basically, power plants are being paid to standby, just in case another plant or a transmission line unexpectedly goes offline.
Similarly, grid operators offer contracts for local black start capacity. The technical requirements are fixed, and any party capable of meeting those can bid on it.
It's quite a lucrative market, actually. If during the summer a gas plant is priced out of the market by cheap solar, it can still make quite a bit of money simply by being ready to go at a moment's notice - and they'll make a huge profit if that capacity is actually needed.
Spain and Portugal are not members, btw.
And the same applies to capacity markets. I believe, there is a plan to come up with a plan for it by 2027.
> Similarly, grid operators offer contracts for local black start capacity. The technical requirements are fixed, and any party capable of meeting those can bid on it.
And I don't believe there are ANY solar/wind plants that have black start capacity in Europe. The current incentives structure makes that a near certainty.
There certainly is in New Zealand, although the dollar amounts are quite small. If your countries regulator doesn't incentivise the capability, I believe that is a fault of your regulator.
Transpower (NZ) says:
We may enter into black start contracts with parties who can offer the black start service compliant with our technical requirements and the Code. Black start is procured on a firm quantity procurement basis (via a monthly availability fee and/or a single event fee for specified stations). Black start costs are allocated to Transpower as the Grid Owner (see clause 8.56 in the Code for details)
The UK keeping its own time just makes things easier for it IMO.
I imagine you can get close enough by syncing to a shared time source like GPS or the DCF77 signal, as long as you communicate how the phase is supposed to match up to the time source. Or at least you could get close enough that you can then quickly sync the islands the traditional way.
The question is if it's worth the effort and risk. Cold starting a power grid is a once in a lifetime event (at least in Europe, I imagine some grids are less stable) and Spain seems to plan to have everything back up again in 10 hours. Maybe if the entire European grid went down we would attempt something like that by having each country start up on their own, then synchronize and reconnect the European grid over the following week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_states_synchronization_...
The harder part is this: To pump power into the grid you lead the cycle ever so slightly, as if you were trying to push the cycle to go faster. If instead you lag the phase the grid would be pumping power into you.
That lead is very very small, and probably difficult to measure and synchronize on. I would imagine that when the two grids connect everything jumps just a little as power level equalize, it probably generates a lot of torque and some heat, I would assume it's hard on the generator.
From a physics point of view, by leading the cycle you introduce a tiny voltage difference (squared), divided by the tiny resistance of the entire grid. And that's how many watts (power) you are putting into the grid.
To synchronize the isolated grids, they all need to operate with an exact match of supply and demand. Any grid with an oversupply will run fast, any grid with an undersupply will run slow. When it comes to connecting, the technical source-of-truth doesn't matter: you just need to ensure that there will be a near-zero flow the moment the two are connected - which means both sides must individually be balanced.
And remember: if you are operating a tiny subgrid you have very little control over the load (even a single factory starting up can have a significant impact), and your control over the supply is extremely sluggish. Matching them up can take days, during which each individual subgrid has very little redundancy.
On the other hand, the interconnect essentially acts as a huge buffer. Compared to the small grid being connected, it essentially has infinite source and sink capacity. For practical purposes, it is operating at a fixed speed - any change is averaged out over the entire grid. This makes it way easier to connect an individual power plant (it just has to operate at near-zero load itself, move to meet a fixed frequency target [which is easy because there is no load to resist this change], and after connection take on load as desired) and to reconnect additional load (compared to the whole grid, a city being connected is a rounding error).