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5. Overview of grid reliability in EU

Last edited Sat Feb 1, 2014, 11:41 AM - Edit history (1)

The CEER has updated its overview of grid downtime and provided a comparison of underground versus overhead power lines in the various member states.

The Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) has published an update of its benchmarking report for grid reliability including data up to 2012. It basically focuses on Saidi, a way of scoring grid downtime with and without exceptional events, such as the storms. When such events are left out of the equation, the number of minutes of downtime on average for the year provides a way of comparing grid reliability.
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In this chart I helped produce for the EnergyTransition.de website last year, we suggested that there is a connection between the share of renewables and minutes of downtime, with grid reliability actually improving as the share of renewables has grown over the past few years.

http://www.renewablesinternational.net/overview-of-grid-reliability-in-eu/150/537/75716/

So in theory I'm supposed to have <17 minutes per year of downtime, but I can't say that I've ever seen it. In the recent big winter storm, there was 98% pre-storm availability of turbines, and none were damaged. Another myth goes down.

In any engineered system there are trade-offs, and the anti-wind folks like to talk about capacity factor without ever considering availability factor. All power systems require reserve capacity; the difference is in how, when, and why their use is required. As usual, Craig Morris says it best:

Conventional plants can fail quickly. In a recent storm that hit Europe, the social media world was concerned about wind turbines being blown away, but I could not find any news of such a thing happening. We do know that the Ringhals nuclear plant, with a capacity of 878 MW, failed completely, however, as one of its blocks did again just a few weeks later.
http://energytransition.de/2014/01/intermittent-or-variable/

The first mentioned failure:
Outage or limitation : Failure SE3 Ringhals Block1 Event duration 1d 2h 47m Duration uncertainty +/- 6 hours
http://umm.nordpoolspot.com/messages/16206

And the second one:
Outage or limitation : Failure SE3 Ringhals Block1 Event duration 1d 1h 48m Duration uncertainty +/- 6 hours
http://umm.nordpoolspot.com/messages/17993