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Dan Sleezer's avatar

Well stated! All Power Engineers understand this critical concept. It will be very interesting if the politicians let the Engineers write the report!! We’ll be able to tell🤪🤪!

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Gene Nelson, Ph.D.'s avatar

Thanks for your post. Californians for Green Nuclear Power (CGNP) is fighting the same problem in California. The aspiration of a large amount of solar and wind collides with the laws of physics and power engineering. Those physical laws are not influenced by politics.

CGNP created the GreenNUKE Substack over a year ago. Our first article is titled, "Why is Grid Inertia Important? Without sufficient synchronous grid inertia, the grid becomes unstable and a blackout occurs" https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important.

CGNP learned of a unique Spanish tax on nuclear power. The tax subsidizes solar and wind, which produce low-quality, intermittent power that lacks synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) SGI maintains the steady "heartbeat" of the power grid. The Spanish politics employed a tax on their safe, abundant, 24/7/365 reliable nonpolluting nuclear power fleet. As a result, the politics dramatically changed the merit order for the Spanish power grid at mid-day. Two perfectly good nuclear power plants were off line on the morning of April 28, 2025. That change was enough to tip the balance to instability. See CGNP's July 8, 2025 article, "The Spanish Version of the 'Duck Curve' is a real killer This curve underscores the problem of insufficient synchronous grid inertia in Spain on April 28, 2025" for more details. https://greennuke.substack.com/p/the-spanish-version-of-the-duck-curve

See also Kilovar 1959's Substack article https://kilovar1959.substack.com/p/the-iberian-blackout-the-reports for additional technical details. Note the comments as well.

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