A few more Dinorwig type pump-storage hydro stations might be simpler than chemical batteries for grid tier storage.Dinorwig alone can store around 11GWh and generate at about 1.8GW - so might have been able to compensate for the loss of Little Barford (740MW).

  - Andy.

I hear what you say but someone was interviewed last night on BBC news, I think, who said that his company had been asked to contribute several 100 MW for a couple of minutes and then asked to recharge they batteries as there was an over supply. 

It is not  MWh that is needed, it is quick response of MW.

The problem with more pumped storage is geographical. You need a suitable small lake near a much larger one with several hundred feet of height difference. Dinorwig, Cruachan and Loch Ness are about the only places suitable.

For the reasons already given by others, I do not believe that any cyber attack was involved in THIS outage which looks like simple bad luck in that two major sources of supply were lost within a few minutes. This has happened before, but not for over ten years.


I am however concerned at the vulnerability of the grid to any future cyber attack, and hope that the absence of any cyber attack THIS TIME does not result in complacency and a lowering of defences.


And as for the substantial problems caused on the railways, I blame this on the trend towards greater complexity. More to go wrong. More reliance on centralised control of signalling and over complicated new trains that need a specialist to re-start them after "computer says no"

The problem with more pumped storage is geographical. You need a suitable small lake near a much larger one with several hundred feet of height difference. Dinorwig, Cruachan and Loch Ness are about the only places suitable.

 

   - Andy.

A specialist with a long set of jump leads to bypass the relay controlled by the computer?

When this event happened I was in A andE at our local hospital and did notice the lights dip quite markedly just once not sure if this was related directly to the big outage or if it happens there anyway. How big an area was affected?  I thought at first it was just a London thin. Incidentally I saw a documentary about why the HS2 rail link was such a mess and in the programme theye said that a transformer failure at pudding lane 400 Kv substation  stopped the testing of new trains for that line coincidence or what?

First I heard of this was during the 10 o'clock news last night. How come that SSE appears not to have been affected?

I think the event is only indirectly related to wind turbines.  Traditional large heavy synchronised generators are being replaced by non-synchronised renewables connected via invertors and as a consequence the inertia of the interconnected network is falling.  It was a windy day in summer, so the system inertia would be unusually low.  With low inertia the frequency drop on losing generation would be very rapid, and would have hit the frequency limits that trigger load shedding before there could be an adequate response.


National Grid is aware of the falling system inertia and is trialling an assortment of measures under the EFCC (Enhanced Frequency Control Capability) programme to mitigate it.  The 9th August event just happened a few years too soon!

"think Ladybower/Derwent/Howden for example"

The trouble is that even with 350m height difference (Cruachan) the water level in the upper reservoir goes up and down like a fiddlers elbow. (The lower one is huge so it doesn't.)

LadyBlower etc. seems to have 35m head so the MWh that could be stored is probably quite small.


Having said that, I suspect it would be a good idea to merge wind and hydro so the wind fills the reservoirs when it blows and the electricity is generated when it is needed most.