Government: let’s create a problem. Government: let’s also spend a ton of money to fix the problem we created
Portugal launches $26.5 billion resilience plan after storms and blackout
Portugal’s government on Tuesday announced a 22.6 billion euro ($26.5 billion) investment programme ?to roll out over nine years, aimed at mitigating risks including ?climate change and power outages.
The plan was initiated after severe storms hit central mainland Portugal in January and February, causing damage worth an estimated 5.3 billion euros, and a ?crippling power outage in Spain and Portugal exactly a year ago.
The initiative, ?named Portugal Transformation, Recovery and Resilience, seeks to strengthen infrastructure, ?institutions, homes and businesses against threats linked to climate change, energy security, ?seismic activity and cyberattacks.
It will be 37% funded from the state budget, with ?private financing accounting for 34% of the total and European funds covering 19%.
Presenting the plan, Prime Minister Luis Montenegro said Portugal had been “hit hard in recent years by extreme ?weather events — droughts, heavy rain, floods and fires — occurring year after year ?with increasing destructive force”.
So, will private donors just kick in voluntarily?
(Jo Nova) Engineers were warning the grid was close to crashing due to excess solar
The mass blackouts in Spain and Portugal wrecked havoc on April 28 last year. At the time everyone accountable was feigning confusion, blaming it on a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which might have set up mysterious oscillations in the line. They were bandying around terms like “ ‘induced atmospheric vibration’ and talking about extreme temperatures (you know, like 23 degrees C). But all along, the head honchos at Red Electrica knew it was due to an excess of solar power and a lack of reliable generation, because the technical staff had told them what was coming:
“Today was really bad, you all saw it”: new audio recordings confirm that Red Eléctrica knew three months before the blackout that the system was failing
Huh
(Not A Lot Of People Know That) Except, of course, it was solar power which was at front and centre of the blackouts, a fact which even the whitewash report could not disguise.
The catalyst for the blackout was a sudden loss of 2.2GW of electricity at Granada substation in southern Spain. The report does not appear to address why this happened, which you might have thought was crucial! But it is believed that one or two solar farms stopped transmitting because of negative prices – these resulted from too much solar generation for too little demand, and this is exactly how the market is supposed to work; negative prices lead to less generation, thus bringing the system into balance.
However solar power now makes up such a large part of Spain’s electricity (about 60% at the time of the blackouts), that the very system of negative pricing is a threat in itself to the grid.
As soon as that 2.2GW disappeared, voltages in the local grid plummeted, leading to a complicated chain reaction of grid disconnections. Within 30 seconds the entire Iberian peninsula was experiencing a complete blackout.
Instead of spending $26.5 billion on “resilience” and crap, how about spending money on making sure the grid won’t collapse, and that there are reliable, dependable power sources?
The cause was ….. Too much solar power ?