Sudden fluctuations in Germany’s power grid are causing major damage to a number of industrial companies. While many of them have responded by getting their own power generators and regulators to help minimize the risks, they warn that companies might be forced to leave if the government doesn’t deal with the issues fast.
It was 3 a.m. on a Wednesday when the machines suddenly ground to a halt at Hydro Aluminium in Hamburg. The rolling mill’s highly sensitive monitor stopped production so abruptly that the aluminum belts snagged. They hit the machines and destroyed a piece of the mill. The reason: The voltage off the electricity grid weakened for just a millisecond.
Workers had to free half-finished aluminum rolls from the machines, and several hours passed before they could be restarted. The damage to the machines cost some €10,000 ($12,300).
In the following three weeks, the voltage weakened at the Hamburg factory two more times, each time for a fraction of second. Since the machines were on a production break both times, there was no damage. Still, the company invested €150,000 to set up its own emergency power supply, using batteries, to protect itself from future damages.“It could have affected us again in the middle of production and even led to a fire,” said plant manager Axel Brand. “That would have been really expensive.”
Ambitious Goals
At other industrial companies, executives at the highest levels are also thinking about freeing themselves from Germany’s electricity grid to cushion the consequences of the country’s transition to renewable energy.
Likewise, as more and more companies with sensitive control systems are securing production through batteries and generators, the companies that manufacture them are benefiting. “You can hardly find a company that isn’t worrying about its power supply,” said Joachim Pfeiffer, a parliamentarian and economic policy spokesman for the governing center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Behind this worry stands the transition to renewable energy laid out by Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Though the transition has been sluggish so far, Merkel set the ambitious goals of boosting renewable energy to 35 percent of total power consumption by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 while phasing out all of Germany’s nuclear power reactors by 2022.
The problem is that wind and solar farms just don’t deliver the same amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will shine.
But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens. That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger system failures.
“The voltage off the electricity grid weakened for just a millisecond.”
This is BS. It takes ten milliseconds to complete a half-wave, so if the power drops out (never mind “weakens”) for a millisecond, no machine would notice. The only way damage could be done in a millisecond is if they had a lightning surge, and then again, it would not affect any of the machines, only control equipment. Here’s a good set of diagrams illustrating power faults; none of them happens in a millisecond:
http://ackadia.com/computer/power-protection/power-protection-power-problems.php
Der Spiegel in its element.
Gene, a voltage dip for a single wave can cause problems in a chemical plant. At 5 waves (1/24 of a second, folks), it causes significant equipment to shut down. A half-second can and will shut down an entire plant. UPSs are needed just to get that half-second and get to a point where you can recover..
The millisecond is obviously hyperbole by someone half-knowing what they are talking about. However, this isn’t a trivial matter.
We used motor generators to insure clean power, back in the day.
Plants subject to significant damage from power blips can be engineered to ride through. Since Germans are known for excellent engineering, I assume that they made a business decision to not spend the money to protect against loss from power blips. If dirty power continues, they will rethink that decision. I’m saying this is as much about the downside of a business decision as it is about power blips.
To wit, if German industry decides it can’t trust the grid for clean power, it will cost a thousand times the Hamburg factory’s losses to retrofit plants to handle dirty power.
In the U.S., plants can sue the power companies for power company caused damages, so there is less need for ride-through capability. Might be the same in Germany, and our star reporter doesn’t know it.
Makes you yearn, sometimes, for the good ole days when high tech was pneumatic controls. Fewer of those unplanned crashes and hours to days to restart.
Keeping the grid balanced between supply and demand is tough enough when the supply is relatively stable. Germany has chosen to rely very heavily on a variable supply.
Here at the foot of the alpes when it lightning strikes the mainpower cables to Italy it trips circuitbreakers for more then a milisecond. You can actually see your lights dim. My computers all just continue functioning without an UPS. I can’t believe that a milisecond drop could do anything.
But a second is long, that could trip the failsafe on machines. Bad journalism doesn’t make the basic premise untrue.
Germany’s taxing the grid with their silly idea to shutdown perfectly good nukes is a fact.
The alway-on relay is a common device in power circuits.
AC is rectified and filtered to provide DC that operates a magnetic coil to hold a ferrometallic ‘reed’ switch closed against spring tension. If the power sags for even a millisecond the switch opens, cutting all power to the equipment, closing valves, etc. When the equipment uses flammable gases (VERY common in industry) this prevents accidental ‘blowouts’ that can explosively(!) reignite after a brief power interruption.
This is a safety feature. A sudden production shutdown is far cheaper than a (possibly lethal) explosion and fire. It si better still if the shutdown can be prevented using a *reliable* grid with UPS systems and backup power.
I’ve seen and dealt with various technologies to ‘smooth’ power and/or protect equipment – saturable core transformers, variacs, fast to drop/slow to engage relays, etc. Those issues are not the crux of the problem. It is simply that all the current ‘green’ energy is unreliable and attempting to make it a mainstay in the grid is magical thinking unrelated to the real world. Just ask the folks in Texas who dropped an entire city when the wind stopped.
All of this is of course, to be laid at the feet of the Satanic Gases and Gorebal Warming. Two of the world’s greatest scams in a hundred years. These people need to go to Devil’s Island and not come back.
Obviously the millisecond comment was just being used in place of “a fraction of a second” which is the layman’s term often used. The writer must have felt it would sound more technical to use the more precise term, not knowing he was actually decreasing accuracy. But that aside, many people including myself have been predicting that the grid in Germany would become unstable and that this would eventually affect their heavy manufacturing base. But we were ignored. Now Germany will pay the price and it could be a decade or more before they fully recover.