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Seneca Plutarchus's avatar

"The people are probably right about teachers and doctors . . . not sure about the other categories."

I think a lot of doctors are in trouble unless the guild structure manages to close off AI supervision. Proceduralists like surgeons and such are probably fine for the near to mid term (though I suppose automated robotic surgery may be coming down the pike soon). But I can really foresee nurse practitioners and physician assistants working in clinics and providing care in hospitals by doing the exams, talking to the patients while being supervised by AI. Perhaps there will need to be a few supervising physicians still around to supervise the AI initially, but a lot of that care is supposed to be evidence based and to conform to algorithms anyway.

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Handle's avatar

I know the details about the Spain blackout. It wasn't intermittentcy, it was "contingency plan implementation coordination failure". It was similar in multiple ways to what happened in California with water during the recent LA fire catastrophe. That is, the people responsible for planning for how to deal with certain crisis scenarios identified the need for certain minimal amounts of critical response resources, but didn't take the extra step of making sure the people with control over those resources would know to never let availability fall below that threshold. Whoops! Let me explain.

In general it's not intellectually productive for green-policy critics to reflexively blame "renewables" when an electrical power supply system is required by policy to use lots of them, as it can still be engineered to be robust to all the special challenges posed by those sources. The only real question is price and whether policy makers are going to accept those much higher prices and be honest about them, or else try to keep the prices down by reducing how robust it is, that is, saving money by taking on extra risk.

So, for renewables there are two major problems that can be engineered around. Intermittentcy can be dealt with by being able to suddenly import lots of extra power from elsewhere (Iberian system could not) or crazy amounts of batteries (too expensive for most situations) or having plenty of gas reserves and idle gas turbines that can be quickly spun up to fill the gaps. And the Spanish system seems to have been built to be up to that challenge.

The other problem is frequency. I'll lose some accuracy and precision to spare you the technical details, but basically, AC power in a system runs at a particular number of hertz (50 in Spain), and everything is built to deal with that exact frequency, and lots of very important and very expensive electrical stuff everywhere will fry and start fires if the frequency gets even a little bit off target, and so they will just disconnect from a system if that happens, and can't use, transit, or contribute power until the frequency is restored and stabilized within a fairly tight range.

In a big failure, the frequency drops to zero and needs to quickly come back up. The problem with most solar installations (and sometimes wind, it's more complicated) is that the solar power can't help much with this, indeed, the solar power has to sit on the sidelines and 'wait' for system frequency stability until it can join the party. What does the job is by using the angular momentum inertia in giant heavy spinning turbines and generators in either huge fossil fuel sites or hydroelectric dams, which you can imagine being like a giant electrical flywheel that keeps everything going with inherent frequency stability that resists change. If it's big enough, it bootstraps the whole system back into shape in a second.

Spain no longer has enough fossil plants to provide this inertia everywhere it might be needed, but that's OK, thought the engineers, because they've got five big hydroelectric dams, and those can provide enough frequency inertia to deal with any grid crisis.

Unless a bunch of uncoordinated decision makers had taken three dams offline for maintenance at the same time. Dios mio! Ay caramba!

The remaining two weren't enough to get things minimally going again for about another 10 hours, and by then, it's dark, so no solar, which increased the delay to getting back to fully operational status.

Moral - Planers need to think about the meta-contingency of how their contingency resource availability might fall below threshold because of uncoordinated human decisions if control over availability is decentralized. California Firefighting policy and Spain Electrical policy failed to provide for this.

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