This event took out about 5% of UK electricity supplies.
There is about 13 GW of installed solar in the UK. Almost all of the embedded generation in this area was solar at the time (clearly it would have been different if this event had been in the night).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_pow ... ed_KingdomAlmost all of that solar is connected to the distribution network. Since the distribution network in this area was dropped (for about 20-secs) when the transmission line got hit lightning, then all those G83 / G59 solar inverters
quite correctly dropped off.
About 5% of that would therefore be 0.65 GW .
Since the reported/estimated infeed loss from distributed embedded generation was 0.5 GW this suggests the numbers are about correct.Since it takes (approx) 2-3 minutes for the G83/G59 inverters to resync following reconnection and the grid coming back into the correct range, then the loss of infeed scenario would appear to need an extra 0.5 GW of response added to the scenarios, or the G83/G59 standards will need to be relaxed/adjusted to not only permit, but require, some form of ride-through for the larger 'commercial' solar farms (and a still considerable, but lesser, amount of additional infeed response for the smaller 'domestic' solar).
If you go to the MCS MID statistics
https://www.microgenerationcertificatio ... tatistics/ it shows approx 967,946 small solar PV installations, i.e. the sub 50kW 'domestic' stuff.
If you go to the Ofgem FIT statistics
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/environmental- ... statistics it shows 4.9 GW of small solar PV installations.
That suggests that a typical small solar PV installation is 5kW, which seems about right to me.
This suggests that about 8GW of the UK's 13 GW solar is the larger commercial solar farms, and 5GW is the smaller MCS domestic solar (etc) stuff.
A view might be that the loss of infeed scenarios should be revised to include (say) 5% x 5GW = 0.25 GW of dropped G83/G59 domestic infeed (as that is very difficult to arrange for ride-through). Going forwards all new solar installs above 50kW (the MCS limit) should have some form of grid stability ride-through requirement imposed (which could be - indeed should be - centrally planned/contracted/paid, but locally reallocated) and the same requirement should be imposed on any new fossil or nuclear plant. That does leave an issue to do with the 8GW of existing solar commercial capacity and the extent to which it is grandfathered or not - and if not then another 0.25GW of infeed needs to be planned for, and centrally contracted/paid, but not reallocated back down to the generator.
I would also require all generators of over 50kW capacity to report/communicate in real time what they are doing. But that gets into another discussion about whether the mobile and/or fixed line phone system can be relied upon in just these sorts of emergency situations, as being realistic you cannot have a 51kW solar array paying for a full-on SCADA connection to the NG ESO !
I am expecting these solar capacities to double or triple over the next decade.
(Wind will more than double or triple, but it is almost entirely very large wind arrays, and the loss of infeed for that is being catered for in much the same way as any conventional power plant and it is seldom a hidden embedded infeed. So it is another subject entirely.)
regards, dspp