The Fix for Solar Power Blackouts Is Already Here

'Between an abandoned market and a rusty, decades-old electrical substation in a rundown part of Liverpool sit two buildings with a shiny coat of white paint behind a high-security fence. This ordinary-looking site is considered “critical national infrastructure” because of what’s inside: two 95-ton cylinders with rotors turning 1,500 times per minute. It’s called a synchronous compensator, and it’s northwest England’s best hope of avoiding blackouts.

The UK’s grid operator pays a Norwegian power company to keep the rotors running at a fixed speed. And the service it provides is so valuable to the grid that the company, Statkraft, has nabbed orders to build four more of these around the country.

“If Spain had enough of these machines, the countrywide blackout could have been avoided,” says Guy Nicholson, head of zero-carbon grid solutions at Statkraft, while giving a tour of the facility. He’s referring to the April afternoon when Spain’s electrical network came to a screeching halt and the whole Iberian Peninsula went dark for nearly a full day — the worst outage in Europe’s modern history.

Solar farm outages had destabilized Spain’s grid, and there weren’t enough gas plants online to provide stability. Synchronous compensators could have kept clean power flowing at the right frequency and voltage, avoiding the blackout. But continental Spain doesn't have any.'

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