Name: Why Wind And Solar Make Grids More Vulnerable to Blackouts
Uploaded: 2025-06-03T04:01:00Z
Duration: 6 min 17 s
Description: Renewable energy, like wind and solar, has become a larger part of the overall power supply, but the grid wasn’t designed to handle it. WSJ asks a mechanical engineer for three ways to fix this.

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Renewable energy, like wind and solar, has become a larger part of the overall power supply, but the grid wasn’t designed to handle it. WSJ asks a mechanical engineer for three ways to fix this. Photo: Adam Falk, Getty Images

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250602/36798ac3-98c8-49d4-aa3a-1ecf2e089061/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Renewable energy, like wind and solar, has become a larger part of the overall power supply, but the grid wasn’t designed to handle it. WSJ asks a mechanical engineer for three ways to fix this.

Why Wind And Solar Make Grids More Vulnerable to Blackouts

Narrator: Renewable energy, like wind and solar has created a hidden infrastructure problem. The issue is that power grids, which carry electricity to homes and businesses weren't designed for wind and solar. And even though renewables have become a larger part of the overall power supply, grid infrastructure hasn't kept up. It's why some grid experts say renewables contributed to the severity of the blackout across Spain and Portugal in April. So we asked a mechanical engineer with over 15 years of experience to explain the hidden risks of renewables and three ways to make the grid more resilient to disruptions.

Renewable power, wind and solar specifically, don't provide something we call inherent rotational inertia, which is something that has provided stability to the grid for decades since basically it was first invented.

Narrator: Conventional power plants like coal and natural gas have inertia built into their design.

This is a 3D printed model of a gas turbine. So we burn the natural gas here and it creates this large spinning piece of rotating machinery. And this thing, this whole deal is connected to a generator that might be sitting over here that produces our electricity.

Narrator: All conventional power plants produce electricity that matches the frequency on the grid, which is 60 hertz in the US.

And all the power generators, they all need to be in sync.

Narrator: If a power plant goes down, the inertia provides buffer time for other energy sources to jump in.

Imagine how if you're riding a bike and you stop pedaling, you continue to move forward. That's inertia. The momentum that you have would help you get up the initial portion of that hill.

Narrator: The grid can only tolerate a small change in frequency. Anything too drastic and power plants will disconnect from the grid to protect themselves from damage. Using more renewable energy and fewer conventional power sources means there's less inherent inertia in the network, which can increase the risk of widespread blackouts.

Solar by its nature is not actually rotating.

Narrator: And wind turbines, even though they are spinning, don't rotate at speeds that match the frequency of the grid.

So one of the best solutions to address the lack of inherent rotational inertia is to use a grid-forming inverter.

Narrator: This technology essentially provides renewable energy with synthetic inertia. Most inverters at renewable power plants today are grid-following, meaning they rely on the grid's voltage and frequency. So if there's an outage, the inverter loses its reference and can't function. Grid-forming inverters are more advanced. They can operate independently and support the grid when there's a disruption. Here's how they work.

The solar panel produces direct current. You could imagine it as sort of a constant supply of current coming out of the solar panel, but our grid operates on alternating current, and so we need to take this blue line and we need to turn it into a waveform that's operating at 60 hertz.

Narrator: That's what a grid-forming inverter does. And because it's adjusting everything electronically, it can react to frequency changes much faster than a conventional generator. It also has an endless supply of synthetic inertia.

Grid-forming inverters are really, really great at allowing us to, say, build a microgrid. So imagine a military installation, for instance.

Narrator: But Todd says they're not as effective when it comes to managing a larger region.

You could imagine you've got all these different regions of some state that are all connected. They all now need to be synchronized. With rotational inertia, we have decades and decades of understanding and history of managing across large regions. With an increasing penetration of renewables, we find ourselves in a new world where we have new challenges to address.

Narrator: Grid-forming inverters also require additional measurements like voltage, frequency, and temperature,

And that can be done by imagining, say, like we put in a whole bunch of instrumentation all over the grid to make sure that we've got awareness on what's happening at each location or within these transmission line on the grid.

Narrator: Todd's second solution to renewable energy's lack of inherent inertia is something called a synchronous condenser.

I am a mechanical engineer, and so I'm a bit of sucker for rotational machines.

Narrator: And a synchronous condenser is just that, a large spinning piece of machinery similar to the gas turbine model you saw earlier.

Instead of actually injecting natural gas into this system, we actually take electricity from the solar panel and we get this large spinning mass that provides additional rotational inertia.

Narrator: He says, ideally this should be paired with a grid-forming inverter to get the best of both worlds.

There is a trade off that we have to acknowledge: not all that electricity is being sold into the marketplace. Instead, some of that electricity needs to go into spinning this large piece of steel. It's essentially like buying insurance. It's a cost that is incurred, but it provides some level of risk adjustment benefit to the overall grid so that it ensures that it continues to operate reliably. So our third opportunity to improve the resilience of the grid would be to have backup power supply, what we call Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS. So there's a transmission tower that's out here in the distance, and we provide power along these transmission lines and then eventually gets dropped down to this battery energy storage system. It stores power in one location, and it has large set of inverters in another location. And so the battery, this fills up with energy over time, and then it gets provided to these inverters, and then those inverters eventually will feed back power into the grid when it is needed.

Narrator: If there's an unexpected outage, batteries can deploy excess energy to stabilize the grid.

The use of battery energy storage systems has been increasing at a significant rate over the last handful of years, but prior to that, the cost of batteries were very high. Now the cost of batteries have declined so dramatically that this is a solution set that is being brought to bear in significant quantities all across the world.

Narrator: As renewable energy becomes more prevalent, Todd says the key to reducing the risk of widespread outages is to keep building and improving the infrastructure supporting it.

All energy sources have trade-offs. There is no silver bullet. It's critical for us to keep thinking about how do we design in a way that we best balance all of these trade-offs.

Each episode of Pro Perfected uses a quintessential expert in the specific topic area to explain how they would perfect a common problem.