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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#381

Post by acc_297 »

londons_explore wrote: post #130

Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption. This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects. The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting the…

You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.

Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.

I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#382

Post by ABS »

boxed wrote: post #366
OgsyedIE wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.

Is this a joke? Because that seems like exactly the wrong thing, and such a system would itself be a bottleneck for downtime issues. Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.

no one would/should prevent companies from using also private channels like X, FB, Instagram, etc but enforcing a public channel that doesn't require private citizens to register, accept T&S and share their private data with 3rd party, unrelated private corporations to be informed of critical, public safety information would be helpful.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#384

Post by gchamonlive »

api wrote: post #360
gchamonlive wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not Musk fetishism. It's network effects. Most people hate X and hated Twitter but people use them because people use them. This should show people just how powerful network effects are. They are legitimately a force of nature.

[flagged]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#385

Post by martinald »

mike_hearn wrote: post #319

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…

Interestingly it seems that the black start drill is considering a smaller zone of impact than what has happened here.

Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.

I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.

Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#386

Post by tejohnso »

jslakro wrote: post #180

A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

Surely there is more than 0 redundancy so that one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#387

Post by frank_nitti »

api wrote: post #360
gchamonlive wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It's not Musk fetishism. It's network effects. Most people hate X and hated Twitter but people use them because people use them. This should show people just how powerful network effects are. They are legitimately a force of nature.

I strongly agree, and to me this supports the argument for heavier regulation (or any really)

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#388

Post by cafeinux »

api wrote: post #362
belter wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably did not patch their firmware in years and have their SCADA systems live on Shodan with default passwords...allegedly...

I remember years ago someone scanned the Internet IPv4 space for open unpassworded VNC servers. Many of them looked disturbingly like industrial control systems.

Just take a look at https://infosec.exchange/@shodansafari. A lot still look like that.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#390

Post by mistrial9 »

pjc50 wrote: post #204
jslakro wrote: post #180

A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

How very California.

you are right, but the emphasis could use a tune-up. In California, home of world-leading tech.. there are sensors and information networks, extensive electrical power lines, heavy equipment and budgets, a lot of dry and dead tress, a history of fire. So you see that California in a way is a world-quality testing lab. and the way the information travels, and the way the information is applied, could also be world-quality .. or, world-theater for government imbecility..
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