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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#402Genuine question: how is it that Ukraine’s electricity grid still works to any degree despite being bombed for years and no doubt intentionally sabotaged / cyber attacked. But a whole country’s grid can go down like this in an instant?
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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spain loses around 15GW of demand at the same time: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh... I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.
Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf) That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequ…
Is 50Hz really that important these days – i.e. more important than maintaining power? (Honest naive question.)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#404I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack. There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages I remember the day when the Swiss railway power networ…
I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf) That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequ…
Is 50Hz really that important these days – i.e. more important than maintaining power? (Honest naive question.)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
That wasn't tree falling in Ohio, that was overloaded line sagged and shorted into a tree, compounded with several other factors that contributed to the grid instability and the inability of the grid operator to realize how unstable the grid was.
"Same difference" to use an Irish turn of phrase. If a short to ground takes out power to an extensive area does it mater what touched what?
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#407Apparently a local grid overload near France and a cascading failure down the Spanish network, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause. Of course there is a lot of noise. For instance, one reporter asked one of the government flunkies whether it could be a cyberattack and they turned his noncommittal “maybe, we don’t know” into “government says cyberattack may be ongoing”. Be careful of idiot reporters out…
Yes, something similar happened in the UK a while back. Full info here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2020/01/9_... Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc): 2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms) 2.4.2. The fault af…
Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked?
In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines.
So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs point B456?
Is this done sort-of-blind? Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#408A 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.
The 2003 US Northeast blackout was caused by the failure of only a few lines that shorted into trees. These line failures created grid instability that resulted, ~5 minutes later, in most of the Northeast losing power in a cascading failure.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#409A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways) "In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."
On the bright side. People die from electricity and from operating electricity powered machines, too. So those will be spared. :)
I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.
I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.
They've had a grudge against humanity since the fall. Ever since—once a year—they send a clear message, "leaf" but do the humans listen? No.