I hope somebody building and selling microgrids and energy storage systems is ready to take advantage of this situation. Mass deployment of batteries at the grid edge is a great idea for a lot of reasons, but none more immediately compelling than "the power won't go out if the grid goes down."
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#432I'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'm going with AGI awakening in some lab today.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#433Earlier 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…
> probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables Renewables were a factor in the blackout here in Brazil a couple of years ago: the models used by the system operator did not correspond to reality, many solar and wind power plants disconnected on grid disturbances quicker than specified. That mismatch led the system operator to allow a grid configuration where a single fault could lead to a cascade (…
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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#434I'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
A monkey took out the whole grid in Sri Lanka this year
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#435Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand. Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question. I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were ac…
> Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points: - Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. Th…
For wind turbines, solar, and batteries, the frequency stability is doable through controlling frequency from inverters.
Some wind turbines are also internally a hybrid design that can dynamically adjust the frequency difference angle both for minimal losses in production, but also to provide frequency shifting and even artificial demand (i.e. essentially using wind power as brake)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#436Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.
Yeah, we just told you that via Signal - that’s how we built the networks :) (No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :)) There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.
> we just told you that via Signal
Who are you and what's Signal?
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#437Europe 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…
Large Inverter Based Resources (IBR) such as huge solar parcs, grid-scale batteries or high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines can be programmed to behave like rotating generators, or even to smooth out smaller ripples. They also don't necessarily need a leading grid frequency but can be used to generate their own frequency normal to cold-start or resync a grid.
Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#438A 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...
From Le Monde live feed, RTE (French electricity network manager) declared the issue unrelated to this fire.
"Le gestionnaire français souligne par ailleurs que cette panne n’est pas due à un incendie dans le sud de la France, entre Narbonne et Perpignan, contrairement à des informations qui circulent."
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#439This 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…
This guy grids!
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much…
As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
Except this is Spain and Portugal which combined have 1/3 of the area of Texas, which had a state wide outage recently.