551–560 of 1001 posts
Looking forward to the postmortem
Unfortunately these things usually take months, being done at the speed of bureaucracy.
Things like Air Crash investigations don't take a year because of paperwork FFS. Investigating things takes immense time.
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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)
The inertia provided by synchronous generators was in essence a natural benefit to the grid that we never appreciated previously. But now with more renewables it’s now something we have to consider and design for. Running a grid on 100% non synchronous requires a bit more effort!
To remember: in the early hours of this morning there was a huge purchase/transfer of monero that increased the price +30% (highly unusual) and a few hours later before lunch time we see Iberia disconnected from the grid. Monero is the favorite payment coin when ordering real cyber attacks.
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Spain is part of the largest interconnected grid in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?
It's a complex enough issue that you can't really 'hand wavey' it. The details are specific and thorny.
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How do we know there was a huge purchase? Monero can't be tracked.
Because to buy that much monero so fast is only possible with bitcoin, which is traceable by governments and interested parties. An estimated 305 million USD of monero were purchased this morning before the grid shutdown. That was a +50% increase on the monero price, something that never happened before in the last 11 years of the coin. Quite a record. Quite a coincidence.
Global warming/climate change strikes again
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“induced atmospheric vibration” on 400KV lines is the current theory
Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia. Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
Makes the case for favouring flywheels over batteries.
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…
Spain is part of the largest interconnected grid in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?
> A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant, to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.[1]
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...
I suppose it makes sense that it was an automatic shutdown rather than infrastructure failing on such a wide area. And then once it's shut down, a black-start is a logistical challenge as other comments have explained.
I'm also seeing some reports about it being more likely that something happened on the east side, somewhere like the Ebro valley or north across the Pyrenees. Catalonia seems to have been particularly affected, and it's on the path of important lines coming from France. High heat at noon could have caused a line to fail and short against a tree, which would be similar to the 2003 nation-wide outage in Italy.