21–30 of 119 posts
The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.
How to explain that to non-engineers is another problem.
I immediately rebooked the same hotel, but when we got back there the receptionist had left so you had to check in over the phone instead. Except WhatsApp wasn't working. Then mobile data went down. And before long we were walking through the old town going hostel to hostel looking for a place to sleep, as everything got darker and darker (due to the lack of powered street lighting). The old town in almost pitch black was pretty scary!
We ended up breaking back into the hotel, borrowing a bunch of towels from a laundry cart in the hallway and sleeping in this lockable room we found in the basement.
Besides that somewhat stressful part, it was a really strange but fun experience to see the city without power: no traffic lights, darkened shops with lots of phone lights, cafés still operating just with only outdoor seating and limited menus, the occasional loud generator, and most of all the people seemingly having a great time in spite of it.
I would've loved to have stayed out all night exploring the city, but finding somewhere to sleep that night was a bit more pressing!
As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing of interest to be conquered xD
The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.
About 4 hours before the grid collapse on the 28th of April 2025 was recorded the largest purchase of Monero in the past 3 years (to remember: monero is coin of choice for special operations), making it surge +40% in 24 hours. The initial Spanish reports mentioned conflicting power information from dozens of locations at the same time which is consistent with a sequential attack using the blinkencity method so the grid itself is forced to close down.
I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid. In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use this model all the time. It's very helpful for explaining the multifactorial genesis of catastrophes to ordinary people.
Also perhaps worth a read: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080416-00/?p=22... "You’ve all experienced the Fundamental Failure-Mode Theorem: You’re investigating a problem and along the way you find some function that never worked. A cache has a bug that results in cache misses when there should be hits. A request for an object that should be there somehow always fails. And yet the system still worked in…
We did have many many problems previously. The state of South Australia went out for a couple of weeks at one point in similar cascading failures. This doesn’t happen anymore. In fact the price of electricity is falling and the grid is more stable now https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...
This price drop is inline with the lowered usage of gas turbine peaker plants (isn’t that helpful right now? No need for blockaded gas for electricity).
A lot of people say it can’t be done. That you can’t have free power during the day (power is free on certain plans during daylight due to solar power inputs dropping wholesale prices to negative) and that you can’t build enough storage (still not there but the dent in gas turbine usage is clear).
It’s one of these cases where you’ve been lied to. Australia elected a government that listened to reports battery+solar is great for grid reliability and nuclear was always going to be more expensive.
The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.
As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing of interest to be conquered xD
The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.
They need more battery storage for grid health, both colocated at solar PV generators (to buffer voltage and frequency anomalies) and spread throughout the grid. This replaces inertia and other grid services provided by spinning thermal generators. There was no market mechanism to encourage the deployment of this technology in concert with Spain’s rapid deployment of solar and wind.
In my system's case, switching to this grid profile was just a software toggle.