Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout • Hacker News Board

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#61

Post by laurencerowe » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC

preisschild wrote: post #41

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #26

Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery... 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 does…

> 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 report you mean (csiro) was wildly biased though. They based their nuclear power cost estimate on a nuclear reactor that was never deployed anywhere (Nuscale) instead of "normal" nuclear power plants that have been deployed for decades.

The CSIRO report appears to have cost estimates for "normal" nuclear power plants too.

    Large scale nuclear $155-$252/MWh.
    Solar PV and wind with storage $100-150/MWh.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-double-...

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#62

Post by laurencerowe » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 8:25 PM UTC

postexitus wrote: post #31

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #26

Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery... 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 does…

You need grid connected storage where you have (unpredictable) renewables. That doesn't negate the benefits of Nuclear baseload power. In an ideal mix, you need both, and also Gas for emergencies. One is not better than the other, they have different roles in a balanced grid.

A case can be made that nuclear could potentially be cheaper than renewables plus batteries in Northern Europe when targeting 100% zero carbon electricity. (It seems unarguable that renewables can get to 80% zero carbon electricity more cheaply).

But they're not really complementary in that one can't fill in for the gaps in the other. So the case for new nuclear gets more and more uneconomic the more cheap renewables we deploy.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#63

Post by AnotherGoodName » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 8:50 PM UTC

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #58

preisschild wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 report you mean (csiro) was wildly biased though. They based their nuclear power cost estimate on a nuclear reactor that was never deployed anywhere (Nuscale) instead of "normal" nuclear power plants that have been deployed for decades.

The NuScale cost was what the project itself announced. And they hadn’t even started building yet. The latest reports also include large scale nuclear power. I find it funny when people get outraged because all CSIRO does is use real world construction costs easily proving how unfathomably expensive new built nuclear power is.

And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the Australian governments research body, separated from the current political party. They aren’t some private company or political group. I don’t think you could have a more neutral and unbiased viewpoint.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#64

Post by galbar » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

lyu07282 wrote: post #57

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which on some level is exactly "what the bosses and politicians want to hear" When it's everybody's fault it's nobody's fault.

But EU's liberalized energy market gives us resiliency and low prices for electricity! /s

But not across the Pyrenees :_)

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#65

Post by pvaldes » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 8:54 PM UTC

unmole wrote: post #35

bluebarbet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have been less fun if it had been in the depths of winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.

We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?

Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#66

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #63

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NuScale cost was what the project itself announced. And they hadn’t even started building yet. The latest reports also include large scale nuclear power. I find it funny when people get outraged because all CSIRO does is use real world construction costs easily proving how unfathomably expensive new built nuclear power is.

And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the Australian governments research body, separated from the current political party. They aren’t some private company or political group. I don’t think you could have a more neutral and unbiased viewpoint.

Exactly. And they have well established methodology publishing a consultation draft asking for review. Then following that review publish a final version half a year later.

Followed by updating the methods for the next iteration to cover any gaps discovered, like only including SMR and not large scale nuclear.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#67

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

dvh wrote: post #51

jacquesm wrote: post #17

472 pages. That's going to be a nice bit of reading this weekend. It is very nice to see such a comprehensive report as well as the fact that it was made public immediately.

Maybe practical engineering will make a video about it

I like reading.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#68

Post by andyferris » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #33

algoth1 wrote: post #9

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

and then people accuse social media of making people paranoid... you are able to be paranoid on your own just fine

My theory is that social media simply increases the connectivity and reach (of the “rumour mill” or what have you) and thus it amplifies an existing social “failure mode”.

(That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are basically a free-for-all).

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#69

Post by christkv » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

Lol it took about an hour for us to realize there was a blackout as our house had switched to island mode. Ended being the sort of organization point of the area for the neighborhood as we could provide mobile charging and light until the power came back around 22 at night

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#70

Post by roenxi » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

cpgxiii wrote: post #37

roenxi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See, for instance, the space shuttle O-ring incident That wasn't really a result of an alignment of small weaknesses though. One of the reasons that whole thing was of particular interest was Feynman's withering appendix to the report where he pointed out that the management team wasn't listening to the engineering assessments of the safety of the venture and were making judgement calls like claiming that a compone…

In reality the "swiss cheese" holes for major accidents often turn out to be large holes that were thought to be small at the time. > [Fukushima] No small alignment of circumstances needed. The tsunami is what initiated the accident, but the consequences were so severe precisely because of decades of bad decisions, many of which would have been assumed to be minor decisions at the time they were made. E.g. - The desi…

To be blunt; that isn't an appropriate application of the swiss cheese model to Fukushima. It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event. Risk models won't help there. Every engineered system has design tolerances. And that system will eventually be hit by a situation outside the tolerances and fail. Risk models aren't to overcome that reality - they are one of a number of tools for making sure that systems can tolerate situations that they were designed for.

If Japan gets traumatised and changes their risk tolerance in response then sure, that is something they could do. But from an engineering perspective it isn't a series of small circumstances leading to a failure - it is a single event that the design was never built to tolerate leading to a failure. There is a lot to learn, but there isn't a chain of small defence failures leading to an unexpected outcome. By choice, they never built defences against this so the defences aren't there to fail.

> Many or all of these failures were necessary in combination for the accident to become the disaster it was.

Most of those items on your list aren't even mistakes. Japan could reasonably re-do everything they did all over again in the same way that they could simply rebuild all the other buildings that were destroyed in much the same way they did the first time. They probably won't, but it is a perfectly reasonable option.

Again I'm going from memory with the numbers but doubling the cost of a rare disaster in a way that injures ... pretty much nobody ... is a great trade for cheap secure energy. It isn't a clear case that anything needs to change or even went wrong in the design process. Massive earthquakes and tsunamis aren't easy to deal with.