Any thoughts/information on what happened? Was it a lack of spinning reserve?
Was it " The Portuguese operator, REN, said the outage was caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, with extreme temperature variations in Spain causing “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines."
as is written in the Guardian?
The Italien blackout from a few years ago had a definate cause in the tripping of interconnetors from Switzerland during a storm.
I could be talking about the forum closure, which I definitely did miss, but I am talking about the loss of electricity supply to Spain and Portugal. I was caught in the centre of Madrid when the power went off. There was absolute chaos. I was with my wife and whilst we are both reasonably fit, there was no way we would have been able to walk to our hotel on the outskirts of the city. I thought it was going to be a night on a park bench. Luckily a friend was able to organise a lift around mid-night.
It might be taken for granted but electricity is badly missed when gone!
It will be interesting to find out what caused the departure!
There are a couple of posts on StackExchange physics.stackexchange.com/.../what-is-induced-atmospheric-vibration and electronics.stackexchange.com/.../what-are-induced-atmospheric-variations-and-how-do-they-cause-grid-desynchron with links to a report on the weak links of the Eurogrid (my term) highlighting the Iberia poor (weak) connection journals.aps.org/.../PhysRevResearch.7.013137.
The likelihood is that the multiplicity of cascading factors have become confused with each other (technologists attempting to talk to journalists).
I'm guessing it's dancing/galloping wires from the heat driven thermals; expanded, slack and distorted wires (aero effects), etc. causing clashing that either is a transient short with re-closure (load transfer / cascade, frequency 'sag'), or transient mischaracterised as low frequency. Either way they ended up with a cascade of protection dropping the whole peninsular.
Most of these 'failures' end up being classified on a 'for the want of a nail [peseta?]' slip/lapse/mistake excuse.
It is interesting than the fact that some of the physical explanations being given are clearly incorrect, which is probably due to a poor 'expert talking to journalists and politicians' interface, but we have seen that before.
More interesting to me, is the fact that it looks from the outside as if there was not a well rehearsed 'black start' process for bringing back small islands of generation and loads & synchronizing and connecting them onto the grid relatively automatically.
Given the huge synchronous interconnectedness of the Eurogrid, I'd have thought that would have been needed quite often, so a failure so long lasting seems a bit surprising unless distribution transformers or switchgear have been damaged at the same time . I think we will have to wait some time for logs to be studied and then a clearer picture to emerge.
Mike
“More interesting to me, is the fact that it looks from the outside as if there was not a well rehearsed 'black start' process for bringing back small islands of generation and loads & synchronizing and connecting them onto the grid relatively automatically.”
If I remember correctly ‘black starts’ are a form of cascade in the other direction. You would start with some diesels or small gas turbines which could start with their own batteries or compressed air tanks and then use this power to start small steam or gas turbine units and work up in size to the nuclear plants. All these generators bring rotary inertia and stability into the system.
Two weeks ago Spain was running on 100% ‘renewable’ electricity:
So other than Hydro (can this be used for black starts???) they had no synchronous power available. Solar and wind will trip on voltage or frequency errors. Nuclear is shut down on loss of offsite power on safety grounds.
I guess they had to bring some smaller thermal plants back into service before they could start recovering the grid.
Was solar/wind tripping part of the blackout in the UK in 2019?
Was solar/wind tripping part of the blackout in the UK in 2019?
As I recall it was "part" of what happened - but only because it tripped out exactly as the grid code said it should, rather than due to any particular characteristic of the technology itself. As I understand it the grid codes have since been revised...
If anything solar and wind should be some of the better choices for a black start - as they only need something to synchronise to, rather than large power source.
- Andy.
If anything solar and wind should be some of the better choices for a black start -
Agree in principle, both due to no need to look for a source of ignition, and also as an inverter type process can decouple frequency from voltage, in a way that a conventional generator can not.
But the current rules of engagement actually make that a disadvantage, as they are written for 'spinning' generators, from a time when it was safe to assume the non-inertial devices are the small part that can safely be thrown off.
It may be part of the problem that we need to get away from assuming that a falling frequency is a reliable indicator of an overload, or handling such behaviour needs to be programmed in.
On the other hand, once spinning, a real genset has much more ability to ride through inrush overloads that are inevitable as things come back on, so a more granular approach to load ramp up may be needed.
Actually at much smaller scale the inverter type variable engine speed generators don't play well when you try and sync them either.
It is really far to soon to be sure what happened here, so this is just speculative, but I think there will be some lessons to learn once it is clearer.
Mike.
My thoughts
Could this happen in other European countries? Yes absolutely.
Lack of information/poor information? Yes absolutely, reminds me of Ed Milliband talking about Heathrow.
Are there lessons to be learnt? Yes absolutely
- All Telecoms (mobile phone networks) need to be power independent/battery backup power for at least 24 hours to help maintain mobile coms throughout the nation
- All Data centres need to be power independent/battery backup power for at least 12 hours to help maintain Data coms throughout the nation
- Countries need to look at how much power they use and how much they buy in from abroad. It only takes 1 country interlink to go down and people will find themselves needing to wear brown trousers. In the UK I bet we have come close to that on several occasions. Picture if you will a power station going offline, then at the same time an interlink to France going down, now you are very close to the mark. Now when that cascade starts it is very difficult to stop the avalaunch.
- More COLD start sites/Black Start site need to be commissioned probably throughout the EuroGrid network
- Procedures are needed or need to be written to ensure assets can synchronise on the network especially considering the amount of renewable energy source created. Voltage and frequency errors are probably the most hidden Gremlin when adding renewable energy onto the Grid be that either NGrid or EuroGrid.
Personally I feel that we need more battery storage attached to the Grids to help store the renewable when it’s created rather than waste it and it may also help even out the fluctuations on the Grids. Now I understand they are the size of large football stadiums and they can not AT the MOMENT create Frequency BUT they would most certainly help minimise the cascade effect that leads to the need for a Black start. It also means that Solar energy can be used at Night. (Other renewable energy sources are available).
Personally I feel that we need more battery storage attached to the Grids to help store the renewable when it’s created rather than waste it and it may also help even out the fluctuations on the Grids. Now I understand they are the size of large football stadiums and they can not AT the MOMENT create Frequency BUT they would most certainly help minimise the cascade effect that leads to the need for a Black start. It also means that Solar energy can be used at Night. (Other renewable energy sources are available)
We particularly need more grid-forming batteries that can act like spinning generators.
Most inverters will simply track the grid frequency as it falls. Until it goes out of specification, and the inverter shuts down. Which only adds to the problem.
There is an interesting article on Medium https://medium.com/@IntrinsicalAI/just-a-blackout-what-public-data-reveals-about-the-iberian-grid-collapse-of-april-28th-2025-cb9acc1f783a that strongly notes that there was a major IT outage (loss of internet connectivity) across Portugal and Spain 5 minutes before the main power outage.
This appears to be the 'wrong' way around from a Power Systems first perspective. There may have been a clock synchronisation issue, but I think that would be completely unrealistic (but who knows?). Perhaps more likely the power system control had slowly been digitised and now was suffering from a loss of connectivity between control nodes, resulting in unhelpful fall backs of operating status.
Also noted was that the open source power reports showed that the Portuguese power grid started going down first. Ultimately the guy reporting the details then falls back onto the conspiracy theory that this was expressly planned as a cyber attack on the whole grid. Again I don't think this wasn't really the case.
It could easily be that there was a small cyber attack on the Portuguese internet's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) system (or thereby) that controls how the main internet servers talk to each other, which then had unforeseen consequences that ultimately tripped the grid collapse.
At least the guy gives references. A good story to ponder.
Once the cascade starts or starts to get out of control it become like an Avalanche. Lets hope that people learn lesson from this disaster and then implement more robust and redundant systems that are capable of meeting the requirements that are now the norm rather than relying on how things were done 20 plus years ago. I do like the fact that Spain has lot of wind turbines (personally I think it still needs nuclear as well) and I hope the UK installs more but and it is a BIG BUT the Wind Turbines on mas scale change how the national grid would work/function during normal operation and under fault conditions. Frequency is crucial to any grid.
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