Iberien Peninsular Blackout

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!

lyledunn said:

It might be taken for granted but electricity is badly missed when gone! 

For some, it might be like the end of the world!

I wonder what happened last week with power outages at Standstead Airport and then the next day on large parts of London Underground

I wonder what happened last week with power outages at Standstead Airport and then the next day on large parts of London Underground

Hello Sergio:

It appears that the UK Power system is working on a knife edge. No one wants to blame net zero as the root cause

 The only advice I heard yesterday on a Guardian podcast, is that every UK family needs to have a 72 hour protection Kit to adequately cover black out conditions.

It should be noted that here is Florida everyone is advised to have a hurricane kit consisting of flashlights, water, cash, full tank of gas, canned food, battery powered radio, small LP burner, dry cookies ,medical kit , etc etc. The state government also has special tax free days on these items just before the start of the season (which Is June 1, 2025),

Peter Brooks

Palm Bay

No one wants to blame net zero as the root cause

To be fair lots of things have changed over the years - we no longer have Central Electricity Generating Board whose primary task was to generate sufficient electricity for the nation, rather now we have a loose collection of private generators whose primary responsibility (as with any commercial company) is to create wealth for their shareholders. Load profiles have changed - we have much less heavy industry with large spinning motors that run constantly all day, but more commercial and domestic loads which are naturally more erratic. The nature of loads has changed across the board too - a lot of simple resistive loads have disappeared (filament lighting, resistive heating) and many motors now have electronic drives. Millions of small transformers in all sorts of things have been replaced by SMPSUs. Unlike traditional loads most electronic controls will respond to a reduced voltage by increasing the current demand - so no longer present such a simple load to the grid and traditional regulation methods (e.g. voltage reductions) not longer work as they did. Then there are new kinds of loads like EVs and domestic heat pumps. Also the changes to inverters for generators (esp. wind and solar). Some of that may indeed have been driven by "net zero" but a lot is also done for other reasons - other politics (privatisation and moving away from coal due to 1980s economic policies, or later policies to reduce dependencies on imported fuels (e.g. Russian gas)), just economics in general as the new technology is cheaper to run, or just "progress" in general. Life brings changes, some changes work out for the better, others don't. As ever, finding problems and fixing them is the life blood for engineers.

   - Andy.

It probably isn't the fault  of ' net zero' as such, or rather, as I suspect you mean, the low carbon sources like solar and wind, as we have lost a lot of nuclear as well, but more a failure of those who write rules and decide how much to invest in what,  to keep up with changes in load patterns and the systemic behaviour of increasingly electronic loads. Undersea lines now tend to be DC and inverter driven as well which may not help.

And power cuts are nothing new - its just with computers we notice their effect more than in the 1970s and 1980s for example.

In the UK specifically, quite a lot of kit is old, from the bottom to the top - as a personal example the wiring to my house went in  1969-1970, the cable in the street is slightly older, as are the two pad mount transformers and the 11kV lines that feed the whole estate. That's before we look further back at the pylons ;-)  There are a lot of pinch points and bits rotting away.

Mike