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!
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
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.
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.
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