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.
There is still not much information about the blackout, especially anything that could be classed as official.
PV Magazine published this based on Spanish government sources:
It seems to suggest some Europe wide instability followed by a cascade failure that could not be stopped by load shedding.
There have been a couple of other graphics of uncertain origin. This one from ENTSOE shows the collapse. At the time there seems to have been a large amount of solar PV generation with the surplus being sent to pumped storage.
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGenerationPerProductionType/show?name=&defaultValue=false&viewType=GRAPH&areaType=BZN&atch=false&datepicker-day-offset-select-dv-date-from_input=D&dateTime.dateTime=28.04.2025+00:00|CET|DAYTIMERANGE&dateTime.endDateTime=28.04.2025+00:00|CET|DAYTIMERANGE&area.values=CTY|10YES-REE------0!BZN|10YES-REE------0&productionType.values=B01&productionType.values=B25&productionType.values=B02&productionType.values=B03&productionType.values=B04&productionType.values=B05&productionType.values=B06&productionType.values=B07&productionType.values=B08&productionType.values=B09&productionType.values=B10&productionType.values=B11&productionType.values=B12&productionType.values=B13&productionType.values=B14&productionType.values=B20&productionType.values=B15&productionType.values=B16&productionType.values=B17&productionType.values=B18&productionType.values=B19&dateTime.timezone=CET_CEST&dateTime.timezone_input=CET+(UTC+1)+/+CEST+(UTC+2)
There have also been a couple of comments that the proportion of solar generation has been reduced and nuclear and gas have been ramped up, this may however just be a sensible action to take until more information is available. This is of German origin but may have been collated from ENTSO.
The comparison of domestic electricity prices is difficult as there are various taxes and levies as well as exchange rate fluctuations. The UK is no longer included in the detailed European data. This site appears to give reasonable information:
https://countryeconomy.com/energy-and-environment/electricity-price-household
The UK is slightly cheaper than Spain, 0.2203 € per kWh against 0.2408 € per kWh. The ‘leaders’ in renewable energy sources, Germany and Denmark are the most expensive by far 0.3943 and 0.3763 € per kWh.
