Mass power outage in Spain and Portugal

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t

The power outage began soon after midday Spanish time and it appears to have affected cities across the country, although the Balearic and Canary Islands do not appear to have been affected.

Mainland Portugal and Andorra also saw a similar blackout.

Public transport has been disrupted, with passengers evacuated from trains and traffic lights also affected.

In Madrid, many businesses, shops and restaurants were plunged into darkness. Internet service was also affected.

Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica has said it is working with energy companies to restore power.

Spain's national railway company, Renfe, says the country's "entire National Electricity Grid was cut off" at 12:30 local time (11:30 BST).

"Trains stopped" and were "without departures" at all stations, the company says.

[Pierre]

Apparently caused by "atmospheric conditions", suitably vague.

Originally Posted by Pierre

Apparently caused by "atmospheric conditions", suitably vague.

A little more info ;

The Portuguese grid operator REN said the Iberian blackout was due to a 'rare atmospheric phenomenon' which occurred in Spain.

It claimed that extreme temperature variations in Spain’s interior had caused ‘induced atmospheric vibration’ in the power grid.

It appears that vibrations in the power lines - which normally create the 'hum' you can hear when electricity passes through - became so bad that the entire network broke down.

REN described it as a “complex phenomenon” that could take up to a week to fix, due to the need to rebalance international electricity flows.

[Dude111]

Thats kinda scary that could affect the grid!

[Sirius]

To be honest i expected the Tin Foil hat brigade to blame EV's for the blackout

[papa smurf]

Originally Posted by Sirius

To be honest i expected the Tin Foil hat brigade to blame EV's for the blackout

i heard that someone plugged in a swasticar and it tried to take over Europe

Originally Posted by papa smurf

i heard that someone plugged in a swasticar and it tried to take over Europe

It was using the DoGE approach of making things more efficient by shutting them down…

[OLD BOY]

Many news outlets are reporting that it’s the rush for net zero that is to blame.

The jury’s still out, but this is looking to be the likely cause of the unprecedented outage.

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Many news outlets are reporting that it’s the rush for net zero that is to blame.

The jury’s still out, but this is looking to be the likely cause of the unprecedented outage.

Why, in your judgment, is it likely?

[Pierre]

Nothing is certain as yet, and we'll probably not know for some time. I heard from one report that 50GW just disappeared from the grid. Which is massive, I don't even know how that's possible.

Originally Posted by Pierre

Nothing is certain as yet, and we'll probably not know for some time. I heard from one report that 50GW just disappeared from the grid. Which is massive, I don't even know how that's possible.

I expect that to achieve that effect would require parts of the core transmission network shutting down, chaotically, all at once. No single power generator produces anything like 50MW - the single biggest station in the UK (Drax) can produce a little under 4MW, and only then if it brought all its decommissioned coal burning capacity back online.

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Many news outlets are reporting that it’s the rush for net zero that is to blame.

The jury’s still out, but this is looking to be the likely cause of the unprecedented outage.

Any other news outlets beside the Telegraph and GBNews?

Otherwise, "many" is doing some very heavy lifting there…

[Taf]

Originally Posted by Pierre

I heard from one report that 50GW just disappeared from the grid. Which is massive, I don't even know how that's possible.

The Grid is constantly matching voltage and frequency levels, but the biggest thing is phase control. Send 2 antiphase signals into the same leg, and you'll get an attempt to cancel each other out. That would cause much sweating in the control rooms.

Several reports seem to indicate a huge drop in available generation, which caused the rest of the grid to struggle and sent the frequency out of spec, which then caused more to shut down as protection protocols kicked in. However, its all speculation atm (inc any loss of some renewable generation).

It affected a lot of data centres, some of my email was inaccessible for a while, while they sorted out the issues.