So, here’s me guessing on hte basis of very little information. How unlike me, eh?
Grids of Portugal, Spain, at least parts of France and Northern Italy went down. And I’m told (by a grid engineer here in P) that Poland did too. I don;t know the truth of all of that, just something that was said to me yesterday. This is all also before I read around the place – now having power again – to find out.
So, my assumption is that it’s renewables and their ability to create grid instability. FR, SP, P etc are all ewll interconnected if not one grid. Southern Italy isn’t…..it’s connected but not so much apparently. So, if N went down and S didn’t then that’s possibly why…..
It’s that claim about Poland that interests. As I say, don;t know whether it’s true, it’s just a claim I’ve heard. But, if true, that to me suggests Germany.
It’s long been true that the surrounding grids have whined bitterly about Germany and – especially – wind power. The fleet spins up and starts to flood the German grid which then exports the stuff in vast waves. At low, zero and sometims negative prices. Which can – obvs – produce instabilities etc. To the point that some peeps have been strongly suggesting that they’ll not accept German power over the interconnectors etc. Just not worth the costs to the grid of doing so.
So, if Fr goes down, well – but if Fr AND PL go down then…..
All pure speculation and you know me, perfectly happy to change my views when the information does. You also know me, perfectly happy to speculate on v little information. But, if true that Poland went down as well then I’d say look at Germany.
Nothing happening in Italy as far as I know (and I live here) even if the grid is notoriusly unstable
Occams razor would suggest to me that this is self-inflicted by the Spanish and not at all unconnected to them announcing, a couple of days ago, to having record share of wind and solar. Now if only somebody could have warned them that you also need stable base load
Although the emphasis now seems to have been dialled back initial media reports were notable for an across-the-board reference to cyber attacks.
Is there nothing those pesky Russians won’t do?
Whatever it was, it was pretty huge… And fast….
The grids are *supposed* to be set up that in case of a cascade breakers can be flipped *before* the overload hits, thus limiting the spread of the blackout.
The fact that, as known so far, southern France and two whole nations were blacked out *completely* , and in a *very* short time tells us at least that failsafes preventing this did not work.
A province or two…. yes ok… but not entire nations…
One of the features of ‘renewables’ is that they come at all scales. There are the massive fields of windmills and solar panels right down to domestic rooftop solar and little windmills in ones and twos. All the small & medium stuff have controllers measuring frequency and voltage and their first derivatives. If any go outside tightly controlled limits then the unit disconnects from the grid to protect itself. It’s quite damaging to generate into what is effectively a short circuit!
At the grid wobble in the UK in 2019 several hundred MW disappeared off the grid in a second or two due to this protection mechanism, and I can imagine it would be significantly worse now.
That kind of rapid rate of change on the grid is not what it was historically designed to manage – things just happened at a slower pace due to the large mechanical inertia at the power stations, so stuff held up until slower acting mechanical relays could shed load if necessary.
As I said earlier, the report on this from Spain & Portugal will be interesting reading, if we are allowed to see it!
Poland and France both rely heavily on traditional steam turbines for electricity production. Coal and nuclear respectively. It’s quite likely that they therefore do rely on the inertia in the tonnes and tonnes of spinning turbine to provide some sort of frequency damping, and maybe not have the ability to really quickly and automatically isolate something that’s causing trouble. Especially, say, an international inter-connector.
Frequency stabilisation is something that can be mitigated by big banks of batteries. Yeah, sure, they need to be charged up, but provided there’s an independent clock source, they can supply power in the sub-µs granularity needed. The trouble is, who pays for them? The only guarantee is that it isn’t going to be the weather-powered brigade who cause the trouble in the first place.
O/T;
https://www.letsrecycle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Geology-Paper.pdf; “Evidence for a rapid anthropoclastic rock cycle”
“Lab analysis revealed high levels of calcium, iron, magnesium and manganese”.
Yes, that one amused. Apparently furnace slag is turning into concrete under the influence of salt water. Surprise!
Sheesh.
As Matt has suggested above, this feels like an issue caused by these parts of Europe all operating at very low inertia due to an abundance of renewables resulting in poor frequency control. Demand surges at say lunchtime, spinning turbines even with their mass cant keep up and frequency rapidly drops.
Power transformers etc can be damaged by this so rapidly go offline to protect themselves, resulting in widespread outages.
I was going to say, concrete is to all intents and purposes a rock, and it ‘forms’ in hours/days. So its not exactly a stretch to think of you mix the right combination things together in the right environment they could easily form ‘rock’ pretty quickly.
Is a grid thats reliant on more wind energy than solar any more resilient? In that wind turbines are at least turning, so must have some inertia, while solar has zero?
On the Spain/Portugal outage my guess is that there will be a lot of handwaving and the implications for renewable grids will be studiously ignored.
Something I just found out this morning. Wind power does have inertia, yes. But it’s too variable to be fed into the grid. So it’s converted, AC to DC then back to AC again – destroying the inertia.
Jim, No. Solar, windmills and international interconnects all generate/transfer DC. This is then turned into AC by inverters which follow the grid. But they must have a stable grid to follow.
The stable grid is provided by massive spinning turbine/generators in real power stations acting as flywheels.
Although windmills turn, they turn very slowly so store little inertia, and they do not turn synchronously with the mains frequency: hence the use of DC generators. NB They have to be powered from the grid when insufficient wind, to keep them turning and prevent the bearings being destroyed by brinelling.
It’ll be interesting to see how widespread the spanish windmill damage will be…
But you are spot on that the ‘renewable’ cause will be hushed up. Or tried to be anyway. Methinks they’ll try and fail. Too big to ignore. And of course, it’ll happen more and bigger next time, until the sanity returns.
Jim – as far as I understand wind turbines do not contribute to overall grid inertia either because they are decoupled from the grid or their electro/mechanical properties are such that it does not work in this way. I believe to compensate, some have virtual/synthetic inertia – but not sure if this is of any use for instantaneous frequency demands – so things like this are really needed:
https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/products-services/product/synchronous-condenser.html
Interesting day yesterday. Made more interesting by an almost total lack of information. The fone system stayed up for about half an hour after the power went but no doubt was overloaded by people making calls. All we had to go on was a friend up in Bilbao telling us it was down there as well & might be the whole of Europe.
A brief spending spree. Spent about 300€. So we now have a lot of candles, canned food & bottled water etc No doubt we’ll use it all eventually. My view was it’s better to be pessimistic. Incorrectly optimistic wins no prizes.
Later we went out to eat. Colombian place caters mainly to the CO community. Interesting how developing country people coped much better than the Spanish. They were doing a single dish-of-the-day rather than a menu but at least we fed. There were a spate of street robberies around town later on, when it got dark.
I’d take this as a foretaste of things to come. Power was eventually restored in the early hours. But nothing’s changed has it? Whatever caused it to fall over will happen again. The penalty for repeatedly electing the barking mad.
According to Zeit Online: “REN told the media that a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” was the cause of the disruption in the Spanish power grid.”
I think an atmospheric event would have been easily detectable and widely reported earlier. Let the gaslighting begin.
I suspect the “rare atmospheric phenomenon” is the volume of bull shit emitted by the usual suspects. But that’s hardly rare.
According to Zeit Online: “REN told the media that a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” was the cause of the disruption in the Spanish power grid.”
Yes, I saw that from another source. Bullshit it is. There was no aurora, the Sun is calm and that kind of effect is really restricted to much more northern latitudes, which the Iberian peninsula is not. Almost certainly finger trouble which cascaded due to inherent fragility, and REN really don’t want to carry the can.
Does the boil a kettle during the ad break in Corrie effect exist in Spain I wonder. Lunch time is synched across the provinces and lots of people put on the Aircon and the coffee maker at the same time. Perhaps
Sunny day, record amounts of solar, so minimal thermal power station with its spinning inertia. Grid instability to order.
Flight of net-zero delusion: meet the concrete pavement of reality.
Will need politicians and ecoloons to admit they are wrong to effect any change.
So expect the same, only bigger, and more often. And soon.
So expect the same, only bigger, and more often. And soon.
I am seriously considering moving forward plans to bugger off to Brasil. For good. I’m taking this as a warning. Better to be somewhere where there’s some resilience. It’s something that seems to being designed out in Europe. Everything requires something else for it to function. Remove one thing & the whole collapses.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/04/29/spanish-blackouts/
Some intial analysis
And this
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2025/04/29/net-zero-watch-warns-of-growing-grid-instability/
It’ll be entertaining to see mad Ed (mad Milliband, not mad Davey) explain how this had absolutely nothing whatsoever, no siree, to do with net zero and everything to do with Putin’s invasion / the oil industry / gas prices on the world market / the energy companies / Trump. Oh, nearly forgot / Brexit.
Perhaps though, he’ll lay low until the furore dies down…..
@Adolff
Loads of warnings for years that this is the inevtiable consequence of NetZero policies
Chickens coming in to roost, stable doors swinging widely etc
BiS: you’ll be stuffed there too. There was a big blackout in Brazil in August 2023, took out much of the country.
Anywhere that has significant electrical generation that you can’t easily control is going to risk this kind of behaviour. I’m assuming that the vast interconnectivity of the European network is to avoid this, but ironically I’m thinking they have just pushed up the risk. If Iberia was better connected to France, and France has more internal connectivity in the SW, this might have rippled much further.
The grid will have big generators normally with inertia that set the frequency and others that follow it. At the start of the blackout they had about 10% nuclear, some hydro, wind and a lot of PV and thermal solar. A couple of faults could have left the solar with no frequency to follow so it goes offline and is gone by the time the automatic reconnect tries to keep the grid up. With most of the generating capacity gone the grid goes down and needs a slow black start to recover it.
Searching for “the cause”, an atmospheric phenomenon or not, is of only secondary importance – a trifle with which to delude the stupid. What matters is that they presumably were trying to run an unstable system. The nature of instability is that almost any old perturbation can knock the thing out of kilter.
It reminds me of the bloody fools who bang on about the ignition source when there’s a destructive wildfire. The problem is the vast stock of unmanaged fuel. An ignition source is bound to come along. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a teenager with a Zippo, a Green with a campfire, a buffoon with fireworks or a disposable barbecue, a discarded glass bottle, a lightning strike, an overheated catalytic converter, or a fallen power cable.
The ignition source will appear if you’ve been so stupid as to accumulate the fuel.
There were some excellent descriptions of the difficulty of running the Grid with lots of “renewables” in the comments threads on the Not A Lot Of People Know That blog. Alas the blog had software probs and when I click on my links all I get is 404. Sod it: the comments were from experienced electrical engineers who clearly knew what they were talking about.
Oh, that’s one of the lessons of my life working in science and engineering. If you want to hear sharp analysis and reliable good sense, talk to an engineer who combines a sound theoretical background with relevant experience.
I’ve heard some silly nonsense from electricians but never from an electrical engineer.
Here’s an idea that’ll help with unreliable renewables – nationalise the gas fueled generation plants (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/29/nationalise-gas-power-plants-to-boost-energy-security-thinktank-urges-uk-ministers).
Because, being government operated won’t lead to them being offline when required.
@Agent Smith
The two power plants that the Guardian are ranting about for being paid many millions to run for just a few hours on January 18th were the final defence against blackout that day as demand was high and the renewables ineffective . Had there been a failure anywhere else on the grid that day lights would have gone off without them. Because they are only earning money for a few hours a year they need to earn enough in that time to pay for them and their operating team for the rest of the year. A rarely used backup is very expensive to maintain.
We need them. Their owners carry the financial risk of them not being called on to generate. Were they to decide to throw in the towel then nationalising them might actually be necessary. The result is the same but the Guardian’s reason is wrong.
“but the Guardian’s reason is wrong” has to be the most redundant statement ever committed to text.
Hmm… from dutch news sources… what’s *suspected* so far.
12:33: the spanish grid lost roughly 15GW ( roughly 60% of typical use around that time) within 5 seconds.
Within those 5 seconds failsafes did cut in…. shutting down the french and portuguese interconnectors.
Which in turn caused a massive drop in capacity in Portugal and France ( Spain exporting a lot of power at the time..) , causing the failsafes there to cut in.
Wasn’t a “cyberattack” .
Wasn’t “renewables” either officially ( figures..) , yet the problem seems to have started at a large solar plant in the southeast of Spain..
My best guess is they either had a serious incident there, or they shut down the plant manually. Using the F.U. button.
(*Normal* shutdown of those plants actually is supposed to mimic spinning down a generator… Unless you use the Nope! button….)
As to what happened there… who knows… Could be the company figured they didn’t get paid enough, and shut down. Could be the Intern working the Weekend being told to shut down, and not following Protocol, or pushing the Wrong Button.
Could be the inverter actually blowing up, with no redundancy.
But losing many-much MW all of a sudden would trip everything into automatically hitting the B.R.B. around it, followed by….
And as pointed out… no redundancy, no spin-down… Not a chance for backups to even spin up… Just a sudden drop in available power propagating across everything connected..
I saw somewhere a few hours ago that there were five non-renewable plants that should have been available for back-up but three were down for scheduled maintenance. I raise my eyebrows at that one. Government ownership, maybe?
No power cuts in Poland as far as I could tell.
dearieme says
I saw somewhere a few hours ago that there were five non-renewable plants that should have been available for back-up but three were down for scheduled maintenance. I raise my eyebrows at that one. Government ownership, maybe?
Sorry, not buying this one. Scheduled maintainance is done by specialised technicians and engineers, of whom there is a limited supply. So even if the nationalised energy generator was stupid enough to schedule all on the same day their contractors would have told them not to be so silly.
My bet is some feedback mechanism that borked the non renewables as well, but that’s a bet from total ignorance. Next week I’m going to win the lottery so long as I don’t buy a ticket.
Returning from a couple of delightful days exploring Wiltshire I had a shufti at Windy, which reveals that in most of Western Europe but especially Germany, winds have been extremely light and skies devoid of cloud for the past several days. There’s your ‘rare atmospheric phenomenon’: a blocking high. Ironically the Iberian peninsula has been the only place with much wind to speak of.
So whatever caused the problem it probably wasn’t windmills going like the clappers. Solar going turbo during the day and disappearing at night may have been contributory, I suppose.