In the wake of the Spanish crisis, experts have also highlighted the relatively low number of interconnectors between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of the Continent.
A key link with France went offline as the blackouts spread and automatic systems kicked in to protect vital infrastructure from being damaged.
A spokesman for the British Government was approached for comment.
The rumour around here is that The P grid has cut the intercdonnector to the S grid as well. It was their failure that triggered our, d’ye see?
Now, true, it’s not difficult around here to get people to agree that you cannae trust the Dagos. But it is still interesting, no? Interconnectors spread the area of damage…..
I suppose these chaps have done their sums, but that looks like a rather impractical distance to transport high voltage electricity, not to mention how busy it is all along that path.
The first priority of a nation is to protect its own supply. So if the frequency wobbles as badly as it did in Spain, it stands to reason that the French interconnector will shut down.
Are these interconnectors two-way ?
European interconnectors are often two way because demand varies according to the time of day and the weather. The UK often exports renewal energy to France but imports nuclear. However the world leader is China which mainly transports electricity from the windy North to the populous south.
Grid stability is not a solved problem and there have been major outages ever since there have been grids. The engineers will be sharpening their pencils.
Like the cheese-eating cat we are waiting with baited breath for the next atmospheric disturbance unique to Iberia to strike again.
Are these ‘experts’ the same sort of ‘experts’ that millibrain has surrounded himself with
Or actual experts?
Let’s rely on the regimes of North Africa to supply us with extremely expensive electricity, what could go wrong?
Elsewhere in today’s Telegraph:
The world is a powder keg waiting to explode
The long peace is over: welcome to a new era of war, chaos and destruction
Oh.
Seems like nobody involved had watched the first episode of James Burke’s excellent “Connections” series from about 50 years ago where he explained a similar outage in the US and how they modified the system to prevent a recurrence.
More generally, any relationship can both increase stability and increase the risk of propogation.
More important here is probably whether there more or fewer power outages with the interconnected networks than there were before, and how were prices affected?
Apologies if it was on this very blog that I met this link recently.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219308564
I gather that our interconnector to France, being undersea, runs on DC and therefore neither party is contributing any frequency inertia to the other.
Some interconnectors are DC – such as the two between UK and Norway and France – so cannot provide any frequency stability nor transmit frequency anomalies.
It seems the interconnector Spain/Portugal is AC meaning the frequency disruption in Spain wax transmitted to Portugal causing grid failure there.
The electric grid is much like a spider web, tug on one part of it and the whole thing shakes. Tug too hard and the whole thing comes down.
DC transmission lines can economically transport electricity over more than 1000 miles. They have switching convertors at each end to do AC-DC conversions. They probably contribute to grid stability because they can respond to changes in demand at the millisecond level. But, if you try to pull too much electricity through them, they will pop offline as well.
Not strange that interconnectors “spread the damage” . They’re still connectors, effectively coupling the national grids.
What happened here is that S was exporting a lot of powerto F/P, and that suddenly conked out.
The affected areas in F/P ran on that power, and did not generate their own power, nor could they spin up enough capacity fast enough.
For all practical purposes, at that time, the entire area was a single grid. It doesn’t matter if that particular node was an interconnector , a transfer station, or a transformer.
The situation on the grid suddenly went tits-up, way beyond safety parameters, so it cut out to protect itself from damage, as it should.
The problem is not in the interconnectors, but the fact that S can suffer such a huge drop in generating capacity to begin with, and F/P not having enough generating capacity on short notice to cover the shortfall should this happen.
My bet is that all 3 nation ran their grid as “lean” ( cheep!!..) as possible, and yeaaahh… you get what you pay for… JIT works only when it works…. Break one part of the chain….
( Grikath gets to play with several 100’s kVA at 3 festivals during the Season as (chief)Sparkie.
The unholy spiderwebs we have to build to feed everything have exactly the same problems on a smaller scale.
It’s a bit of an art to keep them going without major outages.. )
Only recently the UK only managed to keep the lights on because of sucking in vast amounts of electric from France and Norway, due to low wind speeds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/05/06/low-winds-leave-south-of-england-reliant-on-french-power/
I wonder if you could make money running a book based on the grid watch website. Everyday you could place a bet on whether or not most of the electricity would be generated by wind, solar or gas.
dearieme: All the interconnectors to the UK are DC. We are the masters of our own 50Hz, unlike Europe. It seems though that a lot of our offshore wind farms are AC connected. East Anglia 1 was originally designed with a DC connection but they finally built it with AC. I think the really long distance undersea interconnectors planned, between Scotland & England, are going to be DC. That makes sense both from the higher inductive & capacitive loss on an AC cable and decoupling the phase difference (especially variations) at each end even though both ends are nominally the same frequency.
Only recently the UK only managed to keep the lights on because of sucking in vast amounts of electric from France and Norway, due to low wind speeds.
And they will be forgotten in a few weeks when we start to get periods of 90%+ renewables because demand is low and sunshine and wind in their sweet spots. Then the BBC, Guardian and social media will be overrun by Greenies saying: “see why can be self sufficient on renewables” or similar.
New Zealand’s connection between the North Island and the South Island (the “mainland”) is DC, presumably for the same reason.
it’s not difficult around here to get people to agree that you cannae trust the Dagos
Le’s be honest Tim. Even the Dagos don’t trust the Dagos.
My knowledge of leccie suggests that frequency stability is going to be dependent on voltage & DC or not, if you increase the load on an interconnector – W=AxV – the voltage is going to drop.