> What is the role of renewables? > Spain is on its way to being a green energy leader: it has abundant sun and wind. Last year was a record period for renewable power generation, which accounted for 56% of all electricity used. By 2030 that proportion will rise to 81%. > That shift will help Spain end its reliance on energy imports, but it also brings its own challenges. Every national grid in the world will need to spend heavily to upgrade distribution systems to connect scattered renewable generation and ensure it is balanced.

That does not answer the interesting (and slightly conspiratory) question. Did renewables play any negative role in this at all?

No. please see Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

No. Power grids are inherently unstable, this appears to have been "just" a cascading failure that couldn't really be planned for.

TL;DR

> REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

- Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) is a Portuguese energy sector company

I think we saw a lot of news that "this is going to be a black start" and so on. Yet they were operating quite normally already the same night (direct personal communication with people there). I think HN in general didn't provide a reliable picture of what was going to happen at all. Same with my Twitter feed.

Spaniard here. If it were a cyberattack, the Baliaric and Canary islands would be equally harmed; yet they went neraly without issues.

Ghost Riders in the Sky causing abnormal atmospheric vibrations.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Ghost)_Riders_in_the_Sky:_A_C... )

Yippie-yi-oh, yippie-yi-aie!

We'll probably never know. Our government has been markedly opaque and corrupt for too long to trust any of the information they put out.

That article is dated last evening and is outdated, especially since we recently had a press conference from Spanish national grid

Spanish grid saying solar is a likely cause (though the PM seems to be disputing this 'in his view', but may be a poor translation from BBC).

My personal hunch is they were struggling to balance the grid as peak solar approached with too much supply. The last snapshot of data showed less than 1GW of CCGT which is not a lot for a grid of this size (the UK runs 2.5GW CCGT 24/7 for inertia and balancing reasons, even if there is excess renewables available - they will be paid to be turned off). Spain does also have hydro which can respond to the grid in fairness, but I am unsure how well prepared they would be to do this if CCGT is the main balancing source.

I also saw data showing Spain was exporting to France heavily at the time. I suspect if that interconnector went down (as rumored), you'd have potentially 1GW+ more load with nowhere for it to go.

This may have then caused the disconnection events (the spanish grid operator said there were 2), as various plants trip as they saw the grid becoming unstable. They recovered from the first but couldn't recover from the 2nd, there isn't a huge amount of detail on these.

This is basically exactly what happened in the 2019 outage in the UK (and from comments on HN yesterday was also a major factor in the Brazilian outage recently) which affected SE England and London (but didn't cause a full grid collapse, I suspect averted because of more CCGT online to balance).

In that event:

1) 400kV cable goes down. Power is rerouted. Was a lightning strike which is pretty common.

2) This caused a very brief change in the voltage/frequency on the immediate substation that was taking power from Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm to the national grid

3) Hornsea 1's voltage detection equipment was too sensitive and tripped, dropping 700MW of supply. It shouldn't have tripped for such a short drop while they rerouted grid power to bypass the out of service 400kV line.

4) This then caused a cascade of other generating assets to trip (also too sensitive), causing a major drop in grid frequency and this then triggered various distribution points in England to disconnect automatically to try and drop load by 5%. Furthermore all 'variable' generation is requested to immediately raise output to balance the system while load shedding goes on.

5) The load shedding operation did not work as expected. They expected drop was 850MW but only 350MW was achieved. This is likely due to embedded solar which they hadn't taken into account in their calculations (or one of the reasons). This causes frequency to drop further and another level of load shedding to occur.

6) Frequency recovers.

Even worse, there was another potential near miss here - the DNO started reconnecting customers before they had the goahead to connect from the grid. It is lucky that another outage didn't occur because of this as the grid was not fully checked and they should have waited.

Anyone saying that renewables are not affecting grid stability are unfortunately just wrong. I am huge proponent of renewables but we have the ratio of solar/wind/batteries/other inertia (flywheels) really wrong. We should not be running so much variable capacity with so little storage.

I'm in Spain and went through the blackout yesterday. It was very interesting experience and I went around to learn the most from it. I used a Starlink, lithium battery and solar panels among other stuff. I hope you might find it useful:

12:00 I was working when around noon my computer display switched off. I tried turning on a light in the room: no light either. I went to the main circuit breaker, switched it off/on again : still no light. I went out to the street. The house is in a small suburban area so each house has it's own meter. The smart meter was not displaying any light or text. I knew that in my village a blinking red LED on the smart meter means electricity flowing. A fixed-constant red LED light means the grid is on but the house is not consuming electricity. No light and no text means there is no electricity reaching the smart meter. I checked all the neighbors' meters and I saw all lights were off. I started walking to the next street and was checking when another man came out. He told me he was also missing electricity. I checked Google, on the News tab there is no article about "{my_city} outage". So I started to walk towards the center. I called my parents which are in another EU country, they answered and told me all was good and they had electricity. So no electricity but the 3G mobile network was on (it remained on for about 4 hours before both 3G mobile network and normal phone signal went off). I started to walk toward the city center checking meters to understand how big is the problem, all streets are off. I realized my car had only 1/3 of the tank full. I decided to try the petrol station. On the way there, there was a train level crossing, the lights were blinking and the warning sound was on. A young man was keeping the train bar up and gesturing for cars to pass by without risk. I quickly heard him shouting "No electricity". I passed under with the car since many cars were doing it and I knew electricity was off so probably the bars were not working properly.

PETROL STATION

After 30-45 minutes of outage there were 4-5 cars parked around the petrol station pumps. No-one was actively using the pumps to fill the tank. I saw 4-5 people arguing, not sure about what. I went in the petrol station shop and there was an usual long queue of 30 people, the employee at the desk was writing on a paper. I asked another employee if it was possible to put petrol and she said no. I decided it was too late and it was not worth it to wait there. Given also some people already seemed agitated.

SUPERMARKET

Supermarket on the way was closed because it was a bank holiday on Monday. Maybe that's also why the outage had been more likely to happen on that day with less people checking things.

TRAIN LEVEL CROSSING

I was driving back home. At the train level crossing the same guy from before and another man were holding up the bars. I asked them if they needed some tools to rig the bar up and they said yes. Rushed back home and got some tools and wood and ropes. Got back there in 15 minutes. They had found a way to remove the bars by unscrewing a bolt. I chat with them. Another man passe by car and said he had notified the local police they had to remove the bar and the police was aware. At the moment I though those men were smart and capable and thinking on their feet. We exchanged numbers. We promised to all check the electricity at home and come to fix the bar at the train crossing. (I did go to check this morning at 8am when I woke and electricity was back.) The bar was still missing and lights were blinking. There was a long queue of 40 cars. I checked no train was passing and I started to let the people pass by. After I noticed a technician on the track 100 meters out in a yellow suit. I went to speak with him. Walking on tracks and pebbles is not super fast since you can't run easily. The technician said the trains were not running today. I double checked he was aware the protection bars were removed and that he would put them back when he knew the train were passing.

BACK HOME

When I came back home from the train level crossing during the outage I decided to do what I could. I filled up all bottles of waters I had in the house. Even if the outage was temporary I can still drink that water and it wasn't a waste.

STARLINK INTERNET SATELLITE

I have a Starlink antenna that I use in the summer during the holidays. I rushed to resubscribe that I had cancelled. As far as I understand if you don't have internet is not possible to subscribe and use the Starlink (which you need for internet). I also noticed there is a new cheaper plan for 9€ for 10GB in Spain. So I will be permanently subscribed to that to avoid the fear internet goes away and I can't subscribe back to Starlink and make it work.

FIBER OPTIC/DSL

Anyway this time the 3G mobile network was working and I had a small UPS that was keeping the modem and router working. The fiber connection with the modem&router powered by external battery (UPS) was giving normal internet. It worked for 4 hours until around 18:00 when even with power to the modem&router the fiber stopped working. It was around the same time the 3G/mobile signal had stopped.

I'm not sure if there 4 hours diesel generators somewhere or there was some priority line for telecoms. Please let me know if you know anything.

ECOFLOW BATTERY AND SOLAR PANELS

Somehow I had been a bit paranoid in the past few weeks and I had bought 1 month ago an Ecoflow Delta 3 Plus with 1024Wh, 2 solar panels of 800W each and the Powerstream which is a microinverter from Ecoflow to provide up to 800W by plugging in a normal socket of the house. I had decided to actually test them this weeks during the Easter holidays. I had left the Ecoflow battery uncharged because I thought it would be more obvious with the solar panels input. I cursed by perfectionism. Luckily the Ecoflow came 25% pre-charged.

The UPS was down in 40 minutes already and I saw the Ecoflow battery could maintain the modem&router for 4 hours. I was not sure I would be able to set them up correctly if internet went down. Also there were only 2-4 hours left of sun to charge the battery. So I decided to rush it and try to get the solar panel work. I did manage to connect all stuff but I realized I had forgot to buy the XT60i connector to connect the solar panels directly to the battery without the Powerstream. The shadow of a building in front obscured the patio where the solar pannels where around 18:00. Somehow the INPUT of the solar panels even in the last minutes with sun was reported as 0Watt. I went online and double check but I could not find anything obvious. Time was up for the day (or better said, Sun was down for the day). I decided to switch off the battery and save power for the day after with sun to have internet.

BIKING AROUND AND CHINESE SHOP

Given the sun was down and I couldn't do more I decided to take my electric bike and go around. My first petrol car had 1/3 gasoline tank full. I had just bought a second van with popup top roof last week. The tank was in reserve from the dealer and I had planned to go fill it like tomorrow. I cursed myself. Luckily I thought I still had the electric bike to charge from solar. Not sure exactly for what. So I went around the suburban neighborhood, and people were having a good time. It's Eastern holidays, one bar was opened selling drinks. I passed in front of a small Chinese shop. The shop was open with old people and kids going in and out. In Europe there are commonly small shops with tons of useful house things. They are usually managed by a whole Chinese family. Some people were buying torching and batteries. Only cash accepted of course. I already was stocked on torches and batteries and tools like that. But I browser around anyway. Some kids were playing hide and seek in the dark halls of the little shops. It was very cute. Out of the outage on the first hours people were very excited and happy. I bought a 4 in 1 key with triangle/square heads for 2.30€ (3$). It was good to have anyway and when I had checked the smart meters of the neighbors some required a triangle key to be opened and see if they were working. I don't plan to do anything nefarious. It seemed I was among the fastest and most active responders of the situation so it feels ethically okay for me to own this technician key. Just in case.

THE NEWS

Checked internet through Starlink one last time before bed. They said the outage would resolve from 21:00 to 1:00am. Some friends in Valencia around 20:00 CET told the power was back there.

GOING TO SLEEP

I wen to bed. I left the Ecoflow Delta 3 Plus plugged in the sockets in case the electricity came back during the night (and would go away before I would wake up).

LIGHT BACK

Around 1am I was woken up by the bed-side table turning on. Half-asleep I switched it off and kept sleeping.

WAKING UP

This morning electricity was back when I woke up around 8am. As I said in the TRAIN LEVEL CROSSING section I went there to check. I'll spend the day properly learning how the Ecoflow battery and solar panels work together with calm.

Thank you for reading until here!