Sounds like a major infrastructure risk given that it is possible for more than one country to experience a full loss of power.
EDIT: Andorra is also affected, so that is three.
[0] https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250428/10624908/caida-ge...
Not something that's easy to test for.
(No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :))
There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.
It's always fascinated me during disasters how independent telecomm can be. Kudos for all the engineering that went into it!
I.e. even when any other conceivable dependency is down, the networks keep running.
Who are you and what's Signal?
(plus 11 million of Portugal for a total of 60 million people in the Iberian Peninsula)
Not the best news source, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far. HN moderators, feel free to replace it later with a better one.
Supposedly also France is affected (unconfirmed)
Translated version: https://elpais-com.translate.goog/economia/2025-04-28/apagon...
For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.
https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.
The wording in the article makes it look like Seville, Barcelona and Valencia are in France.
Would be interesting to see if it will register here.
But I would guess the whole network equipment would draw quite a bit, especially a modern infrastructure.
All essential infrastructure has to. Heck, if you have a landline you can probably siphon off some power from the DC component.
I mean, what else are you gonna do without power?
Sex. At least that's what everyone believes
The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...
Mon 28 Apr 2025 07:22:00 EDT
Mon 28 Apr 2025 11:22:00 UTC
* https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t (rolling updates)
* http://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20...
* https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0428/1509881-spain-portug...
The Spanish national operator:
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2025-04-28/directo-cor...
Edit
However, I can't get the energy provided outage map to load, maybe too many people accessing it
https://gridradar.net/en/blog/post/underfrequency_january_20...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-europes-power-grid-almost...
https://www.acer.europa.eu/news/continental-europe-electrici...
I remember it because power went out in at least 1/3 of Romania back then.
Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-mon...
~90 page report: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c... (beware: PDF)
According to local newspapers metro network, airport and traffic lights are all down
For instance, one reporter asked one of the government flunkies whether it could be a cyberattack and they turned his noncommittal “maybe, we don’t know” into “government says cyberattack may be ongoing”.
Be careful of idiot reporters out there.
Edit: I’m listening to another radio interview where they are outlining the plans to bring online Portuguese dams and thermal generators over the next few hours, progressively unplugging from the Spanish supply (fortunately we have enough of those, apparently).
It should take 3-4 hours to get everything balanced with only national supplies, and they will restore power from North to South.
(apologies for singling out these specific groups of people - my point is that it might be worth to put down news sources like xitter, and read AP/translated local Portuguese news)
Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc):
2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms)
2.4.2. The fault affected the local distribution networks and approximately 150MW of distributed generation disconnected from the networks or ‘tripped off’ due to a safety mechanism known as vector shift protection
2.4.3. The voltage control system at the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm did not respond to the impact of the fault on the transmission system as expected and became unstable. Hornsea 1 rapidly reduced its power generation or ‘deloaded’ from 799MW to 62MW (a reduction of 737MW).
In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines.
So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs point B456?
Is this done sort-of-blind? Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)
This has changed a lot though, as even home batteries afaik will start discharging if they start noticing the frequency dropping to provide some support on generation. But if it's dropping too fast and too quickly it won't help.
But yes they do have very granular info on all the HV sources and how much load is on them.
This is wild. From a amateur technical perspective, it would only take a cheap hall sensor inside the transformer to have a pretty good guess of how much current has been flowing to the load.
Hell, put the hall sensor onto a board with a micro controller and a LORA transmitter and stick it to the outside of the feed line. Seems like an incredibly cheap upgrade to get real-time load data from every substation.
One of the first things the Russians did when they took the Ukraine War hot, was to cyber-attack their power grid.
Pair this with ongoing Russian 'ransomware' (cyberattacks) on the British food supply, the Russian DDoS attacks against Dutch municipal governments, and the ongoing hybrid-warfare operation in Spain and Italy, to stoke anti-tourism protests, there does seem to be an alarming pattern emerging.
So when are we going to collectively realise that Russia is waging a war of aggression against Europe, and respond accordingly?
Are you suggesting to attack Russia, based on absolute thin air?
Except for the mountain of evil, violent, underhanded and illegal stuff Russia keeps getting caught doing, and has so far escaped scot-free due to Western cowardice?
I agree that Russia is evil, but saying that it got away with it Scot free is just insane. In fact it even plays into Russian propaganda, to say that everything that they are unscathed even after the past 3 years of international sanctions and consequences.
And western cowardice? Apart from nuclear war (which I'm glad people are being "cowardly" about), what do you suggest? It's also funny when war mongers online talk about cowardice. Why dont you go volunteer in Ukraine if you're such a non coward?
If so, then the question would be if Russia did plant that tree. We should look out for more suspicious trees in our immediate areas.
See some tree squating where it shouldn't? Walnut or Vatnik? You can never be sure...
In any case, if I recall correctly from a Youtube video I can't find (it was either Wendover or Real Engineering), if the grid is fully down, it takes quite a lot of effort and time to bring it back online because it has to be done in small steps to avoid over/under loading/using.
Very good video. Very good channel.
I definitely had no problems with electricity all of today (on the eastern side). And there was nothing in the news about local outages either.
Funny enough, there were news before the Easter holidays that they're preparing for extremely reduced demand by shutting down facilities.
Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...
The filters can be used to see similar data for Portugal
Maybe just my perception, but power outages seem to be getting rarer with time, though when they do happen they seem to be far larger.
Should have paid the extra €€ to put the solar panels in backup mode…
It's crazy how momentum can carry a business.
To use a potentially controversial example, Microsoft products (Office, Windows) are still extremely entrenched despite the overwhelming majority of knowledgable people agreeing that they're on a steep downward trajectory and the alternatives have long since surpassed them.. leading to this[0] recent video from Pewdiepie...
> A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause.
I know it may be rare but I think some day we really need to move or mandate every single flat / home / apartment / living places to have a 12 - 24 hours backup battery included. Something that has 10K+ Cycles, durable and non-flammable. Not only does it make sure our modern lives without sudden interruption, it also solves the renewable energy problem.
I bought a generator for just this situation.
The thing you said doesn't really make sense to me; I'm not sure it's an apt analogy.
That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.
Like it or not but we are a species of social animals, you cannot live without relying on others. That's just delusional.
I know so many people who invested in overly expensive battery storage systems for their solar. Power in Germany is expensive, but even with that expensive power many of those battery systems will never hit a positive ROI. But they’re still happy for the feeling of being „independent“.
I’ll turn 26 in a few months. The first time I experienced a power outage in my life was two weeks ago when a construction worker in our basement drilled into the wrong wall…
I predict that home batteries will become a "no brainer" from a financial perspective (for anyone who has the upfront capital to purchase them) within the next 10 years.
Battery storage may become a bit of a no brainer from a purchasing price point of view, but I don't think it will actually be more beneficial for people, especially if BEV adaption continues at a similar rate and bi-directional charing becomes widespread
And even if we do want to invest in large amount of grid storage (which we would need to anyway, if we want to transition to renewables), I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. Its a great way to limit economies of scale and make maintenance/inspection harder.
why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads.
In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.
And if someone is dumb enough to do high load stuff on their own battery during a blackout, then it's less of a problem for others. Also individual failures will cover less homes.
Incentives and consequences will be different and differently spread.
And on individual level, you can also chose whether you want this or are fine with outage. (I'm against mandating this)
I'd prefer for the power coming to my house to just not go out. The grid operator can install batteries in places other than my home. The grid operator can maintain them for me. The grid operator can get cheaper loans than I can for installing them, they're staffed with supposed experts in this stuff, just have them handle it on their premises.
Also, this further just makes having stable electricity yet another thing in the wealth gap. Only those wealthy enough to afford the high upfront capital costs, the ongoing maintenance cost, and the space to store it get reliable electricity, fuck everyone else! Or we can just focus on investing in a stable and clean grid and share that cost with everyone, all you need is to just be connected.
But hey if I get a massive battery bank I'll have power for when the end times come. I won't be able to go get groceries anymore and eventually the fiber line and radios around me will go quiet but at least I'll be able to play videogames. For a few hours at least.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Eagle Scout, be prepared and all that. I've got a big pile of charcoal, a chunk of propane, a camping stove, several day's supply of water and canned/non-perishable foods, some batteries for lanterns, etc. The cars all get topped off when big storms seem possible. If the big outage comes this will be more worthwhile than being able to turn on the TV for a few hours, and cost significantly less than several dozen kWh of batteries. And if the power is out for more than a week or two I'll have far bigger concerns than being able to post on Hacker News.
They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.
And that said, I do have lots of other somewhat beefy batteries around the house. They do a lot of useful things for me such as power my tools including my lawn mower, string trimmer, hedge trimmer, saws, etc. There is a massive one in the car parked in the garage. In these cases it is a useful trade off of that slight risk as I'm actually getting something normally useful out of it.
You could distribute this capacity at each house and feed it back to the grid during peak times. But is TCO of 1000 * 100kWh same price as 100MWh worth of capacity?
If you're going to have the battery anyway(a car) its hard to compete with, but once you need more capacity, I'm not sure it makes sense to distribute it quite as much.
In a longer outage it'd be a massive benefit to have even just a few houses here and there that retain power.
If electricity is that important to you, buy your _own_ resilience. Tesla powerwalls and non-tesla equivalents have been available for ages.
power cuts affect more than just your home.
Also, there are currently four different submissions re this on the front page. I'd suggest we dont need any more.
Growing up in Spain I've never experienced anything like this (not there at the moment, but friends have told me over WhatsApp).
The whole Europe power grid are somewhat interconnected I wont be surprise if this knock on effect start knocking out other surrounding countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.
The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.
Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.
That made sense before technology became available for everyone to make their own choice - but that is no longer the case.
All the wealthy folks with the means have some variation of either a home battery or a standby generator.
Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.
The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot of time to add the power plants (or renewable equivalent) to the grid because they must be synchronized.
Like, what can you do, use some 1000 of MW to melt iron rods or something to give the power stations time to slow down? Free wheels?
The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.
Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.
No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.
They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.
Let's skip the technical problems in your theory and focus on the social.
People need power to survive. You know, food, hot water, light, work, internet, mobile phones, entertainment, etc. This requires stability, not second by second pricing.
When you put a chicken in an oven, you want to cook that chicken and eat it, feed your family. Electricity price rising in the next few minutes would mean that you either have to risk disease (chicken staying in the dangerous temperatures until the electricity price drops) or being hungry and throwing food away. This is not how you want society to function.
Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.
I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.
Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.
I thank the heavens that the people who run the electricity system do not share your opinions.
So some or most cellular towers will have generators, and their fibers will backhaul through repeaters, some or most of which will have their own generators. When it gets back to the MTSO, that will definitely have large diesel turbines on site and at least 24 hours of fuel with priority refueling contracts.
I'd expect there to be a lot of outages, for instance where all the towers in a region end up backhauled through a site where the generator fails or was never installed for some reason. But there will also be a lot of places that stay up in some capacity because, more or less by happenstance, all the fuel tank permits got approved and all the equipment actually worked.
Data, cellular etc everything kept working. But at some point I guess the generators and batteries started to fail and capacity degraded.
There's a map at [2]
> The Spanish electricity system is currently connected to the systems of France, Portugal, Andorra and Morocco. The exchange capacity of this interconnection is around 3 GW, which represents a low level of interconnection for the peninsula. The international interconnection level is calculated by comparing the electricity exchange capacity with other countries with the generation capacity or installed power.
[1] https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/electricity-inte...
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-...
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...
There seems to be some kind of recurrent daily pattern where the French - Spanish interconnect switches from Spain -> France imports to France -> Spain exports at around that time, and then back again in the late afternoon.
The sunny weather is very inviting outside for someone with the day off :-)
from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.
Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.
Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.
It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"
Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!
Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!
Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.
None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.
But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around
Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to
As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.
It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.
However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.
That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.
CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.
Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
North America is organized in regional grids:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Texas, on the other hand, which is easily the size of a country...
As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
I had a long blackout as a kid during a hurricane in 1985. Once it was safe it was repaired rather quickly.
It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.
Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.
I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.
The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.
edit: and europe has almmost always atleast half a year of whole country supply of natural gas in caverns and other storage.
and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.
same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
No need for imaginary scenarios.
When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/neue-rege... https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/kassenbon...
Many other EU countries have similar regulations, and in some cases had them for a long time.
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
I've only seen a few but I believe they have springs on the inside and roll on little wheels similar to how desk draws roll. Most can be opened with a key to trigger that event.
It’s not like you can (could?) keep a block „just in case” and thus many shopkeepers wouldn’t even bother in case of outages.
Depending where you live a good old trust can be a currency. Humans are great when it comes to adaptation, I bet I could just write on paper name, CC number and leave it on a paper for shopkeeper and everything would resolve just fine..
Also, fuel station can probably successfully run it's own backup power;)
Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).
(Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)
Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.
NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:
Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
The similarity between that event and this early-on report is striking.
[es language]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2021/07/24/aver...
"Le gestionnaire français souligne par ailleurs que cette panne n’est pas due à un incendie dans le sud de la France, entre Narbonne et Perpignan, contrairement à des informations qui circulent."
I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading.
That’s why you still need a strong diesel/diesel-electric locomotive fleet, imagine if Spain had been right in the middle military mobilization and military materiel transport, an event like this one would have stopped then dead in the tracks had they been relying only on electric locomotives.
https://www.outono.net/elentir/2021/10/23/the-spanish-army-r...
> For journeys outside the base, *the Army uses Renfe locomotives*.
which, in my understanding, means that in order to move military materiel (to the borders with France, let's say, or to the closest sea-ports most probably) and tens to hundreds of thousands of mobilised men the Spanish Army does indeed rely on Renfe locomotives, i.e not on their own.
This should show people just how powerful network effects are. They are legitimately a force of nature.
Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.
That said, twitter should allow for official profiles and organizations to have their tweets (xs?) made public.
"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."
I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.
There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I remember the day when the Swiss railway power network went down for a day (in 2005) because one power line was down for maintenance and someone pressed the wrong button and produced a short circuit somewhere else. It's a bit like the incidents in planes were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.
So frequent it even has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_an...
A tree falling can be addressed by vegetation management and trimming. A power line sagging because of excess heat is operator error.
These are not remotely the same.
I hate this term, and look forward to using it all the time.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
We're a remote business so it seemed like I'd just rudely dropped off the call, but as everything was down I couldn't let people know what'd happened.
Apparently it was caused by botched maintenance work affecting 30,000 houses, but the timing was so perfect I can't help thinking it was because our AGI overlords really didn't want me to deliver that talk for some reason.
I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth
Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?
I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence
Three quarter of the production disconnects from the grid between 12:30 and 13:00, with only a bit of solar and onshore wind sticking around.
I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.
That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequency excursion, resulting in widespread generator trips.
(I suspect this is going to restart a whole bunch of acrimony about existing pain points like grid maintenance, renewables, domestic solar, and so on, probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables)
Frequency coordination is absolutely critical, via phase coordination. A large generator must not get significantly out of phase. So frequency going out of spec triggers the generator to "trip" (disconnect).
If you have a large spinning inertial mass like a factory motor or a power generation turbine, it's extremely important. Imagine a manual car transmission, but there's no slip-clutch, you need to perfectly align engine with the wheels rotating at 300mph, and the inertial mass you're up against if it's not perfectly synchronized is a freight train.
That's why generators trip offline in a blackout cascade if the frequency deviates out of spec. The alternative is your turbine turns into a pile of very expensive shiny scrap metal.
Renewables were a factor in the blackout here in Brazil a couple of years ago: the models used by the system operator did not correspond to reality, many solar and wind power plants disconnected on grid disturbances quicker than specified. That mismatch led the system operator to allow a grid configuration where a single fault could lead to a cascade (more power was allowed through a power line than could be redistributed safely if that power line shut off for any reason), and that single fault happened when a protection mechanism misbehaved and disconnected that power line. The main fix was to model these solar and wind power plants more conservatively (pending a more detailed review of their real-life behavior and the corresponding update of the models), which allowed them to correctly limit the power going through these power lines.
If you want an excruciating level of detail, the final 614-page report is at https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R... (in Portuguese; the main page for that incident is at https://www.ons.org.br/Paginas/Noticias/Ocorr%c3%aancia-no-S...).
[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Calling attention to how fragile many of our critical systems are is almost certanly a net-positive in the long run.
OP I think is joking La Liga got the power turned off to protect their revenues.
If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up and renewables require external sources of inertia for frequency stabilization, so this usually requires turning on a small diesel generator that creates enough power to bootstrap a bigger generator and so on up until there's enough electricity to start the plant itself. With that back online the power from it can be used to re-energize other plants that lack black start capability in a chain until you have a series of isolated islands. Those islands then have to be synchronized and reconnected, whilst simultaneously bringing load online in large blocks.
The whole thing is planned for, but you can't really rehearse for it. During a black start the grid is highly unstable. If something goes wrong then it can trip out again during the restart, sending you back to the beginning. It's especially likely if the original blackout caused undetected equipment damage, or if it was caused by such damage.
In the UK contingency planning assumes a black start could take up to 72 hours, although if things go well it would be faster. It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.
Edit: There's a press release about a 2016 black start drill in Spain/Portugal here: https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/press-release/2016/11/spa...
Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?
Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267
We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected.
I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears an hour ago.
If the grid frequency goes too far out of range then power stations trip automatically, it's not an explicit decision anyone takes and it doesn't balance load, quite the opposite. A station tripping makes the problem worse as the frequency drops even further as the load gets shared between the remaining stations, which is why grids experience cascading failure. The disconnection into islands is a defense mechanism designed to stop equipment being too badly damaged and to isolate the outage.
Last actual load value for Spain at 12:15: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Last actual load value for France at 12:00: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Everything dropped to zero except wind and solar, which took huge hits but not to zero. I expect those have been disconnected too, as they cannot transmit to the grid without enough thermal plant capacity being online, but if the measurement at some plants of how much they're generating doesn't take into account whether or not they were disconnected upstream they may still be reporting themselves as generating. You can't easily turn off a solar plant after all, just unplug it.
Either that, or they're measuring generation and load that's not on the grid at all.
Rooftop solar for example just shows as a reduction in demand, not 'generation' per se.
Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.
This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.
I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.
Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.
It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.
The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.
But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?
My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.
It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.
A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity.
We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications and financial systems. And yet, public awareness of the infrastructure behind it is shockingly low. We tend to notice the power grid only when it breaks.
We’ve neglected it for decades. In many regions, burying power lines is dismissed as “too expensive.” But compare that cost to the consequences of grid collapse in extreme weather, cyberattacks, or even solar storms — the stakes are existential. High-impact, low-frequency events are easy to ignore until they’re not.
A full grid black start is orders of magnitude more complex. You’re not just reviving one machine — you’re trying to bring back entire islands of infrastructure, synchronize them perfectly, and pray nothing trips out along the way. Watching a rig wake up is impressive. Restarting a whole country’s grid is heroic.
> If emergency calls go unanswered, go to the police and the fire stations in person
That's not a statement I expect to see in relation to a developed city
Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question.
I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were actually worse for the grid due to less predictable power generation or something, but that was a long time ago, certainly pre-battery storage.
So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points:
- Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. That's what keeps the grid running second-to-second; while a power plant might pretend it's outputting a constant 4MW, it actually shifts noticeably from moment to moment. The kinetic energy of the generator helps balance that out.
- Going up from the sub-second range, an overload of the generator obviously would cause the shaft to slow down, dropping the frequency and causing brownouts. Brownouts are bad and can damage the grid, so typically breakers will disconnect if it falls below 49Hz; a 2% drop.
- Baseload plants can't cope with this, as they take multiple minutes to spool up. Minimum; for something like a coal power plant, where you have to shove in additional coal and wait for it to catch fire, it's going quite a few minutes. This is what defines 'baseload'.
- Peaker power plants can increase (or decrease) their mechanical power production in a matter of seconds. These days that typically means gas turbines, though hydroelectric power is even better, and nuclear power could be used for peaker plants -- but isn't; most nuclear reactor designs outside of the navy is a baseload design. France does have some load-following designs, and we need more of those.
- Wind turbines can't increase their output, flat out, but they can decrease it (by feathering, or by using brakes). This is good enough, except this would turn them into 'peaker plants' that can't help with peaks. If we had enough wind turbines to cover 100% of the load then we'd technically be fine, but economically speaking that doesn't work; they'd be at less than 10% power most of the time.
- Wind turbines have rotating shafts, but a lot of the time they produce DC power, linked through inverters, which removes that benefit and makes them act like solar panels in effect. However, this is a purely economic issue; they can trivially be upgraded to support grid stability if the pricing scheme will pay for it.
- Solar panels are worse: They have no inertia! There is no rotating shaft there to cover sub-second usage spikes. That's where complaints about 'renewables causing reduction of grid stability' come from, along with issues like domestic solar needing to backfeed power through distribution lines and transformers that aren't necessarily designed for that.
- But batteries can absolutely help. The kinetic energy of a rotating turbine isn't actually that big; it's not that expensive to pair a solar panel with a battery to build a grid-forming system that acts the same way a kinetic power plant would.
Some wind turbines are also internally a hybrid design that can dynamically adjust the frequency difference angle both for minimal losses in production, but also to provide frequency shifting and even artificial demand (i.e. essentially using wind power as brake)
I guess news networks don’t have comparable access to live metrics
These things have relatively small costs, but make the system much more resilient.
io84•4h ago
mirekrusin•4h ago