This is Government's version and it shows.
REE boss was put there by the ruling party. Still they try to paint REE as a private operator now. It's not. Like many other orgs, it's a mix of private and public capital, ultimately controled by the government.
It's suspected that the blackout was caused because she overruled technicians' opinion, looking for a solar % record.
Not "enough thermal power stations" carefully avoids mentioning nuclear, that they want to erradicate.
Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
Tesla Megapack in Texas Supports the Grid and Keeps the Lights On [Gambit Energy Storage] - https://www.tesla.com/videos/gambit-megapack - September 30, 2021
Tesla’s giant battery in Australia [Hornsdale Power Reserve] reduced grid service cost by 90% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17051066 - May 2018
Tesla Powerpacks Balancing the Grid in Terhills, Belgium [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVHQFrGzThg - May 14, 2018
> Power plants "should have controlled voltage and, moreover, many of them were economically remunerated to do so. They did not absorb all the reactive power that was expected," Aagesen said.
Yeah, these public / private entities can get ridiculous. Her background is legal and political: Secretary of Women and Equality, Spokesperson for Housing, Minister of Housing, State Secretary of Housing and Urban Construction, etc. But she's a party loyalist and she took a few business classes, so it's all good.
And where are those leaks, if one may ask?
French-side the only generation station that actually was ejected from the network that day was, precisely, a nuclear power plant. [1] A non-specific "moar nuclear!" cry seems therefore a bit hard to believe.
[1] https://www.edf.fr/la-centrale-nucleaire-de-golfech/les-actu...
Any argument using the words "nuclear" or "inertia" are incorrect (I suspect often downstream of misdirection caused by the incumbents).
A power network is supposed to be reliable, and it is up to the regulator to create the internal incentives and restrictions such that the network remains reliable as new generation is added.
Other countries have successfully designed their electricity market incentives so that solar provides synthetic inertia, and manages reactive power, and so that voltage cutoffs (over or under) don't destabilise the grid.
The regulator failed to design a stable network. If they were told to run it in an unstable manner, it is up to them to cover their arse.
With you up to this point. Screw that ass covering. Admit the [policy] error and drop the idiotic policy and get back to normal. No need to ass-cover.
REE asked back in 2019/2020 to create a new real-time dispatch mechanism for reactive power, because Spain still relies on fixed dispatch based on emails, phone calls, even snail mail. There was a pilot project in 2022 which was successful (dispatching in less than 5 seconds) but proved to be very expensive, and therefore incompatible with the European Union's directives on creating market-ready regulation processes [1].
[1][ES] https://www.eldiario.es/economia/competencia-reconocio-julio...
That's.. that's a miscalculation alright. But it's not likely that it was just a small math error. It must have been policy to live on the edge.
tux3•4h ago
The press release is here: https://www.miteco.gob.es/es/prensa/ultimas-noticias/2025/ju...
kragen•4h ago
diggan•3h ago
tux3•3h ago
riedel•3h ago
mschuster91•2h ago
We aren't. Pretty much the first things that get dismantled is the turbines and machinery that has no radiation exposure because you need space to maneuver, buffer, dismantle and decontaminate everything else that's coming out of the innards of the plant and actually is contaminated.
Maybe you can get some remaining use as reactive power provider done during the ~1 year that it takes for the bureaucracy to process the actual permit for dismantling [1] - but even during that time, restarting it again is practically impossible after the main coolant pipes have been flushed [2] (that happened shortly after the plant had been formally taken offline and all the uranium pellets were removed from the core, although I can't find out how many months that took - but it did happen in the same year as the shutdown, so less than 8 months).
The only thing that's being kept connected to the grid after that is the small portion that supplies the cooling for the cooldown pools where the freshly removed uranium pellets deplete enough material that they can be stored in CASTOR containers [3]. In addition, the high-voltage switching equipment is being kept alive in Landshut's case as the area of the former NPP is planned to be the end point of the SüdOstLink national grid expansion link and the power is supposed to be transferred from Ohu to the wider regional/state grid using the existing tie-ins of the former NPP [4].
If you want I can try to contact the utility handling the teardown about specifics, I live a few kilometers from there after all, but I doubt they're going to share much information given the obvious threat of Russian espionage.
It's also a workplace safety issue. You absolutely do not want electricity anywhere where you do not vitally need it, particularly no high voltage.
EDIT: Thanks to @closewith, indeed Biblis A's genset was converted for a "second life" as power regulator in 2011/2012 [5], but that's (at least from a cursory research) all I could find.
[1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/genehmigung-fuer-rueckb...
[2] https://www.bayerische-staatszeitung.de/staatszeitung/politi...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_(Kerntechnik)
[4] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/tennet-stellt-suedostli...
[5] https://www.amprion.net/Presse/Presse-Detailseite_2667.html
closewith•2h ago
mschuster91•47m ago
b3orn•1h ago
The term for this is synchronous condenser. According to the system stability report 2023 [0] there were three of these in Germany in 2023 (source is in german, the term you're looking for is rotierender Phasenschieber). It is not clear if these are converted generators, most likely they are not former nuclear power plants, but likely located at the sites of former coal power plants because of the existing grid nodes. For the future this is a concept that is investigated to provide reactive power, in that case from former coal power plants.
[0]: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...