As the system comes back online and attention turns to the possible cause(s) of one of Western Europe’s largest peacetime blackouts, one thing is clear: without cash, the chaos would have been far worse.
They said it could never happen here, that Spain’s energy infrastructure was impervious to a massive, systemic outage. Circulating widely on social media today is a clip of the TV news presenter Javier Ruiz trying to debunk fears of a looming nationwide blackout. That was back in November 2021, when the Spanish government was locked in a months-long standoff with some of the country’s energy companies over surging energy prices:
“The fear [being spread] of a great meltdown, of a massive blackout, is unfounded, it is fake news. Spain has no risk of a blackout, whether for reasons of capacity or distribution, absolutely nothing points in that direction…
Our plants generate twice as much electricity as we consume on any given day. No, there is no risk of a collapse in the generation of power, just as there is no risk of a collapse of the nuclear power plants. Even if that were to happen,… ten different sources of energy feed the system. If the nuclear plants are shut down tomorrow, as some power plants have threatened, we will still have hydraulic power, wind turbines, solar power, other renewables, combined turbines and gas… This diversification of sources prevents a massive blackout.
EL BULO DEL GRAN APAGÓN: ESPAÑA NO ESTÁ EN RIESGO DE PARADA ELÉCTRICA GENERAL
–Ni por capacidad: Produce 107GW, consume 42GW en su pico máximo
–Ni por diversificación: 10 fuentes componen el mix energético
–Ni por ubicación: Rusia no bloquea nuestro flujopic.twitter.com/sJke8RKhZF— Javier Ruiz (@Ruiz_Noticias) November 9, 2021
Then yesterday, this happened:
Just in.
Mass Blackouts in Spain, Portugal and in part of France.
Every single part of digital life from shops, to traffic lights, hospitals, airports, phones, and trains, all down.pic.twitter.com/ETDgtfE9wk
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) April 28, 2025
A little after 12.30 pm, just about everything stopped working as Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France suffered one of the largest peacetime blackouts Europe has ever seen. In some places it would last for 12 hours. In my adopted city of Barcelona, it lasted for six to nine hours.
What first tipped me off was that the monitor of my PC suddenly went blank. I then tried the lights, which were also unresponsive. My initial thought was that the power had gone down in our apartment block, which occasionally happens as a result of nearby road maintenance works. And ironically, there were road works going on just outside my apartment. It wasn’t until my wife told me a few minutes later that the power had gone down in her workplace as well, which is roughly two kilometres away, that I realised something bigger was afoot.
I tried to look at the news on my mobile, only to find I had no connection. Minutes later, the connection briefly came back and I went to the home page of El País where the headline of the main story read:
“Massive Power Blackout in Spain and Portugal.“
…The worst electricity blackout in Spain’s recent history has unleashed chaos on Monday. Millions of citizens of Spain – except on the islands – and Portugal were affected. The blackout has paralysed the normal functioning of infrastructure, mobile communications, roads, train stations, airports, shops and buildings. Hospitals have not been affected thanks to the use of generators. The Spanish and Portuguese governments are investigating the cuts with different technical teams. Red Eléctrica, the public company responsible for the connections, has underlined the unusual nature of the moment: “Nothing like this has ever happened before, it is an absolutely exceptional incident”.
In one fell swoop, the blackout has taken Spain back to the nineteenth century. Traffic lights out of service, traffic jams, pedestrians wandering due to the lack of public transport, relatives desperate to communicate with each other, passengers without a train or flight, cancelled medical consultations, rescues in subways and elevators, refrigerators in restaurants and homes defrosting, radio transistors to get information amid the impossibility of using mobile data to connect to the internet and queues at the doors of some small businesses due to the closure of supermarkets are all part of the unexpected landscape of this Monday.
The trigger for the blackout appears to have been a sudden collapse in electricity generation.
“At 12.33 minutes, and for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced suddenly disappeared,” Red Electrica, the partly state-owned corporation that operates the national electricity grid in Spain, said in a statement. “And that is equivalent to 60% of the electricity that was being consumed.”
BREAKING: Massive — really, massive — electricity outage hits Spain, which large part of the country suffering blackouts (including Madrid and Barcelona).
Data from Spain's national grid shows a lost of >10 GW of demand, from ~26GW to ~12GW in a few seconds. Reason unknonw. pic.twitter.com/KwvDxOOLQJ
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 28, 2025
It is not entirely clear what was behind this sudden plunge in electricity generation, and will probably remain that way for some time. There are plenty of theories doing the rounds, however, including that it was the result of a cyber-attack — which, coincidentally, the European Commission was warning could happen just a few weeks ago with its launch of emergency preparedness kits. So far, both the Spanish and Portuguese governments and EU authorities have ruled this possibility out. Nonetheless, this was a common meme of the day:
— J̵̛̙͙̃̂̍ò̸̬̙̲̅͗̓́̋͋k̷̡̢͙̞͖̻̈́̅͊ͅe̶̡̤̹͇̩͌͂̈̏̀ͅͅr̵̐̽ (@joker_post) April 28, 2025
Early reports out of Portugal suggested that the cause may have been meteorological. From Sky News:
A “rare atmospheric phenomenon” was blamed for the outages, which affected millions, Portugal’s grid operator, Rede Eletrica Nacional (REN), said in a statement.
“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration,’” the statement continued.
“These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
However, as NC reader Grumpy Engineer, with 30 years’ experience in the power generation sector, says, “this sounds like baloney”. Here’s a more plausible explanation he has read:
[T]hey were experiencing grid frequency oscillations especially since they were running predominantly on inverter-based wind and solar power that lacks the rotational inertia of conventional spinning generations.
If this proves to be the case, they can make the system more robust by adding synchronous condensers, which are basically generators where the “prime mover” (like a gas or steam turbine) has been replaced with a big flywheel. This would permit grid operators to implement PSS (power system stabilization) technology per IEEE 421.5, which would definitely help damp out frequency oscillations. They’re not cheap to set up, but they do work.
This chimes with what the physicist and energy expert Antonio Turiel told Onda Vasca earlier today — namely that huge amounts of renewable energy have been integrated into the grid without putting in place the necessary receptive stabilisation systems, simply to save money:
“[At the time of the blackout] a lot of photovoltaic energy was being produced which, due to its technical characteristics, reacts poorly to shifts in demand. The problem with the electricity system is that you always have to anticipate changes in demand and photovoltaic energy is not very flexible in this respect, but that can be compensated for if you put in a series of devices that are obviously expensive but are useful for these situations.
As this has not been done, …most of Spain’s electricity was being supplied with photovoltaic energy, which is inflexible and could not adapt. So, what happened? Some systems began to go down and there was a cascading effect, which by the way, should not have occurred either, because when a system is overloaded, you can disconnect a subnetwork to protect it from burning out. But instead of that happening, the burden was passed from one subnetwork to another causing a cascading effect”.
Another likely, and related, culprit is chronic under-investment in the grid’s infrastructure, which in turn has lead to chronic under-capacity in the system. Between 2015 and 2020, 32% of planned investments in the grid were not executed, according to a recent report by PwC and Redeia. Ultimately, this is largely about money. As Turiel puts it, “in order to earn just a little bit more, the energy companies left the country in darkness.”
In an interview just three months ago with Colectiva Burbuja, Turiel cautioned that Spain had already suffered five emergency power cuts in 2024, suggesting that yesterday’s events were just a matter of time. He also warned in another interview today, this time with the podcast BASE, that next time this happens, it could take days or even weeks to put right.
What has the government said? Not that much.
In an emergency press conference at the Moncloa Palace on Monday afternoon, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that “no hypothesis is being ruled out”, though his government was prioritising getting everything back to normal as soon as possible:
We still do not have conclusive information about the reasons. I call for responsibility. The most important thing now is to follow the recommendations: let’s keep travel to a minimum, follow only official information and use your mobile phone responsibly. We are still going to go through critical moments. The telephone, only when strictly necessary.
This wasn’t difficult given that for most of the day the phone wasn’t working anyway. Even most landline phones were down since they also depend on an electric current these days.
As the chaos mushroomed, people suddenly found themselves unable to communicate with anyone digitally and not knowing why. There was a sudden rush for battery-powered radios at local convenience stores as people turned to 1960s technologies to find out what was happening. As far as I could tell, they were all sold out in my local neighbourhood within an hour.
There was also a mad rush for camping gas stoves as residents with electric-only cookers realised they had no way of cooking dinner. Other products that were suddenly in demand included candles, bottled water, first aid kits and, of course, toilet paper.
Pánico en varios país europeos, Francia, España, Portugal, Andorra por falta de electricidad
Sin efectivo
Hospitales colapsados
Hoteles
Trenes cerrados
Gente atrapada en ascensores
No hay batería
Caos por todo el daño causado al mundo
La vida da vueltas pic.twitter.com/iElM9elccM— 🇻🇪 PATRIA ARMADA🇻🇪 El ESEQUIBO es de VENEZUELA (@Patria8Esequibo) April 28, 2025
Cash Didn’t Crash But ATMs Did
People were able to buy these products for one simple reason: they had cash on them, or at home. Without cash, it was all but impossible to buy anything. Bank apps and online banking as a whole were inaccessible for most people most of the day, plunging the sector into paralysis. Most of the point-of-service terminals in the shops I visited were not working. Meanwhile, ATMs were also also out of order and banks had closed most of their branches for “security reasons”.
Particularly affected were young tourists who, until yesterday, were relying exclusively on their mobile payment apps and had no local network of friends or family to fall back on. My wife and I spoke to a couple of young women in their early 20s who had just arrived in Barcelona earlier that morning to spend a few days’ sightseeing and had no cash on them at all. When the power came back on in our part of the city, we saw them at the front of a long queue at an ATM.
El País spoke to a 70-year old lady in Madrid who expressed relief at sticking with her age-old habit of always carrying some cash in her wallet: “In times like these it is strategic to be old.”
Unlike some other parts of Europe, cash is still King in Spain, albeit a much diminished one. As such, most local people were able to make emergency purchases and many customer-facing businesses were able to continue operating. I cannot imagine the sort of chaos that would reign in my native United Kingdom, where the overwhelming majority of people do not use cash, or in cashless Sweden, where the amount of cash in circulation is equivalent to around 1% of gross domestic product — compared to 8% in the US and more than 10% in the EU.
It is fear over exactly this kind of event that has prompted governments and central banks in Scandinavia to try to reverse the public mass abandonment of cash that they themselves helped set in motion many years ago. As Sweden’s Riksbank warned last year, rapid digitalisation has made payments “more vulnerable to cyber attacks and disruptions to the power grid and data communication”.
Calm Curiosity
All in all, the general mood in my central Barcelona barri was one of calm curiosity rather than brewing panic, though I’m not sure how long the calmness would have lasted if the blackout had extended long beyond the first day.
With no access to the Internet or their smartphones, people began streaming from their homes and workplaces, with many congregating on bar and restaurant terraces to soak up the sun and drink beers while they were still cold. It was a reminder that the Spanish people are by and large a gregarious sort — even in a crisis, or perhaps especially in a crisis, they tend to pull together.
As Orwell once said, “I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain.”
It was also a nice change to see groups of teenagers and older GenZers having natural conversations with one another, looking each other in the eye instead of down at their smartphone screens. Unfortunately, I doubt it will last.
Eventually, as the power began coming back on in incremental waves across the country — first in the northern and central regions, and then latterly the more central areas, including Madrid — cheers of relief rang out across the barrios of Spain.
Acaba de llegar la luz al barrio después de más de 9 horas de #apagón.
No sé escuchaban gritos de celebración así desde que España ganó el mundial. pic.twitter.com/iDpG7uXV7V— Julián Macías Tovar (@JulianMaciasT) April 28, 2025
But if the (as yet unidentified) problems that caused the crisis remain unaddressed — and given that many of the problems are systemic in nature, including the rampant neoliberalisation of supply networks, they probably won’t be — the relief is likely to be short-lived.
Unfortunately, if there’s one global trend that is clearly on the rise, it is that of power blackouts. In the last year alone, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador have all been plagued by repeated, prolonged power outages, sometimes lasting days at a time. Argentina and Chile also suffered big blackouts over the summer while back in Europe, the Balkans experienced an hours-long outage in June last year as the south-eastern European region sweltered in an early heatwave.
‘without cash, the chaos would have been far worse.’
This is absolutely true. I was watching the TV news tonight and saw how bad Spain and Portugal got hit. There were interviews with people saying that the ATMs were down, that trains were stopped with people having to climb out of them and walk to the nearest station – both nations came grinding to a stop. But there was one thing that I saw on the news that grabbed my interest. There were people in a supermarket shopping for food. Yes, the supermarket was in semi-darkness being inside a building but that did not matter as people with money were still able to buy food to take home. It took the edge off the emergency. And of course those that did not bother having money with them learned a very valuable lesson. Come to think of it, I wonder how many homes had candles and matches in storage.
I have been told that, at least in my part of Austria, they have a plan that in case of a blackout, supermarkets are to hand out all the perishable food before it goes bad, I think for free, but I’m not sure.
Sounds like a good plan, Fried. The authorities in Austria are among the most pro-active in this area. Even back in 2021, the government was talking about a nationwide blackout as being a question of when, not if. Austria, like neighbouring Germany and Swizterland, also has the added advantage that an overwhelming majority of its citizens still use cash.
I was just in Greece and everybody still wants cash. And a belated thank you to the commenter who steered me in the right direction to keep the European ATMs from ripping me off. This video is quite useful for those from non-euro countries – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdYhm__yMQY
Heard from my better half today that her boss was on vacation in Spain and was in an elevator when the power went out! He had just enough charge on his phone to call in to approve this week’s payroll for his organization.
During the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, although it wasn’t planned, many stores in Toronto did give away their frozen and perishables for free. It was a very interesting (and heartwarming) sight, everyone having to walk home from work and shop owners along the way handing out ice cream, popsicles, anything that needed refrigeration.
That also happened in NYC. Especially ice cream!
We ALWAYS have at least 200 quid in cash on hand at home. Plus if I rooted around in my “overseas wallet” from my days as senior academic there is probably AUD150, USD100, SGD100, EUR200 as well as other stuff.
Our family has healthy distrust of the banking system after I explained it was all programmed in COBOL and there are probably only 5 people alive still patching it.
Ditto, but without the foreign reserves, although I should probably have more than a handful of loonies in the till.
Always have $100 on me in reserves when I go out and my reserves at home have reserves. They have proven time and again to be able to meet emergencies or to snap up opportunities on the spot. Was living on minimal money for a few years but the lessons from then have stuck.
Good on you. One thing I admired about oz when there was that there was much more potential to have a “basic account” like the old Girobank in UK for poorer people to help with Medicare etc.
Unfortunately it’s been whittled down by both Labor and Coalition.
If i lived back there I’d be giving neither my primary vote. Oh i hear Dutton wants to strip dual citizenship…….. Funny they didn’t propose that 20 years ago when it turned out most Coalition members were BRITISH citizens lol
Many silver bugs and just about all preppers keep a stock of “junk silver,” pre-1965 dimes, quarters and half-dollars, which are 90% silver and remain government-backed coinage. If a power outage situation were to persist and/or be chronic, we might see it reappear in wider usage.
Cash money, baby, cash money!
Socialist household has an emergency cash stash too – it’s a national recommendation. But given that my corner of the globe is as close to a cashless society as possible, I wonder how to use it in case the shop registers and barcode scanners are not powered. It’s not like we have price tags in the products anymore, nor am I sure all cashiers can do the math in their head or on paper even if they’ve got one of the best primary education in the world.
In the USA, it might turn into a cylinderella story if a blackout lasted a good while…
Might makes right and all that-
…guns fix all your woes
Guns have been known to end the party with a bang!
This was a temporary issue. An ex was in NYC in the early 2000s during the blackout (as a tourist, no less) and she relayed that folks were in more of a giving mood then she expected. I assume it was the same in Spain yesterday.
Let me know when it has been five days with no power, all frozen and refrigerated food is no good, and no one knows when it is coming back on. It would get ugly REAL fast after that scenario.
Nick Corbishly, I recommend that you add the duration of the blackout somewhere early in the article. It was hard for me to pay attention to the many paragraphs of good information (and to understand their significance) when the only question in my mind was “how long was it?” It mattered to me, was it a few minutes? was it a few hours? I felt that I couldn’t really evaluate the information that you were presenting without knowing this….
Fixed that small little detail. Thanks, Expat, for the heads-up.
Hope you get info you need. Another anecdote I’ve mentioned before which I wouldn’t have had it not been for the fact NC has run multiple articles about this.
I lived in Sweden for 6 months 10 years ago. Beggars had card machines and turned down cash! I saw how difficult it was becoming to use cash back then….. now their central bank is issuing warnings, picked up by this site.
If I were a bad minded person or state outside NATO I think it’d be pretty easy to bring Sweden to a halt…..just saying…..because their system even in 2015 seemed ultra vulnerable to me and I was made to feel like an annoyance/freak when using cash. Nobody carried it except me and I used to get totally annoyed at having to go into bank branches to verify myself when I used ATM to withdraw cash. FFS. In fairness, a Swedish fellow professor (though born and bred in a different Swedish city) took the time to tell me that these issues “aren’t you…..they’re us…… I’m still not properly accepted in this city”. Which is rather sad. My boss there was lovely and did everything he could to help me integrate….. but ultimately the system wouldn’t bend :(
As a follow up….. I went through awful “anglo saxon” stuff that made me be a whistle blower in Sydney.
I really really wanted to make things work in Sweden. I was utterly heartbroken when they refused to do things like give leeway or adjust their Swedish language classes given that I had to fly across the world regularly for conferences to showcase their work. NOT A SINGLE NON NORDIC PERSON found this to be compatible with life. So I knew it “wasn’t a me issue”. When a local tells you “we are an effed up society” you do tend to realise that you…… Along with 30 other non Swedish academics…… Are not wrong.
I ALWAYS wanted to integrate and loathe the UK expat thing. It still hurts because my boss KNEW how Swedish academia had to change…… But he couldn’t do it by himself…… Thus I quit in rather spectacular fashion once I learnt who was was plotting against me (BECAUSE I’d violated the “automatic advance” rule in favor of who is good rule). Now I mask up me and buy stuff for mum.
Flashback 2003, the Northeast blackout, Wikipedia.
The blackout’s proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of much of the Northeast regional electricity distribution system.
I was living in the Morningside Heights neighborhood at the time. Two of my strongest memories were the endless stream of pedestrian traffic trudging north up Broadway, and the homeless taking charge of the intersections, directing both auto and people traffic and doing a good job of it.
All the stores were closed save for the bodegas and the pizza places, where the lines ran down the sidewalk for a block or more. (What would we have done without cash?)
Power was mostly restored by the next day coloring the experience more as an adventure than the disaster that an extended outage would have produced.
I was in Australia at the time but got many reports. Basically 2 flavors: some people stuck on high floors of office buildings who slept there.
The second was that people in apartments in not horribly high floors (and of course townhouse apts) came down to the street and hung out. Some brought down potables and munchies. Some brought instruments and performed. So those who could made a party out of it.
We lived in a five floor walk-up, 20 units. Everybody was on the roof that night. Even though the beer and wine were flowing, it was more of a gathering than a party, quiet though not somber as I recall.
Several friends and colleagues got stuck on the subway, something I probably would not enjoy.
Thanks. It sounds like the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still although in that one the cars also stopped working. This post WW2 film was about an alien who comes to Earth to warn us about the destructive future for a world dependent on technology and most especially the atomic bomb. As per one of the mantras here at NC, hubris–our scientific pride that we have things all figured out–precedes nemesis unless, says lead Michael Rennie, we change our ways.
We still haven’t changed them but by the skin of our teeth we avoided nuclear war during the first Cold War. It seems the survival instinct still trumps greed and power if only just barely.
And power outages are not too unusual where I live with Helene being most an example. Here though the internet stayed up because the cell towers had generators. Sounds like Spain needs lots of changes.
There was a solar storm, wonder if that was the culprit?
I live in east-suburban Pittsburgh, and every so often the power just goes out because … well, reasons I guess. Sometimes there is a mild thunderstorm, or it’s windier than usual, and sometimes there is just nothing. It can stay out for 30 seconds or it can stay out for hours. The power company phone menu has something about notifying people when the power is back on and also what caused it, but I have never heard an explanation of any kind. I suspect this is happening in many other places, and probably much more severely in some. I only expect things to get worse as things continue to collapse, slowly or increasingly quickly. I suppose some money could be invested to improve things, or something, but I guess 2000-lb bombs aren’t going to pay for themselves and, you know, priorities.
Also, I have shared this before and it’s not exactly on topic but I think definitely related. It is especially relevant since it was mentioned that Spain has a lot of “renewable” energy sources. Long, but definitely worth a read:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bright-green-lies-derrick-jensen/1137553042?ean=9781948626392
Out here in nw texas hill country, power, fones and cell fones all get crazy…pretty much randomly…but weather is the main culprit.
Rain, freezes and extreme heat.
Cell service always goes out when we get more than an inch
Who needs nuclear bombs to bring down the US and win a war when you can do this?
https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/infrastructure-security/the-threat-of-nuclear-electromagnetic-pulse-on-critical-infrastructure/
“Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronization failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
I’ve worked in the power generation sector for almost 30 years, and this sounds like utter baloney. What do mechanical vibrations in power lines (which can indeed be induced by certain atmospheric conditions) have to do with the electrical concern of grid synchronization? Unless the vibration was so severe that it caused disparate lines to come into physical contact (which should never happen under even tornado or hurricane conditions) or to physically fracture, this wasn’t the culprit.
I’ve read separately that they were experiencing grid frequency oscillations, which sounds much more credible, especially since they were running predominantly on inverter-based wind and solar power that lacks the rotational inertia of conventional spinning generations.
If this proves to be the case, they can make the system more robust by adding synchronous condensers, which are basically generators where the “prime mover” (like a gas or steam turbine) has been replaced with a big flywheel. This would permit grid operators to implement PSS (power system stabilization) technology per IEEE 421.5, which would definitely help damp out frequency oscillations. They’re not cheap to set up, but they do work.
Thanks, Grumpy, for your insights. If you don’t mind, I have hoisted part of your comment into the post.
I don’t mind.
And as a secondary comment, I really hope the results of the incident investigation are fully revealed to the public. It would help guide policymakers going forward in addition to satisfying the intense curiosity of people like myself.
But I don’t know that we’ll ever see it. Heck, I still want to know what triggered the enormous battery fire at the Moss Landing battery storage facility back on January 16th. [News of the event was largely swamped out by the other fires in California that were destroying homes and businesses by the thousands, but it was a big fire that was unusually polluting and difficult to extinguish. ~1000 MWh of batteries burned to the ground. Ouch.] But it’s been three months now.
Yeah, I won’t be holding my breath either, especially given the amount of damage caused — not only here in Spain but also in Portugal and France. And as you say, how do we learn from these disasters and make sure they never happen again if those responsible can’t even come clean about what happened?
If this is the case, then the irony is that one of the biggest suppliers for synchronous condensers is in Spain, in Beasain in the Basque Country (Ingeteam).
So far as I can see, they’ve only used them in Spain for island grids – the Balaerics and Canaries.
Various designs of synchronous condensers have been built into former thermal plants in Ireland and Finland and are increasingly a part of BESS facilities around Europe. It may be that the Spanish thought that their national grid, which is quite well integrated with the French grid, is large enough that they weren’t needed at any scale. A key problem with them is that while they are very important for grid stabilisation, they aren’t as potentially profitable for market arbitrage as batteries, so its proven more difficult to persuade private developers to integrate them (this is changing rapidly).
The Spanish and Portuguese seem to be rowing back from initial statements and are being very coy about potential causes of the blackout. So there is nothing really go to on right now except for guesswork. But the speed they got the system back up and running is impressive – there were many predictions that a solar heavy grid would take days to get up after an outage, this doesn’t seem to be the case so far.
“A key problem with them is that while they are very important for grid stabilisation, they aren’t as potentially profitable for market arbitrage as batteries, so its proven more difficult to persuade private developers to integrate them (this is changing rapidly).”
Aye. Under tamer grid conditions, all synchronous condensers are good for is consuming power. [They’ll typically consume about 1% of the generator nameplate rating when running.] Because of this, there is obvious temptation to turn them off when they’re not needed, but if this is done and then the grid suddenly experiences severe stability problems, it might not be possible to spin them back up quickly enough to re-connect to the grid before the blackout occurs.
And in terms of the finances, I don’t know how you’d even charge for PSS services. [At least with VAR compensation services, you can measure the amps.] This is definitely one of those situations where power producers will want to point at somebody else and say, “Make it their responsibility.” National governments or grid authorities will likely have to impose requirements.
[And as a side note, the US has taken a similar approach to Ireland and Finland, converting old thermal stations into synchronous condenser stations. Which makes sense. You get to re-use the generator, the big step-up transformer, and most of the peripherals. Just replace the turbine with a flywheel.]
James Burke’s “Connections” – S1, E1, The Trigger Effect (1978), beginning, especially about 3 minutes in..
The technology – and more importantly society – are much more fragile now.
can you imagine—there was a time when a science history documentary was a prime-time event on BBC1/BBC2/PBS!
There is a dearth of quality science documentaries (maybe it’s somewhere that I don’t know about)….the stuff on Netflix pales in comparison to the glory days of BBC Science.
one of the greatest non-fiction filmed scenes in video history….https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk
I can’t think of any presenter alive today who could replicate that as effortlessly as Burke.
A curious detail (in the part of Spain where I live electricity was restored 1.15 am), all the retail chains and stores of course closed to the public, not only they hadn’t lights on inside, they hadn’t cash registers, they hadn’t internet either. But one of them, Mercadona, remained open nationwide (as far as I know, the only one). They have generators in their stores, I don’t know how they keep their internet link. The image was very… Spanish, between surreal and grotesque. And (techno) dark. Half lightened stores, overcrowded (the one I was you access by escalators, stopped of course), Berlangueque (huge) queues at the cash desks, with people accumulating absurd purchases (i.e. “special” milks because “normal” ones were exhausted), and the like. I am sure yesterday a lot of things lost pretty amounts of money, but these guys make a killing.
The lede should be that in the drive to be 100% solar-wind, Spain took shortcuts re. grid stability. All predicted by reasonable people—who were ignored by policymakers and the rabid, anti-thermodynamics environmentalists.
Having a wad of EUR300 does you no good if the cash register won’t open, or the petrol pumps won’t turn on.
From the article I gather that a significant reason for the collapse was the tight interconnection of the electrical grid across countries, since Portugal and France were badly affected as well (in fact as completely in the case of Portugal).
Decades ago, when that wondrous unified European electricity “market” did not exist, when energy was produced by municipal utilities, when the only true countrywide electricity network was the one of the railways, a problem in a region would remain largely contained to a subnetwork and not cascade to another, bringing several countries’ systems down.
As Grumpy Engineer discusses above, there are technical solutions to harden a global network against those frequency oscillations causing large-scale disruptions — but they require investments, while privatized energy companies have their eyes firmly set on shareholder value instead of infrastructure robustness.
If I may get in a quick plug, I have an essay coming out tomorrow on fragilities of western society and our inability to understand or anticipate them ….
A good lesson! Perhaps it’s because we live on an island and come from a place where there were frequent blackouts, but we built our house with outage resilience in mind.
We have a 120 gallon propane tank fueling an 11K-watt generator that can power our entire house except for the heat-pump HVAC for 5-10 days depending on the tank level (the tank is monitored and serviced via Wi-Fi). We have a high-efficiency Tyrollean wood stove and a fireplace for heat. We always keep enough food on hand to eat out of our pantry for at least 10 days. If cellular and internet are down we have a battery/solar/hand-crank AM/FM/NOAA/shortwave receiver. We also have a large library of books and DVD’s for entertainment. Water tank lasts 10 days.
Our local power cooperative supplements the cable from the mainland with solar micro-grids and battery arrays to serve the hospital, fire station, and airport. A tidal generator is currently on the drawing board.
We’re not preppers; just prepared.
Its a wise precaution. That sort of inbuilt resilience was really only available to the wealthy until recently, but the huge drop in solar panel and battery costs has made it quite a sensible option. An engineer friend who did a deep dive into the costs for a house he bought in a fairly remote rural area here in Ireland (often prone to local outages as there are only two circuits providing power for his locality) worked out that with available grants he had a reasonable pay back period for an investment in full solar (i.e. sufficient capacity to be largely self reliant) along with a days battery storage. The pay back calculation of course varies significantly according to where you are.
I’ll be very interested in what is determined to be the root cause of this failure. (And I agree with Grumpy Engineer that the current explanation sounds a bit goofy).
As I have mentioned before, upper management at the very large corporation I worked for wanted to implement “run to failure” as a maintenance policy in order to save costs. We pointed out that this would endanger lives, factories, and equipment, and in many cases violate regulatory requirements (break the law). We repeatedly pointed to examples of when critical maintenance of power vaults was neglected:
Boeing suspends shifts after power outage
https://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/boeing-suspends-shifts-after-power-outage-1310651.php
As with PG&E in California, where neglected maintenance of high voltage lines resulted in the Camp fire, our apparent elevating of profit above maintaining critical infrastructure does result in the rest of us paying a very high price:
Camp Fire (2018)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Fire_(2018)
It’s still amazing to me to watch both America and the EU talking about finding the “required” trillions for protection from Russia and China, but fail in it’s ability to quite literally “keep the lights on”, a very warped understanding of what society defines as “security”.
Here in Peru where the average yearly income is around $5k, a good many homes have gardens and fields of corn.
It struck me that essentially nobody grows their own food in the USA, the backup plan sans electricity is to have cash-not corn
Reading this post, the blackouts in Spain and surrounds lasted roughly 12 hours at most. I do not want to minimize the difficulties tied to 12 hours without electric power, but some of the more problematic aspects of a power outage take more than 12 hours to become urgent. I believe the delivery of water in a most modern cities depends on electric power. Food and light are nice to have, but water is vital. The urgencies of a day without power are different from the urgencies of a week or two without power. [I do try to keep cash on hand, and other items of ‘trade’. Having cash on hands seems to be a ‘lesson’ of this post.]
I live in a rural area of the u.s. and the power here goes down from time to time, sometimes for longer than 12 hours. Many of the homes rely on wells and electric powered well pumps to assure the delivery of water. I believe the townships that deliver public water rely upon electric powered pumps to maintain water pressure and assure the delivery of water. All the sources of heat for keeping my home minimally warm rely on the continuity of electric power. I have propane gas heat that requires electric power to run the heater blowers and control circuits. My gas stove and oven requires electricity to run the controls, although I can start a stove-top flame with a match [YES, I keep matches and candles around.]. My sister has a a kerosene heater and I should get one. If I need gasoline, the local pumps require electricity to pump the gasoline into my car — or diesel into a truck delivering goods. I might also mention that toilets do not work well without water, though I suspect I might be reluctant to use water I might have cached in my bathtub [actually I have only an extremely small shower and no bathtub] to use for flushing my toilet. If a power outage lasted, not all that many days, I would probably value the bathtub cached water as drinking water.
For a region wide power outage, there are other problems that arise as an electric power outage extends past a few days. What happens at the local nuclear power plants — assuming nuclear power is part of the power generation mix.