Spain and Portugal hit by unexplained power blackout

[Leo Gura]

Space kangaroos.

[Princess Arabia]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Space kangaroos.

I love it when you say silly things. Shows the human side you're trying to get rid of you space kangaroo you.😜

[LostSoul]

There is a plausible explanation out there gaining popularity...

The morning of the blackout, at 10:30 AM, oscillations were detected in the grid. From the nuclear power plants, the generation dispatch was informed of the issue and the response was: "There is an excess of renewable generation."

The issue was stabilized, and at 12:30 PM the reactive power oscillations started again (this is only for those with knowledge of electric power), and due to a lack of damping caused by nuclear groups being offline (specifically, the one called Almaraz only had 1 unit operating at 70% and the other completely shut down), the system collapsed.

Solar panels cause terrible oscillations in the grid; today they were at 80% at the time of the blackout, and since there was an oscillation, they disconnected from the grid, resulting in a sudden loss of supply.

The transient still needs to be analyzed in more detail, but the root cause is the lack of synchronous generators (such as nuclear) that guarantee system stability.

And of course, Pedro Sánchez (president of Spain) is never going to admit that it’s the fault of renewables (in reality, it’s the fault of a system not designed for renewables), because his entire political platform is based on them.

[Davino]

10 hours ago, PurpleTree said:

True. It’s also why paying with money should still always be possible.

Oh yes, that was a big problem. Youngsters who only use credit cards where quite f*cked. I had to go help my girlfriend buy some essentials with the cash I had.
Lesson learned, keep a good ammount of emergency cash.

[Davino]

8 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

Have they discovered the cause yet?

No and they say it will take weeks. It seems to be a very technical process and people are quite impacient about it.

8 hours ago, Natasha Tori Maru said:

I do always wonder if hackers will target the power grid, as it works with its own grid code.

While its not a programming language, I have been alerted to large vulnerabilities through my friends in government (Australia though).

There are many theories and our president has said it would be reckless to discard any of them yet in the same way it would be reckless to support any one of them yet. It seemed like a CIA statement actually ahahahha. But yeah, there is a chance it was an attack. In any case, the answer will take quite some time.

[Leo Gura]

11 hours ago, Princess Arabia said:

I love it when you say silly things.

Silly? It is humans who are silly. Space kangaroos are serious creatures.

Edited yesterday at 01:17 PM by Leo Gura

[Raze]

 

[Sea]

On 29/4/2025 at 8:22 PM, Norbert Somogyi said:

It can shine when it's calm, but it can also have bursts of anger in the form of solar flares. In a cyclic way spanning 11 years or so. Those have the potential to disturb the electric grid of the globe, collapsing civilization back to the early industrial era. Imagine the chaos that would ensue. 

We experienced one back in 1859 called the Carrington Event, turning on telegraph writers without a direct source of electricity (and igniting some stations on fire). The auroras must have been beautiful around the world. The luck was that our civilization was far from being electrified.

The Sun has been monitored for centuries or milleniums by astronomers around the world, later by telescopes (thank you Galileo) and nowadays satellites like NASA's SOHO. It is thanks to that nowadays collaborative effort and the development of technology (which coincidentally is part of our potential demise) that we can start preparing for such an occasion (beyond just forecasting).

So yes, it can do more than just shine.

And there have been solar flares observed from other stars over a million times stronger than the Carrington Event. If we ever got hit with something like that it would be the end of human civilization.