Country wide power outages reported Spain and Portugal
Country wide power outages reported Spain and Portugal
Power has mostly been restored to cities across Spain and Portugal after a major outage caused chaos yesterday. But a debate is growing about what caused the cuts.
I live very close to the border but on the French side, we had a tiny outage of about 1/3 of a second (but long enough to reset routers)... That's probably why.
I'm in Lisbon and right before the power went out the lights flickered like crazy for a good second.
Lisbon, Texas?
That's all it takes some times if conditions are bad inside a grid.
This is one of the unfortunate downsides to moving form 'large spinny things' in coal generation to tiny integrated circuits generating the rotational momentum needed in an AC system. We had a similar issue in South Australia in 2016, complete black system after a number of events but of the two biggest preventable causes, one was simply the loss of rotational momentum in the system, in 1995 is used in be close to 10s, in 2016 it was less than .6s
We need to start rethinking the grid for the future, we can't keep coal/gas but we also can't keep a grid completely reliant on momentum for short term ride through.
Good point. In the Netherlands there are tests being done with ultra fast batteries to take over the grid forming properties of 'large spinny things'. See: https://www.rwe.com/en/press/rwe-generation/2024-09-09-rwe-builds-ultra-fast-innovative-battery-storage-system-in-the-netherlands/
But saying that this power outage is caused by it is speculation at this point.
They're all hinting at a cyberattack. Probably has nothing much to do with the grid.
but we also can’t keep a grid completely reliant on momentum for short term ride through.
If I understand it properly, the problem you're referring to is "grid following" vs "grid forming". The former being most solar/wind deployments and the latter being one of the big spinny things. Its not that the tiny integrated circuits can't do grid forming too, its that its risky for anything to do so and many operators when given the choice decouple (meaning their contribution to the grid stops) rather than let their expensive equipment be put in danger.
One solution to this is gridscale battery storage. As the cost of batteries fall (especially with cheap chemistries like Sodium Ion) we'll likely see many more gridscale battery deployments.
Why would that require coal though? Wouldn't nuclear power provide the same rotational momentum with the turbines? Wouldn't hydro electric also provide rotational momentum?
Antena3 News If you can read Spanish this is informative but also has videos of various impacts.
English summary:
- A massive power outage struck most of Spain, Portugal, parts of southern France, and Andorra around 12:30 PM CET on April 28, 2025 (3.5hrs ago).
- Electricity consumption dropped by about 50%, causing widespread disruption.
- Possible causes include a rare atmospheric phenomenon affecting high-voltage lines or a cyberattack; investigations are ongoing.
- The blackout disrupted traffic lights, public transport (trains, metro), airports, and telecommunications.
- Hospitals operated on emergency power; many surgeries were suspended; urgent patient transfers prioritized.
- Emergency plans were activated; Madrid raised its emergency level and considered military support to maintain order.
- Power restoration began gradually but full recovery could take 6 to 10 hours.
- The outage affected supermarkets, businesses, and public services, causing closures and delays.
##Update:
- Authorities have ruled out a cyberattack, with investigations indicating the outage was caused by a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” that led Spain’s power system to disconnect from the European system, collapsing the Iberian electricity network
Incompetence of network operators? Sabotage by a state actor?