By Jo Nova
Is this the Net Zero world we’re aiming for?
It could be a coincidence, but Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers.
Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”.
Notably, Spain has one of the highest proportions of renewable power in Europe — with 50% of the national supply coming from pure unreliable power. Spain has 32 GW of solar power, and 32GW of wind turbines. As it happens, the wind turbines have been largely useless for the last 24 hours. The Telegraph is reporting that solar power was providing almost 60% of Spain’s power two hours before the blackout.
Blackout Chaos
DailyMail, UK
Panic buying has swept Spain and Portugal as nationwide blackouts paralysed both countries, shutting down transport networks and prompting people to clear supermarket shelves amid fears the chaos could last for days.
Huge queues formed outside shops and banks as residents and tourists desperately sought to stockpile essentials and take out cash as much cash as they could amid the uncertainty. Rows of cars were pictured lining up at petrol stations as people hoped to fill up their vehicles and fuel cans, with ex-pats detailing how they have tried to power generators to keep their homes going.
Airports have also been hit by the outages, with flights delayed and cancelled and holidaymakers in Portugal warned by the country’s flagship airline TAP Air not to travel for their flights until further notice. A British holidaymaker in Madrid described the situation in the city centre as ‘carnage’, telling MailOnline: ‘People are starting to panic. It’s going to get really bad if they don’t restore power quickly.’
It must be an attack of the “Rare Atmospheric Phenomenon”
There were rumors it was a cyber attack, or a fire in a transmission line. But Portugal is blaming Spain and says it was due to a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” which sounds like a polite way to say “a renewable energy failure”. After all, it’s hard to imagine a rare atmospheric phenomenon blacking out a nuclear plant.
What caused it?
The Guardian
The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.
REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
It appears the phenomenon occurred when it was a climate extreme of 23 degrees C in Madrid today. The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than hand-waving excuses.
But it’s all kind of obvious when we look at network five minutes before the crisis. Some particular event may turn out to be the trigger, but a system that is 78% reliant on unreliables could probably be knocked over by a teddy bear, or perhaps a wayward cloud.
Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia.
Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%
Nuclear: 11.5%
Co-generation: 5%
Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)Snapshot at 12.30pm local time (outage was 12.35pm) pic.twitter.com/fF7FiIB6UD
— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 28, 2025
h/t auto, Tonyb, MrGrimNasty, Another Delcon, Old Ozzie, CharlesM, Stephen Neil, Bella, and Bally.
Lots of luck bringing that mess up for a black start, a la Broken Hill.
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Synch from French nukes went offline.
Splat.
France should set a new “stupid” tax on Spain.
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Looks like Spain went full “South Afailure”. You never go full “South Afailure” …
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Thousands of switch-mode non pure sine wave inverters all dancing to a slightly different beat as opposed to synchronous spinning inertia? What could possibly go wrong… ?
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This blackout remindeds me of the one that occurred in the UK in 2019 when wind energy was supplying a very large amount of power to the grid. A lightning strike set off a chain reaction where several power stations went offline (first an NG fired one followed by a large wind farm) as the frequency dropped.
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I’ve often wondered about that Konrad.
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“synchronisation failures between the electrical systems”. Of course. Edison won the battle and the world runs on AC, but it is fundamentally unstable for a National system. Local systems must be isolated by HVDC. This idea of National or even supra National systems just makes the whole thing unstable. And then it takes weeks to bring it all back up without blowing up power stations.
This is an expected mode of failure. Not for stable, cheap, reliable, non carbon generated power, but the dream of single point control of all (electrical) power by politicians, ultimately by the EU and then the UN. Hitler and Napoleon would have done the same. It has nothing at all to do with common sense. And it is also why coal, gas, nuclear power must be wiped out. Whoever controls the electricity controls the country and worse, in a digital world, controls even the distribution of gas, water, petrol, food, people.
It’s a taste of the fundamental Totalitarianism behind a national grid. Independence will be wiped out. Politicians uber alles.
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And we are nowhere near summer. Expect worse to come. And blame the weather. Ha!
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23*C in Spain sounds like a cold snap, though it looked ‘sunny’ in the video clip. The internet went down so schools were closed: wtf? Have books really been banned? PM Pedro Sanchez said not to spread ‘misinformation’, as a 19-year-old was ‘stunned’ saying “this has never happened before” (via AFP).
Look out Britain, you’re next – it may might possibly could reach 27C later this week, as it was in May 1989 when I briefly visited the UK.
As for the Antipodes today, four different weather sites are promoting four different max temps for us: 20, 21, 22, and/or 23*C. I’m stunned: that’s more than TWICE the amount the whole planet has fluctuated since 1860 or 1880 or 1910 or whenever the climate cherry tree was picked.
If Spain can’t do solar, nowhere can. RIP.
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A few degrees in a maximum temperature prediction? Everyone know it doesn’t matter. Even if it is the entire and only rationale for killing fossil fuel power.
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Edison promoted DC power. Tesla and Westinghouse promoted AC power. AC won because DC at available voltages at the time could only transmit power over short distances of a few miles. AC can easily be transformed to higher or lower voltages, and allows 3 phase motors.
HVDC can transmit over long distances, but is only practical at 500 KV to 1000 KV and greater than 750 to 1000 mile distances. Each substation costs about USD 500 Million to 750 Million to construct. Minimum of 2 stations, maximum of 5 for economic reasons. And the bipolar transmission lines for HVDC are some USD 4 Million/mile.
AC systems are not unstable when using dispatchable, syncronized, thermal generation. We’ve had it and it’s worked for over 100 years. Trying to join non-dispatchable, unreliable, generators onto the existing system is what causes the instability. Things worked just fine until the wind/solar and political wonks started messing with it.
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Edison actually fought for (his) DC and gave in to AC but this article suggests DC may still be a contender.
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It’s terrible when stuff gets imbalanced.
And causes rare phenomenon.
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How have the EVs coped, the trains haven’t been a good alternative.
With Ed Milliband’s vision in the UK we are looking forward to the Brave New World, with Black Starts at regular intervals to liven things up.
It was amusing to hear a couple of days ago some functionary from the EU recommending that everyone should have a 72 hour Emergency Kit with bottled water, canned food, and batteries/power bank to run a radio and mobile phone.
I don’t think he realised that his advice would be needed so soon.
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“everyone should have a 72 hour Emergency Kit with bottled water, canned food, and batteries/power bank to run a radio and mobile phone.”
Not mentioned of course was that little thing called “CASH” The next thing in line to be shut down all for our own good of course.
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We shouldn’t use weather dependant electricity or other inefficient energy sources.
Sails, windmills, animal and human power became obsolete as soon as a commercially viable steam engine was invented by Newcomen in 1712.
(They used to teach that sort of thing in achools, back in the day. In grade 6, I recall converting my billy cart into a model of Stephenson’s Rocket for a homework assignment about early steam engines.)
Coal and gas and steam engines and the descendants thereof, power station steam turbines and turbo generators to make electricity were the great liberators of humanity, and still are. Except in stupid countries which destroy their power stations, like Australia for instance.
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Yes David, if wind was the answer we would still be using sailing ships!
Still cannot explain that to the uninitiated.
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How do you say “dispatchable power – spinning reserve” in Spanish?
Economic losses from blackout need to be added to the real cost of all the “free” power.
Look at all the other countries learning their lesson…Oh wait, cult members are closed
to reality and never learn. Why do we keep voting for them?
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potencia despachable – reserva giratoria
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In contrast look at our generation in Eastern Australia with wind over the last 24 hours lucky to be at 10% capacity factor and the grid being supplied by predominantly fossil fuel generation.
Bowen hiding under a rock so as his claims of future 80% renewables generation not to be exposed during the election campaign. Clever by the ALP or deceptive?
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” In contrast look at our generation in Eastern Australia with wind over the last 24 hours lucky to be at 10% capacity factor and the grid being supplied by predominantly fossil fuel generation. ”
Wind supplying 6.55% at 8.10pm last night.
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Even worse, Batteries in the NEM, 37 battery sites, 5,547 MW Capacity, 0.5 percent of supply at 19.7 Gwh output over 7 days.
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Why do Australians allow simpletons like Bowen to be in charge of our most important infrastructure elements like the electrical power system?
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Obviously our PM Albo thought it was a good and solid appointment OMG
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What makes you think that Bowen or any other politician is in charge of anything?
They are merely the talking heads spruiking for big bureaucracy.
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Hummm, Grid Vertigo?
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Only a few weeks ago the EU and UK were urging their citizens to put together a 72 hour survival kit; non-perishable food, water, cash etc., in case of amongst other things, power outages.
Coincidences eh!
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Given the interconnectedness of the European grid, how did they stop this from spreading to the rest of Europe with a cascading series of failures and blackouts?
How was it stopped at “just” Spain, Portugal and parts of France?
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At a guess the interconnectors were shut down. How that shut down didn’t cause further chaos is anybody’s guess.
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Welcome to sunny Spain, it is just so satisfying to be able to say ‘we told you so’.
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More renewables = less stability. In other words, the greater the instability, the greater the susceptibility to “rare atmospheric phenomenon” and “induced atmospheric vibration” and other forms of stakeholder spin, useful idiot shilling and excuse mongering.
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Just added to the post:
The Daily Mail has a fancy diagram explaining how extreme temperatures cause some regions to use more power than others for cooling. As energy “moves to hotter regions” they say, parts of the grid are “left with different voltages and frequencies”. This creates “‘anomolous oscillations in very high voltage power lines, leading to synchronization errors across the network”. I remain unconvinced that this is anything other than hand-waving excuses.
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Jo, they are talking through their hats.
It’s ALL mumbo jumbo.
Because 97% of the people do not have a clue about how electricity systems work
so they can say ANYTHING.
Politicians are the worser.
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A grab for the closest expert!
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Yes, along with “China cyber attack! Let’s start WWIII” and “Solar flare”, this is just frantic hand flapping to try to get “narrative” airborne.
This is another “Green Out”. The Lamescream Establishment Misledia just don’t want to say it.
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It was all of 23C in Spain. Heatwave my foot.
Only a very few things will cause a grid failure: Loss of generation, loss of transmission , frequency collapse or voltage collapse.
Spain had 78% renewable and 20% dispatchable power online at time of outage.
My best guess is that the installed inverters cannot generate sufficient reactive power to sustain system voltage and/or some large number of inverters lost their 50 Hz synch pulse and disconnected from the grid simultaneously, causing a large drop in available generation. If only 20% of generation was dispatchable, then the grid almost instantly collapsed.
This is why no sane grid should have a renewable generation penetration higher than the average capacity factor of that form of renewable generation, and certainly no higher than reserve thermal dispatchable generation. A grid collapse happens in as little as 10 seconds or as long as 15 minutes, but that’s the time window available to stabilize the grid. Barring that, it is grid wide blackout time.
Restarting the grid is tricky. All the loads that were connected at the time of collapse are still connected, and mostly inductive loads. All the large loads have to be disconnected, the grid segmented, and portions of the grid brought back online stably, whilst synchronizing and paralleling generation sources. Residential loads are the largest resistive load source. Everything else is inductive. Inductive loads take 4 to 6 times their running power to start up. They simply don’t have the reactive power to do this.
It could be weeks to months before all this happens.
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23 is the new 100?
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From SMH (paywalled):
Major power outage brings Spain and Portugal to a standstill
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/major-power-outage-brings-spain-and-portugal-to-a-standstill-20250429-p5luxo.html
An extract from the SMH story:
” One Portuguese official said the problem appeared to be with the electricity distribution network in Spain. A board member for Portuguese electricity distributor REN, Joan Coneicao, said it the outage was possible caused by a “very large oscillation in electrical voltage, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system”. REN said it had restored production at a hydroelectric and thermoelectric plant, and was prioritising supply resumption to hospitals and transport. ”
Cheers,
Dave B
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You’re right to be sceptical. A robust grid gobbles up these excuses… I mean, irregularities.
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Remember this Spanish “renewables” scam when they sold “solar energy” at night?
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So, really not unlike what happened in South Australia / Adelaide a few years ago. A system too reliant on wind / solar, then affected by an anomaly(storm) which affects energy infrastructure. The whole system trips to protect that infrastructure. Also, your backup link (Victorian interconnector) trips as well. Then, because there is no spinning reserve available anymore the grid can’t be stabilized quickly and rebooted. It’s why so many businesses in Adelaide installed their own generators after that event and why a similar event in future won’t be as disastrous. So, then the idiots running the de- carbonized grid can say “ Look, the grid worked”. I predict a huge demand for small generators in Spain in the immediate future.
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I recall how a few years ago, the Australian Government spent $20 million on a diesel generator for the Australian Submarine Corporation in South Australia because when welding a submarine hull, you cannot afford to interrupt the welding process due to a power failure or any other reason.
I can’t find a reference online, it seems to have been “disappeared”.
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There are a number of diesel generators operating in SA, e.g. those in the desalination plant.
From what I can gather the plant runs an hour or so a year (because there is a contract about maintenance) but it seems that those diesels use a lot of fuel.
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It was the Russians!! Always the Russians!
“The blackout is the second serious European power outage in less than six weeks after a March 20 fire shut down Heathrow Airport in the UK and comes as authorities across Europe gird against sabotage backed by Russia.”
“Officials said the reasons for the blackout were unclear… restoring power to the country and neighbouring Portugal could take six to 10 hours…the outage was possible caused by a “very large oscillation in electrical voltage, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system”.”
https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/major-power-outage-brings-spain-and-portugal-to-a-standstill-20250429-p5luxo.html
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You mean rather than incompetence in planning and operation?
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I wonder whether this might make some voters be caution about Labor’s plan about electricity?
Probably a bit too late.
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Anyone who votes for Labor is already so stupid that they wouldn’t understand or care.
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Hi All,
Javier Blas gets it right, sort-of.
The nuclear generation, having a conventional generator, would also have been supplying a proportion, a large proportion, of the available synchronous inertia.
Remember, the availability of sufficient synchronous inertia at all times is absolutely essential to the continued operational reliability of any grid.
“Ronin”‘s opening remark about this situation being “a la Broken Hill” is in fact spot on.
If we remember, only half of the emergency backup generation at Broken Hill was available when the triggering event, the disconnection of the one connecting transmission line caused by a storm. These emergency generators, being conventional generators, are able to supply synchronous inertia, but the single generator on its own couldn’t supply the entire load. What then complicated the situation was that rooftop solar, which provides no synchronous inertia, kicked in during the day, promptly destabilising what grid function that was available.
Synchronous inertia, the locked-together mechanical rotational inertia provided fully automatically by conventional generators spinning at the same frequency, is a direct consequence of the application of Maxwell’s equations. As such, it is always “there” when conventional generators are in use. That is, so long as the generators are properly operational, it is fail-safe always available. However, to be effective, there must be sufficient conventional spinning generation operational.
By contrast, any form of substitute for synchronous inertia cannot be provided by such as solar panels, wind turbines or batteries without the provision of highly complex, and therefore prone to failure, sophisticated circuitry of some kind. However this might be provided, it cannot be considered to be “fail-safe”.
I trust that the AEMO, with all its talk about developing “synthetic inertia” or “grid-firming” technologies using batteries are taking very careful note of what has happened in Spain and Portugal.
Beautifully reported Jo, as always.
Paul Miskelly
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This is going to be you Australia, enjoy.
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I think the Spanish gave the game away when they came up with this as the cause – “induced atmospheric vibration”. Forty years of working in an RF and electrical engineering field and this is news to me. Now, we do know that charged particles can impact transmission lines, such as when we have a very large solar flare which triggers a geomagnetic storm, but that didn’t happen in this case and only one country in the south of Europe was impacted. Aside from this, there is no other mechanism for any atmospheric related issue. When you know you’re being lied to you also know everything else they say is also probably a lie, so we’ll never know the truth.
The outage occurred at midday, when the sun was at its peak and my guess is that this was possibly triggered by excess solar power in the system that caused a frequency imbalance that couldn’t be stabilised in a grid with insufficient spinning inertia. But you can’t rule out a cyber attack. Did the Chinese use Spain as a trial run to test an inverter based grid attack ?. We know that almost all of the inverters are made from China, using Chinese software and are connected online. Switching off a large bank of inverters or by removing their over-frequency derating settings could cause this type of outage.
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That power distribution graph shown was so interesting.
Add the Solar PV, Wind, Solar Thermal, Cogeneration/Waste sources and it adds up to around 82%.
Okay, you say, that’s good. (but only IF you’re a renewables supporter)
Most of that is from Inverters, and some small MW Units, so as Lance and others have pointed out, they offer no large heavy spinning ‘reference’ for frequency control, hence, with few large spinning references, then absolute frequency control is minimal at best.
Now, see that Solar Thermal (Concentrated Solar Power, CSP) there’s 1500MW. That’s from an overall CSP Nameplate of 2400MW, so it’s operating at around a Capacity Factor of 62.5%, Again, you might think that’s good.
However, that Nameplate is from around 50 plants, so only at an average of 50MW per plant. That 50MW is pretty much the best you can get from CSP. (and even then they all need Natural Gas to operate them initially, in the hours before the compounds come up to operating temperature)
Now, while those 50MW Units offer ‘some’ spinning reference, consider this.
FIFTY plants for a Nameplate of 2400MW.
And that’s still only 90% of Bayswater, and Bayswater DOES have 4 Large Units with heavy spinning reference for that important frequency control.
50 CSP plants cost humungously more than ONE coal fired power plant.
Now, as I mentioned in a recent comment here, again see how power generation is closely linked back to ….. SCIENCE.
Tony.
PostScript – And see how they use carefully worded, and reasonably sounding technical speak (mumbo jumbo really) to ‘explain away’ the reasons behind this.
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This is what happens when Electrical Engineers are no longer allowed to design/run/maintain an Electricity Grid.
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The trains in Spain fail mainly as do plains (ruinables!)
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“REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”
A triumph of leftist govt inspired doublespeak.
About the only bit of that you could believe is “synchronisation failure”, in other words, when France detected a wobble, they disconnected them causing a cascading failure due to “synch anomalies”.
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