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.