Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified. Spanish rail giant Renfe said trains across the country had stopped as of 1230 Central European Time (1030 UTC) as "the entire national electricity grid was cut off," with Spanish grid …
Radio was the only channel for most people in these countries today. There was not even phone connection in most places.
iPhone users were certainly lost. It is always a good idea not to throw away that AA-battery powered old radio or an mp3 player with radio included. Old smartphones with a 3.5-connector/radio would be collecting dust without charge, unfortunately. Lithium-battery powered devices are not great for critical situations.
I'm lucky... Running off solar and using starlink. The starlink ground station is in Madrid so it must be running off backup power. No TV now and I did think it was kind of daft running TV "disaster" specials when no one had leccy or mobile reception to receive anything with. Bet Gen Z will need therapy after this.
Re". iPhone users were certainly lost.
Not sure why you highlight iPhone users. All smartphones get through batteries quickly, and even if they didn't, the various mobile networks would not have lasted that long without electricity, so it's likely any mobile phone without satellite facilities was useless.
Because Samsung phones with 3.5mm connectors still have FM radio. All the innovative Apple could do something, as it advertises itself as a safety-oriented device. FM modules cost pennies.
> All smartphones get through batteries quickly <- Not if you switch them off. And switch on only to listen for the latest news from the radio. Again, Apple could innovate to operate a radio even with the phone switched off.
Unfortunately FM requires wired headphones as an antenna. With popular smartphones now mostly having wireless Li-accumulator headphones. Oopsy.
My Samsung with a headphone jack (A12) doesn’t have an FM radio which is annoying because normally I don’t buy a phone without one. I only bought that one because I was going abroad and the backlight on the then current phone had died. The £30 Nokia I have does have a FM radio on it and in an area with a strong station I don’t even need the headphone cable. It’s much better with the cable though or one of these https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/364200907544 and plays through the phone speaker.
"All smartphones get through batteries quickly,"
Many smartphone users (as in addicted) get through batteries quickly. The impact to all of society is greater than anybody thinks. My guilty indulgence is cop shows on YT and plenty of the people being detained and arrested go absolutely ape-shit-crazy when separated from their phones or can't be bothered to hang up the phone on a traffic stop to talk with the officer and instead hold up a finger to have them wait while they blather.
I think I put my phone on the charger every 3 days or so. The battery is getting old and I expect if I fitted a new one, it would last longer. I don't bury myself neck-deep in the phone and leave Data/WF/BT off when I'm not actively using them. My audiobook iPod gets charged each night.
charge it in your car. probably not going anywhere, be out of fuel for most vehicles trying to get somewhere with power. no pumps no chargers. power only out for 4 days? not too bad. lost power for 6 days in a halloween ice storm a number of years ago, and it was getting pretty cold. knew people with no power for a week and a half. been through some pretty big outages in 2003 and 1967. took a chunk of canada with us.
Yeah, living somewhere where power outages are more frequent does generally make it easier to cope because you plan for the expected. Most of the EU, power outages are relatively rare, many people never experience more than a few hours of a local outage, so are not prepared for the unexpected and very rare wider and longer lasting outages. My personal experience of power outages here in the UK were the miners strikes in the 70's with rolling blackouts and maybe a dozen at most short very localised (maybe a square mile or so) lasting up to maybe 8 hours (last one was actually 3 days, but they had a large generator hooked up to the local substation with a 4 or 5 hours. I'm looking at about 60 years of my personal memory here, other may have a different experience, especially in more rural areas :-)
They are blaming "induced atmospheric vibration" probably aeolian vibration (apparently happens with slow, uniform, laminar-flow wind perpendicular to the transmission line), which suggests that this was a single transmission line fault which then cascaded. If so, then the next question is: Did anyone at the Spanish grid operator realise that they were a single fault away from a nationwide blackout?
> I expect there are 10 years worth of unanswered emails and memos advising management of the fact.
Probably not, complex chaotic systems are complex and chaotic
System A is perfectly stable and can't fail because off system B, System B is totally reliable as long as system C is online and system C is 100% uptime so long as system A is available - only there are 97 interconnected systems in the state and nobody knew
A similar size power out event happened in the USA and Canada in 2003. While it is complex and there are many ultimate reasons, a degree of it was put down to a section of line being poorly maintained and failed during a particularly high use period. This caused other parts of the grid and stations to try and fix it with force and get around the problem area, but since they were already maxed out it caused a cascade failure when asked to push just that bit more.
So yeah stuff like this is known and was on a list of 'to get to' but it wasn't. And it failed. I imagine a similar outcome will come to light in time here
https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/2/9/what-really-happened-during-the-2003-blackout
Stockbridge dampers- yes. But different oscillation modes have different frequencies.. This mode is considered 'rare' apparently, so maybe the dampers are tuned to a different frequency.
There is another explanation going around that it is 'extreme temperature variations' i.e. thermal expansion related.. Both cause failure by metal fatigue.
I wonder if it is all speculation so far besides some evidence of metal fatigue on a damaged overhead line, which the power company haven't yet made public
>” There is another explanation going around that it is 'extreme temperature variations' ”
Given the network has survived months of summer temperatures, also winter temperatures, I doubt any of the temperatures recorded in the last 48 hours could be construed as “ extreme”.
Not saying temperature might have caused a failing component to finally fail.
I suspect if the network contains any Chinese or US manufactured “smart” equipment (known to be insecure by design and thus have been compromised by hackers) then I suggest a cyber attack is highly likely to have been the trigger, with the network protection doing what it was designed to do and shutting the network down.
A cyber attack also explains why there is no clarity as to the cause, and why restarting the network is going to be challenging.
The 2003 one here in Ontario, and most of northeastern US was blamed on terrorism, then Canada ( apparently having stone knives and bearskins operating the electrical grid ), then a series of bizarre conspiracies from the white house ( yes, GB was just a tiny-Trump).
Eventually, the real root cause was identified as the incompetence of a single operating company.
All the other mud was flung to keep their stock from cratering until the important people had cashed out.
same old, same old.
"A causa di estreme variazioni di temperatura in Spagna ci sono state oscillazioni anomale nelle linee ad altissima tensione: un fenomeno detto vibrazione atmosferica indotta" according to La Repubblica
[Extreme temperature variations causing [vibrations|oscillations]? in the high voltage lines, a phenomenon known as induced atmospheric vibrations.]
https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2025/04/28/diretta/black_out_in_tutta_la_spagna-_le_news_evacuata_la_metropolitana_di_madrid-424153463/?ref=RHLF-BG-P3-S1-T1-RIAPERTURA-
I love the fact that this was reported via the Italian press. When I was studying Italian and had to write altogether four pieces of work, one of them was "Il Giorno del Blackout" (yes, that was the word that La Repubblica used). Every line of my essay had a citation to an Italian newspaper article (mainly La Repubblica, because it uses fairly straightforward language). But the teacher didn't like it. She wanted me to write about some seriously self-indulgent Italian film director. Strange though she could be, she was actually the best language teacher I've had (apart from my partner).
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The naked anti-Russian Racism is so glaring - you will never forgive them for defeating the Nazis, Again.
Truly sickening, do you blame all Americans for Trump or Biden perpetrating a Genocide ? no, but Russia it's acceptable to demonize millions of people, because you claim to disagree with the actions of the Government - horseshit - it's the same naked racism as was ever thus.
Er..
Suspecting a blatant, obvious, well-known "anti-west troll" of being a Russian troll is hardly "demonising millions of people" - it's demonising the few thousand people who work in Putin's Internet-troll department.
Nobody here is demonising ordinary Russians who live their daily lives terrified of one day being sent to the pointless war.
OK, I'll put my head above the parapit.
If he/she is a troll, call them a troll.
If they are representing the Russian state either officialy or off their own bat, call them Russian but bear in mind that they may not represent the population who are generably just trying to get bye.
If they are christians (Russia is a nominaly christian country) call them christian, but only if it is relevant ie the Russian church was supporting some point of view.
If they are Israeli and it is relevant ie they are representing the view of the government, by all means call them that.
If it is relevant call them Jewish if they are representing a religious viewpoint (may be in the case of the more extreme, fundimentalist viewpoints). Bear in mind though that most folk who's religion is judaism are just ordinary folk like Buddists, Musslims, Christians, aethiests around the world.
Grouping people can be helpfull, but needs nuance. We are too ready to loosely group jewish fundimentalist facists under the heading of 'Jew' in the same way that some, with an axe to grind, classify all Palastinians as terrorists.
Both generalisations are wrong and results in conflict.
I mostly agree with what you wrote. I would quibble with the suggestion that Ukrainian fascist nationalism is associated with Judaism by people other than Zionists, who in the main are not Jewish.
Judaism and Zionism are antithetical to one another.
Jewish Supremacism is a sub-specialism of White Supremacism, and like all supremacist idealogical narratives is concerned with power relations not logic or religious beliefs, it's mostly a belief in EthnoNationalism using Jews as a helpful rhetorical shield, but US backed Zionist State Terrorist group on trial for Genocide at ICJ today https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1b/k1bqp5ffpz
A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Seahttps://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid
There are no Israelis, only members of US backed Zionist State Terror group, mostly Eastern European like Internationally wanted fugitive Polish Genocide Perpetrator Ben "Bibi" Milekowsky, and Ukrainian Fascist Homophobe Bezalel Smotrich https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/11/10/war-in-the-middle-east-israeli-minister-bezalel-smotrich-a-supremacist-and-revisionist-should-not-be-welcomed-in-france_6732288_23.html
The rest is sophistry. The Genocidal terrorist group who assassinated Lord Moyne, sent letter bombs to Churchill and enslaved Palestinians who survived the Nakba initial genocide and expulsion, are essentially the same Polish Purloiners, Lithuanian Liars, Romanian racists, Hungarian heisters, Belarusian Blaggers, Ukrainians Usurpers, French Fascists, German Grabbers, British Burglars, armed by Aggressive Americans in 1917, today.
It’s based on the writings of an Austrian Atheist Author with distinctive facial hair who having divided the world into the untermench, and the supermen who needed lebensraum, decreed the supermen were justified in the extermination of the people of Palestine to build the “old new land”.
No Palestinians are Terrorists, they are under occupation by US backed Zionist State Terrorist group, and as such have every right to use violence to rid themselves of the Genocidal occupier.
Some Palestinians are members of UK Proscribed organisations, which should not be taken as a Judgement on their activities, given the UK doesn't require any reason to proscribe an organisation,
so may choose to proscribe the Milk Marketing Board tomorrow, and supporting them will be legally equivalent to supporting any other proscribed group. It would not be lawful to be reckless in allowing someone else to think you might support the Milk Marketing Board.
This is clearly not based on their actions when the same laws may target armed groups abroad and unarmed civilian groups with completely different aims, actions, idealogical motivations
The UK is now supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria, you know the headchoppers, flew planes into buildings, that Al-Qaeda. Like what the actual.
Just Ask the UK government who HTS are
Al Qa’ida (AQ) - Proscribed March 2001
Inspired and led by Usama Bin Laden, its aims are the expulsion of Western forces from Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Israel and the end of Western influence in the Muslim world.
The government laid Orders, in July 2013 December 2016 and May 2017, which provided that the “al-Nusrah Front (ANF)”, “Jabhat al-Nusrah li-ahl al Sham”, “Jabhat Fatah al-Sham” and “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” should be treated as alternative names for the organisation which is already proscribed under the name Al Qa’ida.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/proscribed-terror-groups-or-organisations--2/proscribed-terrorist-groups-or-organisations-accessible-version#list-of-proscribed-international-terrorist-groups
The Russians didn't defeat the nazis. That was the Soviet Union. Ukraine lost more people fighting the nazis than Russia, per head of population so why back Russia over Ukraine? The USSR was led by a Georgian then so why back Russia over Georgia? Russians aren't a different race to the rest of Europe so saying this isn't racism.
There is no-one in the Russian government today who fought the nazis. There is no-one in the German government who was one. Look at their actions now.
There is an entire Russian government fighting Nazis in Ukraine backed by the US/UK/Germans, There are large numbers of heavily Nazi tattooed captured Nazis, quite famously was the steelworks,
where the guardian featured adoring photographs shot by a well known Nazi.
1 Publish on the Nazi Brigades Telegram - https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/11/inside-the-azovstal-steelworks-in-pictures
2 Galleries not keen on Nazis -
https://hyperallergic.com/781937/ukrainian-photographers-show-canceled-over-neo-nazism-accusations/Ukrainian Photographer’s Show Canceled Over Neo-Nazism Accusations
Dmytro “Orest” Kozatsky, a member of the Azov Battalion, said his social media posts depicting hate symbols were “taken out of context.”
To be clear it's the same white washed Nazi
Dmytro Kozatsky, Azov Regiment fighter and photographer, documented the siege of the Azovstal metalworks. Before his capture he posted his pictures on
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2022/may/23/inside-the-battle-for-the-azovstal-metalworks
Are the US funding Russian Nazis as well as Ukrainian Nazis?
Are the UK funding Russian Nazis as well as Ukrainian Nazis?
Have you any links to photos by said Russian Nazis published in UK Press with glowing references and soft soaping the photographer ?
Have you any evidence at all for the incorporation of Russian Nazis into automatous Military units and their integration into the Russian Army?
Because that's Ukraine a Nazi State, can you find a Nazi Russian, sure fighting for Ukraine at this point, like all the other European Nazis.
But Russian doesn't have a Nazi occupation, and Nazi Government, statues to Nazis, and a declared intent of exterminating the subhumans - all of which Nazi Ukraine has in spades.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
Ukraine has several dozen monuments and scores of street names glorifying this Nazi collaborator, enough to require two separate Wikipedia pages (there are so many Bandera streets that only a few are listed in this project). These include:
joint monuments to him and Roman Shukhevych in Cherkasy, Horishniy, Pochaiv, Rudky and Zaviy;
a monument to him, Shukhevych and other OUN leaders in Morshyn;
a monument to him and his father in Pidpechery;
a plaque and monument in Lutsk;
a bas-relief, monument and museum in Dubliany;
a plaque, monument and museum (with bust) in Stryi;
a plaque, street and monument in Zdolbuniv;
monuments in Berezhany, Boryslav, Buchach, Chervonohrad, Chortkiv, Drohobych, Dubno, Hordynya, Horodenka, Hrabivka (Ivano-Frankivsk Raion), Kalush, Kamianka-Buzka, Kolomiya, Kozivka, Kremenets, Krushel’nytsya, Kyiv, L’viv, (and a plaque), Mlyniv,Mostyska, Mykolaiv (L’viv Oblast), Mykytyntsi, Nyzhnye (Sambir Raion), Pidvolochysk, Romanivka, Sambir, Skole, Sniatyn, Staryi Sambir, Seredniy Bereziv, Sokal, Sosnivka, Strusiv, Tatariv, Terebovlia, Truskavets, Turka, Uzyn, Velyki Mosty, Verbiv (Narayiv Hromada), Zahirochka and Zalishchyky;
a plaque and street in Sniatyn and Zhytomyr;
plaques in Ivano-Frankivsk, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne;
museums in Staryi Uhryniv (with a statue and memorial plaque) and Volya-Zaderevatska (with a bust and bas-relief);
a park in Kamianka-Buzka;
a street in Dnipro; and a school in Dobromyl.
https://forward.com/news/462916/nazi-collaborator-monuments-in-ukraine/
There are open Nazi in the German Government supporting the Genocide of Palestinians with a racial supremacism and deep funding of Ukrainians with Literal Hitler tattoos.
There were more Nazis in the West German Government post WW2 [1] than during, and the Nazi to NATO [2] pipeline is well established, the support for Racial supremacism continued unabated with enthusiastic support for two apartheid regimes, and zero remorse for the Genocide in Namibia.
Germany is today chock full of Racism where the sight of heavy build blonde German man dressed in Black, beating up a Jew protesting for Palestinian Rights is not uncommon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHFWS7rMixk
This continued in the naked support for Genocide evidenced by the Germans submissions at the ICJ and the constant stream of Arms provided to the US backed Zionist State Terrorist group in defiance of the ICJ ruling on the illegality of such support.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification
[2] https://asawinstanley.substack.com/p/natos-secret-nazi-armies
Ukraine lost more people fighting the nazis than Russia, per head of population so why back Russia over Ukraine?
Ukraine also lost more people per capita fighting for the nazis. Then they lost more after the Soviets liberated Ukraine and some reprisals against those nazi collaborators. And then more when the Banderites decided to switch to killing Soviets instead. And then the Banderites started becoming a bigger influence in Ukraine after their coup, and the rest is becoming more history.
But that's all rather off-topic, and this event is more interesting because it potentially highlights the weakness of EU energy policy, infrastructure and dependence on 'renewables'.
Our Supreme Twit Donald spent 23 of the first 92 days in office playing golf at his course in West Palm Beach. He's getting tired of the same old course, especially as his Honduran and Guatemalan grounds staff have all departed one step ahead of ICE and the hedge outside the property is looking a bit shaggy.
especially as his Honduran and Guatemalan grounds staff have all departed one step ahead of ICE
I wouldn't be at all surprised if ICE is leaving Palm Beach County alone just to be sure, to avoid the headlines that would result if a bunch of illegal aliens working at his swamp palace got deported.
"Why tell me something that's not relevant to ME?"
Are you living a completely digital life where your phone and little plastic cards get you through the day. Not a Real in your pocket? No change in a bowl by the door?
I know people that are like that and when they have no cell signal, they have no money. Where I live, most merchants are using the same internet provider so when service is down, all of the shops are cash only.
This sort of thing is just getting worse. Look at how much fun M&S is having. Do you think there's any chance they'll compartmentalize their IT operations going forward so an issue in one link of the chain unhooks the boat from the anchor? I don't. C-Level is enamored with systems that are all joined up. Throw in a power outage somewhere and it's massive loss of profit along with a load of pissed off customers that don't care why you screwed up.
Same reason why El Reg reported on Heathrow being caught with its pants down after the substation caught fire recently.
And given there's a plan to build a large number of solar plants in Morocco, and connecting that to a HVDC line to the UK, maybe connecting through Spain/Portugal would probably out of the question now.
Power systems are being run ever closer to the edge of capacity what with complacency caused by years of falling demand as things got more efficient leading to power stations (especially coal) being turned off and not much new stuff built
Now demand is going up and it can take just one power failure event to black out the entire country (or 2 in this case). Doing a black start nationwide is a nightmare and something many countries have not had to do for a very long time as power is "always on" somewhere. Renewable power like solar and wind also cause more instability.
So do you want to stick your head in the sand and ignore such an event that could happen to you? And it is not just no power - as reported communications go down cutting off people from information, card and digital payments fail , have you got an emergency cash supply ??
The theory of grid systems is that the loss of one major interconnect should be mitigated by other connections but as you say they are all running near, or at, capacity so there is no head room.
Large scale PV will always be subject to large variations. A single cloud going over can drop the output by 90+%.
One of the issues with the Ivanpah solar thermal plant was the tendency of the area to get scattered cloud cover and they had to keep the steam temperature up using natural gas.
"One of the issues with the Ivanpah solar thermal plant was the tendency of the area to get scattered cloud cover and they had to keep the steam temperature up using natural gas."
There was also the issue of keeping the salt hot enough to stay liquid rather than freezing up in the pipes. And the obliteration of birds lured in by the mirrors looking like a lake.
The molten salt one is crescent dunes in the Nevada desert. Ivanpah is the one in CA just north of the I15 just before Primm and is a pure solar to steam with no intermediate stage.
Crescent dunes was a good idea but oh so complex.
Both insta-fry birds.
"The molten salt one is crescent dunes in the Nevada desert. Ivanpah is the one in CA just north of the I15 just before Primm and is a pure solar to steam with no intermediate stage."
Since the Ivanpah is scheduled for closure in 2026, the web site being offline might be permanent. Wikipedia does say that gas is used, but doesn't describe the heat cycle of the generation system. I don't think using water as the working fluid would be viable. I've driven by the installation when it was active and holy bird smoker is it bright and super white. I tried to get a photo and couldn't tame the exposure with a 10-stop filter and a super fast shutter speed.
The mirrors look like a lake and I'll wager that birds see it that way too and by the time they fly over and get a different angle, it's too late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
The plants use BrightSource Energy's "Luz Power Tower 550" (LPT 550) technology[25] which heats the steam to 550 °C directly in the receivers.[26] The plants have no storage.[27]
The upside is that the system is simple, water in, steam out. The downside is that if the sun intensity changes the steam out changes quite rapidly. Zero thermal inertia.
https://iowaclimate.org/2025/02/01/ivanpah-solar-plant-the-flaming-failure-thats-finally-being-put-out-of-our-misery/
Its never really made it past 50% capacity. It was a nice idea but turned into a proper boondoggle! If you've watched 'Planet of the humans' it was claimed that the mirrors were not being maintained and this claim was disputed. Go on google maps and you can see many smashed mirrors just left on the ground. It is a tiny fraction of the total but you get the feeling that the owners sorta gave up on the plant pretty soon after opening. They could see the writing on the wall.
Spain has a number of CSP plants that seem to work ok but most have an intermediate working fluid. I believe Crescent dunes was based on a Spanish design.
"Not battery storage. Diesel storage for generating power."
Generation wasn't the issue. The distribution got knackered. The Great New York Blackout was caused by one component tripping out and causing a cascade of failure. South Australia had the same thing happen to them after they switched from a few discrete power generation stations to many intermittent sources (wind mostly) and the grid hadn't been designed for that.
"It also drives industry to China, who now burn in the order of 30% of global coal production."
China is very good at flinging up coal power plants in minimal time. Given how bad their air quality gets, I expect that once they've conquered the commercial world, they will have also transitioned away from burning so much coal. Bootstrapping with no concern about the environment in the mean time.
"Not battery storage. Diesel storage for generating power."
As the end user, it works better for me to have the battery storage than rely on the "grid". My chest freezer runs on solar with batteries that get charged from the panels. I have a switching system that uses the mains for backup if the batteries go flat and the temperature goes too high. It's does me no good for the power company to have a battery back up if they can't get the power to me for some reason. At the moment, the freezer is stuffed as I've just done a big shopping run and a bunch of stuff was on offer. It would be expensive to have to bin it all due to an outage. If the chest freezer failed (it has an alarm), I could stuff the more expensive stuff in the kitchen freezer, but that won't hold all that much even if I take out the shelves and pack it solid.
Absolutely, homes and businesses should have battery storage and solar panels / wind. It's "grid battery" storage, and large-scale wind/solar farms that we really DON'T need.
Nevertheless there are technical challenges with distributed generation, most inverters require an upstream AC 50Hz source to synchronise with, otherwise they don't work. Of course it is possible to run an inverter in off-grid mode, but it is dangerous to have one that can operate both on- and off-grid, usually they are one or the other and not both. (without interlocks, you risk driving your inverter into the grid i.e. an effective short-circuit, or electrocuting a maintenance technician who tests a cable dead which then becomes live, or closing a switch with both sides live but out of phase, resulting in double the normal short circuit current and a spectacular bang..)
All of this means that the more distributed generation and centralised renewable generation that we have, it makes it all the more difficult to restart a grid once it collapses
If every household were equipped with the necessary switchgear to make on/off grid microgeneration safe, then we would have much better resilience and I hope that's what starts to come in the wake of this incident
Germany is seeing a boom in 'micro generation', or as they call it, 'Balkonkraftwerke'. They've gone for the plug-in style type panel designs, so as long as you remain under a certain wattage, you can plug your panels into the wall. What then happens is that you use more of your own juice instead of the grid's, so I suspect power usage and generation is a lot more local and evened out. However, I think to feed back into the grid, you need to have your setup installed by professionals and also connected to your meter. Or at least that was the case a couple of years ago when this was raised by a relative.
"I think to feed back into the grid, you need to have your setup installed by professionals and also connected to your meter. "
Oh yes, and the inverter needs to cut off if the grid goes down so a lineman doesn't get fried while trying to make repairs.
If you have panels and a battery storage box (really, it's silly to call it a solar generator), running a small appliance and charging devices is easy. I'm itching to go pick up some surplus PV panels I found selling for $20ea (170W). They have others that are better on a cost/watt basis but won't fit in my car and it's a pretty long drive to get them so renting a vehicle isn't a deal. If I can get something like a mini van for a day cheap, I may do that. My friend's full size pickup would do the job, but costs a mint in petrol.
Having looked into this again a bit more, the inverters are included in the deals the German companies do. And apparently, the only thing you *do* need to do is have your meter changed (to avoid backwards-running meterage that is considered fraud, since on a small DIY setup you're not paid a FIT).
Getting a small 800Wp setup (the maximum you can have in a DIY setup without regulatory fuss) for €200-300 is pretty darn good, and if you add a small (2kWh) battery storage pack to that for another €800-900, you can save a lot of electricity apparently. Of course, this does not mean you can run your home off-grid completely. For that you'd probably need a professionally-installed* setup.
* YMMV
"and if you add a small (2kWh) battery storage pack to that for another €800-900,"
I keep hoping I can get some things flogged off so I can get a couple of batteries a local seller has for $325ea. 24v, 5kWh beasts. A pair would be quite nice hooked in series for 10kWh at 48v. Rather than use the system as a backup, I'd make it the primary source for a couple of things and use the mains as a backup via a transfer switch. The feed-in tariff will keep going down so I do much better to offset usage than sell power back.
"most inverters require an upstream AC 50Hz source to synchronise with, otherwise they don't work. Of course it is possible to run an inverter in off-grid mode, but it is dangerous to have one that can operate both on- and off-grid, usually they are one or the other and not both."
It's not a technical issue, but inverters that can work both ways are more expensive. Many will be sold the cheapest system where the installer can do the most markup on the kit. I always say to never ask the installer to provide the design.
Where I live now, we get more outages than the almost none where I had lived previously. That means the system I'd want would be different. It gets quite hot in the summer so I want my swamp cooler completely off-grid this season. I'm nearly there, but after the sun starts going down, it's back to mains. Being able to run the whole house off-grid has some appeal, but there's only been one time when the power has been off for many hours. I don't see the point in spending all of the money to cover every contingency. If the food in the fridge and freezer will be kept cold and I can cool the house in summer (I have passive solar heating for winter), I'm good to go. I can grab a torch to move around after dark and be content with listening to an audio book until I want to go to bed. In a big emergency, I figure I'm clever enough to work something out.
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No country has 100% guaranteed energy resilience and quite frankly, never will, no matter what resources are thrown at it.
It's unachievable over an indeterminate period as there are always modes of failure,which however unlikely will happen given a long enough period.
Accept that and plan for failure. That's what engineers do.
"No country has 100% guaranteed energy resilience and quite frankly, never will, no matter what resources are thrown at it."
The analysis has to be ongoing since the grid anywhere is constantly undergoing changes. If a new bit is added on and the analysis doesn't go very far up the chain, there's no telling what might happen. I just watched a show on the Citicorp building in NY where somebody asked a question of the structural engineer that made him go back and check on some things. It turned out there was a 100% chance the building would fall over and start a domino effect with other tall buildings around it. It wasn't just one thing and the initial analysis was done the same way that it had always been done but the building was employing a very new design and the diagonal bracing that was supposed to be welded was bolted together which might have been fine if some other engineer didn't come up with a plan to use 4x fewer bolts than it would take at an absolute minimum. (Static vs dynamic loading and also considering wind only flat-on to the sides, not on the corners).
It's a good idea to have a devil's advocate department that spends their days asking "what if". It's like the Feynman story were he's looking at building plans for a Uranium separation plant and randomly points at something where he has no idea what the thing is and asks, "what happens if this fails" and happens to spot a serious problem completely by chance. It made the designers go back and re-evaluate the whole plant based on a similar assumption. Sometimes you just get lucky. If you never do the analysis, you'll never get lucky.
"Accept that and plan for failure. That's what engineers do."
Plan to cover immediate needs. If you work up a plan to replace your power service entirely for an indeterminate period of time, you can spend loads of money that will have very little return. I'll live without running the coffee maker, microwave, toaster and hair dryer all at the same time. I can live without using any of them although I would be using the gas hob to make coffee.
The Iberian Pensinsula is an "energy island" with not nearly enough interconnects, which is not going to help: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/fr/memo_18_4622 or google "iberian interconnects". No idea if it's a constributing factor here, but I'll wager it's not helping them get back on their feet.
"It is worth remembering that the US has never had a single frequency sync'd grid nor has it desired one."
I don't think I really grasped how big the US was until I stopped flying and started taking the train. There's miles and miles (yeah, 'those' units again) of nothing between some islands of population which would mean a tremendous amount of transmission losses to try and build a single interconnected grid.
.. there was a popular graffiti at major railway stations, airports and sea ports:
"Would the last person to leave the country please turn off the lights."
It seems to have been a cascade from a single failure, rather than a problem at an actual 'single point of failure'. It is indeed worrying that such a massive outage could occur due to a single event. The report from the technical inquiry will make interesting reading for power engineers the world over.
Gemini AI
In a rapidly transitioning electricity grid with increasing renewable energy penetration, grid inertia, the resistance to frequency changes, is a crucial factor for stability. Traditional fossil fuel generators provide inherent inertia due to their rotating masses, but renewable sources like wind and solar, while beneficial for sustainability, lack this inherent inertia. This decrease in inertia can lead to faster frequency changes, making the grid more susceptible to disturbances and potentially causing power outages.
Spain hits first weekday of 100% renewable power on national grid
Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, with wind, solar, and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday. Five days later, solar set a new record, generating 20,120 MW of instantaneous power – covering 78.6% of demand and 61.5% of the grid mix.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/22/spain-hits-first-weekday-of-100-renewable-power-on-national-grid/
Another sad consequence of adopting the Net Zero cult which the public was never made aware of.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes!
You are quoting an AI bot which is known for spouting made-up rubbish. I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make or prove.
Renewable power sources lack inertia. Look it up.
You might want to do your own research instead of revealing your ignorance time and again on these forums.
Cool that you think asking an LLM is 'doing your own research'.
Cool that you seem to be maintaining the fiction that the output of said LLM is somehow inaccurate with regard to grid inertia.
Instead of throwing out ad hominems, why not dispute the claim that this outage was very likely caused by a lack of inertia in the Spanish power network?
Google's LLM happily told me about street in a nearby town, over several paragraphs, including great detail about its history and special conservation status. Of course I'd got the wrong town and the street didn't exist.
So whether its right or wrong, the burden of proof is definitely on you to tell us why you think it's due to grid inertia. Quote a source, not an LLM.
"Renewable power sources lack inertia. Look it up."
Only relevant if that's your prime source and you are still relying on it. UK has been looking at "black start" from bottom up renewables instead of top down coal/gas/nuclear since at least 2019 and from what I read, has been tested and due to be available next year. Of course, I could be wrong, I read this a year or more back. Is our resident power systems guy still reading here and might know some details?
> from what I read, has been tested and due to be available next year.
It can't have been tested, because we haven't had a nationwide blackout to test it with yet!
There is such a thing as a "grid-forming inverter" that can run without an upstream supply, and there is also such a thing as "virtual inertia" whereby a battery-backed inverter will try to stabilise the frequency at 50Hz. However, both have stability problems when you try to connect multiple 'islands' together to form a larger grid (i.e. your 'bottom up' approach)
I personally think we need to follow Spain and have an organised test of our Black Start systems, we may soon need them!
Well firstly I'd take anything produced by any AI /LLM with a truly massive pinch of salt. Secondly '100% renewable power' doesn't actually mean what it implies.What it means is that in theory, for a (short) time, renewable energy generation, ie solar, wind, could, theoretically have provided the entire requirements for that period. ff course the second that the sun goes down and/or the wind stops blowing then all bets are off!
And that's fine, small steps, yes?
In theory, 'renewable' energy sources 'could' provide all the energy requirements of the human race, but like I said, 'in theory'. In reality it's not always there when you need it, sorry about that and methods of storing energy are cumbersome, inefficient and expensive.
Which brings us back to the obvious, which is nuclear (be that fission or (hopefully in ten to twenty years)) fusion power. Renewables do, absolutely do, have their place. Now in an ideal world imagine a massive solar collector farm in northern Africa, and another in Australia and another in central America, plus massive wind turbine farms in the North Sea etc, all connected to a world-wide grid, that distributed energy to where it was needed.
Alas we don't live in an ideal world, the chances of a rogue government cutting off supplies because of 'reasons' is approaching 100%. Maybe one day; I'm an optimist!
So Beast.
You're now using AI as your Russian - English translator has maxed out for today.
I guess your country would fund it harder to bomb 10,000 solar panels and wind turbines than a single power station. But you've kind of move on from that and just go for killing kids.
Same with thermal. In Australia when one of the old coal fire power stations has an emergency shutdown and the rest were not able to completely cover it.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/coal-generator-to-face-court-over-blackouts-caused-by-catastrophic-explosion/
https://www.afr.com/politics/portland-smelter-200000-victorian-homes-lose-power-in-chaotic-day-for-energy-markets-20190125-h1ai39
Probably because their power is off.
Maybe there is a TikTok craze - everyone in Iberia hoovering at once. Or maybe a cleaner just unplugged the wrong thing.
The moral of this is obvious. I can only repeat what I often say on here: The pivot to digital reduces our resilience. We need to be able to function better when hacked or when the power goes off, because with climate change it will do that more often. So we need to retain real cash. And stuff needs to work manually as a plan B.
Time will tell whether this is an epic fail - a single point of failure that nobody could be arsed to fix, or an epic hack. Either way, this will be one for the textbooks.
Probably because the only viable way to travel to inspect the field equipment is Don Quixote style on horse back, but probably more likely like Sancho on a donkey… plus having made the trip, there is the return trip…
"I live in Spain, the Govt. took 6 hours to respond and said absolutely nothing. "
Other cities have moved communications to the internet or regular cell network and found that it can go down during large emergencies. Not only can they not get field reports, they can't disseminate any information that they might have.
As a "ham", our clubs practice communicating while completely off-grid every year during "field day". It's loads of fun for a weekend and we try to make as many unique contacts as we can from all over the world and even to/from space. Our club runs all of the radios from solar/battery and I think our planning meeting is in a couple of weeks so we know who's bringing what and how we can combine stuff. Cities should be able to do the same thing completely separate from the internet and cell network for police and fire. They should also have good contacts with local ham clubs to be able to call them in if needed.
Due to decades of underinvestment since most EU countries privatised their grid and generation capabilities, the grid in Europe, Scandinavia and the UK has become increasingly fragile. Cascading failures are almost guaranteed and this problem is not a "freak, one off event caused by weather".
As soon as politicians started selling off national infrastructure to make short term profit and get rid of the responsibility for maintaining critical infrastructure, this was inevitable. People in the industry have been warning of these risks for at least the last two decades and have been roundly ignored by the politicians as infrastructure is no longer their problem.
The next one will probably take out a much larger area and take much longer to get the grid up again.
"As soon as politicians started selling off national infrastructure to make short term profit and get rid of the responsibility for maintaining critical infrastructure, this was inevitable."
Another major part of the problem is the private utilities being treated the same as any other for-profit corporation. There should be more controls since that base level of infrastructure is so vital. In the US where utilities can be a monopoly in an area, why do they need to advertise and sponsor sports venues? Why are their corporate executives allowed to draw obscene salaries? Why should they be allowed to invest in financial markets rather than invest that money into upkeep and upgrades?
"Because upkeep and upgrades spend money rather than add to investors stock price maybe?"
Which draws an arrow back to "why are utility companies being treated like every other for-profit corporation?"
Should there be investors with expectations of growth? I'd like to see a special class of corporation for utilities that are privately operated, but under rules similar to those that a utility owned by a municipality must operate under. I don't like them being run by government due to how inefficient government can be doing such things.
Why simulate it when there will be elements of dispatchable generation within the grid mix already in spinning reserve and more than capable of running in frequency control mode? ( I think most here understand that coal is not a prerequisite).
This simulation method would be useful on small subgrids but across a National or Continental grid there will be some Nuke or Gas generation more than capable of acting as the Frequency 'clocks' which are a fundamental distribution grid requirement.
An external clock isn't needed - the grid can provide that. What is needed is to vary the phase of the current fed to the grid according to the frequency of the voltage received from the grid - just as the armature of a real alternator would.
If the grid is running slow, current leads voltage. If it's fast, current lags voltage.
This effect can be powered by local batteries which can also be used for storage.
The algorithm should be trivial for any competent DSP engineer
Yes and no. Part of the grid frequency regulation is a electro-mechanical property of the many multi-hundreds of ton spinning turbines and alternators out there. These huge generators are actually magnetically phase locked together simply by being linked to the grid. If you reduce the steam flow to a turbine it initially won't slow down, it will maintain speed as the grid will keep it turning in sync, to a point.
This is a property that electronic systems do not inherently have and the vast majority of inverters currently installed are just grid following.
Look up synchro systems, its really very cool how you can lock magnetic devices together with electricity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchro
I don't think you are familiar with power generation nonclementure.
Frequency control mode is a specific function of large power generation facility control systems. The control is tuned specifically to resist or force changes to the local grid frequency. When in this mode they are sometimes referred to as 'clocks'.
Grid will request specific generation capacity in a particular area to run in this mode and the specific generation company will receive an appropriate fee for doing so
This effect can be powered by local batteries which can also be used for storage.
The algorithm should be trivial for any competent DSP engineer
Inertia wouldn't even be an issue worth mentioning if the solution was as trivial as you claim.
People are truly hard of thinking here!
Inertia wouldn't even be an issue worth mentioning if the solution was as trivial as you claim.People are truly hard of thinking here!
But to be fair, people are struggling with cognitive dissonance after years of lobbying from the 'renewables' scumbags. Wind not blowing? Just add batteries. Sun not shining? Just add batteries. Battery park on fire? Just add more batteries*.
So rather than root cause analysis identifying that the problem is 'renewables', what laughably passes for leaders (Millibrain, von der Liar etc) still seem determined to throw more money at 'renewables' to make the problem worse, and energy more expensive. But batteries can be a solution, and an extremely profitable one, ie battery parks in NSW trousering millions providing synchronisation/stabilisation services rather than acting as battery backups. 'Renewables' are truly the grift that keeps on grifting.
But to the average Green, they understand batteries. They don't understand the costs or complexities of backing up 400kv power lines, or powering 50m homes. Or how to initiate a black start when you've been busily banning gas and you have no useful turbines to get up to speed
*Battteries not included. How much to power 50m+ homes? Err.. all the money! The most suprising aspect for me so far was it only took a frequency drop of apparently 0.15hz to cost billions and a lot of embarrasment. Especially after Spain crowed about how it'd gone '100% renewable' only a couple of weeks earlier.
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That the problem was actually the 'Wrong kind of cloud' ie sparse but dense patches. Essentially because solar is connected directly to the grid it has little to no 'Spinning Reserve'. Now usually grid operators fix this by using larger gas and other stations that can be turned on and off quickly. Nuclear is good for relatively high power use, unfortunately when the grid goes down the reactors typically switch to cooling-only mode with the help of backup diesel generators.
To an extent the lack of spinning reserve ie 'Black Start' is a problem as grids need high stability, it is said that Europe came within two seconds of an even larger blackout.
Also a factor, heating of the wires meant that 400KV cables were particularly vulnerable to solar heating. You sometimes see this in hot summers where wire sag can cause accidental contact with trees that weren't properly trimmed causing problems.
Interestingly several cloud providers were affected, we had a Google accounts outage here yesterday afternoon.
Having been on the wrong end of this in Portugal, one thing that has become apparent is how dependent Portugal is on energy from Spain. Spanish electricity generation is very significantly cheaper and so local generation is mostly aimed at peak demand.
Portugal was able to "black start" its grid using the gas plant at Tapada do Outeiro and the hydro plant at Castelo do Bode, but that only got the power up in the Porto region - power to Lisbon had to wait until the Spanish link was back up and running. It's not just a question of what type of reserve you have, but also where it's located.
One of the many things that will presumably be considered in the weeks and months to come is how you measure the true price of energy, given the costs that accrue in its absence.
This is a major problem. The whole point of the interconnects is to allow sharing between areas when there is an abundance of elec in place A and a shortage in place B. But what has happened is that market forces have taken over. If you can sell your elec for 10p/kWh in place A or 20p/kWh in place B you will do your level best to sell it for the most money.
Now if you can only generate elec for 30p/kWh in place B you will like buying it from elsewhere at 20p as its cheaper. The interconnects have resulted in a reliance on energy coming from elsewhere.
Germany saw the light a bit after the project to put vast solar farms in North Africa fell through. Someone finally had the brainwave that putting the majority of your power generation a thousand miles away on the far side of the Med reliant on long cables through international waters isn't as secure as advertised.
@ Conundrum1885
Speaking as one with little knowledge but a desire to improve on that....
There seems to be a fair amount of 'ludite' thinking amongst some of the commentators here.
I appreciate that the legacy system (only a hundred or so years old) has been developed into a centralised, interconnected system with generation at the center of the web and a high inertia which for the most part provides a high level of resilience. 100 years ago that resilience didnt exist as generation was fragmented and was not interconected, but the engineers and the governing authorities engineered in the required resilience.
We are moving to more renewable energy sources and during the transision there will undoubtably be problems which will need to be solved.
The topology of the new system is significantly different from the legacy system and so provides challenges as well as opportunities.
Generation in the new world will be a hybrid of central generation (nuclear, possibly tidal, large grouped solar and wind power, other options we havent thought about) and mini and micro generation out at the edge of the web. I appreciate that there is a problem of complexity syncing the plethora of generation nodes, but I have every confidence in the engineers and, after a few electric shocks have been applied, the authorities (at least in Europe - may be not the US).
Resilience is another challenge in the distributed generation senario, but along with distributed generation comes distributed power storage. If most houses have solar or wind generation and battery storage (possibly two or more batteries if you have an electric car) you have the core of the solution before you even start to consider bigger centralised resiliance such as tidal and hydro power.
The suggestion that problems were caused by the wrong sort of cloud causing ripples on the network has a direct analogy to the bridge failures caused by gusty wind. The answer wasn't to shut down all the bridges. The engineers identified and resolved the problems, at least until nature came up with a new twist not covered by the modeling with the millenium bridge.
Believe in the engineers and even in some cases the polititians!
If most houses have solar or wind generation and battery storage...
I was struck by how little it would take to significantly improve resilience. My solar hot water stopped working because it depends on an electric control system, likewise the gas heating. The window shutters are electric and have no manual override. There's LED lighting that could survive for hours with modest battery backup, though there is none. Although there's a gas supply, all my cooking facilities are electric.
But it's not just about the power grid. I was lucky to maintain my water supply whereas others lost theirs when pumps failed. FM radio - being shut off in many countries - was the main means of information as a single programme was broadcast on all the stations of the public radio service. The mobile network gradually degraded: 5G was deliberately turned off to conserve bandwidth and power and masts gradually lost power and eventually data connectivity petered out. But it was the Internet where people were being signposted for information. Whereas there's perhaps not a lot you can do about the mobile network, it's perhaps been too easy for other services to simply outsource their resilience planning to the electricity grid and assume the problem was solved.
To an extent the lack of spinning reserve ie 'Black Start' is a problem as grids need high stability, it is said that Europe came within two seconds of an even larger blackout.
Yep. From what I've read, something wonderful happened, then frequency dropped and things started tripping the light fantastic. New islands formed within Europe and power companies got to test their black start procedures. A major culprit though seems to be the lack of inertia to keep the grid(s) stable.
Also a factor, heating of the wires meant that 400KV cables were particularly vulnerable to solar heating. You sometimes see this in hot summers where wire sag can cause accidental contact with trees that weren't properly trimmed causing problems.
Sure, but it's April 28th, and not mid-summer. So given the temperatures weren't anything unusual, or in modern parlance, 'extreme'.. Why fail now? Or, if the issue is Spain's added too much solar & not enough resilience, if it'll happen again as we keep heading into summer and things really heat up. The RFOs are going to make interesting reading, and possibly uncomfortable reading for the 'renewables' lobby.
Sadly I don't think you do.
'the lack of spinning reserve ie 'Black Start' is a problem' , two terms related to grid level generation but with little connection. Certainly not in the context you are using them.
Also, the notion of trees contacting 400kv lines is frankly laughable. You would need 30 m tall trees to even be in vicinity of the relevant pylons and these routes are monitored vociferously.
I think you need to find another authority mate.
"Also, the notion of trees contacting 400kv lines is frankly laughable"
It is not unknown. It does not take much elongation of the conductor wires to cause a very large sag. It also requires good upkeep of the vegetation around lines.
The 2003 US 'Northeast blackout' was in part caused by line overload and sag resulting in contact with trees.
'It is not unknown'
There are a multitude of things which are 'not unknown' but don't you think that lessons have been learned in the two decades that have passed since the incident you use to justify this speculation?
400kv infrastructure easements are stripped of trees, subject to periodical (multiple per year) helicopter surveys with visual and thermal camera analysis, _any_ ground activity within the easement not flagged already to NG is followed with a ground visit (Inc the Police) if necessary.
This has certainly been the case in the UK for the last few decades and as we have been in close regulation with Europe until fairly recently I would suggest the same applies to them.
Given that this the case, I consider the speculation laughable and the originating commentard finds a new authority.
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