Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t

by lleims • 1 year ago

1560 1074 1 year ago

All of Spain is without energy. All systems have shut down immediately and are not coming back. Apparently the same has happened in Portugal.

io84• 1 year ago

Source?

mirekrusin2• 1 year ago

I can confirm, all coworkers from Portugal seem to be affected. Big thing.

MrPapz• 1 year ago

Yes, it’s happening

T3x• 1 year ago

I can confirm (I'm from Portugal)

xavaki• 1 year ago

barcelona has been out for the past 20 minutes or so

pablo-120971• 1 year ago

Got reports from Toledo and Madrid

rvz2• 1 year ago

A full nationwide power outage affecting not one but three [0] countries.

Sounds like a major infrastructure risk given that it is possible for more than one country to experience a full loss of power.

EDIT: Andorra is also affected, so that is three.

[0] https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250428/10624908/caida-ge...

ifwinterco• 1 year ago

The whole European grid is essentially connected at this point, it's a simple trade of resiliency for efficiency. People just forget about the resiliency part until something goes wrong

chippiewill4• 1 year ago

The European grid is a connected synchronous grid. Usually that would add stability but it also means if a single country's grid blacks out then their neighbours have to respond to that. Portugal and Spain's grids will be intimately connected which won't have helped.

Not something that's easy to test for.

derbOac• 1 year ago

Yeah I've been wondering why this seems so centralized. I'd think power would be more decentralized.

enether2• 1 year ago

ditto, definitely TIL

celso2• 1 year ago

Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

Yeah, we just told you that via Signal - that’s how we built the networks :)

(No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :))

There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.

ethbr14• 1 year ago

Wow! Battery capacity has gotten cheap.

It's always fascinated me during disasters how independent telecomm can be. Kudos for all the engineering that went into it!

I.e. even when any other conceivable dependency is down, the networks keep running.

yreg3• 1 year ago

we just told you that via Signal

Who are you and what's Signal?

karohalik2• 1 year ago

There is still no electricity, at least in my neighborhood in Lisbon. Less noise, more human voices outside. Time to meet some more neighbors I guess.

karohalik2• 1 year ago

Update: still no electricity, 4G/5G is barely working, city is more chaotic than usual but not that dramatic as some media say - there are huge queues to the buses and smaller shops that are still working, more people are outside.

miohtama• 1 year ago

Most base station masts have lead battery backup up to 24h - 48h.

mirekrusin2• 1 year ago

People are not voting this up to top because they're offline. This outage is quite massive.

znq2• 1 year ago

Confirmed by contacts on the ground in Spain and Portugal.

Not the best news source, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far. HN moderators, feel free to replace it later with a better one.

Supposedly also France is affected (unconfirmed)

znq2• 1 year ago

This is the first brief article from El País, a leading newspaper in Spain: https://elpais.com/economia/2025-04-28/apagon-electrico-masi...

Translated version: https://elpais-com.translate.goog/economia/2025-04-28/apagon...

EZ-E• 1 year ago

Looking forward to the postmortem

rvz2• 1 year ago

Definitely looking forward to this postmortem.

sph5• 1 year ago

Accidentally dropping the production database doesn’t seem that big of deal in comparison to killing the electricity in two countries.

Calwestjobs6• 1 year ago

unless it is database of russian oligarchys bank accounts in vietnam where they hidden their stolen money. XD

carlos-menezes5• 1 year ago

Who would be responsible for writing the postmortem? Are they required to?

sph5• 1 year ago

Not required, but engineers tend to enjoy this sort of thing. Also, since it affected some 60 million people and EU-wide grid interconnects, someone will have to explain what happened.

pjc5018• 1 year ago

I would expect the Spanish parliament to have some means of summoning an explanation, via its local regulator and grid authority. https://www.ree.es/en/about-us/regulatory-framework

leomca7• 1 year ago

I think it's ENTSO-E, here's their most recent report into an incident on 21 June 2024: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/system-operations-reports...

For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.

pjc5018• 1 year ago

Unfortunately these things usually take months, being done at the speed of bureaucracy.

mrguyorama4• 1 year ago

It's not the speed of bureaucracy, it's the speed of doing a good job

Things like Air Crash investigations don't take a year because of paperwork FFS. Investigating things takes immense time.

underdeserver• 1 year ago

How can we follow this story? Who's updating in real time?

aosaigh• 1 year ago

BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t

sph5• 1 year ago

The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/28/spain-portugal...

pera• 1 year ago

Parts of France are also affected according to Sky:

https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...

FrustratedMonky• 1 year ago

France and Italy. Aliens? Russia? EMP?

andy_ppp• 1 year ago

EMP would kill electronics no?

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

Neither. Apparently a local grid overload and a cascading failure, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause.

chippiewill4• 1 year ago

There's a connected grid across most of continental europe. If Portugal's grid blacked out unexpectedly then Spain's grid could have been made unstable too, which then continue onwards to South of France and Italy.

Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.

raxxorraxor2• 1 year ago

Nobody fed the electricity beetles and they are on strike now.

benob• 1 year ago

Parts of France also appear to be affected, according to Spanish media reports, which said Seville, Barcelona and Valencia were hit by the outage.

The wording in the article makes it look like Seville, Barcelona and Valencia are in France.

verzali2• 1 year ago

The southwest of France seems ok. At least I still I have power.

mrtksn3• 1 year ago

Here's a "real time" map of electricity production and flow between countries: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly

Would be interesting to see if it will register here.

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

It should take 72 hours to update

mrtksn3• 1 year ago

I think that must be the scale so you can browse the historical data. The resolution on the slider is 1H when on 72H scale.

suslik2• 1 year ago

I'm in Valencia and it is indeed happening here. A street parade under my windows continues nonetheless.

rambambram• 1 year ago

How are you posting this?

suslik2• 1 year ago

Mobile internet still works.

bayindirh• 1 year ago

Telcos have tons of backup power. They’re required to have it.

stavros5• 1 year ago

A street parade under my windows continues nonetheless.

I mean, what else are you gonna do without power?

ta12433• 1 year ago

Usually?

Sex. At least that's what everyone believes

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-maternity/

djuc• 1 year ago

i had an appointment in Barcelona, but can only guess it’s not safe on the roads

sparky_2• 1 year ago

Traffic lights are out across Iberia apparently, better stay home.

stavros5• 1 year ago

Do people forget how to drive if there are no lights? I can't imagine many people would think "well, there are no lights, which means GREEEEEEEN!". Over here, a traffic light that doesn't work means it's now a stop sign.

nakeru• 1 year ago

I work in Barcelona and live in a town 20Km outside it. I drove back home just fine at around 16PM. Some traffic in the city, but manegable. My town has had electricity in homes since 15PM, some neighbourghs told me. At night I drove to my parent's (different town, 10km away) since I couldn't communicate with them and was worried. Their town was pitch black. People were driving mostly safe and slowly. Of course you get the random POS that doesn't care, but I didn't feel in danger at any moment. My parents were fine. I drove back home later and same story. I just woke up (it's 7AM here) and the Internet is back and I have a message from my parents, their electricity is back too. Overall, I didn't see any crazy behaviour.

Zealotux• 1 year ago

I just walk through Eixample, traffic is a bit chaotic and police has trouble managing it. Stay safe!

throw0101b3• 1 year ago

As of:

    Mon 28 Apr 2025 07:22:00 EDT
    Mon 28 Apr 2025 11:22:00 UTC

this is breaking just minutes ago:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t (rolling updates)

* http://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20...

* https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0428/1509881-spain-portug...

The Spanish national operator:

* https://www.ree.es/en

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Eléctrica_de_España

openplatypus2• 1 year ago

Apparently Italy is also affected.

https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2025-04-28/directo-cor...

amarcheschi4• 1 year ago

Tuscany good so far

Edit

However, I can't get the energy provided outage map to load, maybe too many people accessing it

sph5• 1 year ago

I’m in NW Italy and all seems fine

g-b-r• 1 year ago

foul• 1 year ago

Outage map is down but no blackouts here (NE Italy) atm...

openplatypus2• 1 year ago

I am getting downvoted for mentioning something from the linked article. Fun.

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

CNN story: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/28/europe/spain-portugal-pow...

enopod_2• 1 year ago

In contrary to the CNN headline, air traffic doesn‘t seem to be affected. (As one would expect, as airports all have backup power systems)

avh02• 1 year ago

Except Heathrow apparently

sparky_2• 1 year ago

Hello from Portugal. Local news is indeed reporting that power is out across all of Iberia.

sgfgross• 1 year ago

I’m close to Valencia and we’ve had no electricity for about an hour.

nottorp4• 1 year ago

4 years ago this almost happened:

https://gridradar.net/en/blog/post/underfrequency_january_20...

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-europes-power-grid-almost...

https://www.acer.europa.eu/news/continental-europe-electrici...

I remember it because power went out in at least 1/3 of Romania back then.

ptsneves3• 1 year ago

It shows that even when the original issues are solved the reboot takes time due to power station being spooled down due to excessive production. I hope it is all back before telecoms start draining the batteries, otherwise things get uglier

input_sh• 1 year ago

A similar thing happened last June, with Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and most of the Croatian coastline losing power simultaneously.

Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-mon...

~90 page report: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c... (beware: PDF)

soyyo• 1 year ago

I am currently in my work office in Madrid, main building has electricity so I guess they have some backup generators, the kitchen however is out of service.

According to local newspapers metro network, airport and traffic lights are all down

Calwestjobs6• 1 year ago

most office buildings have gas(methane) generator backup.

Scoundreller5• 1 year ago

Dunno about Spain/portugal, but in North America they’re usually just for elevators/alarms, partial hallway lighting & maybe water pumps (for firefighting).

Maybe a tech company with servers will pay extra for full backup, but it’s not typical.

Without fail, during every grid outage, some will fail to start and there will be elevator rescue calls throughout the city.

maipen• 1 year ago

Yeah we only have telecoms and unreliable at times. If power doesnt comeback soon that too will fail.

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

Apparently a local grid overload near France and a cascading failure down the Spanish network, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause. Of course there is a lot of noise.

For instance, one reporter asked one of the government flunkies whether it could be a cyberattack and they turned his noncommittal “maybe, we don’t know” into “government says cyberattack may be ongoing”.

Be careful of idiot reporters out there.

Edit: I’m listening to another radio interview where they are outlining the plans to bring online Portuguese dams and thermal generators over the next few hours, progressively unplugging from the Spanish supply (fortunately we have enough of those, apparently).

It should take 3-4 hours to get everything balanced with only national supplies, and they will restore power from North to South.

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

I was going to say something similar. I live in Portugal and I've heard a lot of panic/fear mongering, mainly from the techies in the co-working space I was working on and expats.

(apologies for singling out these specific groups of people - my point is that it might be worth to put down news sources like xitter, and read AP/translated local Portuguese news)

divan• 1 year ago

"xitter" in Portugese would be pronounced as "shee-tehr", right?

martinald5• 1 year ago

Yes, something similar happened in the UK a while back. Full info here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2020/01/9_...

Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc):

2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms)

2.4.2. The fault affected the local distribution networks and approximately 150MW of distributed generation disconnected from the networks or ‘tripped off’ due to a safety mechanism known as vector shift protection

2.4.3. The voltage control system at the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm did not respond to the impact of the fault on the transmission system as expected and became unstable. Hornsea 1 rapidly reduced its power generation or ‘deloaded’ from 799MW to 62MW (a reduction of 737MW).

ethbr14• 1 year ago

Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked?

In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines.

So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs point B456?

Is this done sort-of-blind? Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)

dark-star3• 1 year ago

I can only imagine the "fun" in getting those synced back up to the European grid once this is all over... That alone will take weeks

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

It's a good reminder how much noise and misreporting flies around during live incidents

phplovesong• 1 year ago

Local betting site had odds if this was a attack by russia

nacnud2• 1 year ago

There's a map of realtime load flow here: https://gridradar.net/en/wide-area-monitoring-system (currently shows Spain and Portugal as 'offline')

amarcheschi4• 1 year ago

10 mins ago Malaga was online, now it's offline. It doesn't look promising

sofixa2• 1 year ago

Might just be lag?

In any case, if I recall correctly from a Youtube video I can't find (it was either Wendover or Real Engineering), if the grid is fully down, it takes quite a lot of effort and time to bring it back online because it has to be done in small steps to avoid over/under loading/using.

pandemic_region2• 1 year ago

Romania seems offline as well now?

mrtksn3• 1 year ago

Are you sure "offline" means that? Romania looks offline and when I checked their CNN they were reporting live from Spain about the blackout without mentioning Romania.

Here: https://tv.garden/ro/F83BfecjsD6BjR

rcarmo9• 1 year ago

They were probably put offline as the network is rebalanced. That just means they (Romania) don’t contribute to the network.

nacnud2• 1 year ago

The map seems to be based on monitoring stations in the different locations, so yes - it's also possible that a station is offline for other reasons (maintenance, etc).

steanne• 1 year ago

now mannheim shows offline

leomca7• 1 year ago

The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show

Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

The filters can be used to see similar data for Portugal

fulafel2• 1 year ago

Interesting that the recovery (edit: of load graph) is going at relatively steady 600 MW/hour, it will be a while if the pace continues the same way.

anal_reactor• 1 year ago

Call me crazy but I'd love to see full power outage at least once in my life

stavros5• 1 year ago

Well, maybe you can see one now, depending on how far from Spain you live!

mango72832• 1 year ago

We had one in my country when I was a kid 30 years ago after a substation tripped and took down the rest of the grid. We broke out the candles and chilled I guess. Power was back up in my area that same night.

sexy_seedbox• 1 year ago

Has not happened to me yet in Hong Kong, even through 2 Typhoon Signal 10s.

libertine2• 1 year ago

Hopefully there won't be any loss of life due to this event.

crvdgc• 1 year ago

In Japan, sometimes earthquakes will cause regional power outages, though they are usually recovered quickly.

flobosg• 1 year ago

I was living in Chile during its 2010 earthquake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake). The power outage in my hometown lasted approximately two weeks.

verzali2• 1 year ago

I used to live in an area that regularly had power outages during thunderstorms. I was also once in London during a power cut that took out most of the city centre. It was a strange experience, but not as weird as walking through empty streets in the time of covid.

Maybe just my perception, but power outages seem to be getting rarer with time, though when they do happen they seem to be far larger.

enether2• 1 year ago

It was actually pretty cool to bike through the streets. It all felt so calm. Stores/restaurants closed, no traffic lights, little traffic.

Parks were full of people. Literally chilling, walking dogs. Most weren't on their phones either (no service).

anonzzzies3• 1 year ago

I've heard from friends in France, Portugal and I am in Spain. I saw people are also mentioning parts of Italy.

brutuscat• 1 year ago

Yup I confirm. Went to turn on the car to hear the radio. Andorra seems to have power from French side, though in Catalunya we do not.

Should have paid the extra €€ to put the solar panels in backup mode…

solarkraft• 1 year ago

This is a really good stress test. I’m impressed that communications still seem to work somewhat for now.

ndsipa_pomu2• 1 year ago

It's surprising how vulnerable electric supply can be.

pandemic_region2• 1 year ago

Reported here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819791#43820127

nottorp4• 1 year ago

Here too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819914

dang• 1 year ago

We eventually merged all the threads.

codetrotter2• 1 year ago

I’m in Spain. Internet here is very unstable now also.

Scoundreller5• 1 year ago

How are the routes looking?

Ronzie2• 1 year ago

Same happened in Murcia. Just thought it was a normal power outage!!

amarcheschi4• 1 year ago

Some parts of Spain are slowly coming back online https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267

libertine2• 1 year ago

The crazy thing is how is Twitter still being used to communicate these events.

dijit• 1 year ago

Agreed.

It's crazy how momentum can carry a business.

To use a potentially controversial example, Microsoft products (Office, Windows) are still extremely entrenched despite the overwhelming majority of knowledgable people agreeing that they're on a steep downward trajectory and the alternatives have long since surpassed them.. leading to this[0] recent video from Pewdiepie...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0

Ronzie2• 1 year ago

Murcia is also without power. We live in the campo so presumed it was a normal outage. Obviously not

ndsipa_pomu2• 1 year ago

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause.

ksec2• 1 year ago

I saw it on twitter and had to go to BBC to make sure this isn't some joke or hoax. 2025 and we have National level power cuts?

I know it may be rare but I think some day we really need to move or mandate every single flat / home / apartment / living places to have a 12 - 24 hours backup battery included. Something that has 10K+ Cycles, durable and non-flammable. Not only does it make sure our modern lives without sudden interruption, it also solves the renewable energy problem.

elric3• 1 year ago

Sounds like an incredibly expensive solution to a problem that could be tackled more efficiently at a larger scale.

jvanderbot2• 1 year ago

Didn't we used to pump steam around for heating and now homes have individual furnaces? If the cost for this were about the cost of a furnace I don't see why this wouldn't be viable.

I bought a generator for just this situation.

alchemist1e9• 1 year ago

I’ve read discussions about preparing for a strong solar flare basically simply involves having on hand spare equipment stored unconnected and that then would also immediately improve repairs and maintenance for regular issues. I don’t know the details but I believe the US is looking at providing funding to the utilities companies to acquire the duplicate extra equipment.

Loughla3• 1 year ago

Mandate a battery backup. Instead of requiring the power suppliers to build and maintain reliable energy.

That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.

littlestymaar8• 1 year ago

“How to waste money and valuable resources” in a nutshell.

Like it or not but we are a species of social animals, you cannot live without relying on others. That's just delusional.

moooo992• 1 year ago

People seem to love those expensive solutions though.

I know so many people who invested in overly expensive battery storage systems for their solar. Power in Germany is expensive, but even with that expensive power many of those battery systems will never hit a positive ROI. But they’re still happy for the feeling of being „independent“.

I’ll turn 26 in a few months. The first time I experienced a power outage in my life was two weeks ago when a construction worker in our basement drilled into the wrong wall…

Finnucane• 1 year ago

I was living in Brooklyn, NY during the 2003 blackout that knocked out much of the northeastern US for a couple of days. In those days we weren't quite so dependent on cell phones and such things. People walked home, since the trains were stopped. Guys grabbed flashlights and directed traffic. We listened to the news on the car radio. After that I went to J&R and bought a wind-up emergency multi-band radio. In the intervening 22 years, I've never used it. Though at the rate things are going, maybe that will change.

joha42702• 1 year ago

Most of the time, the grid is reliable. How much investment do we actually want to prevent a few hours of downtime once in a blue moon?

And even if we do want to invest in large amount of grid storage (which we would need to anyway, if we want to transition to renewables), I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. Its a great way to limit economies of scale and make maintenance/inspection harder.

chii• 1 year ago

I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible.

why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads.

In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.

pjc5018• 1 year ago

Mandating battery storage is nonsense. Making the regulatory system better for it is not, though; it would be good to make it possible for consumer battery systems to do "islanding" properly so they can be true backups.

anonzzzies3• 1 year ago

This is very rare. Not actually worth to make that much fuss unless you are a hospital.

everfrustrated• 1 year ago

Spot a European at a hundred paces by their reflex that anything happens the _government_ must do something.

If electricity is that important to you, buy your _own_ resilience. Tesla powerwalls and non-tesla equivalents have been available for ages.

arccy• 1 year ago

unlike americans, people in europe don't just huddle in their own fortresses afraid to even take a step outside without riding in tanks.

power cuts affect more than just your home.

Niksko• 1 year ago

Spot an American at a hundred paces proposing that you either have the money to buy batteries yourself, or else you should just eat it and suffer

mr_mitm• 1 year ago

A Tesla powerwall won't help with trains and traffic lights. Those are important to me as well.

otikik• 1 year ago

"Don't expect the government to do anything, give money to big corporations instead"

And then he chooses the one big corporation which has a guy in the government.

mensetmanusman2• 1 year ago

Something that stores enough energy to bake cookies will always somehow be flammable.

oceanplexian• 1 year ago

Gravity storage of water. Not flammable, but could definitely bake cookies.

andyjohnson0• 1 year ago

I have family in Andalusia and they seem to have dropped off the net. Mildly concerning.

Also, there are currently four different submissions re this on the front page. I'd suggest we dont need any more.

amval• 1 year ago

Apparently this spans more countries? Very strange. Possibly a cyberattack or sabotage?

Growing up in Spain I've never experienced anything like this (not there at the moment, but friends have told me over WhatsApp).

cr3ative• 1 year ago

Grids are widely interconnected. Problems on one grid can and do cascade to another.

voidUpdate2• 1 year ago

Possibly some kind of rare cascade failure where it might have been on the edge for a while, and some small event happened that tripped things, similar to the american northeast blackout in 2003. High demand, plus a power station going offline meant more demand on some interconnects, which shorted on trees and were cut off, putting more load on other lines until the entire system collapsed

ksec2• 1 year ago

Continental Europe Synchronous Area [1]

The whole Europe power grid are somewhat interconnected I wont be surprise if this knock on effect start knocking out other surrounding countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

HeatrayEnjoyer4• 1 year ago

Is that a risk with the small amount of interconnect capacity?

londons_explore2• 1 year ago

Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption.

This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.

The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.

Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.

0xTJ• 1 year ago

This sounds more like a dystopian novel, where only the wealthy can afford stable power and everyone else is left without.

londons_explore2• 1 year ago

The current system is that everyone pays equally for X amount of stability, and for some people they don't get as much stability as they desire (eg. These people in Spain), whilst others pay more money and than they'd like when they would be fine with 5 minutes outages once a year.

That made sense before technology became available for everyone to make their own choice - but that is no longer the case.

doix• 1 year ago

That is basically what happens in South Africa today. There are rolling blackouts and rich people with backup generators and batteries are unaffected. It's gotten to the point where richer cities (like Capetown) have their own power sources to mitigate the problem.

littlestymaar8• 1 year ago

This comment is Dunning-Kruger effect in action…

Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.

The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot of time to add the power plants (or renewable equivalent) to the grid because they must be synchronized.

rightbyte4• 1 year ago

Having such interdependent grids seems like a market or political problem not a physics problem to me.

japanuspus• 1 year ago

The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

Texas had a pretty free market, with many users on a floating price, didn't work that well either a few years ago when their grid went dawn.

Dma54rhs• 1 year ago

EU electricity market is very similar to it, but interconnected and probably more free market style. A lot of people pay the spot price depending on county and their provider of course.

xp842• 1 year ago

I didn’t really find anything problematic from an economic standpoint with the Texas power disaster. On the surface, the main problem there was just that a bunch of people were on spot energy plans, in order to save tremendous amount of money as long as the spot price stayed low. This is simply gambling. Those people after some period of savings suddenly cried foul when their gamble went south as prices spiked. The only issue I see here is if they weren’t adequately informed of that possibility. Obviously, the people who got the $2000 electricity bills are going to be the decide they weren’t informed adequately, and I’m sure it was spelled out in a document the size of an iTunes license agreement that literally no customer ever read. But anyway those people had themselves to blame as that plan was not mandatory or default.

ajsnigrutin• 1 year ago

Oh god.

Let's skip the technical problems in your theory and focus on the social.

People need power to survive. You know, food, hot water, light, work, internet, mobile phones, entertainment, etc. This requires stability, not second by second pricing.

When you put a chicken in an oven, you want to cook that chicken and eat it, feed your family. Electricity price rising in the next few minutes would mean that you either have to risk disease (chicken staying in the dangerous temperatures until the electricity price drops) or being hungry and throwing food away. This is not how you want society to function.

acc_297• 1 year ago

You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.

Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.

I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource

thyristan2• 1 year ago

Large Inverter Based Resources (IBR) such as huge solar parcs, grid-scale batteries or high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines can be programmed to behave like rotating generators, or even to smooth out smaller ripples. They also don't necessarily need a leading grid frequency but can be used to generate their own frequency normal to cold-start or resync a grid.

Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.

VagabundoP4• 1 year ago

What about large scale distributed containerised Iron Salt batteries?

I've seen some papers saying that they help stabilise grids.

eldaisfish4• 1 year ago

This is the exact kind of techbro nonsense that I’ve come to expect from this website. No empathy for your fellow humans and dressed with a side of “computers and code plus finance”.

I thank the heavens that the people who run the electricity system do not share your opinions.

pcardoso• 1 year ago

In Portugal here. Lost power about 1 hour ago. Reading the news while batteries last.

netsharc• 1 year ago

Amazing/curious that all the infrastructure to feed news to your phone still works. I can imagine a poorly-built systems would have some infrastructure without UPSes, and in all that chain of technology, there'll be an element or more without power. Not saying Spain/Portugal would necessarily be more prone to have poorly-built infrastructure, I assume the whole world runs on half-assery.

postexitus• 1 year ago

Turns out not everybody in the world are jokers.

myself2483• 1 year ago

If their networks are built like the ones I've worked on, everything has at least a little battery, but only some of it has generators to keep going after that.

So some or most cellular towers will have generators, and their fibers will backhaul through repeaters, some or most of which will have their own generators. When it gets back to the MTSO, that will definitely have large diesel turbines on site and at least 24 hours of fuel with priority refueling contracts.

I'd expect there to be a lot of outages, for instance where all the towers in a region end up backhauled through a site where the generator fails or was never installed for some reason. But there will also be a lot of places that stay up in some capacity because, more or less by happenstance, all the fuel tank permits got approved and all the equipment actually worked.

eknkc• 1 year ago

I believe it was 10 years ago or something, we lost power in Turkey. I mean the entire country for around 10 hours.

Data, cellular etc everything kept working. But at some point I guess the generators and batteries started to fail and capacity degraded.

carlos-menezes5• 1 year ago

This outage does not affect the islands, at least in Portugal. Madeira has power.

enopod_2• 1 year ago

Spanish islands are also all ok, they have independent networks

prof-dr-ir• 1 year ago

The last major European blackout was in 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

9dev• 1 year ago

Anyone read Blackout[1]? So it begins. Both countries completed (or almost completed) their smart meter rollout…

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)

terom3• 1 year ago

It looks like the Iberian peninsula is relatively isolated from the rest of the CESA synchronous grid, with only 2% cross-border capacity compared to local generation. [1]

There's a map at [2]

The Spanish electricity system is currently connected to the systems of France, Portugal, Andorra and Morocco. The exchange capacity of this interconnection is around 3 GW, which represents a low level of interconnection for the peninsula. The international interconnection level is calculated by comparing the electricity exchange capacity with other countries with the generation capacity or installed power.

[1] https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/electricity-inte...

[2] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

brohee2• 1 year ago

Edit : I was misreading the confusing Rte site... Entsoe actually a lot more readable. France went from importing to exporting around the incident.

https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-...

https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

terom3• 1 year ago

That graph doesn't seem to make a very clear distinction between historical, real-time and predicted values... I think the event happened at 12:30 local time or so.

There seems to be some kind of recurrent daily pattern where the French - Spanish interconnect switches from Spain -> France imports to France -> Spain exports at around that time, and then back again in the late afternoon.

luckys• 1 year ago

I'm in Portugal. Mobile data was slow when it started, now it's much better.

The sunny weather is very inviting outside for someone with the day off :-)

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

"I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added.

from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...

This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

leereeves• 1 year ago

I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.

kylebenzle• 1 year ago

It's not just stores, pretty much our entire socity runs on cheap power, without it the whole thing falls apart.

corbet• 1 year ago

Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out.

The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.

mytailorisrich6• 1 year ago

Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!

throw0101b3• 1 year ago

My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.

I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.

DebtDeflation• 1 year ago

I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.

bilekas4• 1 year ago

My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers.

That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..

Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.

richev• 1 year ago

I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.

Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.

jonathantf2• 1 year ago

I was in a Tesco when there was a power outage - the self checkouts all died (and rebooted into a custon Debian based OS with a Chromium front end by the looks of it), but the staffed tills still worked and could accept Chip+PIN but not contactless.

mschuster914• 1 year ago

This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!

Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.

kortilla4• 1 year ago

our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency,

None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.

ironick09• 1 year ago

As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!

bilekas4• 1 year ago

Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.

The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.

belter7• 1 year ago

And this is a trial for how a Carrington event will look like.

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

You mean the part that anything above 130nm technology would be fried?

megous4• 1 year ago

I just look to Gaza strip as an example how society continues operating under extreme adversity from the western powers, incl. total lack of electricity distribution for more than a year and a half and full blockade of water, food, and medicine.

No need for imaginary scenarios.

seydor3• 1 year ago

If anything, it shows how little use there is for physical cash , only as emergency backup

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

"emergency backup" is a very strong, rational use, and should never be neglected.

lpapez• 1 year ago

Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion.

When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

kortilla4• 1 year ago

A cash register is not required to make cash transactions

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.

michaelscott• 1 year ago

Store owners just make out paper receipts in this case, like businesses used to do back in the day

bradly3• 1 year ago

The gas station I worked at used a paper bag when offline. Good, not great.

InDubioProRubio2• 1 year ago

Cashier scribbles furiously to add to cash register later

throw0101a2• 1 year ago

When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).

skc• 1 year ago

Another reason why itcoin is a pipedream too, particularly for third world countries

PhilippGille• 1 year ago

If an ATM is down, it's down. With Bitcoin you can still use mesh networks. Here's an old article about an example: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-ena...

(Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)

peab• 1 year ago

You can have physical bitcoins - devices that hold a private key in a tamper free way. The private key holds a fixed amount of BTC

red_admiral3• 1 year ago

I agree that bitcoin is a poor solution for anyone but a small elite. But as long as you have the mobile network on diesel generators (which you do in countries where power cuts happen regularly), something like M-PESA still works.

bradly3• 1 year ago

This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.

NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:

Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."

ghc• 1 year ago

whistleblowers

Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.

trgn2• 1 year ago

Prophets

croes2• 1 year ago

There isn’t much you can buy with cash either if there is no electricity.

jslakro• 1 year ago

A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause:

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

pjc5018• 1 year ago

How very California.

InDubioProRubio2• 1 year ago

Warming world is so hot right now..

mistrial92• 1 year ago

you are right, but the emphasis could use a tune-up. In California, home of world-leading tech.. there are sensors and information networks, extensive electrical power lines, heavy equipment and budgets, a lot of dry and dead tress, a history of fire. So you see that California in a way is a world-quality testing lab. and the way the information travels, and the way the information is applied, could also be world-quality .. or, world-theater for government imbecility..

Rygian• 1 year ago

A power outage in 2021 was ultimately traced to a firefighting hydroplane that damaged a high-voltage transmission line in southern France.

The similarity between that event and this early-on report is striking.

[es language]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2021/07/24/aver...

tejohnso• 1 year ago

Surely there is more than 0 redundancy so that one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.

jcranmer2• 1 year ago

The 2003 US Northeast blackout was caused by the failure of only a few lines that shorted into trees. These line failures created grid instability that resulted, ~5 minutes later, in most of the Northeast losing power in a cascading failure.

pixl97• 1 year ago

Redundant systems have failures in one path quite often that you never know anything about. We get headlines when the failures correlate in the same timeslot.

matkoniecz2• 1 year ago

one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.

Called N-1 criterion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(electrical_grid)#...

And it depends. During https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout N-1 criterion was supposed to be holding, in practice not even N-0 was holding and network crashed.

Few years ago nearly entire day European network was sitting on N-0 due to multiple issues in Poland, caused by a heat wave and deeper root causes. There are many power plants and power lines where any further issue would cause Europe-wide blackout.

yaantc• 1 year ago

From Le Monde live feed, RTE (French electricity network manager) declared the issue unrelated to this fire.

"Le gestionnaire français souligne par ailleurs que cette panne n’est pas due à un incendie dans le sud de la France, entre Narbonne et Perpignan, contrairement à des informations qui circulent."

oersted• 1 year ago

I'm seeing some reports saying that a significant frequency oscillation happened, which triggered automatic shut-downs, which cascaded. Could an event like this have that effect?

I suppose it makes sense that it was an automatic shutdown rather than infrastructure failing on such a wide area. And then once it's shut down, a black-start is a logistical challenge as other comments have explained.

I'm also seeing some reports about it being more likely that something happened on the east side, somewhere like the Ebro valley or north across the Pyrenees. Catalonia seems to have been particularly affected, and it's on the path of important lines coming from France. High heat at noon could have caused a line to fail and short against a tree, which would be similar to the 2003 nation-wide outage in Italy.

wongarsu3• 1 year ago

The grid is supposed to tolerate any single failure, even under full load. Of course sometimes the first failure is a fire or equipment malfunction and the second failure is a planning failure or someone pressing the wrong button.

andy99• 1 year ago

Older readers may remeber the Northeastern blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada that was caused by cascading overloading, I believe originally triggered by high loads due to hot weather and poor vegetation maintenance under lines.

I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

ta12433• 1 year ago

Older readers would remember the 1965 blackout. 2003 was only 22 years ago

lwo32k• 1 year ago

That was a mad few days. We were stuck on campus. Water ran out by the next day. And students were using water from the campus fountain.

73737373733• 1 year ago

Good documentary on the ice storm of 1998

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ccTzHBUsYQ

In January 1998, Montreal and the region surrounding it was hit by the most disastrous ice storm ever recorded: more than four inches of ice entombed an area larger than the State of Florida, causing trees and power lines to collapse on an unprecedented scale, leaving millions in the dark without heat (some for up to four weeks). 35 people died and damages totalled more than $5 billion making it the worst natural disaster in Canadian history.

4 out of 5 power lines to Montreal went down

RALaBarge• 1 year ago

I have such great memories of the blackout. I was in college at the time, so obviously indestructible.

The first night, we had 2 grills with 10ft high flames roaring but I would say in a controlled fashion. The cops quickly asked us to not do something dumb like that anymore and we agreed.

Memories of the local party stores selling 40oz's for pennies on the dollar, as the outage would last days but the booze would not. It didn't really turn into anything bad for us in SE Michigan other than a fun story I can tell my internet pals about 20 years on.

If I recall correctly, we were also somehow the first house in the neighborhood to get power restored...I remember playing a Dreamcast with a hacked NES emulator running Rampart 2 player. I never made good on it, but I always said I wanted to make a shirt that read "I blacked out in the black out of '03"...which is probably for the best.

timewizard• 1 year ago

And a computer system failure.

Full grid failures are almost certainly never down to a single cause.

pmlnr9• 1 year ago

For those not aware how interconnected the European Grid is: https://storpower.co.uk/the-day-europes-power-grid-came-clos...

paganel3• 1 year ago

Spain's electricity grid operator Red Electrica has confirmed power outages across the country.

That’s why you still need a strong diesel/diesel-electric locomotive fleet, imagine if Spain had been right in the middle military mobilization and military materiel transport, an event like this one would have stopped then dead in the tracks had they been relying only on electric locomotives.

fer• 1 year ago

No, the armed forces have their own fuel locomotives. I imagine any sizeable military does the same thing. Plus most (all?) cargo trains still use fuel. 100% electric is just passenger traffic.

https://www.outono.net/elentir/2021/10/23/the-spanish-army-r...

paganel3• 1 year ago

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong article, but there's this:

For journeys outside the base, *the Army uses Renfe locomotives*.

which, in my understanding, means that in order to move military materiel (to the borders with France, let's say, or to the closest sea-ports most probably) and tens to hundreds of thousands of mobilised men the Spanish Army does indeed rely on Renfe locomotives, i.e not on their own.

davedx• 1 year ago

[flagged]

belter7• 1 year ago

They probably did not patch their firmware in years and have their SCADA systems live on Shodan with default passwords...allegedly...

api2• 1 year ago

I remember years ago someone scanned the Internet IPv4 space for open unpassworded VNC servers. Many of them looked disturbingly like industrial control systems.

gchamonlive• 1 year ago

[flagged]

api2• 1 year ago

It's not Musk fetishism. It's network effects. Most people hate X and hated Twitter but people use them because people use them.

This should show people just how powerful network effects are. They are legitimately a force of nature.

OgsyedIE• 1 year ago

This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.

boxed• 1 year ago

Is this a joke? Because that seems like exactly the wrong thing, and such a system would itself be a bottleneck for downtime issues.

Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.

teekert• 1 year ago

They may not be aware. We had Dutch fire depts do the same, it used to be possible to see tweets without logging in.

scarlehoff• 1 year ago

While I don't particularly like twitter (X), in a situation like this it probably has a better reach than the website of REE.

That said, twitter should allow for official profiles and organizations to have their tweets (xs?) made public.

deanc• 1 year ago

You’re kidding right? The overwhelming majority of people do NOT use X or have accounts there. We are in a bubble. (Not making a Musk point here as it was the same before the “exodus”)

brohee2• 1 year ago

They did post on BlueSky, but not every update so I assume someone is cut and pasting manually...

https://bsky.app/profile/redelectricare.bsky.social

pcblues• 1 year ago

A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways)

"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."

megous4• 1 year ago

On the bright side. People die from electricity and from operating electricity powered machines, too. So those will be spared. :)

Wobbles422• 1 year ago

I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.

I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.

carlos-menezes5• 1 year ago

Getting two network bars in Madeira. Seems to be affecting 4G/5G now.

red_admiral3• 1 year ago

I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack.

There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages

I remember the day when the Swiss railway power network went down for a day (in 2005) because one power line was down for maintenance and someone pressed the wrong button and produced a short circuit somewhere else. It's a bit like the incidents in planes were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.

reitoei• 1 year ago

a.k.a. Hanlon's Razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

makeitdouble• 1 year ago

As far as we know stupidity isn't a primary cause, and local authorities are also probably competent at scale.

fbn79• 1 year ago

Not many month ago the Italians trains was disrupted by a single nail into a cable: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-rail-services-d...

belter7• 1 year ago

were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.

So frequent it even has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_an...

JimBlackwood• 1 year ago

Or that time in 2003 when a tree fell on a power line in Switzerland and all of Italy ended up without electricity.

hersko• 1 year ago

I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

jcranmer2• 1 year ago

That wasn't tree falling in Ohio, that was overloaded line sagged and shorted into a tree, compounded with several other factors that contributed to the grid instability and the inability of the grid operator to realize how unstable the grid was.

Wobbles422• 1 year ago

The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.

Ayesh• 1 year ago

A monkey took out the whole grid in Sri Lanka this year

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...

bobthepanda• 1 year ago

There was also a race condition in some management software that hadn’t tripped in over thirty years of usage.

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

We live in a society filled with systems that can have "normal accidents".

Keyframe• 1 year ago

I'm going with AGI awakening in some lab today.

chaosbolt• 1 year ago

Sorry I couldn't resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnDk8BcqoR0

mattkevan• 1 year ago

A few months ago I was hit by a blackout literally the second I was about to start delivering a company-wide talk on AI. Everything went out - Internet, mobile networks, street lighting, the lot.

We're a remote business so it seemed like I'd just rudely dropped off the call, but as everything was down I couldn't let people know what'd happened.

Apparently it was caused by botched maintenance work affecting 30,000 houses, but the timing was so perfect I can't help thinking it was because our AGI overlords really didn't want me to deliver that talk for some reason.

padjo4• 1 year ago

“induced atmospheric vibration” on 400KV lines is the current theory

CGMthrowaway• 1 year ago

Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia.

Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%

Nuclear: 11.5%

Co-generation: 5%

Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)

JensRantil• 1 year ago

I would _love_ to understand more about how this atmospheric state impacted the vibration of power lines. Sounds exotic.

alickz• 1 year ago

an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid

I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth

Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?

I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence

slightwinder• 1 year ago

but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth

Some are harder than others, and some have random flaws which nobody can really predict.

Spain seems in the transition to renewables, so it's possible that they have some flaws because they are still in the process, or because it's something which never happened before and is unknown territory. Also, Spain had some economic problems in the last decade, maybe someone build to cheap or was even cheating somewhere.

Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?

Hospitals should have backup-systems. Traffic should be able to stop in time. I guess the most problematic parts are people stuck in elevators and other spaces which only open electrical, as also the loss of cellular phone-connections for calling helpers.

bonzini• 1 year ago

Hardening focuses first on not damaging equipment and second on providing energy. If things go wrong quickly enough you don't have time to react, because after a power plant disconnects you get sudden bumps in load that can trigger a chain failure near the original point. The last time it happened in Europe was in 2003, which isn't too shoddy.

hibikir• 1 year ago

What Spain's PM is saying (and is being reported by Spanish newspapers), 15 gigawatts of energy production went down all in 5 seconds. Hardening to tolerate that much of a change, that fast is a more extreme event than a grid the size of Spain's preps for.

geophile• 1 year ago

But there is so much highly motivated malice right now.

red_admiral3• 1 year ago

Update: BBC news says something something hot weather, EU council says it doesn't look like a cyber attack.

LeonM• 1 year ago

As confirmed by António Costa (President of the European Council) on X: https://x.com/eucopresident/status/1916859055546544517

switch0072• 1 year ago

Hot weather? Huh? It's spring

m000• 1 year ago

Might as well mean that they suspect the culprit, but they're not going to do anything anyway for this specific culprit, so let's all pretend it was an accident. Why make yourself look like a fool?

They already became a laughing stock once for promising the "strongest possible response" for the Nord Stream 2 sabotage [1].

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-sees-sabotage-nor...

guerrilla6• 1 year ago

I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack.

I think we should prepare for the worst though. It's wrong to assume it's not an attack too, and until we can conclude it's not an attack we should be prepared to deal with the possible consequences and act accordingly.

rawgabbit• 1 year ago

Having lived through the Texas electricity fiasco in 2021, I would blame cost cutting, the reckless drive for “efficiency”, and maximizing shareholder value.

In Texas, the electric providers cut staff and maintenance to maximize shareholder value. They will not have redundant systems and redundant plants out of the goodness of their hearts. The Texas marketplace actually allowed them in the odd event of an outage to charge astronomical spot prices thinking this will incentivize them to have redundant systems. This was a foolish fantasy.

Now in Texas, discussion of how to cost share redundancy have taken place. But no one wants to pay for it. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/01/texas-power-market-p...

TOMDM• 1 year ago

Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

If you want a no fail grid you need to incentivise a no fail grid.

wouldbecouldbe• 1 year ago

Seems to be caused by fire in France that connected Spain / France

balazstorok• 1 year ago

I think James Burke's classic talking about the fragility of our complex interdependent systems starting the episode from the 1965 Northeast blackout is still relevant and an interesting watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

casey22• 1 year ago

Every single retrospective I've seen on major power outages is full of miscommunication and people who would be fired if they worked in fast food. As well as blaming the tech boogeyman ("Our systems were on the fritz this morning")

gregwebs• 1 year ago

There’s an explanation that earth’s magnetic field is now so weak that a normal solar wind ended up breaking through a vulnerable spot.

Very poorly explained right now by Space Weather News. I am waiting for an updated explanation.

tux32• 1 year ago

You can see the crash on the ENTSO-E live data: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

Three quarter of the production disconnects from the grid between 12:30 and 13:00, with only a bit of solar and onshore wind sticking around.

leomca7• 1 year ago

Spain loses around 15GW of demand at the same time: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.

pjc5018• 1 year ago

Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf)

That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequency excursion, resulting in widespread generator trips.

(I suspect this is going to restart a whole bunch of acrimony about existing pain points like grid maintenance, renewables, domestic solar, and so on, probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables)

terom3• 1 year ago

Portugal has an even bigger relative drop in load, from 5852MW at 11:00 hours -> 613MW at 13:00 hours - these seem like 1 hour averages.

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

Helmut100013• 1 year ago

Interesting - when you realize that nuclear energy is not as reliable as solar (nuclear disappears completely around 1 pm, while solar keeps a stable input share).

brutusborn2• 1 year ago

Looks like they're using French nuclear to help black start the grid [1]. Solar and wind systems could have caused the instability issues that led to the Spanish Nuclear requiring isolation. It will be interesting to see the final investigation, but my bet is that "induced atmospheric vibration" is a PR deflection from a badly designed and operated system [2].

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF... [2] I'm not necessarily blaming the engineers, but the politicians who force those engineers to put square pegs in round holes. For example, I can imagine politicians making a short term decision to skimp on energy storage while increasing renewable penetration. Surely renewable systems must be less reliable without storage given the lack of rotational inertia?

keepamovin• 1 year ago

Is this a cyber issue? Guess too close to tell, but what are possibles?

moffkalast2• 1 year ago

Wow that's interesting, solar was absolutely peak at the time. Maybe related to poor frequency leading from solar powerplants coupled with some other spike that drew it out of sync?

bombcar3• 1 year ago

Red Electrica - red is Spanish for network, not the color (roja)

AndrewDucker• 1 year ago

Regardless of the source of this specific issue, I suspect investment in infrastructure security and resilience is about to ramp up.

Calling attention to how fragile many of our critical systems are is almost certanly a net-positive in the long run.

smartbit• 1 year ago

Seems to have briefly expanded into France and even Belgium had issues.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...

Edit: BBC reports it now also https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t

parrit• 1 year ago

Is there a La Liga game on perhaps :)

rurban2• 1 year ago

There's the Madrid Open tennis tournament affected. No Swiatek - Shnaider game until they'll get online. The restaurant is lit with candles, but the DJ has power. So there's music. He was clever.

switch0072• 1 year ago

Context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157259 / https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...

OP I think is joking La Liga got the power turned off to protect their revenues.

mike_hearn5• 1 year ago

This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult.

If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up and renewables require external sources of inertia for frequency stabilization, so this usually requires turning on a small diesel generator that creates enough power to bootstrap a bigger generator and so on up until there's enough electricity to start the plant itself. With that back online the power from it can be used to re-energize other plants that lack black start capability in a chain until you have a series of isolated islands. Those islands then have to be synchronized and reconnected, whilst simultaneously bringing load online in large blocks.

The whole thing is planned for, but you can't really rehearse for it. During a black start the grid is highly unstable. If something goes wrong then it can trip out again during the restart, sending you back to the beginning. It's especially likely if the original blackout caused undetected equipment damage, or if it was caused by such damage.

In the UK contingency planning assumes a black start could take up to 72 hours, although if things go well it would be faster. It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.

Edit: There's a press release about a 2016 black start drill in Spain/Portugal here: https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/press-release/2016/11/spa...

leomca7• 1 year ago

It seems Spain lost 15GW of load, but is still running 10GW of load: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?

Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

mike_hearn5• 1 year ago

They're definitely doing a black start:

https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267

We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected.

I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears an hour ago.

If the grid frequency goes too far out of range then power stations trip automatically, it's not an explicit decision anyone takes and it doesn't balance load, quite the opposite. A station tripping makes the problem worse as the frequency drops even further as the load gets shared between the remaining stations, which is why grids experience cascading failure. The disconnection into islands is a defense mechanism designed to stop equipment being too badly damaged and to isolate the outage.

martinald5• 1 year ago

Interestingly it seems that the black start drill is considering a smaller zone of impact than what has happened here.

Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.

I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.

Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.

genewitch10• 1 year ago

Grid tied solar won't put power into the grid when the grid is down. It's the one reason I didn't grid tie.

Non tied solar won't affect the grid at all. So this is a non-issue.

Grid tie requires the grid to tie to, otherwise it can't synchronize. So it stays disconnected.

Tireings2• 1 year ago

Those small solar panels probably go directly to the next consumer.

You need to calculate for it but I don't think this would be a problem

caf2• 1 year ago

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of.

The South Australia System Black in 2016 would count - SA already had high wind and rooftop solar penetration back then. There's a detailed report here if you're interested:

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...

qyckudnefDi5• 1 year ago

This guy grids!

chippiewill4• 1 year ago

The frequency aspect of a black start is presumably a bit easier in Europe because there's an interconnected synchronous grid so they can bootstrap it from France essentially.

It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.

padjo4• 1 year ago

I was recently told by an electrical engineering lecturer that the black start plan here in Ireland is to use the DC interconnectors with the UK to provide startup power to a synchronous generator.

oliwarner• 1 year ago

Does the source of "truth" matter? You still have to turn everything off, bring your generators up, each in sync and then allow load back on slowly.

The UK keeping its own time just makes things easier for it IMO.

tzs2• 1 year ago

Isn't that backwards? When grids interconnect via DC wouldn't there no longer be a need for the grids to synchronize frequency?

celticninja• 1 year ago

cash is all well and good but if the tills dont work most stores wont be able to serve you. corner shops, vape shops and barbers will be ok though

genewitch10• 1 year ago

Stores with tills and freezers etc will have power for the tills but the backing network for payments probably won't be up. That's the concern with being cashless. They can accept cashxl, but no one has any.

petertodd7• 1 year ago

The tills have keys to manually open them, and you can just record transactions on pen-and-paper if needed and enter them later. I've seen plenty of businesses do exactly that during power outages. Not as fast. But totally doable.

torcete• 1 year ago

I was able to buy some groceries and pay with card. The tills had a battery backup and the network infrastructure that supports card payments was apparently working.

That said, lots of people hit the cafés and had to resource to cash payments. There was also lots of people buying bottled water at the shops.

So basically, you could divide people in two groups. Those that took it like an extra Sunday, and those that took it like the beginning of a war or something :-D

floatrock2• 1 year ago

Practical Engineering did a really great video a few years ago on why black starts are hard, complete with a tabletop demo about the physics of synchronizing large spinning generators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w

apexalpha• 1 year ago

Would this be relevant here? Spain is connected to the French grid, and probably also Morocco.

The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.

crmd• 1 year ago

It would be essentially the same thing as a grid black start, except that the first breaker to close has the European grid on its primary side, instead of a freshly started generator under your control.

The complex process of configuring the transmission network to bring grid power to each power plant in succession is the same.

lysace• 1 year ago

The continental part of the EU runs on one synchronized grid. The Nordics (except half of Denmark and, uh, Iceland, Greenland etc) runs on a separate synchronized grid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

jameshart• 1 year ago

Re: probably also Morocco: yes, there is an interconnect across the Strait of Gibraltar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain-Morocco_interconnection

mlsu2• 1 year ago

Does solar power make this process easier or harder? I know that with thermal plants you have a spinning mass that you have to synchronize, and phase shift is used to assess how hard the plant is working (and whether to trip a disconnect as we see here)

But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?

My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.

mike_hearn5• 1 year ago

Most solar and wind plants follow the inertial lead of the thermal plants. They can't synchronize without enough thermal generation being online. Supposedly there are efforts to change that, I don't know enough about grid engineering to say how far along that might be in Spain.

pjc5018• 1 year ago

Mike_hearn's comment was grey but was correct: phase following is indeed done through software in the inverter. Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat.

Currently the main driver of battery deployments is not so much energy price time arbitrage as "fast frequency fresponse": you can get paid for providing battery stabilization to the grid.

(for the UK not Spain: https://www.axle.energy/blog/frequency )

sceadu• 1 year ago

But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?

If you mean how does solar detect phase and synchronize to the grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop

If you mean how does solar act to reinforce the grid: search for terms like "grid forming inverter vs. grid following inverter" though not all generators are the same in terms of how much resilience they add to the grid, esp. w.r.t. the inertia they do or do not add. See e.g. https://www.greentechmedia.com/squared/dispatches-from-the-g...

Hydrocarb0n• 1 year ago

Harder mostly, See the frequency is set by huge rotating masses in the form of generators, and when the supply and demand is matched the frequency and voltage are stable, when demand dramatically increases it pulls the frequency and voltage down, which is effectively slowing the generators down as load / magnetic drag increases with current drawn. Having large inertial masses spinning actually helps smooth out frequency changes. whilst large solar farms can and do syncronise with the grid, they are reactive and do not add the same smoothing effect as humungous spinning masses.

Low Grid frequency & voltage can cause an increase in current & heating of transmission lines and conductors and can damage the expensive things, this is why these systems trip out automatically at low frequency or low voltage, and why load shedding is necessary

stephen_g• 1 year ago

I'd say a little harder to negligible now, but potentially way easier in the future.

The main difficulty is that the software of grid-following inverters tend to make them trip out very suddenly if the grid parameters get too far out of spec (they will only follow the grid so far), but once the grid is good they basically instantly synchronise.

But all large solar farms are likely to be mandated to switch from grid following to grid forming inverters eventually which will make them beneficial for grid security because they will help provide 'virtual intertia' that looks exactly the same to the rest of the grid as spinning mass does.

bob10293• 1 year ago

Thermal plants require energy to start up

It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.

pfdietz3• 1 year ago

That's true of some kinds of thermal generators, but not all. Simple cycle gas turbines can come up very quickly (think jet engines). Or your car's engine.

7952• 1 year ago

Can thermal stations be kept running without any laod?

Vox_Leone• 1 year ago

The fewer resources we dedicate to grid resilience and modernization, the harder black starts become. And as grids get more complex and interdependent, recovering from total failure becomes exponentially harder.

A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity.

We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications and financial systems. And yet, public awareness of the infrastructure behind it is shockingly low. We tend to notice the power grid only when it breaks.

We’ve neglected it for decades. In many regions, burying power lines is dismissed as “too expensive.” But compare that cost to the consequences of grid collapse in extreme weather, cyberattacks, or even solar storms — the stakes are existential. High-impact, low-frequency events are easy to ignore until they’re not.

roughly• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is the turkey’s dilemma - life on a farm is a lot better than life in the wild for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year.

Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.

The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.

the_duke2• 1 year ago

Just to highlight this: the last significant power outage in Western/middle Europe was 2003. [1]

That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.

It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.

Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout

jrs235• 1 year ago

Honest question, are we better off in the long run, and is it a better solution, to decentralize energy generation and make more smaller grids rather than linking them all up? This isn't to say completely getting rid of the ability to transfer between the smaller grids to assist with power disruptions but to decouple and make it less likely for catastrophic "global" failures like this.

pyrale3• 1 year ago

Burying lines is not a panacea, it generates massive reactance changes compared to a classic line.

yibg• 1 year ago

Maybe a good reason (in parts of the world where this is practical) to have some solar + battery storage. Doesn't even need to fully replace grid power, just enough to run the barebones when the grid goes out.

miki1232112• 1 year ago

We're slowly reaching this point with the internet too.

I feel like to many technologists, the internet is still "the place you go to to play games and chat with friends", just like it was 20 years ago. Even if our brains know it isn't true, our hearts still feel that way.

I sometimes feel like the countries cutting off internet access during high school final exams have a point. If you know the internet will be off and on a few days a year, your systems will be designed accordingly, and if anything breaks, you'll notice quickly and during a low-stakes situation.

dv_dt• 1 year ago

I would think that renewable infrastructure could be the fix, at least if you start installing larger battery capacity to meet renewable store and usage shifts, the grid essentially is installing the resources that can also be used to respond to & contain sudden source losses and prevent cascades.

oilman2• 1 year ago

In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform.

A full grid black start is orders of magnitude more complex. You’re not just reviving one machine — you’re trying to bring back entire islands of infrastructure, synchronize them perfectly, and pray nothing trips out along the way. Watching a rig wake up is impressive. Restarting a whole country’s grid is heroic.

zdragnar3• 1 year ago

I can appreciate the ability to revert to hand cranking an air compressor, yet I can't help but feel that the 99.99% of events, you'd be better served with keeping a two stroke gas engine ready to go. Air compressors tend to have parts just as or more vulnerable to environmental factors, and you get a lot more power for less elbow grease out of a two stroke.

cybergibbons25• 1 year ago

Black out on a rig or ship is very different to black start of a national electricity grid.

Most vessels will experience a blackout periodically and the emergency generator start fine, normally on electric or stored air start, and then the main generators will come up fine. It's really not delicate, complex or tricky - some vessels have black outs happen very often, and those that don't will test it periodically. There will also be a procedure to do it manually should automation fail.

There are air starters on some emergency generators that need handling pumping. These will also get tested periodically.

The most complex situation during black out restoration would be manual synchronisation of generators but this is nothing compared to a black start.

lenerdenator2• 1 year ago

I remember talking to my ex's dad about his job, which involved planning refuels of a large nuclear-powered generation station in the Lower Midwest.

The words "it's a miracle it works at all" routinely popped up in those conversations, which is... something you don't want to hear about any sort of power generation - especially not nuclear - but it's true. It's a system basically built to produce "common accidents". It's amazing that it doesn't on a regular basis.

SoftTalker3• 1 year ago

Hand crank? I'd think something like an oil rig would have a propane or gasoline or diesel generator with an electric start and batteries.

tantalor3• 1 year ago

hand-crank a tiny air compressor

Is that what Dr. Sattler is doing in this scene from Jurassic Park?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoW4vXnkhJw

lillecarl2• 1 year ago

I love the "analog" handcranked air compressor to 7MW generator escalation, it really captures human ingenuity.

I wonder however how being part of the "continental Europe synchronous grid" affects this, and how it isolates to Portugal and Spain like this.

But yeah there are a lot of capacitors that want juice on startup that happily kills any attempt to restore power. My father had "a lot" of PA speakers at home and when we tripped the 3680w breaker (16A 220v) we had to kill some gear to get it back up again. I'm also very sure we had 230v because I lived close to the company I worked for and we ran small scale DC operations so I could monitor input voltage and frequency on SNMP so through work I had "perfect amateur" monitoring of our local grid. Just for fun I got notifications if the frequency dropped more than .1 and it happened, but rarely. Hardly ever above though since that's calibrated over time like Google handle NTP leap seconds.

I love infrastructure

kryogen1c• 1 year ago

have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator

Similarly, the US Navy maintains banks of pressurized air flasks to air-start emergency diesels. Total Capacity being some multiple of the required single-start capacity

lr19702• 1 year ago

bringing islands together requires one to synchronize both -- frequency and phase. It is super difficult for large generators and transmission lines. transient heat dissipation can be a real bummer.

wepple• 1 year ago

I can’t see an answer here: how does an air compressor start an engine?

segh• 1 year ago

ChatGPT's tone is slowly taking over the entire internet

egorfine3• 1 year ago

Ukraine can share some experience with forced black starts.

petertodd7• 1 year ago

Ukraine is interesting in this context because there are so many generators. In the richer parts of Odesa I've even found it hard sometimes to tell whether or not the grid power is on as literally every single building had sufficient backup generators to keep the lights on (also, many big businesses seemed to run their generators even when the power was on, I presume as a civic-minded way to add generation capacity overall and avoid interruptions when the power flips on and off).

gwbas1c2• 1 year ago

Spain is part of the largest interconnected grid in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...

Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?

throwup2384• 1 year ago

Yes because they have to bring it all back up in phases so that they only face the load spike* from one interconnect at a time, which can take some time and can fail if there’s unknown damage like the GP said.

It really depends on the region though because almost all large hydroelectric dams are designed to be primary black-start sources to restore interconnects and get other power plants back up quickly in phase with the dam. i.e. in the US 40% of the country has them so it’s relatively easy to do. The hardest part is usually the messy human coordination bit because none of this stuff is automated (or possible even automatable).

* the load spike from everyone’s motors and compressors booting up at the same time

Damogran62• 1 year ago

It's a complex enough issue that you can't really 'hand wavey' it. The details are specific and thorny.

zymhan• 1 year ago

Presumably not

A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant, to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

Havoc2• 1 year ago

Yup - a true black start would be substantially more difficult and time consuming. More like a gradual reconnect.

Then again they might be less prepared precise because of the euro grid is available

mike_hearn5• 1 year ago

Spain is but Portugal is only connected to Spain and they are currently doing a full black start.

For Spain the external power and synchronization can come from France rather than generators which will help, but the process and complexities are still mostly the same. Call it a dark start, perhaps.

larusso• 1 year ago

I actually have no real clue how and where Spain/Portugal is connected to rest of Europe but could they also restart North to south with help from the grid from France?

kennysmoothx• 1 year ago

This is literally like Factorio.

If your Factory uses too much power, theres not enough energy to run the power plants generation, which decreases your power production. Death spiraling until theres no power.

You have to disconnect the factory, and independently power your power plants back up until you have enough energy production to connect your factory up again.

baq5• 1 year ago

They should allow you to build automatic rate-of-change-of-power-generation breakers...

eddd-ddde• 1 year ago

In my server I hooked up a sound alarm to a set of capacitors. Too low of a charge indicates higher power consumption than production, allowing you to unplug certain low priority loads. I also have some emergency coal generators ready to go at the flick of a switch if needed.

Man I need to go play some more.

shagie4• 1 year ago

Capacitor circuit network warning for alarm for "main grid is drawing on this bank - bad things may happen if capacity is not increased."

Another "trick" is those burner inserters are black start capable. They can pick up fuel and feed themselves to keep running without an electrical network.

I also tend to put Schmitt triggers in low priority areas. They've got a battery on the main grid next to them and if the battery drops below 50% power they remain off until it goes back above 75% power.

manbitesdog• 1 year ago

I've been thinking EXACTLY this while listening to FM radio for the last 7 hours (we didn't even have phone line)

somat• 1 year ago

Same with Satifactory, The larger powerplants need a lot of energy for their infrastructure to run and an overload will trip breakers and shut the whole grid down, a naively designed grid death spirals very easy. My factory was needing increasingly complicated black start systems so I started putting the powerplant infrastructure on a self contained islands. something a factory overload would not trip, it was something like one coal power plant can run the machinery needed for itself and 8 grid power plants.

belter7• 1 year ago

One of the Administrators of the REN, the Portuguese electric supplier is currently giving a press conference. Confirmed they are in scenario of restart from black start.

- Cause of event not known yet.

- They noticed power oscillations from the Spanish grid that tripped safety mechanisms in the Portuguese grid. At the time, due to the cheaper prices, the Portuguese grid was in a state of importing electricity from Spain.

- They are bringing up multiple power systems and the Portuguese grid is able to supply 100% of needs if required. It was not configured in such a state at the moment of event.

- They had to restart the black start more than once, since while starting, noticed instabilities in some sectors that forced them to restart the process.

- Time for full recovery unknown at this time, but it will take at least 24 hours.

lastdong• 1 year ago

Can’t upvote enough! Thank you!

beefnugs• 1 year ago

And if you are a mere mortal in this world, play Factorio : Space age expansion on the planet Aquilo. To learn the precious importance of reliable multi stage power bootstrapping

anovikov• 1 year ago

Power never went out in a country completely. At the lowest point consumption was ~40% of normal for that time of day.

Ukraine went through many black starts in the first winter of Russian strikes against energy. I guess they built a skill of recovering it quickly enough that it started happening faster and easier every next time.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 1 year ago

Oh damn, I thought this was a problem only in Dyson Sphere Program, lol

sgt1012• 1 year ago

I did a project where we predicted transformer failure (they blow up!) from changes in the oil that they have in them (its insulative properties suddenly change). This was 30 years ago so it's all a bit fuzzy, but the one thing that really stuck with me was the story that the SME that we were working with had about the UK grid teetering on the edge of failure during the "great storm" of 1987. His telling was that they really were unsure if they would get it back at all!

bsder3• 1 year ago

It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.

Most places are so dependent upon electricity that they can't even take cash during a blackout. And they don't even have the mechanical machines to take a credit card imprint anymore.

brewdad3• 1 year ago

The last of my raised number credit cards went away last month. Those old machines will only get a blank rectangle from me. Sad, because I did actually use one of those about 3 years ago when a rural gas station had power but no network.

isolli• 1 year ago

What does synchronization mean in this context, and why is it needed?

seabrookmx• 1 year ago

The bulk of the power grid is alternating current (AC), and the frequency of the resulting sine wave needs to be synchronized with the other parts of the grid it is connected to.

Tempest1981• 1 year ago

The grid uses AC (not DC), running at 50 Hz (cycles per second). So the voltage is going up and down at that frequency, in a sine-wave pattern.

If you try to connect another generator to the grid, it needs to be at the same point (phase) in the sine-wave cycle, so that its power contribution is added, not subtracted.

If it's not in sync, huge currents can flow, causing damage. Sort of like connecting jumper cables backwards.

hnthrowaway03152• 1 year ago

I wonder if someone could build a realistic scenario into a game -- let's say some sort of smaller scale black start for, say, a space station. And throw in a unknown computer architecture for the in-game computers so that players need to RTFM to figure out how it works.

Xorakios• 1 year ago

Awesome idea!

sterlind• 1 year ago

make it so! the fun of reverse engineering systems I don't understand to fix them is half the reason I joined this industry.

dxuh• 1 year ago

I tried to make something like this (not power specifically) for a game jam once: https://pfirsich.itch.io/arbitrary-complexity

I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI

The game is bad and nothing of what we planned on doing actually made it into the game. The video is long and boring too. But maybe someone finds this cool and is inspired by this and makes a game like this.

The first 15 minutes of the game were actually about getting the ship moving, first by reading the manuals of half a dozen different ship systems and then following some procedure outlined in those manuals (parts of which were simply incorrect), maybe having to do some things in sync with your other players and stuff like that. I think it would have been cool to add multiple reactors and start them up in sync and stuff. The different ship systems were actually Lua programs that interacted via a message bus. So kind of a unknown computer architecture?

bill34783• 1 year ago

A true black start has several factors (which make it difficult and notable):

1. The grid has to fully collapse with no possibility of being rescued by interconnection

2. As a result, a generation asset has to be started without external power or a grid frequency to synch to

3. An asset capable of this is usually a small one connected to a lower voltage network that has to then backfeed the higher voltage one

4. Due to the difficulty of balancing supply/demand during the process, the frequency can fluctuate violently with a high risk of tripping the system offline again

None of this applies in yesterday's case:

The rest of the European synchronous grid is working just fine.

News reports stated Spain restored power by reconnecting to France and Morocco.

By reestablishing the HV network first, they can directly restart the largest generation asset with normal procedures.

As they bring more and more load or generation online, there's little risk of big frequency fluctuations because the wider grid can absorb that.

fredo2025• 1 year ago

It’s not just restarting it that’s difficult. There are the side effects like what happened in NY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977

have some cash at home

For maybe the first 24 hours at a grocery store, and then not so sure. Would your neighbors sell you supplies and food? Maybe not? And so many places now depend on cashless transactions and doubtful they have pen, paper, lockbox, and safe as a contingency plan.

greggsy• 1 year ago

Sounds like my last Satisfactory build.

fifteen1506• 1 year ago

Black Start achieved! Not at 100% yet. Apparently we have [at least] 2 blackstart stations in Portugal, both were used.

ncruces3• 1 year ago

I expect those two (one CCNG, one hydro) are the protocol for a black start, but other hydros should have the capability should those fail.

StopDisinfo910• 1 year ago

As the press release you linked points out, the black start plan Spain trains on uses nuclear energy supplied from France to re-energize the power plants.

"Luckily", France is at an historically high level of production capacity at the moment and the connection between the two countries was reestablished fast.

According to RTE (French network manager), the interconnection was maxed yesterday at around 3GW of power.

Sadly, while Spain is part of CESA, it's not very well connected. I wouldn't be surprised if one the takeaway from the whole incident is that more interconnections are needed.

prmoustache4• 1 year ago

It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.

More than cash it was important yesterday to have the following in case it would have lasted longer:

- a battery powered am/fm radio with spare new batteries

- some candles and matches

- food reserves for a few days that don't need refrigeration: bread, anything in can, pasta, rice...

- some kind of gaz or alcohol stove, dry wood or bbq charcoal: you can always make a fire in the middle of the street where there is no risk of burning things around.

- water reserve (I always have like 24L of drinking water) and since I hate waste I regularly fill jerrycans when waiting for hot water in the shower that I use for manual washes (kitchenware or gears).

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

It's wild how much modern life depends on these insanely delicate chains of events going perfectly

bArray• 1 year ago

Just to add, I was at a University campus when the entire building's electrics went out and there was a significant pull due to relatively powerful computers in every room. They initially tried to bring the building back online altogether and failed. Then they tried to bring it back in sections and failed too. In the end they ended up going into each lab, turning every computer off at the wall to bring each lab's power back, and then turn each computer on one by one.

I can only imagine the difficulty of bringing large parts of the grid back online, that rush current must be immense.

LorenPechtel15• 1 year ago

Yup. I used to work with a factory that had a bunch of really big machines. Turn everything on at once and the transformer out on the pole self-destructed. Note that the breakers didn't pop--the startup transient was short enough. The power company wasn't happy.

Or look at Apollo 13. The astronauts had turned off everything possible because they had lost their generator and only had their batteries. And it took a lot of furious planning by the guys on the ground to come up with a sequence of turning things back on that didn't cause the peak draw to go too high. Can't go too fast or it trips. Can't start too early because the power is limited, but can't start too late because the systems have to be up when they hit the atmosphere.

zestyping2• 1 year ago

I'm confused. Would the start ever have to be truly black? Wouldn't water always be driving hydroelectric turbines, generating some electricity? Solar panels generate electricity without requiring input. I understand that synchronizing AC is not trivial, I'm only questioning the part about whether the start is truly black.

mrtz• 1 year ago

The "Blackout" novel comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)

carlos-menezes5• 1 year ago

Mobile network is fully gone on the islands now — it was working until ~10 minutes ago.

bakugo• 1 year ago

Still working in mainland Portugal but it's getting slow, probably severely overloaded.

carlos-menezes5• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's back and slow. Sidenote: RTP (National Public broadcaster) is gone.

rurban2• 1 year ago

They just reported on TV it will be on again in 20min earliest (15:30 CEST)

ta12433• 1 year ago

Madrid Mayor said

If emergency calls go unanswered, go to the police and the fire stations in person

That's not a statement I expect to see in relation to a developed city

the_gipsy• 1 year ago

She's generally imitating Trump's playbook, no surprise.

belter7• 1 year ago

As of 2 min ago..( 14:32 WEST ) in many parts of Portugal electricity still out, and also Water systems also offline. Report is for some it can take up to 10 to 12 hours before power back up. Probably many locals not reporting here as they are low on battery.

rich_sasha3• 1 year ago

Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand.

Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question.

I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were actually worse for the grid due to less predictable power generation or something, but that was a long time ago, certainly pre-battery storage.

Filligree3• 1 year ago

Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient?

So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points:

- Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. That's what keeps the grid running second-to-second; while a power plant might pretend it's outputting a constant 4MW, it actually shifts noticeably from moment to moment. The kinetic energy of the generator helps balance that out.

- Going up from the sub-second range, an overload of the generator obviously would cause the shaft to slow down, dropping the frequency and causing brownouts. Brownouts are bad and can damage the grid, so typically breakers will disconnect if it falls below 49Hz; a 2% drop.

- Baseload plants can't cope with this, as they take multiple minutes to spool up. Minimum; for something like a coal power plant, where you have to shove in additional coal and wait for it to catch fire, it's going quite a few minutes. This is what defines 'baseload'.

- Peaker power plants can increase (or decrease) their mechanical power production in a matter of seconds. These days that typically means gas turbines, though hydroelectric power is even better, and nuclear power could be used for peaker plants -- but isn't; most nuclear reactor designs outside of the navy is a baseload design. France does have some load-following designs, and we need more of those.

- Wind turbines can't increase their output, flat out, but they can decrease it (by feathering, or by using brakes). This is good enough, except this would turn them into 'peaker plants' that can't help with peaks. If we had enough wind turbines to cover 100% of the load then we'd technically be fine, but economically speaking that doesn't work; they'd be at less than 10% power most of the time.

- Wind turbines have rotating shafts, but a lot of the time they produce DC power, linked through inverters, which removes that benefit and makes them act like solar panels in effect. However, this is a purely economic issue; they can trivially be upgraded to support grid stability if the pricing scheme will pay for it.

- Solar panels are worse: They have no inertia! There is no rotating shaft there to cover sub-second usage spikes. That's where complaints about 'renewables causing reduction of grid stability' come from, along with issues like domestic solar needing to backfeed power through distribution lines and transformers that aren't necessarily designed for that.

- But batteries can absolutely help. The kinetic energy of a rotating turbine isn't actually that big; it's not that expensive to pair a solar panel with a battery to build a grid-forming system that acts the same way a kinetic power plant would.

p_l2• 1 year ago

For wind turbines, solar, and batteries, the frequency stability is doable through controlling frequency from inverters.

Some wind turbines are also internally a hybrid design that can dynamically adjust the frequency difference angle both for minimal losses in production, but also to provide frequency shifting and even artificial demand (i.e. essentially using wind power as brake)

nine_k• 1 year ago

It almost sounds like running a large motor/generator with a large flywheel on it, just for the purposes of frequency stabilization and flattening load spikes, may be a good idea in a large solar installation. The downside is the mass and the bulk, and the cost of copper. The upside is zero reaction time.

Matthyze2• 1 year ago

I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which is of course very helpful for grid management. Dispatchable generation can be increased if supply requires it, or multiple dispatchable generators can be 'redispatched' to relieve congestion in a part of the power grid (by rebalancing generation). Power from renewable sources can be decreased through curtailment, but that wastes the generated energy.

rich_sasha3• 1 year ago

Yeah, hence I mention batteries specifically in my question. I guess a renewable grid will need a lot of batteries. And presumably these are highly dispatchable?

ExoticPearTree5• 1 year ago

The "problem" with renewables is that they are not dispatch-able, meaning you will never be 100% sure that tomorrow or a week for now there will be sun or wind in a specific region. On the other hand, a nuclear or a coal powered plant, know months in advance if they will be available for peak load or not.

Yes, if it is sunny or windy, they can be scaled in minutes, but only if conditions are met. The inverse is true for nuclear/coal - they cannot be scaled up & down in minutes.

Havoc2• 1 year ago

Wild that cloudflare was first to report this. At least first I saw.

I guess news networks don’t have comparable access to live metrics

dredmorbius• 1 year ago

Wikipedia has an article following this:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage>

WJW• 1 year ago

Well obviously. Computers use electricity, so if the grid goes out so does internet traffic. Local data centers might have backup power but local homes and everything in between the homes and the data center probably won't.

jonplackett• 1 year ago

Genuine question: how is it that Ukraine’s electricity grid still works to any degree despite being bombed for years and no doubt intentionally sabotaged / cyber attacked.

But a whole country’s grid can go down like this in an instant?

amai• 1 year ago

Maybe because it has not been privatized, yet?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrenergo

selivanovp• 1 year ago

The answer is simple: EU and USA taxpayers billions pumped into Ukraine to buy hundreds of thousands of mobile diesel powered generators and fuel for them, and spare parts and replacement blocks for everything that’s been destroyed.

On top of that, Ukraine inherited a lot of nuclear power plants, and despite losing the largest one in Zaporozhie region, still operates all the other as Russia doesn’t attack them in any serious way.

No miracles, just pumping money non stop.

luke-stanley4• 1 year ago

For offline messaging over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi without internet or central infrastructure, I saw these recommended by ChatGPT Deep research and they seem current: Bridgefy (Android & iOS) – direct Bluetooth mesh within ~100 m, instant one-to-one & group chat, <1 min install. Berty (Android & iOS) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi; Briar (Android) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi with Tor fallback. Manyverse (Android, iOS, Desktop) – offline-first social feed that syncs posts over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi when peers meet. Can anyone vouch for these or know better?

luke-stanley4• 1 year ago

Whoever downvoted, a comment explaining why would be nice, when the cell tower generators are out, and there is only phone battery left, offline communication options could be useful, I'm glad I'm not in that position right now.

luke-stanley4• 1 year ago

Seems like some people are not interested in honest and useful feedback because this got downvoted too! I thought it made clear points about an important topic. Well, whoever sees fit to do this, I hope you get whatever it is you want.

croes2• 1 year ago

Maybe because you don’t have to ask ChatGPT for what could have been a simple web search.

mbgerring• 1 year ago

I hope somebody building and selling microgrids and energy storage systems is ready to take advantage of this situation. Mass deployment of batteries at the grid edge is a great idea for a lot of reasons, but none more immediately compelling than "the power won't go out if the grid goes down."

spacebanana72• 1 year ago

It should be mandatory for critical infrastructure like ATMs to have 24hr batteries installed. And some sort of power backup to maintain internet access as well - even if it's just a matter of everyone being allocated a small amount of starlink data or public wifi.

These things have relatively small costs, but make the system much more resilient.

olyjohn2• 1 year ago

What do you do when the ATMs run out of cash? It's not an unlimited supply in them.

You should probably just keep some cash on hand. And keep an FM radio and a few batteries on hand.

scotty79• 1 year ago

Maybe the grid upgrade should be to DC to get something hopefully more stable?

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

Practical Engineering YouTube channel black start video: https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w

nunobrito7• 1 year ago

To remember: in the early hours of this morning there was a huge purchase/transfer of monero that increased the price +30% (highly unusual) and a few hours later before lunch time we see Iberia disconnected from the grid.

Monero is the favorite payment coin when ordering real cyber attacks.

stavros5• 1 year ago

How do we know there was a huge purchase? Monero can't be tracked.

nunobrito7• 1 year ago

Because to buy that much monero so fast is only possible with bitcoin, which is traceable by governments and interested parties.

An estimated 305 million USD of monero were purchased this morning before the grid shutdown. That was a +50% increase on the monero price, something that never happened before in the last 11 years of the coin.

Quite a record. Quite a coincidence.

nunobrito7• 1 year ago

Related talk in Berlin 5 months ago detailing how to shutdown energy grids using only radio waves: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st...

pantalaimon• 1 year ago

Not really relevant, but the talk was in Hamburg

nicoboo• 1 year ago

I remember the talk and thought about it when I saw the news.

No conspiracy or whatever, just thinking about the complex system which is also vulnerable for some parts.

nerder92• 1 year ago

A quick Google seems to point into another direction: https://crypto.news/moneros-50-price-pump-likely-tied-to-330...

WinstonSmith84• 1 year ago

yes (of course) .. It's fascinating how always people love to jump to conspiration theories .. If it were a cyberattack (and so far it isn't proven at all), it would be nothing less than a state sponsored cyber attack to be able to get down the electrical grid from 2 EU countries - and obviously no "reward" such as crypto would be involved behind the scene

nunobrito7• 1 year ago

Please read carefully what you linked. It claims theft without a victim being identified. There is no victim and there is zero evidence of being stolen coins.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Remember folks, there's about 1% chance of a Carrington event occurrence every year. We're simply not ready.

dark-star3• 1 year ago

can't be ready for everything and anything shrug

guerrilla6• 1 year ago

We can be significantly better prepared for most things.

xyst2• 1 year ago

Would help if fossil fuel industry would stop pumping out anti-climate change propaganda.

whall6• 1 year ago

Fossil fuels increase grid stability?

ttoinou• 1 year ago

They’re hiding Carrington events risks ?

anonzzzies3• 1 year ago

Last big outage here in Spain, we got a generator, wind turbine, solar and battery. All cheap Chinese stuff as it doesn't happen often, as a result, this event was barely noticeable to us. Especially the wind turbine did well the entire day and night until the power came back a few hours ago.

Loughla3• 1 year ago

What batteries did you get? We have solar and wind, but storage is a real problem.

vfclists2• 1 year ago

What are the non-expensive non-Chinese alternatives?

mannyv• 1 year ago

Remember folks, civilization could end any time. We're simply not ready.

73737373733• 1 year ago

It's fascinating to see simulations of power grid disturbances propagating due to the limited speed of light/causality: https://youtu.be/5vAkdXRyKWM?t=713

TazeTSchnitzel• 1 year ago

This is really interesting. Even though I'm used to reaching websites on the other side of the continent in less than a second, it's incredible seeing how fast a frequency disturbance propagates.

blendo• 1 year ago

AC is overly complex and too reactive.

PLenz• 1 year ago

Carrington event?

GnarfGnarf• 1 year ago

There would be a broader area affected.

xyst2• 1 year ago

The Portuguese electricity operator earlier said the outage was caused by a "rare" atmospheric phenomenon, related to variations in temperatures

Global warming/climate change strikes again

yannvon• 1 year ago

I experienced it first hand in Madrid. This was much scarier than I would have imagined.

News travelled extremely slow: phone coverage was just barely enough to receive a couple text messages every 15 minutes or so. News spread on the street, I even saw a group of 20 people hunched around someone owning a hand-held radio in the streets.

Just before power was restored, things started to get worse, as the phone coverage went completely out (presumably batteries were depleted). People were in between enjoying the work-free day, and starting to worry about how tomorrow would look like if power didn't come back.

MisterTea4• 1 year ago

When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollution. Next day was totally in the dark as well and again, no panic. More beers were enjoyed.

The choice to move to electronic everything without having to give a shit about reliability is a failure of modern government. Move fast and break society for a dollar.

toast02• 1 year ago

thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability.

Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the telco DSL would drop instantly with utility power so I don't have big hopes and I wasn't willing to pay $60/month to find out.

Around when I moved, stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat. Cash might work, and I've got some, but I don't think many people in my community do; people don't have cash for the snack shack we run at my kid's sports, so I doubt they have it for restaurants and stores either. And we get frequent 2-4 hour power outages, at least one, usually two or three per year; and ~ 24 hour outages every few years. The snack shack runs during summer where electricity is most reliable, but I doubt people stock up on cash in the fall and use it all up before spring/summer; they probably just don't have any.

Kkoala• 1 year ago

That sounds like the sensible reaction, at the time at least.

It's interesting to think about and realize how much things have changed now though, and how reliant people are on everything, and especially their tiktoks etc. working all the time.

Some of the panic is likely related to the war in Europe too, and especially the general talk about war

rimeice• 1 year ago

2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones. I’ve been in Lisbon today and it’s surreal being 100% cut off from friends and family back home and a big relief power is back on, we’ve become very used to and reliant on seamless instant connection. Our mindsets and how we live our lives with that instant communication is totally different to 22 years ago.

seanc• 1 year ago

Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

Like 10-15 years ago before VOIP I sold internet/landline services door to door for a summer. My biggest selling point was explaining to people (usually who had children) that the VOIP service they switched to would not work in an emergency where power wasn't available... Worked like a charm to get people to switch back.

moonlanders• 1 year ago

Similar experience in a town in Madrid's metropolitan area.

Electricty went down (something kind of frequent). My UPS kept PC up, and alarm system with sim and small UPS mantained wifi up for an hour or so.

Scary moments started when people I was in a call with in Portugal texted 'Grid is out'. Later no phone signal nor data.

At first, it might seem people running towards supermarkets an overreaction on being without TikTok for a couple of hours, but you have to live how scary it is to experience this in Europe's current political status to know 60 million people (plus industry) in three countries are out of the grid.

If you see Snowden's film (this might not be the most trustworthy source) it is exactly how CIA's agent describes the feasable attack towards these countries. Again, not a valid source, but I'd love to understand if that could be feasable.

sebastiennight2• 1 year ago

I think this is where F-droid and Briar have a (short-lived in this instance) chance to shine. Since Briar allows communication between phones without access to the Internet, and F-droid allows to direct transmit apps between phones as well.

I wonder what similar solutions exist in the iOS ecosystem.

jaharios• 1 year ago

Until you have to charge your phone.

integricho• 1 year ago

we tried briar during the recent mass protests in Serbia and the bluetooth connection never worked, it was unable to connect to any of the contacts that were previosly added using the normal 4G connection.

EugeneOZ• 1 year ago

My son was at the university outside of Barcelona, and I lost contact with him for 6 hours. He was traveling home, and I knew that the roads had no working semaphores, and there were dozens of incidents...

I lost some years today.

My son is fine, thanks to a random person (“the man with a rabbit”) who just decided to give a lift to my son and his friend to the edge of Barcelona.

Jare2• 1 year ago

Glad you are all ok. There have been many stories of people supporting and helping each other, very uplifting in these troubled days.

EasyMark• 1 year ago

no one has emergency fm radios there? I thought that was pretty much ubiquitous. that's the first I'd go to check what was going on I think, other than my phone

pta20022• 1 year ago

From my personal experience, mostly just in the car. Here in Portugal there was a rather well-timed rail strike today, so a lot of people who would've taken the train drove instead and had a way to get back and listen to the radio. From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too, which is the national broadcaster's main radio station, who stopped all normal programming and did an all-day massive report on this situation to keep people informed. From what I could tell they didn't even run any ads during that period, just all-day reporting continuously repeating key information for people who'd just tuned in.

findingMeaning• 1 year ago

I come from a world where I faced power outage for 17 hours for weeks. Each day there would be power at random time of the day. Life is just bleak. And when I see these kind of posts, I sympathize with them. You can't do anything in that situation. Modern world itself is so complex, you are left to thoughts. If this continues for a month, most people will go insanse especially those who rely on technology to stay sane.

I hope this comes back ASAP.

jventura• 1 year ago

Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.

All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..

Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies). Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!

Pure fear and panic..

I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.

VagabundoP4• 1 year ago

During a bad storm here many people used their electric cars to power their house. There were still places to charge it and then come back to the house to power it until the house was re-connected.

ExoticPearTree5• 1 year ago

I have to ask: what's with "many people buying toilet paper" when there's the smallest probability of a disaster? Why? Why? Why?

bigbacaloa• 1 year ago

I did not see much fear. I was at work and it took about two hours for us to realize the outage was not just local. The cafeteria had gas burners and served everything they could to empty the refrigerators. We all at lunch and discussed whether those who lived far away (train trip) would need to sleep at work (they might have, I don't know what happened to them). I made the relatively short 75 minute walk home across the city.

The atmosphere was quasi-festive and most people were quite relaxed, enjoying an unexpected afternoon off. Younger people filled the bars which were serving everything they could. There were long lines at supermarkets and an occasional fellow toting a box of supplies, but mostly there were just huge numbers of people in the street and completely collapsed traffic flow (the police were out in force almost immediately, directing traffic). In the part of Madrid I was in about 1/4-1/3 of the population is from South America and I suspect most of them have seen this all before anyway. The only real stress I saw was from people that need a train to get home (because the trains weren't running) and a had a walk of more than 2-3 hours.

I got cell phone signal when I was near two hospitals which were fully operational.

It was interesting that almost immediately, while I was still at work, everyone said power was out in Portugal and France too. After an hour or two some were claiming problems in Germany, but this seemed already to be unfounded rumors.

Some younger people couldn't walk home because they didn't have google maps ...

tiborsaas• 1 year ago

You can track the outage with CloudFlare's traffic radar page too:

https://radar.cloudflare.com/es?dateRange=1d

https://radar.cloudflare.com/pt?dateRange=1d

Portugal nearly reached zero.

BoredPositron2• 1 year ago

Two days ago someone cut a whole overland power pylon in Germany…

guerrilla6• 1 year ago

Link please?

BoredPositron2• 1 year ago

In German: https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/strommast-abge...

perihelions• 1 year ago

- "[Portugese electric network Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN)] said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of 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.”"

- "The risks posed to electrical systems by big variations in atmospheric temperatures are well known in the industry, even if it is rare for problems to manifest on this scale."

- "“Due to the variation of the temperature, the parameters of the conductor change slightly,” said Taco Engelaar, managing director at Neara, a software provider to energy utilities. “It creates an imbalance in the frequency.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p... ("Spain and Portugal power outage: what caused it, and was there a cyber-attack?")

Karawebnetwork• 1 year ago

What caused it? 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 of 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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p...

guerrilla6• 1 year ago

So, what you're saying is that literal bad vibes caused it... ;)

Eduard2• 1 year ago

"Conductor gallop" is one of several proposed causes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conductor_gallop

MaoSYJ• 1 year ago

Power back at 20:30 approx in some Madrid province locations at this point most of Madrid should have power.

Mortiffer• 1 year ago

Power is back on some parts of Lisbon

ksajadi5• 1 year ago

Apparently Europ network came close to shutdown due to frequency drop as the result: https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916914966663434493?s=46

leumon• 1 year ago

Except that's not true: an auto shutdown only occurs at 47.5 Hz, at least in Germany, some countries have the limit even lower: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterfrequenz

ksajadi5• 1 year ago

Thanks for the clarification. However the idea behind this hypothesis is that the inertia stored in physical generators is mostly responsible for keeping the grid stable and as less inertia exists in the grid the risk of this goes up.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

celsoazevedo2• 1 year ago

Is that a reliable source? The guy started blaming this on renewables hours ago even though no one seems to know exactly what happened.

ksajadi5• 1 year ago

WSJ good enough? https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

sapiogram3• 1 year ago

The guy is an American political journalist, his opinions here have exactly zero value to me.

ksajadi5• 1 year ago

His opinions or his facts?

codingbot3000• 1 year ago

Sponsored by the fossil fuels industry... Also, Texans are not in a good position to lecture others about power network stability :-D

The official investigation is not over yet, but the head of the Spanish power network has already said that this cannot be related to renewables: https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250430/10632617/beatriz-...

geye1234• 1 year ago

Relevant:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/22/spain-hits-first-week...

timhigins• 1 year ago

One guy simulated Australia's electrical grid for 3 years to show that the entire grid could run off of >98% renewable energy using the installed renewables with just a small amount of storage (e.g. 5 hours of average demand, ~10% of demand over the entire period).

To me this indicates that in many energy markets where renewables are sufficiently built out, the only factor for why we aren't using them more is the storage capacity and grid infrastructure to handle their variability -- and instead just running stable but dirty energy systems.

There are a lot of cool mechanical grid systems like gravity batteries (e.g. weights on a pulley system) [2] or compressed or liquid air storage systems [3] which provide cheaper storage at higher capacities and durations than electric batteries

1. https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr... 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trA5s2iGj2A 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjERw-Ol-_s

worldsayshi2• 1 year ago

It makes intuitive sense to me that a small amount of storage would make a big difference. Outside of peak use there has to be a huge amount of potential effect that never gets generated because lack of demand at that time.

red75prime• 1 year ago

Some amount of storage, significant over-provision, right balance between wind and solar; smart, well interconnected grid.

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

Yeah, this matches what I've been thinking too - we're way closer to a high-renewables grid than people realize, but the bottleneck isn't generation anymore, it's storage and infrastructure

_kb2• 1 year ago

Live view of the grid status, phase, and frequency as everything comes back online: https://gridradar.net/en/wide-area-monitoring-system

victor23k• 1 year ago

I live in Madrid, and when the electricity came back around 22:00, people started cheering and celebrating in the street. You could hear how each neighbourhood was going back online.

It’s funny to think how the moment is goes off you feel nothing, but hearing that many people produce noise and express happiness makes your body notice instantly, a sensation we often describe as electric.

cma• 1 year ago

First episode of Connections is great to watch on blackouts and technological dependence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ

qwikhost• 1 year ago

Sounds like China 30 years ago

bgwalter• 1 year ago

The privatization of infrastructure in Europe has been a disaster. The only area where at least prices went down are telecommunication companies.

The postal services are worse now. Railway is more expensive and a disaster. Energy prices are sky high and apparently now we also see unreliability.

ricardbejarano• 1 year ago

Can't you just wait for a minute 'til we know what happened to point fingers? sigh

silexia• 1 year ago

Green energy! Maybe nuclear and fossil fuels would help?

cynicalpeace• 1 year ago

Living in Maine makes you prepared for this type of stuff.

It happens every winter. When I was a kid, we once went 2 weeks without electricity.

Wood stove becomes an obvious necessity. Not just for staying warm. For cooking.

Chickens in the backyard too.

Those moments show you that being self-sufficient is an extremely important skill, and while we're not totally self sufficient in those moments, we get pretty darn close.

Really makes you appreciate the pre-electric era.

People cut down forests with axes. Pulled the stumps out with oxen. Cut the lumber with hand saws. Chiseled foundations with pickaxes. Etc, etc.

With the constant threat of Nuclear War, there's a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads that we will return to this era.

That makes it all the more important to learn these skills.

littlecranky67• 1 year ago

We had power on the canary islands (belong to spain, but located in the atlantic ocean ~80km west of Africa) since it is an independent grid. But couple of hours into the blackout (starting 5-6pm local time), internet issues occured - with confirmed multiple landline providers going offline (Digi, Movistar) while others seems to continue to work (Vodafone). Also some cellular 5G were affected, otheres continued. Interested to see the postmorten - I suspect after 8-10h the data center's diesel generators on the peninsula that route the traffic ran empty. Internet operation resumed during the night (for me around 1am).

pete1302• 1 year ago

Practical Engineer YT religious watcher here.

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

grid ops discussion on reddit about it https://www.reddit.com/r/Grid_Ops/comments/1k9uov6/major_out...

soci2• 1 year ago

I'm from Spain, electricity is almost fully restored in my area. But my fiber network is still down, same with the buildin elevators. People do not realise that when the backup supplies (batteries, diesel, whatever...) get drained, a cold start of non electric infrastructure could also be needed because syncornizing a mesh of unstable IT systems is tricky by itself, in some cases needing physical access.

EDIT:: typos

diggan7• 1 year ago

What network are you on? I'm outside Mataro and with Vodafone, got internet connection and power restored some time early morning/late night (after 02:00, before 09:00)

soci2• 1 year ago

MasMovil / Orange. Yesterday connection went on and off while the router powered by and UPS. But since last night, the fiber does not sync with the GPON anymore.

schnitzelstoat• 1 year ago

I'm with O2 (Movistar) in BCN and the internet came back at the same time as the power at around 18:00.

VagabundoP4• 1 year ago

On a slight side note if anyone has any good references to read on grid stability and resilience please reply.

Ex Electronic Engineer interest.

feirlane• 1 year ago

Practical Engineering on youtube has some good videos on the electrical grid. This one in particular is a good explanation on what they had to go through to get power back on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w

VagabundoP4• 1 year ago

Excellent video, thank you.

alexnewman• 1 year ago

Knowing what I know about powersystems, it's a miracle electricity ever works and the people who manage it are silent heros. Please buy them a drink

frozenwind• 1 year ago

I'm wondering: are there any simulator games in which you have to take care of the stability of a nation-wide power grid? This whole situation has me interested in logistics of power distribution now.

notfirstpost• 1 year ago

UK NESO’s website has one. It’s more educational that a real game…

https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/balancing-grid-interactiv...

zmibes• 1 year ago

My experience of it in Lisbon was undramatic. I was able to buy medication from the pharmacy. Life continued as usual more or less apart from some inconveniences, people playing cards in the street and a sense of everyone stepping away from the tech. Eyes were rolled as the reflexive suggestions of "putin" were inevitably voiced, more to make conversation than anything else. I met neighbours that I'd never talked to before, and reconnected with some I hadn't talked to for years. People played guitar on their balconies rather than spotify bluetooth speaker pop. The neighbourhood cheered as it came back online but part of me, selfishly, would have liked a few more hours of blackout.

Would have been a very different story if it were a week rather than a day, but I was left with a sense that this complex community of locals and foreigners is stronger than I previously suspected.

tfrutuoso• 1 year ago

I've lost power at 11:30 and regained at 00:12 (Portugal). My hat's off to those brave engineers and technicians that managed to black start the ancient, under-invested grid in record time. Massive respect.

unholyguy001• 1 year ago

Grady over on Practical Engineering is going to be so excited (-;

Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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