In Spain & Portugal.
Interesting through an academic lense, but think of those poor people as the country comes to a stand still & business is basically impossible. So close to month end when bills and payments are being processed.
Portugal’s worst case scenario is that it could take 7 days for restoration.
Expert on Sky news says the big problem is that the grid operators now don’t know how much demand there will be as they start to bring power stations back online. How many fridges will start up? How many geysers, how many A/C units? So they have to restore small isolated pockets and then start figuring out how to stitch together a whole grid. And when they do this, ideally the power stations should be able to talk to each other.
It’s unusual because the weather is fine which is normally a player in these blackouts.
Nobody has even suggested what the cause is. A cliffhanger as they say…
Yeah if they don’t have a good plan for how to restart the grid, I assume this could be very tricky. We probably have great data and infrastructure in place to actually do such a thing and stagger reconnection of the loads and generators back to the grid. 
The problem they face is a bigger version of what we see with restoration of power after load shedding. Power comes back, but lots of devices are turned on, there’s a sudden large demand, a current surge and then a trip.
They are bringing stations on line, and they have historic data from which they get an anticipated demand, but that is almost certainly an underestimate.
State of emergency declared in Madrid.
Last week Spain hit headlines for running 100% off of renewable on a working day. That may have been misreported as Spain has significant nuclear power. More likely it was no fossil fuel (which the UK did a few years back).
Anyway, social media is now full of experts on power generation & distribution.
Indeed, which is why I say they need a good plan to restart it already in place. Big stable loads like smelters they can turn on etc. Which I’m sure they have, but restarting the grid is still like setting up a bunch of dominos and just one mistake gets you to start all over again.
Presumably the generators are still going, they are just disconnected from the grid due to the grid’s frequency dropping, so not a “black start” as I would understand it.
*Edit: From what I can tell it seems the power has already been restored.
BBC reports job 87% of Spain back on at about 6:00 our time. Pretty good going.
I was wondering if this was an unprecedented event. It isn’t. There was a major outage affecting many EU countries in 2006.
If you haven’t seen this then check it out…
Grids that have the majority of RE appear to be vulnerable.
@Phil.g00 perhaps you can comment?
RE types have negligible system inertia, whereas big spinning machines can stabilize frequency events.
I think there will be a future demand for grid-based synchronous condensers to provide that system inertia.
Or some of these to stabilize the grid frequency.
I’ll tell you what, if I were living in Spain I’d be a bit miffed about the price increase they’ve just had.
I read about the one that was installed at Moneypoint power station on the west coast of Ireland.
Reading between the lines it appears they don’t have enough inertia on the Spanish grid. I look forward to reading the post mortem when it is published…
The political side of this was interesting to watch. “The Australian” (a news paper in… well… Australia) ran no less than FOUR stories about how this was the fault of renewables. I suppose we can guess who pays the salaries around there…
The rubbish on YouTube about the ‘cause of the blackout’ drives me crazy. They then go on to describe what a blackout is in its simplest form.
This is the only substantial bit of info I have read:
“Spain and Portugal have some of the highest shares of wind, solar and hydro power in Europe: in 2024 these provided nearly 60% of Spain’s electricity, and over 70% of Portugal’s. The comparable figures for Britain, France and Germany are closer to 40%, 30% and 50%, respectively.”
PS: We wait patiently to hear the truth…
One thing I don’t trust is YouTube.
This is a good summary with some technical detail.
I know a few Saffas who’ve moved to Spain and Portugal, wonder if they took the juju with them, plugged in a cursed device that caused blackouts. Bit of “low shadow” that side.
We are still waiting to read what actually happened…
In the meantime decisions will be made by the public because they need answers.
So when you hear that RE is unreliable and can’t be used then you can attribute this to these decisions that have been made by Jan Publiek!