Induced atmospheric oscillations.

Sounds a bit "AI or web translator doesn't properly understand" ...

Supposedly the portugese grid has a new article, but it's gone all 500

The Telegraph calls it 'Extreme Weather'. Obviously Global Warming to blame.

Bloomberg's Javier Blas noted:

"Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia.

Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)

Snapshot at 12.30pm local time (outage was 12.35pm)" pic.twitter.com/fF7FiIB6UD — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 28, 2025

"It's a race against the sunset to restore power in Spain.

In about four hours, Spain will lose ~1/3 of its current electricity generation (sunset is ~9pm Madrid time).

Spanish national grid is trying to reactivate (black start) as much spinning generation before that. "— Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) April 28, 2025

"Portugal's grid operator, REN (Rede Eléctrica Nacional), claimed that the massive power outage affecting Portugal and Spain was sparked by a "rare atmospheric phenomenon," specifically "extreme temperature variations" in the Spanish electricity grid. "

Apparently, six days ago, Spain celebrated getting 100% of its electricity from renewables. I had a feeling that Germany discovered some time ago that a stable grid could not be maintained with too much unreliable input.

Yes, I posted that earlier ...

Looks like they lost 3/4 of their solar, all their nuclear and all their interconnects at once, it was slowly coming back.

Grabbed from here, but it's a bit intermittent

Only 4 out of 7 nuclear plants operating before, and 3 of those were in Catalonia. Nuclear apparently lost shortly after something else.

sky.au reports that Spain recently introduced a new policy of maximising renewables.

If you look at the recent graphs, they seem to have pegged non-renewables between 9am and 6pm, creating a noticeable dip of about 5GW.

Very strong auroras are known to disrupt power grids, Canada being nearer the Auroral Circle is very prone to this effect.

It is being reported this morning that the inter-connector to France tripped, and that caused the Spanish and Portuguese grids to trip.

Well, that's when 18GW of solar kicks in, and they seems to be exporting

They've had less than 1/3 of that so far today, fair enough it's not yet noon, I've no idea what their weather is doing.

They *are* doing imports and exports again, but no that much, peak export today has been under 2GW

The spain/france connector wasn't doing a huge amount at the time of the blackout, it's possible it saw frequency variations and isolated itself?

Is it possible that the prospect of instability in such a grid running on so high a proportion of renewables was foreseen, and an explanation that no-one has ever heard of in this context thought up in advance to be deployed where necessary?

Its just something someone dreamed up in a panic to hide the awkward truth. Too much 'renewable' energy..

Most power plants will disconnect immediately from a grid that's lost its frequency stability.

Spinning mass generators will last a little longer, but even they can't hold up a grid in massive overload.

Once it gets to a certain point unless the grid itself disconnects the load the spinning mass generators will all trip off line, as well.

This looks like an interesting article:

According to an expert I spoke to, it would be “really really weird” for this weather to have caused - or 'induced atmospheric vibrations’.”

Most likely explanation. # ALL the wind and solar is extremely vulnerable to temporary overloads or loss of capacity. It will simply disconnect itself from a grid that is no longer 50Hz. That doesn't make renewables the proximal cause of the problem, but it does make them completely complicit in the scale of it

Juts as a car ferry fire may not have started with lithium batteries, but they sure cause d it to be a disaster.

Indeed. So says today's daily express. However there were no strong auroras and Spain is a long way from the North pole

Can't you smell the bullshit?

This is a disaster that could turn the whole tax paying public completely off renewable energy. The truth cannot be allowed to come out...

No,. It has all the inconsistency and vagueness of something thought up in a few minutes in a harassed PR department of some grid operator. 'Can we blame it on climate change' 'well let's invent some term that kind of looks like it'

This looks like a well-founded assessment:

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, Graham. snipped-for-privacy@yopmail.com writes

Power lines are huge long L-C networks. If there is a disturbance you can get damped oscillations in voltage which is Bad News. The sense circuitry then disconnects the generators and the HV lines .

It's a b@@er to get it all started up again.

I've still no idea what caused it in the first place, but it looks like the use of wind and solar makes it more susceptible. The UK grid has synchronous machines that store energy to try to stop this,

Fun eh ?

Brian