Induced atmospheric oscillations.

It is utter bullshit.

Nothing has changed in power grids for decades and this phenomenon only shows up as 'being important' when renewable energy reaches a new high? I have a bridge to sell you

Does Spain have 'smart' meters? A sudden national demand drop at 12:30 from 27GW to 15GW could be the likes of Putin's codesmiths remotely commanding millions of such meters to disconnect from the supply, all at the same time

I've seen a figure of a frequency drop of 0.15Hz triggering the shutdowns. If you're trying to synchronise AC power across a continent, you really can't afford much unplanned phase shift anywhere.

It is well understood that if you can't produce more power pretty much instantly, that kind of grid is chaotic i.e. the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings might cause a domino chain of cutouts. There doesn't really need to be a significant and blameable cause. A cloud passing between the Sun and a large solar installation could be the initial trigger,

Germany had already realised this and was thinking carefully about adding more renewable energy to its grid.

I've just seen this in the Telegraph:

"Britain’s electricity grid operator is investigating unexplained power plant failures that hit the UK’s system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into blackouts.

Control room staff at the National Energy System Operator (Neso) observed unusual activity on Sunday that saw the power frequency shift unexpectedly in the early morning and the evening."

Further down the page:

"‘Inferno’ at London substation caused by equipment fault"

and of course we recently had much the same near Heathrow...

Intermittent renewable energy on a grid introduces positive feedback. If the frequency drops too far, because there is an overload, the renewable energy disconnects, thereby increasing the overload.

They couldn't find the positive feedback in climate change, so they engineered it into renewable energy instead, They just want catastrophes to justify government control of everything and state funded corporate wealth

The beeb is suggesting 2 disconnection events in south west Spain within a second, reminiscent of Hornsea 6 years ago.

Yes quite so the bollocks thats been written by the media amazing ..

Suppose the same will happen here given time!..

I suppose that somewhere a generation source came off line the removal of that load caused the frequency to go too high so the other connected ones said sod this were leaving and that happened very quickly.

So as we here know as much as anyone apart from adding some hefty flywheels what's to be dome?...

Having a house in Spain there are a few differences between there and the UK which seem relevant. Nearly every one has a smart meter. They are legally required. You pay for it as at a daily rate which is itemised on the bill. My last bill says @ 0.026630 Eur/day.

Second, your standing charge depends on your maximum permitted load. I Mine is 5.75kw charged at 0.117456 Eur/Kw/Day.. Exceed this and your smart meter will cut your power. You have to switch off the main switch to reset it.

Lastly, nearly every one has time dependant tariffs, either three level or "by-the-hour". I wonder if this last one caused a surge in demand as the rate switched....

Dave

The usual answer given by the renewables-believers to these problems is to demand yet more renewables…

About a week earlier, Spain had boasted of getting 100% of its power from renewables. You don't get much more than that.

All sounds pretty sensible. I wonder if they have as much an issue with crap smart meter comms as we seem to have?

Tim

Another possible route in for bad actors. For the UK SSEN they can by telemetry ,remotely pre-emptively cut supplies at substations in their network, if these systems were hackable. Such disconnect demonstrated locally last year for marine flooding 08/09 April 2023. It looks like the flood barrier at the Hamble Marina slipway could not be fitted due to dilapidations or something. The lowest SSEN transformer was flooded to a depth of about 5 feet in the end. The flood level was lower than the top of the barrier if it had been in place, but higher than the top of the open slipway/hard.

SSEN would never remotely disconnect a large number of loads at the same time, but not so for bad actors

I couldn't see a Spanish grid frequency monitoring site, but AFAIK mainland Europe is all sync'ed, and I found a German one showing a dip to 49.85Hz

Assuming the work on a similar tolerance to the UK of +/- 1% they were well within limits.

This site does its own local frequency monitoring, a slight lag all day long but nothing particularly out of the ordinary

But there are limits and limits. On 9th Aug 2019 there was a short power cut in the south-east of England but it turned out that pretty much all Thameslink trains stopped and could not be restarted. There was widespread disruption on the entire network for the rest of the day.

The cause was that the UK grid frequency dropped very briefly to 48.8 Hz. The train specification should have allowed them to survive that but in practice they did not. In an even worse design defect by Messrs Siemens most of them could not be restarted by the driver and needed a visit from a technician.

It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that there was some component in the Iberian electricity system that was more sensitive to a frequency drop than it should have been and that this pulled the whole system apart.

Each time I try to price up what it would cost to have enough battery to cover a (say) five-day dunkelflaute, I get a figure in the region of £1,000,000,000,000.00

Can anyone do any better?

There is a claim they lost 15 GW of generation, in a matter of a couple seconds.

They now have to backtrack, check the waveforms, and see why those facilities kicked out.

I suspect at this point, these "single data point" observations will have to wait, until all the "items" are aligned to figure out the trigger. The 15 GW of generation, could drop out on the frequency stability boundary 0.15 being hit. Something generated the event, and the transient on the HV facility could be the "result" of something else tripping, and not the cause.

It can take quite a while, to do a good job on the analysis. It also depends on enough instrumentation being available, and if you have a shitload of renewables, what are the odds all of those have atomic clocks and loggers.

Paul

That might have been the trigger, but it wasn't the main charge ....