The Spanish Power Outage

The first I knew about today’s massive failure of electricy grids across the Iberian peninsula was at 4 o’clock this afternoon, when I tuned in to a regular Euclid telecon and found that the expected speaker wasn’t able to give their presentation because there was no power in Spain. I was subsequently shocked to discover the scale of the outage, the cause of which remains unknown (at least to me). I’ve often thought that Ireland’s power grid was a bit unstable but I’ve never known the whole country to be shut down!

It all reminded me of the 2003 power blackout in the North-Eastern USA and Canada.

There has been speculation about an “unusual atmospheric phenomenon” being the cause, but that seems somewhat implausible. Indeed, nothing I’ve read so far about the cause of this event makes much sense.

This time last year I was in Barcelona, and today’s events got me thinking what it would have been like to be there without any power. The apartment I was living in was all-electric so there would have been little I could do – no light, no cooking, no air conditioning, no internet, no TV, no radio. I was on the top floor and the lift was powered by electricity so I would have had to use the stairs to get in or out. It would have been an interesting experience to see the city in total darkness from my balcony.

Had I been in the Department of Physics when the power went off I probably would have had to walk home, as the Metro would not have been running and with all the traffic lights off the roads would be even more chaotic than usual. That would have meant a walk of an hour or so, which would have been annoying, but feasible. Come to think of it, people actually on the Metro when the failure happened would have been stuck in a tunnel which must have been very unpleasant.

Anyway I hope all my friends and colleagues in Spain are not too badly inconvenienced and that this very weird event doesn’t lead to any serious issues. I understand the power supply to hospitals is secure, which is a relief. I must admit though I am very curious to learn the cause of this catastrophic failure. Was it human error? Deliberate sabotage? Or was it really an “unusual atmospheric phenomenon”? No doubt there will be a full investigation and we’ll find out in due course.

This entry was posted on April 28, 2025 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Barcelona, Biographical, Euclid with tags Electricity, power outages, Spain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The Spanish Power Outage”

Anton Garrett Says:
April 29, 2025 at 11:50 am

This is what happens when you give a grid over to a very large proportion of renewables and a cloud goes over. The present explanation is very ‘economical with the truth’.

Supply has to match demand exactly at every instant, and the usual way to manage this in power stations is to allow slight variations in voltage and in frequency, i.e. you speed up or slow down the steam turbine connected to a generator by a small amount. That trick is not available with solar power, and when discrepancies between supply and demand become too large then interconnectors between different parts of a national grid system are liable to shut down. Depending on other parts of the grid, the problem may escalate into a chain reaction of shutdowns.

Nor is a ‘black start’ easy after a total shutdown, given that you have to match supply and demand at every instant.

Reply
- telescoper Says:
  April 29, 2025 at 12:07 pm
  
  At the time of the outage, solar power contributed around 60% of the being electricity generated. No unusual weather activity was reported, and in any case solar generators in Spain are widely spread. I could of course be wrong, but it seems much more likely that there was some sort of transmission infrastructure failure. We’ll just have to wait and see.
  
  Reply
  - Raul Jimenez Says:
    April 30, 2025 at 9:18 pm
    
    Indeed Peter, you are correct in your reply as all form of electricity generation shutdown. Competent engineers and scientist still investigating, but so far, most likely cause is what you point out. Just for the record, the posting you reply to is a verbatim copy of what the ultra-right-wing newspapers in Spain described as the cause of the outage, without any data whatsoever to support their claim.
  - telescoper Says:
    April 30, 2025 at 9:36 pm
    
    If I recall correctly, the root cause of the blackout that affected NE USA and Canada was a software error. In any case it certainly had nothing to do with solar power…
  - Anton Garrett Says:
    April 30, 2025 at 9:57 pm
    
    That this has anything to do with shades of political hue is just lazy argumentation. An energy analyst for Bloomberg has this to say:
    
    x dot com/JavierBlas/status/1917156299990499462
    
    Red Electrica has since added that the initial event was likely related to solar power.
    
    I welcome further information but in the meanwhile I see no reason to alter my initial explanation.
    
    A country like Spain can do very well with solar power by day, but it needs to keep the giant steam turbines in power stations spinning in order to have sufficient inertia in the system to prevent events like this. Keeping them spinning but producing little electricity is neither difficult nor costly. The energy market needs to be rejigged to make this worthwhile for their operators.
- nannacecilie Says:
  April 29, 2025 at 1:57 pm
  
  We do not know the cause of this (cyberattack seems to be ruled out), but it appears to have been exacerbated by having a single grid covering the entire Iberian peninsula. At least one lesson to draw would be the need to be able to isolate sub-grids in the case of disruption. At a micro-scale, many people had domestic solar panels but could not use them since they could not be isolated from the grid. The same thing happened during Storm Eowyn in Ireland, where even if you had a battery it was useless in a power cut in the absence of an isolator switch (which many installers will not supply).
  
  Reply

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