Widespread Power Outage Is Reported in Spain, France and Portugal (nytimes.com) 138
Widespread power outages were reported Monday in parts of Spain, Portugal and France, affecting critical infrastructure like airports and causing transportation disruptions. From a report: "The interruption was due to a problem in the European electricity grid," E-Redes, the national energy supplier of Portugal, said in a statement. In addition to Portugal, it said, "The blackout also affected regions of Spain and France, due to faults in very high voltage lines."
E-Redes said that the outage was widespread across Spain, with outages in Catalonia, Andalusia, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque Country, Castile and Leon, Extremadura and Murcia. In France, the Portuguese energy supplier said, "the Basque Coast and the Burgundy region also experienced power cuts."
Spain's national power company, Red Electricia, said in a post on X that it had restored some power in the north and south of the peninsula. The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. But the effects of the disruption were felt in cities across the region.
E-Redes said that the outage was widespread across Spain, with outages in Catalonia, Andalusia, Aragon, Navarre, the Basque Country, Castile and Leon, Extremadura and Murcia. In France, the Portuguese energy supplier said, "the Basque Coast and the Burgundy region also experienced power cuts."
Spain's national power company, Red Electricia, said in a post on X that it had restored some power in the north and south of the peninsula. The cause of the outages was not immediately clear. But the effects of the disruption were felt in cities across the region.
CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:4, Insightful)
> The cause of the outages was not immediately clear.
It's clear to the utility company operators. They're just not making it public.
Here's hoping people are safe, hospitals have power, people's emergency (medical?) equipment is functioning, and fridges are working.
Shout to to the EU readers - I hope you are all OK. One day we'll find out the cause, but right now, take care of yourselves.
Ehud
Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:5, Funny)
Any Chinese ships in the area missing an anchor?
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You haven't thought this through.
Do you think they'll drag an anchor, snag a power line hundreds of kilometres inland from the coast (see footnote), then ... just gas-axe the chain (or cable) that attaches the anchor to the vessel? Instead of hauling the anchor inboard until the power line (not designed to take much more than installation forces) breaks (releasing your anchor) ; or the anchor chain (designed to hold the vessel against high currents) breaks, when it loo
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
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Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
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"Submarine drone swarms" sounds very cool and "Net2.75beta". But their difference to a torpedo is ... what?
- Tonnage of explosives delivered to the side of the hull? Nope - already covered under "torpedo".
- Speed of movement? Also covered under "torpedo". Though a "Submarine drone" could travel at lower-than-normal-torpedo speeds. Which brings them into the territory of submarines. A known threat.
To the best of my knowledge, navies around the w
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:5, Insightful)
I am continually amazed at the increasing number of slashdotter's that can no longer identify sarcasm.
And are doomed to explain in detail how the OP's statement was impossible.
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As I said, harbour masters take this sort of thing seriously ... (and have major powers in consequence - as you say, "Once detained") ... because
Actually, being down an anchor is a "fix ASAP",
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:5, Interesting)
Heathrow Airport (in the UK) recently suffered a major outage due to one of its power feeds failing. No 'foul play' was suspected.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if there's some meddling going on here. I actually doubt it, because if it's an attack, it's not very effective. If it's 'testing the fences', then it's probably doing the opposite because you can bet everyone will be looking for ways to be resilient to this in future. The most likely is 'natural causes', but linking three countries together and having them all have some level of failure sounds like quite a lot of inter-linkage.
What I do know is that the transformers they use are oil and paper insulated. They're also in service for *decades* at a time. They're all designed not to degrade, but of course they do eventually. There are warning signs of problems, but when they go, they go really spectacularly quickly. The other thing I always find interesting is how they're able to switch in alternative supplies with relative ease. Even just having a switch on a high tension circuit is an engineering marvel.
Side note: The teacher I had when I was about 18/19 for 'Power Electrical' had previously worked in these sorts of settings. He told us of a particular building full of switch gear that had a safe working distance of 18 feet. There was a track marked out on the floor that you couldn't deviate from, and you were told not to point at things for fear of making yourself into a conductor. That story stuck with me - whilst some of it looks pretty 'basic', it's really pretty awesome at the same time.
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I don't think it is any great mystery or conspiracy. It is just electrical demand is growing faster than most people expected.
Like all infrastructure maintenance is required some of that is offline maintenance and that is never convenient, the server interval is therefore stretched to the outside of what the safe operating window is really expected to be, and very occasionally something isn't caught before the smoke gets let out.
We hear about it because we get news from all over the world now, very rapidly
overloaded lines that trip out and they did not bu (Score:2)
overloaded lines that trip out and they did not build more lines to cover the loads?
Re:overloaded lines that trip out and they did not (Score:4, Informative)
That's not a root cause as such a thing wouldn't cause a cascading failure of an entire grid, only loss of a feeder. We can speculate all we want, but analysing what happened here will take weeks to get to the bottom, and given the scale of the event it will take many months for reports to be sent through legal review and finally issued.
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"But ... but ... that would come out of the CapEx budget and reduce my Bonus. The guy who takes over after I retire can take that hit."< < Every CEO of the site for however-many years.
"Mistakes were made. But were not discovered until after the responsible people had left."
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:5, Interesting)
Beware of people claiming to know what caused it. I'm reminded of the Luton Airport fire which was quickly blamed on an electric car, only for it to turn out to have been a petrol one that caught fire.
The only word we have had on it so far is that they don't think it was deliberate, i.e. not criminal/terrorism.
They have massive amounts of solar power in Spain, and the sun is out, but most of the installations can't operate without the grid. Inverters with backup outputs are becoming more common now, but due to the cost of actually setting the facility up (wiring from the inverter to the appliances you want to keep running) people often don't bother with it.
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever happened at Heathrow is in no way similar to this power outage, and has nothing to do with transformers and the like. This is a HUGE outage with 15 GW (that's GIGA Watts) of power being down currently. Heathrow's peak power consumption is 40 MW, so we're talking about multiple orders of magnitude (15,000 vs 40) in power here.
The amount of power we're talking about is equivalent to a dozen nuclear reactors. So there is some kind of major cascading failure of actual power plants or the largest of power switching stations in the country. This isn't about old transformers.
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And if it were about old transformers it wouldn't cause a cascading failure either. Whatever caused this is complex, and it will take a LONG TIME to uncover the root cause and even longer to make recommendations.
The cause of this will almost certainly be a complex combination of multiple factors, and timing. ... Or a very well coordinated cyber attack, but that would seem kind of strange since Spain hasn't really pissed off anyone recently and an attacker wouldn't play their hand like this without something
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We dont know the root cause at the moment but the Spanish electricty company told they had to shut down part of network to avoid a bigger collapse and restarting a network is not so easy which is why they say it is going to may be take 10 hours to turn everything back on. They had plenty of power at this hour as it was middle of day with solar producing a lot so probably not du to unsufficient power. The whole European Electricity network is connected so the collapse was contained even if quite big locally.
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
Was it due to oversupply of power?
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
One of the problems Spain has is its limited number of overland high voltage connections.
The only way for Spain to connect is via the Pyrenees to France and France has been actively sabotaging new projects because they don't want to bear the cost of building all the pylons and the other infrastructure needed.
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True for France, false for Portugal. Portugal Spain interconnects are big and more being build. The excess power from solar is transferred to Portugal, where it is used to power hydro storage and later resell that power on high demand times (usually around sunset, people cooking and like), and early morning (bath and cooking breakfast)
Spain /Portugal interconnects were around 50% load and Portugal hydro storage was also around 50% of capacity... so no. It should not be excess capacity. Info from: https://ap [electricitymaps.com]
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Most of these things are down to human error (and squirrels). San Francisco lost power for 8-12 hours back in the '00's because someone forgot to remove a grounding strap on a transmission line prior to re-energizing a circuit. Things like that can either stress a transformer or cause a failure. The former leads to a reduction in service life, as do things like leaks in the oil gaskets either causing a loss of oil or entrance of moisture.
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:4)
For such a widespread outage they've probably had cascading failures, very rapidly, across a large part of the Iberian power grid. Some of those may have caused outages at different substations, ranging from tripped relays that can be easily reset to things that have physically blown and need replacement. It's entirely possible they have a pretty good idea of what needs fixing or resetting, but no idea yet what and where the cascade started from. Just because one site failed first doesn't mean that wasn't in response to an issue at another sending too much current, and so on.
Also, after the accusations and counter accustations of the recent LHR outage, I suspect they don't want to go off half-cocked and start an avoidable blame game so are making sure they've got all the facts before they start making any firm statements.
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
For an outage this big hopefully they'll have some idea what happened, the initial rumblings sound like some sort of frequency stabilization event... so I'm guessing that's what the operators saw at least. You're right that they're a little gunshy saying something definitively I'm sure.
Unfortunately there's really three fundamental things working to destabilize Western power grids.
First was the move to wholesale power markets, whose primary "benefit" has been to take slack out of the system by pooling relia
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:4, Insightful)
It's clear to the utility company operators.
Why is that necessarily so?
Sometimes when you're dealing with failures in complex systems, you know what went wrong right away. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out what happened. Most of the time it's in between. Often you may know *generally* what happened but the more you investigate the more specifics you have about the exact cause.
This story was posted just 14 hours after the event started. Why would the utility company *necessarily* understand the *precise* cause that quickly?
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It wasn't posted 14 hours later, the disruption happened exactly 5 hours ago
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It's clear to the utility company operators. They're just not making it public.
That seems like a bold claim to make. An entire country's grid goes down and you figure they instantly understand the root cause?
I mean, it would have been great if someone back in 2003 had stood up after a few minutes and yelled "there's a race condition in the management system!" when the US north east went dark, but that really only happens in movies. In reality, things like this can take months to investigate. Of course, the cause here might be a lot less subtle and more readily identifiable, but still.
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I'm in an industry where I too must fight mission critical fires (AS networks, a different kind of huge grid).
When shit goes boom, you try to prevent things like cascading failures, but they're not uncommon.
Root cause tomorrow or the day after to next week's problem. Today's problem is getting it fixed and stable.
Once that's done, then we get to work on drafting an RFO (Reason For Outage).
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
An entire country's grid goes down and you figure they instantly understand the root cause?
3 countries. Spain, France and Portugal.
However, not entirely. The islands in the Atlantic and Mediterranean were not affected, and most of France was fine.
So as you said, we cannot know what happened but we can begin to understand and eliminate some potential causes.
The Chinese anchor theory is not looking great right now.
An IT problem that starts in Spain and interferes with Portugal mainland grid leaving out the islands is very odd.
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France is fine. It's Portugal and Spain whose grid failed and a tiny bit of France is usually powered by it. RTE (the french grid operator) quickly diverted some power to this tiny bit and they got back up. France is even powering a bit of Spain right now.
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Yeah the fault seems to have been from Spain.
Reports say the power went off in Andorra for under a minute, restored from the French side.
Re:CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:4, Interesting)
I heard a podcast with a 60-something neurosurgeon yesterday who trained in New Orleans (Hurricane Central) and he had to demonstrate competence in opening a skull with a Gigli Saw to pass residency.
Because sometimes trauma comes in while the power is out.
I doubt most current residents could do it.
Similarly I saw that the Citibank building in NYC requires an electric pendulum (inertial mass damper) to not fall over in heavy winds. They have backup generators but eventually fuel runs out.
One small micronova event from a wandering galactic dust cloud and most of our civilization collapses. And apparently twenty of the world'd tallest skyscrapers.
In the case of Citi they have a ten-square block evacuation plan ready to go. Which is odd because TV told me that skyscrapers fall into their own footprint at freefall acceleration.
Nobody wants to talk about any of this. Keep your own family safe.
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I would guess that, even if a skyscraper falls into its own footprint, there could/will be a large dust cloud produced which even if not super toxic would be less than ideal for people inhaling before it can settle and thin out some.
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The building isn't stable enough to survive high winds without the mass damper.
If the building were to spontaneously collapse due to some inability to handle the static forces, it would do so in its own footprint.
However, with the combined momentum of 90mph winds hitting one side of it? I can guarantee it will fall over, not inward.
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FWIW, the mining industry knew about the dangers of silicosis (from pulverised rock) and the like from law suits launched (often by trade unions, because who else would have the motive?) in the 1930s and 40s. They just didn't advertise it, because they didn't want to warn potential employees and investors.
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Which is odd because TV told me that skyscrapers fall into their own footprint at freefall acceleration.
Yes they do. But where do you think the rubble goes? Hole in the ground? The evacuation plans are for general safety. 10 square blocks is where you're not likely to get hit by even a tiny bit of rubble, not where a building lands. Go look at 9/11 videos. Notice how the building fell into its own footprint? Now go look at an aerial shot of New York City minutes later to see how far debris actually travelled.
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It likely won't fall into its own footprint.
Otherwise- completely agree. Even if it goes down in its own footprint- you still don't want to be anywhere fucking near it.
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One small micronova event from a wandering galactic dust cloud and most of our civilization collapses. And apparently twenty of the world'd tallest skyscrapers.
That and one major wind event. It doesn't just collapse if the power goes out.
Which is odd because TV told me that skyscrapers fall into their own footprint at freefall acceleration.
They do, when something isn't pumping a lot of external energy into the system with a directionally correlated momentum (the wind required to make it fall down without the active mass damper)
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I missed the Millennium Eve party because a client wanted a crew on a drilling rig which depended on imported power on the job over the Millennium Bug hour, who had the experience to manage a kicking oil well with paper, pencil and pocket calculator, and no other computer-based data-acquisition or monitoring equipment. People who, if they lost their "the level in this fluid tank is X" sensor, would go out wi
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It's clear to the utility company operators. They're just not making it public.
Nothing is clear. At the time of writing from TFA the outage was less than 2 hours old. A cascading outage of this scale can take days to get to an initial guess, and weeks to investigate internally to determine the root cause. I've been on many investigations on outages of HV power systems. THIS SHIT TAKES TIME TO DO CORRECTLY.
Not everything is a god damn conspiracy that someone is hiding from you. Your UID is low. Stop pretending to be part of the impatient TikTok generation and have some fucking patience
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
Isn't AI obviously to blame?
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Very likely. In the last couple years, I've had four power outages lasting 4+ hours where the sky was blue and there was no rain or wind. I believe I know exactly where the shunt/breaker is that is faulting. Sometimes the effect is that the whole small city is without power, but other times it seems to cause a bit of a cascade and a few other towns are out.
They know for sure that they are technically the ones that flipped the switch to turn off power (even if automatically). I get that they may not know
Re: CAUSE of the outage not CLEAR (Score:2)
Something about weather causing unexpected Corona discharge on long AC lines, which induced a slow oscillation in frequency until it oscillated too far down, so shit started disconnecting, resulting in cascade failure.
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There are reports of one Spanish power operator describing unexpected power problems 5 days ago, may be related to this or not... in a few days we will know more
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> It's clear to the utility company operators. They're just not making it public.
please inform us about it!! we all want to know!!
All we now right now is a major power fluctuation in Spain and cascaded to Portugal, as at that time Spain was outputting lot of cheap solar power and Portugal was using that power to store in their hydro storage systems and later resell that same power, just after sunset, when power demand is higher. France was also buying Spanish cheap solar power, but as Spain/France conne
Notes at 13:30 UTC (Score:5, Informative)
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So it's European meth heads to blame?
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The "legitimate" business-men who employ the meth-heads (or just plain stupid criminals; via intermediaries) to steal the copper cables - they're the scumbags who bear responsibility, and should do long jail time for it.
Re: Notes at 13:30 UTC (Score:2)
Did you hear that here in Washington state some fellows were charged with attacking substations not because of terrorism, but because they wanted to burglarize nearby businesses without worrying about alarms?
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A cut cable is not a root cause for an event of this scale. It may have been an initiating factor, but cascading failures like this have bigger underlying causes such as lack of frequency correction equipment, incorrectly configured trip systems, etc.
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Again a completely unsubstantiated guess. Do yourself a favour, don't play low-IQ games. Let engineers and investigators do their work and then read the final report at the end.
That said this guess we can quickly validate. Red Electrica set a new record for investment in the grid in 2021. It broke that record in 2023. It broke it again in 2024, and the announced projects for 2025 would make this the most expensive year on record.
It's hard to blame cost cutting when they are objectively spending more than ev
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Need more Tesla Megapacks (Score:2)
European dems & lefties rather freeze to death (Score:2)
than to be receiving energy from Musk.
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That depends entirely on the nature of the failure. A cascading load shedding event such as what happened in Australia could be prevented by a battery pack, but it'll be months before we know if this was something that could be rectified by adding dispatchable generation to the grid.
Solar flares? (Score:3)
Re:Solar flares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that means rapid changes in ambient temperature causing sufficent expansion and contraction of the HT cables to cause enough physical vibration in the lines which then presumably either led (via a disruption in the transmission frequency?) to protection devices tripping at the substations.
Re: Solar flares? (Score:3)
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That implies the temperature oscillates, rapidly, up AND down. Not very likely ; even less likely to happen repeatedly, and often enough to constitute an actual vibration problem.
More likely (if this is an actual cause ; I'm not considering that question) : rising temperatures through the morning ; warming cables expand ; they sag lower than designed, experiencing more near-ground wind shear, and that generates the oscillation in frequencies that are not damped out by the
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Spain and Portugal have flatland, but also mountains ranges, some very high, that can also generate weird winds and the today sunny day for sure increased the temperature on places that were cold (it snowed a few days ago in some mountains) , generate more wind or at least, rotating the wind direction. So yes, wind seems more likely than temperature
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I'm not saying it's impossible, but it doesn't seem plausible. It's April and yesterday was far cooler than the typical temperatures in August which will have been the basis for the design (with a safety margin, one hopes).
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And an update a day later, there was no abnormal weather:
Spain’s meteorological agency, AEMET, said it hadn’t detected any “unusual meteorological or atmospheric phenomena,” and no sudden temperature fluctuations were recorded at its weather stations.
Not solar flares (Score:4, Informative)
There haven't been any significant solar flares in the last 6 days. In fact the X-ray flux has been unusually low for this point in the solar cycle.
I'm not saying it's aliens, but (Score:2)
...it's Russian Aliens!
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Supply unaffected in Gibraltar. Clearly the British! :)
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who supply power to Gilbraltar? Probably not Spain, that would allow Spain to isolate it and force a UK negotiation :)
Overgrown Vegetation Triggers Widespread Power Out (Score:2)
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The big 2003 east coast blackout was poorly trimmed trees in northern Ohio initiating a cascade of failures. A decent summary video [nytimes.com] I use in a freshman "energy" class.
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Portugal and Spain have log of wild fires, usually the vegetation under power lines are under heavy control, with team controlling and cleaning everything during winters and spring. I dough this is the reason for this one
France is lucky this didn't take them down too (Score:2)
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The blackout was roughly 12 to 6, so if you charge up your car overnight for the next day's commute you'd be more affected by the traffic caused by the traffic signals being out than the inability to charge. It would have sucked to be on a road trip, though.
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The world needs more roundabouts because they keep working during power outages.
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People who charge at home often get in the habit of plugging in every time the get home so they never have to think about it. In those cases, they should be fine. People who can't charge at home and have to plan a charging stop may be impacted, but people with petrol cars may also have a challenge finding stations with generators that are still operating.
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I can see the point at a fuel station in the middle of an empty desert. But since power companies tend to put their power lines close to roads, so they can get to them for repairs in the winter ... it's just not a necessary extra hassle.
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There are some, at least in Europe, usually in strategics locations, exactly allow fuel emergency services if there is any problem (fire, flood, earthquake, etc)
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That said, "strategic locations" does not necessarily mean "publicly accessible". I worked for the Post Office a while ago (before it was sold to the Czech guy), who have UPS systems (and maybe even diesel gennies in the back corner of the site ; several hectare site) for the sorting machinery come winter power cuts. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the diesel pump in our corner of the site was on the back-up power. Or had a hand-crank for fuelling the fleet. None of whic
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Why? EVs don't suddenly stop when the power is out. They work much like gasoline cars in that they will continue to run until their energy source is depleted. My car is currently at 30%, plenty enough for a few trips to work. I'll probably charge it on Thursday.
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At least in Portugal, there are LONG lines of gas powered cars in the few gas staging that can still operate (either gravity or generator powered). Most can't even operate and some that can operate are blocked, reserved only for emergency services and the Grid operator technical teams, working to restore the power
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Re:power out (Score:4, Insightful)
Having to siphon petrol would really suck.
Having to suck petrol would really siphon!
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Hint : if you suck a mouthful of, say, flesh-dissolving surfactant, or strong acid then you'll learn quickly how to actually syphon hazardous materials. You may want to practice first with a 100mm diameter hose to get the technique right.
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The trick is to use a consi
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It's at moments like this that I feel the need to listen to the dulcet tones of Ms Polt Styrene (dec.) and the 3-chord guitars of X-Ray Spex, telling the world "Oh Bondage! Up Yours! [lyrics.com]"
(I use the opening lines for my phone's ring tone. If you hear it, I'm likely to be within earshot.)
Bishop, or actress? Hmmm.
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all of the bitcoin and AI usage put us under 1.21 (Score:2)
all of the bitcoin and AI usage put us under 1.21 gigawatts!
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replace most with bigger... smaller shops, restaurants, coffeehouses manage to work still... yes, there were problems, but many will either insert the sells tomorrow, or simply not declare today sales and manage any out of sync info later
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I was in Barcelona when this happened, trying to hail a taxi to get to the airport for a flight to Madrid. Taxis essentially stopped picking up rides because the card readers did not work. I had some euros on me (typical cost was 34 euros to the airport from where I was staying). He won't do it until I offered him 45. On the ride there, I understood- roads were a mess. Ended up taking a long route there to get to BCN. Most of the restaurants/stores were open, but they only wanted cash (and, of course, most