Spain Outage Was First of Its Kind, Worst in Decades, Group Says (financialpost.com) 26
The blackout that left Spain without power last April was the most severe incident to hit European networks in two decades and the first of its kind, according to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity. Damian Cortinas, the organization's chairman, said the April 28 outage was Europe's first blackout linked to cascading voltages. More than 50 million people lost electricity for several hours.
A preliminary report published in July attributed the outage to a chain of power generation disconnections and abnormal voltage surges. The final assessment will be released in the first quarter of next year and presented to the European Commission and member states. A government probe in June found that grid operator Red Electrica failed to replace one of 10 planned thermal plants, reducing reserve capacity. Spain spent only $0.3 on its grid for every dollar invested in renewables between 2020 and 2024, the lowest ratio among European countries and well below the $0.7 average.
A preliminary report published in July attributed the outage to a chain of power generation disconnections and abnormal voltage surges. The final assessment will be released in the first quarter of next year and presented to the European Commission and member states. A government probe in June found that grid operator Red Electrica failed to replace one of 10 planned thermal plants, reducing reserve capacity. Spain spent only $0.3 on its grid for every dollar invested in renewables between 2020 and 2024, the lowest ratio among European countries and well below the $0.7 average.
Contraddictory Headline (Score:1)
It can't be both.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. It can be the worst outage in decades, while being the first of this specific type of outage.
So THERE!
Re:Contraddictory Headline (Score:5, Interesting)
Headline is actually correct, if meaningless. It was also the best, most yellow, least wet and most foretold outage of its kind with regards to any timeframe that actually included it. You get that when you just have one of them.
What these people were trying to say is that as a power outage, it was the worst in decades in Europe. These things are not common here. I have experienced a total of two localized ones that lasted less than a minute in the last 25 years. The specific TYPE of outage was a first. But using reasonable models or competent risk management and acting on the results would have prevented it. The ones that messed up were just trying to do things cheaply and ended up cheaper than possible. On top of the bad infrastructure, and messed-up planning, Spain has a very weak (too weak) link to the European grid. Incompetent greedy assholes at the grid operator, no doubt. These never learn proactively.
That said, this will likely also be the last outage of its type in Europe for a long, long time. Because anybody risking something like this again will find themselves without a connection to the European grid. And then it just becomes localized incompetence. This was a threat to the whole grid.
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The "easy" prevention is spinning reserve being enough to cover loss of biggest resource to a region, but that hits diminishing returns. Europe's grid is in better shape than the US, but a lot of the infrastructure is approaching end of life and requires reinvestment; this gives an opportunity to screw up in brand new ways.
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> But using reasonable models or competent risk management and acting on the results would have prevented it.
This. The risk is well understood and usually well managed. This is pure incompetence of the Spanish grid operator.
The report tried very hard to spin it otherwise, calling it "unprecedented". Yes, it is unprecedented, because nobody else was that stupid.
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Indeed. This was pure gross incompetence. And the spin tried is very close to being misinformation and may even be over the line.
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The title is saying that this was the first power outage of the kind of outage that it was. The power outage was also the worst in 30 years.
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Sorry, not 30 years. Decades
It sounds like (Score:1)
It's pretty typical but it's also pretty easy to fix the article describes exactly what they need to do and says they are doing it. So there's really not a lot to see here. It just means you can't cut corners on your infrastructure spending if you want a modern functional civilization
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It actually just needs solid engineering as a fix. This was a management problem and maybe engineering failure. It could have been done right and would have been clear how to do so. My guess is greed and political pressure are ultimately to blame.
Re:It sounds like (Score:4, Informative)
They rolled out a ton of renewables but they didn't properly build out the infrastructure to handle how renewables work so they ran into problems. Basically they cut some corners when they started building out.
Sort of like that. From the fine article...
Critics were quick to point to Spainâ(TM)s heavy reliance on renewable power, without enough measures to avoid power surges. The government denied that, but the grid started using more gas-powered turbines that help stabilize the network after the blackout.
They had the tools to maintain the stability of the electrical grid but chose not to use them. They are using them now to prevent a repeat event.
It's pretty typical but it's also pretty easy to fix the article describes exactly what they need to do and says they are doing it. So there's really not a lot to see here. It just means you can't cut corners on your infrastructure spending if you want a modern functional civilization
There may not be "a lot" to see here but there is something to see. This was a very large power outage, it cost them a lot of money, and cost them something like a dozen lives. From what I could tell half of those deaths could be considered Darwin Award levels of doing stupid shit but the other half were cases of people in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when the outage hit and they died from it. For those that died from this outage, when they did nothing wrong to lead to their own death, that's on the people running the electrical grid. I expect people will argue how many of those died directly from the outage as opposed to something stupid they did in reaction to it there should be little dispute that this outage directly caused at least one death. That death could have been avoided if only the people running the show had done their job.
We can't read minds to know what they were thinking but it appears the people running the grid were aiming for "bragging rights" on using the least electricity from fossil fuels to keep the grid up. If Spanish utilities are running more natural gas power plants now to avoid a repeat event then that tells me someone likely knew they could have avoided this outage if only they fired up a natural gas power plant at the first signs of grid instability a half hour before the grid collapsed.
To the asshole that tried to claim that the lines between Spain and France were all HVDC the last time this came up on Slashdot, read this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
12:33:21 CEST â" AC lines between France and Spain tripped.
I don't know how tightly the European electrical grid is tied but it would appear that the instability of the Iberian portion of the grid was seen as far away as Germany. If that AC line to France was not dropped then this could have spread further.
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It seems to me that just about every place that hopped onto the renewables bandwagon early did the same including China.
These were terrible decisions that hurt later adoption and public sentiment
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That only seems to you because you are clueless. Renewables are fine, but they do not remove the need for solid grid engineering. And whenever something gets changed larger-scale, some incompetents that could deal with the steady-state but not with changes get exposed. That is what happened here. In more than one sense.
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"Renewables are fine, but they do not remove the need for solid grid engineering"
That was my point.
"And whenever something gets changed larger-scale, some incompetents that could deal with the steady-state but not with changes get exposed"
and there is or should be no need to have to re-learn the mistakes every time
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My apologies, I misunderstood what you meant. Please disregard the relevant part of my posting.
"And whenever something gets changed larger-scale, some incompetents that could deal with the steady-state but not with changes get exposed"
and there is or should be no need to have to re-learn the mistakes every time
Indeed. But greed, arrogance and incompetence makes tired old mistakes something that happens time and again. The only thing that has helped so far is regulation with serious personal (!) penalties for those that screw up. While that helps, regulation has a real downside in that it makes everything slower and makes innovation harder. But it seems there is no other way. Apparently, the human race is not able to ass
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"regulation has a real downside in that it makes everything slower and makes innovation harder. But it seems there is no other way. Apparently, the human race is not able to assure that critical things are only done by people with high levels of skill and personal integrity"
and the backlash can be bitter as has been the case in the USA for quite a lot of years and become much worse with this 2nd Trump administration.
it's been said that every line of safety regulations is written in blood but it seems some n
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Contrary to what the article seems to point, the problem was not the infrastructure, that was already one reason why the problem was so bad.
The infrastructure for Spain and Portugal is wide and well connected. they have many lines and renewable sources. A failure in one should not have affected the others. Nuclear and Gas are more centralized, so more risky for this to happen... if it was not one small detail:
Nuclear and Gas have inertia, so a small problem may be erased by the inertia, but on most current
Same as East North America? (Score:2)
Isn't this the same thing that happened during that massive blackout across Ontario and New York a while back?
C-Suite Incompetence (Score:2)
Spending money on maintaining, upgrading and expanding your basic infrastructure, in whatever business, is not "sexy" or "cool" press-release material... but it's called "keeping the lights on" for a reason.
The Spain outage is just another example of why the proper operation of utilities - water/energy/etc - should not be subservient to the demands of shareholder dividends and C-suite bonuses.
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The Spain outage is just another example of why the proper operation of utilities - water/energy/etc - should not be subservient to the demands of shareholder dividends and C-suite bonuses.
Not every problem is solved by having more government.
I'm of the belief that government incentives to use more renewable energy was a contributing factor. The fine article points to how Spain is acting to prevent a repeat of this outage by using more natural gas power. If all they had to do to stop this outage from happening was to power up a natural gas power plant then why didn't they? Might it be government incentives to burn less natural gas?
There's no profit in seeing the lights go out so there's co
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Not every problem is solved by having more government.
Correct. You may also notice that I didn't mention "government" at all. It is quite possible for a private company to be structured and operated in a fashion where share price and dividends are not the controlling factors.
I'm of the belief that government incentives to use more renewable energy was a contributing factor.
Only insofar as those incentives were used to their maximum to drive short-term profits, at the expense of long-term network stability.
...prevent a repeat of this outage by using more natural gas power. If all they had to do to stop this outage from happening was to power up a natural gas power plant then why didn't they?
Profit. Spinning up a gas turbine power plant is not cheap, and will impact the bottom line, making C-suites and shareholders unhappy. It might also be tha
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Correct. You may also notice that I didn't mention "government" at all. It is quite possible for a private company to be structured and operated in a fashion where share price and dividends are not the controlling factors.
Can you explain how that is done without government intervention?
Only insofar as those incentives were used to their maximum to drive short-term profits, at the expense of long-term network stability.
You are ignoring how the government created this incentive.
Profit. Spinning up a gas turbine power plant is not cheap, and will impact the bottom line, making C-suites and shareholders unhappy. It might also be that doing so required a specific executive's authorisation, and he was having a siesta. I've been victim of this, when an emergency fix to a trading system required a specific sign-off and the exec in question had taken the afternoon to spend with his mistress. The bank lost a few hundred thousand, and he was "invited to seek opportunities elsewhere."
Again, you ignore the profit incentives created by government intervention. If the government wasn't subsidizing solar energy like it was then there would not be be same kind of cost in firing up a natural gas power plant.
Again, only insofar as it affects profitability, which is their fundamental operating incentive.
Still ignoring how the government created the problem, and not explaining how you expect to solve the problem but with more government.
The no-gas incentive was one, of many, contributory factors but ultimately all the tools were in place to prevent this outage from happening - they were not used because profit, not supply stability, is the key in the decision-making process.
A profit incentive that was a
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Red Electrica has a public-private ownership structure. So, who to blame? Shareholders? Corporate interests? The government that the people elected (i.e. blame themselves)?
First Of Its Kind (Score:2)
Worst in decades
If it's the worst in decades, then the more accurate though redundant headline would have been "The worst ever".
Re: (Score:2)
Other news say "worst in 2 decades". Just before that was Cyclone Lothar (26 Dec. 1999, the worst recorded windstorm over Europe), which cut high power lines as it moved over northern France, Belgium, Germany, annihilating the grid.