Thread: Spain starts probing causes of massive blackout

Spain began to investigate Tuesday (Apr 29) the causes of the crippling blackout that disrupted millions of lives across the Iberian Peninsula, with a court probing potential "sabotage" of critical infrastructure.


Telephones, internet and lights were working again, train services resumed, shops reopened and workers flocked back to offices in Spain and Portugal following the outage Monday that lasted up to 20 hours in some places.


Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said his government had set up a commission to investigate what caused the incident and refused to rule out any hypothesis.


"All the necessary measures will be taken to ensure that this does not happen again," he told a press conference.


In a separate probe, Spain's top criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, said it was investigating whether the blackout was "an act of computer sabotage on critical infrastructure" that could be classified as "a terrorism offence".

Although the causes are unknown, "cyberterrorism is among" the potential explanations and the "critical situation" generated for the population meant an investigation was necessary, the court said.


But Spanish grid operator Red Electrica (REE) and a Portuguese government spokesman ruled out a cyberattack earlier in the day.


"There was no type of intrusion in Red Electrica's control systems that may have caused the incident," REE's director of operations, Eduardo Prieto, said at a news conference.


Sanchez held an emergency meeting later Tuesday with representatives of the country's main electricity firms including Endesa and Iberdrola to ask for their cooperation in the probe.


"We must make the necessary improvements to secure supply," he wrote on X after the talks.

"SECURE SUPPLY"


Sanchez also denied reports that a shortfall of nuclear energy was behind the outage, saying proponents of the suggestion were "lying or demonstrating their ignorance" in a response to criticism from the far-right Vox party.


Nuclear power, which the leftist government has planned to phase out, "was no more resilient" than other electricity sources and "with a greater dependence on nuclear, the recovery would not have been so quick", Sanchez said.


Portuguese Prime Minister Luis Montenegro, who is facing an early general election next month, said his government had requested an independent audit of electrical systems from the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER) and created a commission to assess the handling of the crisis.


For Pratheeksha Ramdas, a senior analyst at the consulting firm Rystad Energy, the episode highlighted the region's "heavy dependence on cross-border electricity flows".


The high percentage of renewables in Spain's energy mix "exposed difficulties in balancing intermittent supply, while Portugal's complete reliance on imports underscored its lack of flexibility and energy storage", Ramdas wrote in a research note.

"AFTERNOON OF RESPITE"


People in both countries began to recover a semblance of normality Tuesday after the chaos and confusion, with businesses and schools reopening.


But police found the bodies of three elderly people at a home in the northwestern region of Galicia who died from suspected carbon monoxide poisoning after using a generator to power an oxygen machine during the blackout.


Susana, a 50-year-old finance sector worker in Madrid who declined to give her full name, said she struggled Monday during her 90-minute trek home on foot -- in heels.


The lesson she learned? "Wear sneakers," she joked in a cafe where a television replayed images of the chaos.

Some people, like 32-year-old lawyer Marcos Garcia, welcomed the pause as "an afternoon of respite, a technology break, an impromptu disconnection".


High-speed Spanish train lines, including those connecting Madrid, Barcelona and Seville, were back up and running on Tuesday and regional services were gradually being restored, said national railway operator Renfe.


Madrid's Atocha station was packed with expectant travellers on Tuesday who cheered every time a departure was announced.


Monday's disruption saw huge tailbacks on roads, customers rushing to withdraw cash from banks and residents finding themselves trapped in lifts.


Thousands of stranded travellers slept in train stations overnight and streets were plunged into darkness with all lampposts and traffic lights off.


The episode also affected areas of southwestern France as well as in Morocco and Denmark's Arctic territory of Greenland.

Spain starts probing causes of massive blackout - CNA

Start with Russia.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Start with Russia.

Seriously!
Does that mean this is a warning to the rest of the world?

Strange that this "Massive Power Blackout" starts all of the sudden to happen all over Europe.
I just read somewhere that the same thing happened in Dublin yesterday.

My opninion, we had 2 world wars because of the Germans and now a 3rd world war is being prepared again by the Germans.

Angela Merkel started the mass-immigration of "Doctors and Engineers" and now Von der Lyden wants to create an European army.
But where to find the money?
Easy peasy?
Create a fear situation like the Covid pandemic (Massive Power Blackouts) and force all the European citizens to buy a "72 hours survival kit" at inflated prices like she said allready before the EU.
And in the mean time, back Szelinsky and gat the ton of Russia.
People haven't learned anything from the previous 2 world wars.

I find it hard to believe that the head of the Spanish electricity grid operator does not yet know what happened.

Originally Posted by Neverna

I find it hard to believe that the head of the Spanish electricity grid operator does not yet know what happened.

Probably looking for a scapegoat.

Originally Posted by Neverna

I find it hard to believe that the head of the Spanish electricity grid operator does not yet know what happened.

According to what I did read about this, the Spanish Electric authorities were performing a test to supply the grid ONLY on solar energy/wind energy and other renewal supplies.
This test was OK for 4 consecutive days.
But on the 5th day there was a sudden power surge and the grid collapsed.

Originally Posted by Neverna

I find it hard to believe that the head of the Spanish electricity grid operator does not yet know what happened.

They knew it was about to happen about 3 hours beforehand. The exact cause was not known at that time. There are probably several things that happened concurrently that caused the failure and the timing of these problems is the crucial part of the investigation.

Electricity systems rely on so-called “inertia”, which is a by-product of power stations that have spinning parts – such as those running on gas, coal or hydropower. Inertia is caused by the natural velocity of the spinning parts, and is a core component of any electrical system.
These plants have turbines that can speed up or slow down to help adjust the power frequency, which must be kept within certain limits at all times for the lights to stay on.

Inertia also helps to protect the system from faults that cause sudden drops in frequency, as it gives grid operators more time to take actions that will stabilise the system.

But solar panels and wind turbines do not generate inertia because they do not have the same spinning parts. And before Monday’s power cuts, they were generating almost 80pc of Spain’s power, according to transparency data.

There was also less gas-fired power on the system as demand at lunchtime tends to be low, meaning that any sudden drop in frequency – such as one caused by a transmission line fault – would have been harder to deal with than usual.

Kathryn Porter, an independent energy analyst, explains: “If you have a grid fault, it can cause a frequency imbalance and in a low-inertia environment the frequency can change much faster.

“If you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly enough.”

Duncan Burt, a former British grid operator who is now strategy chief at Reactive Technologies, agrees.

“If you have a very high solar day, like Monday, then your grid is less stable, unless you’ve taken actions to mitigate that,” he says.
However, he believes low inertia alone was not enough to cause what was seen in Spain and Portugal and that weather conditions on Monday do not appear at first glance to have been particularly unusual.

“In Iberia, it is known they are headed towards a low-inertia situation. But it is quite early to see anything this severe,” he adds. “There is definitely something deeper going on.”

Tom Smout, an analyst of electricity grids and markets at LCP Delta, contrasted France’s resilience to such events with Spain’s relative vulnerability.

“France is resilient to these problems because it has a lot of nuclear power plus hydroelectricity which have stable and predictable outputs,” he says.
Yet what exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one.

What caused power outages in Spain and Portugal?

Today I is learned...

The country’s nuclear plants, as planned, were operating at half their usual capacity because, according to their owners, the high charges they are subject to make them economically unviable during periods when the price of electricity is very low.
At that time the price of electricity on the official market was in the negative at around -1€/MWh. At these prices Spain was exporting electricity to Morocco, Portugal, and even France. In addition, much of the available energy was being used to pump water from low lying river basins into reservoirs – the only practical way to store energy on a large scale. However, this capacity has a limit and, with the reservoirs almost full, it cannot continue to be stored indefinitely.

And there is a lengthy discussion here:

Spain-Portugal blackouts: what actually happened, and what can Iberia and Europe learn from it?