Major power grid issues in Portugal, Spain and parts of France

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alarmguy

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They are not even sure what caused it, if it was strictly atmospheric or terrorist related.
It just goes to show how frail electric systems are.

Even in this country, where we are promoting electric vehicle use. Less than 5 million cars on the road out of 300 million and yet almost every household in this country is told to conserve energy certain periods of the day. I think we have a lot of things to work on.

Anyway, right now overseas here we are estimates up to a week to get it all put back together
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/spain...ates-widespread-blackouts-cause-ha-rcna203274
 
Expert commentary from a good friend and former grid operator:

"Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in very high voltage lines, something called 'induced atmospheric vibration'
These oscillations cause synchronization failures between the electrical systems"

Yet induced atmospheric vibration is mechanical, similar to wind induced vibration.

"Cause:
When high-voltage lines operate near their corona inception threshold, ionization of surrounding air molecules occurs, creating space charges (ions and electrons).
Under certain conditions (e.g., high humidity, rough conductor surfaces), these charges interact with the electric field, generating periodic electrohydrodynamic (EHD) forces.

Mechanism:
The EHD forces induce pressure waves in the air, causing vibrations in the conductor or nearby objects (e.g., insulators).
Unlike aeolian vibration (caused by wind) or galloping (large-amplitude motion), IAV is driven purely by electrical-atmospheric coupling.

Effects:
Usually low amplitude but can contribute to fatigue over time.
May exacerbate other vibration modes or cause audible hum.

It was a cascading outage. 2-400 kV and 2-220 kV lines connect Spain & Portugal to ENTSO-E. They are geographically spread out. Sounds like they separated and the islanded area split up. Lack of adequate inertia will cause severe frequency spike with leads to disconnection of generation and inverter based resources. If the system splits during the disturbance, regional inertia also comes into play.

Unfortunately the 3400 MW of nuclear shut down and will be gone for days. Some fossil and gas also disconnected and needs to recover. Some solar and wind survived so that will become a talking point. Needless to say making room for it in the first place may have caused or aggravated the disturbance.

Same type of disturbance happened in SA a few years back when the Heywood Interconnector (2 synchronous transmission lines) failed during a wind storm. Frequency spike was so fast that load shedding didn't have a change to operate before resources started disconnecting due to absolute low frequency. Spain could be the same.

1745872008213.webp


Solar connected to distribution doesn't help in a system recovery either. It is combined with loads on the same feeders so ends up being restored later in the process. Appears to be the case in Spain too.

Orange = wind
Purple =solar
Grey = nuclear
 
This is of particular interest:

"Lack of adequate inertia will cause severe frequency spike with leads to disconnection of generation and inverter based resources. If the system splits during the disturbance, regional inertia also comes into play."

They're talking about the ability of the system to absorb fluctuations, and you don't get that out of solar and wind is my understanding.

It takes big spinning iron/copper to provide that inertia.

Just one of the thing grid operators will have to figure out as we shift to more solar/wind. That's where Nuclear is a big winner, you're still using big spinning things with lots of mass.
 
ctechbob said:
This is of particular interest:

"Lack of adequate inertia will cause severe frequency spike with leads to disconnection of generation and inverter based resources. If the system splits during the disturbance, regional inertia also comes into play."

They're talking about the ability of the system to absorb fluctuations, and you don't get that out of solar and wind is my understanding.

It takes big spinning iron/copper to provide that inertia.

Just one of the thing grid operators will have to figure out as we shift to more solar/wind. That's where Nuclear is a big winner, you're still using big spinning things with lots of mass.
Click to expand...
Correct. A few days ago, Spain was bragging that they had managed to run on 100% VRE for a few hours (likely netted, as I assume they didn't shutdown their nukes for example). The consequence of this, as you note, is that you are relying on mostly non-inertial sources, so if you have a disturbance in this scenario, you have next to nothing to absorb it, frequency poops the bed and you get a cascading collapse.
 
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Fascinating, subject that I know nothing about except I like reading about them and great post from @ctechbob and @OVERKILL

Others like myself included to some degree just accept if you place a piece of wire at one end of a power source and connect it to a recipient at the other end, all that matters is the thickness of the wire and nothing else

Really is a delicate balance regarding frequency, atmospheric conditions, and whatever else more so as things are pushed to the limit, I assume
 
rijndael said:
On that note, we have a number of the flywheel UPS units to hold us through short lived power issues (sags, dips, etc). It's pretty cool tech.
Click to expand...
Sycons (synchronous condensers), basically a generator but without its own power source, so the grid keeps it spinning, and in turn, it provides inertia and can absorb spikes and sags. These are really common on the ends of HVDC links, since HVDC, having to be rectified, doesn't provide any inertia.
 
alarmguy said:
Fascinating, subject that I know nothing about except I like reading about them and great post from @ctechbob and @OVERKILL

Others like myself included to some degree just accept if you place a piece of wire at one end of a power source and connect it to a recipient at the other end, all that matters is the thickness of the wire and nothing else

Really is a delicate balance regarding frequency, atmospheric conditions, and whatever else more so as things are pushed to the limit, I assume
Click to expand...
I got really interested in the grid when I read the NERC reports on the 2003 East coast blackout. They are fairly easy to read and really shine light on how this whole massive machine interacts. Sets off all the right neurons in my brain.
 
OVERKILL said:
Sycons (synchronous condensers), basically a generator but without its own power source, so the grid keeps it spinning, and in turn, it provides inertia and can absorb spikes and sags. These are really common on the ends of HVDC links, since HVDC, having to be rectified, doesn't provide any inertia.
Click to expand...

It definitely sounds like this is something we are going to need more of in the future. Does wind count as "inertia" style supply? I'm guessing not as you can't be sure of the rotational speed of the turbine it'd have to be decoupled and go through inverters to match it to the grid?
 
jtay2024 said:
It definitely sounds like this is something we are going to need more of in the future. Does wind count as "inertia" style supply? I'm guessing not as you can't be sure of the rotational speed of the turbine it'd have to be decoupled and go through inverters to match it to the grid?
Click to expand...
You guessed correctly. Wind is typically a DC generator, converted to AC at the edge. This is required for exactly the reason you speculated: variation in rotational speed.
 
For anyone that wants a couple hundred foot view on the 2003 blackout. There are some cool graphics in this presentation and some basic explanation of the whole thing. If you don't want to read the 100 page report and are slightly interested in the grid.

 
There is a fantastic YouTube channel that I have watched a lot of videos of that does great vids on power generation etc. well worth a watch!

How does the power grid work? -


What is a black start of the power grid? -



🙂
 
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jtay2024 said:
It definitely sounds like this is something we are going to need more of in the future. Does wind count as "inertia" style supply? I'm guessing not as you can't be sure of the rotational speed of the turbine it'd have to be decoupled and go through inverters to match it to the grid?
Click to expand...

Correct.
 
My favorite Dr Who line:
Hey, who turned out the lights!?
Almost every species in the Universe has an irrational fear of the dark. But they're wrong. 'Cause it's not irrational. It's Vashta Nerada"

Anyway, thanks for the technical explanation. I know I won’t read it anywhere else.
 
ctechbob said:
For anyone that wants a couple hundred foot view on the 2003 blackout. There are some cool graphics in this presentation and some basic explanation of the whole thing. If you don't want to read the 100 page report and are slightly interested in the grid.

Click to expand...

I have to watch this when I have time
Wife and I and the kids went through that blackout in 2003 on Long Island
 
Question for you grid experts:

Is the inertia needed because rectifiers on edge of HVDC because it needs to "follow" an AC, and is any of the problem due to any possibility of incorrectly designed grid running AC or DC power in a "loop" or "ring" that causes chaos / oscillations?

I would imagine for solar you can just physically disconnect the source from the farm's individual panel and just "dump" the input power without causing significant problem. Would that damage the individual panels?
 
OK, it was likely two solar plants that caused this:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-could-be-behind-iberian-power-outage-2025-04-29/

Red Electrica said it had identified two incidents of power generation loss, probably from solar plants, in southwestern Spain that caused instability in the electric system and led to a breakdown of its interconnection with France. The electrical system collapsed, affecting both the Spanish and Portuguese systems.
Spain was exporting power to France and Portugal at the time of the outage. Exports to France were close to the available net export capacity until 1000 local time. According to Red Electrica data, exports to France stopped at 1235 local time from 868 MW beforehand.
The European Union will initiate a thorough investigation of the power outages in Spain and Portugal on Monday, EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen said on Tuesday.

The Spanish grid is interconnected with those of France, Portugal, Morocco and Andorra.
 
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