Reports of widespread power cuts in Spain and Portugal
bbc.comAll of Spain is without energy. All systems have shut down immediately and are not coming back. Apparently the same has happened in Portugal.
All of Spain is without energy. All systems have shut down immediately and are not coming back. Apparently the same has happened in Portugal.
This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult.
If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up and renewables require external sources of inertia for frequency stabilization, so this usually requires turning on a small diesel generator that creates enough power to bootstrap a bigger generator and so on up until there's enough electricity to start the plant itself. With that back online the power from it can be used to re-energize other plants that lack black start capability in a chain until you have a series of isolated islands. Those islands then have to be synchronized and reconnected, whilst simultaneously bringing load online in large blocks.
The whole thing is planned for, but you can't really rehearse for it. During a black start the grid is highly unstable. If something goes wrong then it can trip out again during the restart, sending you back to the beginning. It's especially likely if the original blackout caused undetected equipment damage, or if it was caused by such damage.
In the UK contingency planning assumes a black start could take up to 72 hours, although if things go well it would be faster. It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home.
Edit: There's a press release about a 2016 black start drill in Spain/Portugal here: https://www.ree.es/en/press-office/press-release/2016/11/spa...
The fewer resources we dedicate to grid resilience and modernization, the harder black starts become. And as grids get more complex and interdependent, recovering from total failure becomes exponentially harder.
A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity.
We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications and financial systems. And yet, public awareness of the infrastructure behind it is shockingly low. We tend to notice the power grid only when it breaks.
We’ve neglected it for decades. In many regions, burying power lines is dismissed as “too expensive.” But compare that cost to the consequences of grid collapse in extreme weather, cyberattacks, or even solar storms — the stakes are existential. High-impact, low-frequency events are easy to ignore until they’re not.
I would think that renewable infrastructure could be the fix, at least if you start installing larger battery capacity to meet renewable store and usage shifts, the grid essentially is installing the resources that can also be used to respond to & contain sudden source losses and prevent cascades.
The frequency aspect of a black start is presumably a bit easier in Europe because there's an interconnected synchronous grid so they can bootstrap it from France essentially.
It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.
I was recently told by an electrical engineering lecturer that the black start plan here in Ireland is to use the DC interconnectors with the UK to provide startup power to a synchronous generator.
Interestingly it seems that the black start drill is considering a smaller zone of impact than what has happened here.
Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.
This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.
I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.
Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.
Practical Engineering did a really great video a few years ago on why black starts are hard, complete with a tabletop demo about the physics of synchronizing large spinning generators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
> Thermal plants require energy to start up
It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.
Does solar power make this process easier or harder? I know that with thermal plants you have a spinning mass that you have to synchronize, and phase shift is used to assess how hard the plant is working (and whether to trip a disconnect as we see here)
But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?
My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.
Most solar and wind plants follow the inertial lead of the thermal plants. They can't synchronize without enough thermal generation being online. Supposedly there are efforts to change that, I don't know enough about grid engineering to say how far along that might be in Spain.
It seems Spain lost 15GW of load, but is still running 10GW of load: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?
Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
They're definitely doing a black start:
https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267
We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected.
I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears an hour ago.
If the grid frequency goes too far out of range then power stations trip automatically, it's not an explicit decision anyone takes and it doesn't balance load, quite the opposite. A station tripping makes the problem worse as the frequency drops even further as the load gets shared between the remaining stations, which is why grids experience cascading failure. The disconnection into islands is a defense mechanism designed to stop equipment being too badly damaged and to isolate the outage.
BBC reporting the head of Spain's electricity grid saying restoring power could take "between six and ten hours": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t?post=asset%3A85...
Interesting, but in terms of load I think think the data may just be delayed by ~1 hour. Switching to UTC, to avoid timezone confusion, it's currently 13:10:
Last actual load value for Spain at 12:15: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Last actual load value for France at 12:00: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
It may also be a measurement artifact. Looking at the generation by type page,
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Everything dropped to zero except wind and solar, which took huge hits but not to zero. I expect those have been disconnected too, as they cannot transmit to the grid without enough thermal plant capacity being online, but if the measurement at some plants of how much they're generating doesn't take into account whether or not they were disconnected upstream they may still be reporting themselves as generating. You can't easily turn off a solar plant after all, just unplug it.
Either that, or they're measuring generation and load that's not on the grid at all.
Probably they are estimates of not grid metered generation assets based on wind speed and solar production, at least in the UK nearly all solar is 'estimated' because it is not measured directly (apart from larger sites), at least in real time.
Rooftop solar for example just shows as a reduction in demand, not 'generation' per se.
Would this be relevant here? Spain is connected to the French grid, and probably also Morocco.
The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.
cash is all well and good but if the tills dont work most stores wont be able to serve you. corner shops, vape shops and barbers will be ok though
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I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack.
There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I remember the day when the Swiss railway power network went down for a day (in 2005) because one power line was down for maintenance and someone pressed the wrong button and produced a short circuit somewhere else. It's a bit like the incidents in planes were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.
>an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid
I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth
Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?
I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence
I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
A monkey took out the whole grid in Sri Lanka this year
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
That wasn't tree falling in Ohio, that was overloaded line sagged and shorted into a tree, compounded with several other factors that contributed to the grid instability and the inability of the grid operator to realize how unstable the grid was.
"Same difference" to use an Irish turn of phrase. If a short to ground takes out power to an extensive area does it mater what touched what?
Yes, it absolutely does.
A tree falling can be addressed by vegetation management and trimming. A power line sagging because of excess heat is operator error.
These are not remotely the same.
The proximal cause was a race condition in a piece of software, so as usual it comes back to you keyboard ticklers!
> keyboard ticklers
I hate this term, and look forward to using it all the time.
I think the point is that neither of those events should take out a whole city; the design is such that there is considerable redundancy in the system.
Indeed. For instance, power grids ideally operate with N-1/N+1 redundancy, i.e., the disablement of any single power line should not cause a cascading failure.
It seems like both are a monitoring problem and both have a maintenance fix. A tree falling is more forgivable though.
The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.
Can you blame them? Just look at how they've been treated in the last few hundred years.
They've had a grudge against humanity since the fall. Ever since—once a year—they send a clear message, "leaf" but do the humans listen? No.
“induced atmospheric vibration” on 400KV lines is the current theory
Not many month ago the Italians trains was disrupted by a single nail into a cable: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/italian-rail-services-d...
I'm going with AGI awakening in some lab today.
A few months ago I was hit by a blackout literally the second I was about to start delivering a company-wide talk on AI. Everything went out - Internet, mobile networks, street lighting, the lot.
We're a remote business so it seemed like I'd just rudely dropped off the call, but as everything was down I couldn't let people know what'd happened.
Apparently it was caused by botched maintenance work affecting 30,000 houses, but the timing was so perfect I can't help thinking it was because our AGI overlords really didn't want me to deliver that talk for some reason.
Sorry I couldn't resist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnDk8BcqoR0
We live in a society filled with systems that can have "normal accidents".
> were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.
So frequent it even has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_an...
Or that time in 2003 when a tree fell on a power line in Switzerland and all of Italy ended up without electricity.
a.k.a. Hanlon's Razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
As far as we know stupidity isn't a primary cause, and local authorities are also probably competent at scale.
You can see the crash on the ENTSO-E live data: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Three quarter of the production disconnects from the grid between 12:30 and 13:00, with only a bit of solar and onshore wind sticking around.
Spain loses around 15GW of demand at the same time: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.
Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf)
That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequency excursion, resulting in widespread generator trips.
(I suspect this is going to restart a whole bunch of acrimony about existing pain points like grid maintenance, renewables, domestic solar, and so on, probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables)
> probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables
Renewables were a factor in the blackout here in Brazil a couple of years ago: the models used by the system operator did not correspond to reality, many solar and wind power plants disconnected on grid disturbances quicker than specified. That mismatch led the system operator to allow a grid configuration where a single fault could lead to a cascade (more power was allowed through a power line than could be redistributed safely if that power line shut off for any reason), and that single fault happened when a protection mechanism misbehaved and disconnected that power line. The main fix was to model these solar and wind power plants more conservatively (pending a more detailed review of their real-life behavior and the corresponding update of the models), which allowed them to correctly limit the power going through these power lines.
If you want an excruciating level of detail, the final 614-page report is at https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R... (in Portuguese; the main page for that incident is at https://www.ons.org.br/Paginas/Noticias/Ocorr%c3%aancia-no-S...).
Is 50Hz really that important these days – i.e. more important than maintaining power? (Honest naive question.)
Frequency is effectively more important than voltage. Or rather it collapses first. Frequency reduction for a rotary generator means that more energy is being taken out than the rotary shaft energy is being put in, so it is effectively an early warning that voltage is about to drop.
Frequency coordination is absolutely critical, via phase coordination. A large generator must not get significantly out of phase. So frequency going out of spec triggers the generator to "trip" (disconnect).
If you have a switching power supply brick for your tiny USB device, not really.
If you have a large spinning inertial mass like a factory motor or a power generation turbine, it's extremely important. Imagine a manual car transmission, but there's no slip-clutch, you need to perfectly align engine with the wheels rotating at 300mph, and the inertial mass you're up against if it's not perfectly synchronized is a freight train.
That's why generators trip offline in a blackout cascade if the frequency deviates out of spec. The alternative is your turbine turns into a pile of very expensive shiny scrap metal.
Yes. https://storpower.co.uk/the-day-europes-power-grid-came-clos...
Frequency is health of the grid. If it's an entire hz off of where it should be something is massively wrong. Most generating equipment will trip on a deviation that bad.
Absolutely. The frequency needs to be maintained between 49.8 and 50.2 Hz, or the situation starts spiraling out of control freakishly fast.
Portugal has an even bigger relative drop in load, from 5852MW at 11:00 hours -> 613MW at 13:00 hours - these seem like 1 hour averages.
[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Apparently a local grid overload near France and a cascading failure down the Spanish network, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause. Of course there is a lot of noise.
For instance, one reporter asked one of the government flunkies whether it could be a cyberattack and they turned his noncommittal “maybe, we don’t know” into “government says cyberattack may be ongoing”.
Be careful of idiot reporters out there.
Edit: I’m listening to another radio interview where they are outlining the plans to bring online Portuguese dams and thermal generators over the next few hours, progressively unplugging from the Spanish supply (fortunately we have enough of those, apparently).
It should take 3-4 hours to get everything balanced with only national supplies, and they will restore power from North to South.
Yes, something similar happened in the UK a while back. Full info here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2020/01/9_...
Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc):
2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms)
2.4.2. The fault affected the local distribution networks and approximately 150MW of distributed generation disconnected from the networks or ‘tripped off’ due to a safety mechanism known as vector shift protection
2.4.3. The voltage control system at the Hornsea 1 offshore wind farm did not respond to the impact of the fault on the transmission system as expected and became unstable. Hornsea 1 rapidly reduced its power generation or ‘deloaded’ from 799MW to 62MW (a reduction of 737MW).
Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked?
In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines.
So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs point B456?
Is this done sort-of-blind? Or is there continual measurement? (e.g. there's XYZ MW of load behind A123 as of 2:36pm)
I can speak for the GB case. Low Frequency Demand Disconnection (LFDD) occurs automatically and in stages when the frequency drops until it stabilises. The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time. If it's sunny, you could easily trip off a lot of solar generation connected on the low voltage network, causing the frequency to drop further. It is far from optimal!
> The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time.
This is wild. From a amateur technical perspective, it would only take a cheap hall sensor inside the transformer to have a pretty good guess of how much current has been flowing to the load.
Hell, put the hall sensor onto a board with a micro controller and a LORA transmitter and stick it to the outside of the feed line. Seems like an incredibly cheap upgrade to get real-time load data from every substation.
They don't really disconnect it like that in these circumstances (as in they choose what to disconnect). As far as I know generation plants will start disconnect when grid frequency is <49Hz or >51Hz (at least in the UK) automatically as it's all starting to go very wrong. This is what causes this huge cascade effect. Roughly speak less frequency means there is more demand than supply and the other way round for higher frequencies.
This has changed a lot though, as even home batteries afaik will start discharging if they start noticing the frequency dropping to provide some support on generation. But if it's dropping too fast and too quickly it won't help.
But yes they do have very granular info on all the HV sources and how much load is on them.
I was going to say something similar. I live in Portugal and I've heard a lot of panic/fear mongering, mainly from the techies in the co-working space I was working on and expats.
(apologies for singling out these specific groups of people - my point is that it might be worth to put down news sources like xitter, and read AP/translated local Portuguese news)
"xitter" in Portugese would be pronounced as "shee-tehr", right?
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A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
A power outage in 2021 was ultimately traced to a firefighting hydroplane that damaged a high-voltage transmission line in southern France.
The similarity between that event and this early-on report is striking.
[es language]: https://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/espana/2021/07/24/aver...
From Le Monde live feed, RTE (French electricity network manager) declared the issue unrelated to this fire.
"Le gestionnaire français souligne par ailleurs que cette panne n’est pas due à un incendie dans le sud de la France, entre Narbonne et Perpignan, contrairement à des informations qui circulent."
Surely there is more than 0 redundancy so that one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.
The 2003 US Northeast blackout was caused by the failure of only a few lines that shorted into trees. These line failures created grid instability that resulted, ~5 minutes later, in most of the Northeast losing power in a cascading failure.
Redundant systems have failures in one path quite often that you never know anything about. We get headlines when the failures correlate in the same timeslot.
How very California.
you are right, but the emphasis could use a tune-up. In California, home of world-leading tech.. there are sensors and information networks, extensive electrical power lines, heavy equipment and budgets, a lot of dry and dead tress, a history of fire. So you see that California in a way is a world-quality testing lab. and the way the information travels, and the way the information is applied, could also be world-quality .. or, world-theater for government imbecility..
Warming world is so hot right now..
It looks like the Iberian peninsula is relatively isolated from the rest of the CESA synchronous grid, with only 2% cross-border capacity compared to local generation. [1]
There's a map at [2]
> The Spanish electricity system is currently connected to the systems of France, Portugal, Andorra and Morocco. The exchange capacity of this interconnection is around 3 GW, which represents a low level of interconnection for the peninsula. The international interconnection level is calculated by comparing the electricity exchange capacity with other countries with the generation capacity or installed power.
[1] https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/electricity-inte...
[2] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
Edit : I was misreading the confusing Rte site... Entsoe actually a lot more readable. France went from importing to exporting around the incident.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-...
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...
That graph doesn't seem to make a very clear distinction between historical, real-time and predicted values... I think the event happened at 12:30 local time or so.
There seems to be some kind of recurrent daily pattern where the French - Spanish interconnect switches from Spain -> France imports to France -> Spain exports at around that time, and then back again in the late afternoon.
Yes, France was importing 884MW from Spain at 12:45, 198MW at 13:00, no net flow at 13:15, and Spain has been importing up to 265MW since: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...
4 years ago this almost happened:
https://gridradar.net/en/blog/post/underfrequency_january_20...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-europes-power-grid-almost...
https://www.acer.europa.eu/news/continental-europe-electrici...
I remember it because power went out in at least 1/3 of Romania back then.
A similar thing happened last June, with Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and most of the Croatian coastline losing power simultaneously.
Definitely felt surreal to first lose power to the degree that even traffic lights were no longer working, and then to hear it's also happening across the region just before mobile networks also went offline.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/power-blackout-hits-mon...
~90 page report: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c... (beware: PDF)
It shows that even when the original issues are solved the reboot takes time due to power station being spooled down due to excessive production. I hope it is all back before telecoms start draining the batteries, otherwise things get uglier
Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand.
Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question.
I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were actually worse for the grid due to less predictable power generation or something, but that was a long time ago, certainly pre-battery storage.
I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which is of course very helpful for grid management. Dispatchable generation can be increased if supply requires it, or various dispatchable generators can be 'redispatched' to relieve congestion in a part of the power grid (by rebalancing generation). Power from renewable sources can be decreased through curtailment, but that wastes the generated energy.
> Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient?
So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points:
- Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. That's what keeps the grid running second-to-second; while a power plant might pretend it's outputting a constant 4MW, it actually shifts noticeably from moment to moment. The kinetic energy of the generator helps balance that out.
- Going up from the sub-second range, an overload of the generator obviously would cause the shaft to slow down, dropping the frequency and causing brownouts. Brownouts are bad and can damage the grid, so typically breakers will disconnect if it falls below 49Hz; a 2% drop.
- Baseload plants can't cope with this, as they take multiple minutes to spool up. Minimum; for something like a coal power plant, where you have to shove in additional coal and wait for it to catch fire, it's going quite a few minutes. This is what defines 'baseload'.
- Peaker power plants can increase (or decrease) their mechanical power production in a matter of seconds. These days that typically means gas turbines, though hydroelectric power is even better, and nuclear power could be used for peaker plants -- but isn't; most nuclear reactor designs outside of the navy is a baseload design. France does have some load-following designs, and we need more of those.
- Wind turbines can't increase their output, flat out, but they can decrease it (by feathering, or by using brakes). This is good enough, except this would turn them into 'peaker plants' that can't help with peaks. If we had enough wind turbines to cover 100% of the load then we'd technically be fine, but economically speaking that doesn't work; they'd be at less than 10% power most of the time.
- Wind turbines have rotating shafts, but a lot of the time they produce DC power, linked through inverters, which removes that benefit and makes them act like solar panels in effect. However, this is a purely economic issue; they can trivially be upgraded to support grid stability if the pricing scheme will pay for it.
- Solar panels are worse: They have no inertia! There is no rotating shaft there to cover sub-second usage spikes. That's where complaints about 'renewables causing reduction of grid stability' come from, along with issues like domestic solar needing to backfeed power through distribution lines and transformers that aren't necessarily designed for that.
- But batteries can absolutely help. The kinetic energy of a rotating turbine isn't actually that big; it's not that expensive to pair a solar panel with a battery to build a grid-forming system that acts the same way a kinetic power plant would.
For wind turbines, solar, and batteries, the frequency stability is doable through controlling frequency from inverters.
Some wind turbines are also internally a hybrid design that can dynamically adjust the frequency difference angle both for minimal losses in production, but also to provide frequency shifting and even artificial demand (i.e. essentially using wind power as brake)
The inertia provided by synchronous generators was in essence a natural benefit to the grid that we never appreciated previously. But now with more renewables it’s now something we have to consider and design for. Running a grid on 100% non synchronous requires a bit more effort!
There's a map of realtime load flow here: https://gridradar.net/en/wide-area-monitoring-system (currently shows Spain and Portugal as 'offline')
The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show
Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...
The filters can be used to see similar data for Portugal
Interesting that the recovery is going at relatively steady 600 MW/hour, it will be a while if the pace continues the same way.
Are you sure "offline" means that? Romania looks offline and when I checked their CNN they were reporting live from Spain about the blackout without mentioning Romania.
Here: https://tv.garden/ro/F83BfecjsD6BjR
The map seems to be based on monitoring stations in the different locations, so yes - it's also possible that a station is offline for other reasons (maintenance, etc).
They were probably put offline as the network is rebalanced. That just means they (Romania) don’t contribute to the network.
Our government said we're fine with our local generation and are even exporting 200 MW (possibly to our eastern neighbors?).
I definitely had no problems with electricity all of today (on the eastern side). And there was nothing in the news about local outages either.
Funny enough, there were news before the Easter holidays that they're preparing for extremely reduced demand by shutting down facilities.
10 mins ago Malaga was online, now it's offline. It doesn't look promising
Might just be lag?
In any case, if I recall correctly from a Youtube video I can't find (it was either Wendover or Real Engineering), if the grid is fully down, it takes quite a lot of effort and time to bring it back online because it has to be done in small steps to avoid over/under loading/using.
It was Practical Engineering. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
Very good video. Very good channel.
Idk, it might be updated with some lag
Romania seems offline as well now?
now mannheim shows offline
Apparently this spans more countries? Very strange. Possibly a cyberattack or sabotage?
Growing up in Spain I've never experienced anything like this (not there at the moment, but friends have told me over WhatsApp).
Possibly some kind of rare cascade failure where it might have been on the edge for a while, and some small event happened that tripped things, similar to the american northeast blackout in 2003. High demand, plus a power station going offline meant more demand on some interconnects, which shorted on trees and were cut off, putting more load on other lines until the entire system collapsed
Continental Europe Synchronous Area [1]
The whole Europe power grid are somewhat interconnected I wont be surprise if this knock on effect start knocking out other surrounding countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
Is that a risk with the small amount of interconnect capacity?
Grids are widely interconnected. Problems on one grid can and do cascade to another.
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Ah, yes. The dubious and evil Perro Sánchez.
Woof!
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Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.
Yeah, we just told you that via Signal - that’s how we built the networks :)
(No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :))
There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.
Wow! Battery capacity has gotten cheap.
It's always fascinated me during disasters how independent telecomm can be. Kudos for all the engineering that went into it!
I.e. even when any other conceivable dependency is down, the networks keep running.
> we just told you that via Signal
Who are you and what's Signal?
There is still no electricity, at least in my neighborhood in Lisbon. Less noise, more human voices outside. Time to meet some more neighbors I guess.
Most base station masts have lead battery backup up to 24h - 48h.
People are not voting this up to top because they're offline. This outage is quite massive.
nah, spain has only population as big as new york state + new jersey + connecticut + massachusets combined TIMES TWO -80 mil or almost 1/4 of usa, no big deal !
Spain has 49 million people, which is a lot, but not 80 million.
(plus 11 million of Portugal for a total of 60 million people in the Iberian Peninsula)
ok so just remove times two then XD
Older readers may remeber the Northeastern blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada that was caused by cascading overloading, I believe originally triggered by high loads due to hot weather and poor vegetation maintenance under lines.
I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
That was a mad few days. We were stuck on campus. Water ran out by the next day. And students were using water from the campus fountain.
Older readers would remember the 1965 blackout. 2003 was only 22 years ago
Red Electrica - red is Spanish for network, not the color (roja)
I'm in Valencia and it is indeed happening here. A street parade under my windows continues nonetheless.
> A street parade under my windows continues nonetheless.
I mean, what else are you gonna do without power?
Usually?
Sex. At least that's what everyone believes
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-maternity/
Well, sex and looting, and maybe inventing new music genres.
The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...
How are you posting this?
Telcos have tons of backup power. They’re required to have it.
Mobile internet still works.
It works, but only some of the time now. It’s been very unstable for me since the outage started. I’m in Spain.
"Cell towers have backup generators?"
All essential infrastructure has to. Heck, if you have a landline you can probably siphon off some power from the DC component.
Cell towers have backup generators?
Most of them have batteries. How long they last depends, in my country they can typically manage 4 hours.
Batteries at least.
They still need other infrastructure to get anywhere though (routers and other networking infrastructure).
Cell towers have batteries and/or generators, with fibre connections to data centres, which also generally have batteries and/or generators.
Always picture someone with a big can of diesel filling up a generator. Experience says it could be a genny running on natural gas. Had that at work before.
I think cell phone towers use surprisingly little energy, just a few kW. So even longer term operation should be possible withs bobs backyard generator running on vodka.
But I would guess the whole network equipment would draw quite a bit, especially a modern infrastructure.
Well obviously. Computers use electricity, so if the grid goes out so does internet traffic. Local data centers might have backup power but local homes and everything in between the homes and the data center probably won't.
Wikipedia has an article following this:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_European_power_outage>
Some parts of Spain are slowly coming back online https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267
The crazy thing is how is Twitter still being used to communicate these events.
Agreed.
It's crazy how momentum can carry a business.
To use a potentially controversial example, Microsoft products (Office, Windows) are still extremely entrenched despite the overwhelming majority of knowledgable people agreeing that they're on a steep downward trajectory and the alternatives have long since surpassed them.. leading to this[0] recent video from Pewdiepie...
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0
Hello from Portugal. Local news is indeed reporting that power is out across all of Iberia.
In Portugal here. Lost power about 1 hour ago. Reading the news while batteries last.
Amazing/curious that all the infrastructure to feed news to your phone still works. I can imagine a poorly-built systems would have some infrastructure without UPSes, and in all that chain of technology, there'll be an element or more without power. Not saying Spain/Portugal would necessarily be more prone to have poorly-built infrastructure, I assume the whole world runs on half-assery.
If their networks are built like the ones I've worked on, everything has at least a little battery, but only some of it has generators to keep going after that.
So some or most cellular towers will have generators, and their fibers will backhaul through repeaters, some or most of which will have their own generators. When it gets back to the MTSO, that will definitely have large diesel turbines on site and at least 24 hours of fuel with priority refueling contracts.
I'd expect there to be a lot of outages, for instance where all the towers in a region end up backhauled through a site where the generator fails or was never installed for some reason. But there will also be a lot of places that stay up in some capacity because, more or less by happenstance, all the fuel tank permits got approved and all the equipment actually worked.
I believe it was 10 years ago or something, we lost power in Turkey. I mean the entire country for around 10 hours.
Data, cellular etc everything kept working. But at some point I guess the generators and batteries started to fail and capacity degraded.
Turns out not everybody in the world are jokers.
Looking forward to the postmortem
Accidentally dropping the production database doesn’t seem that big of deal in comparison to killing the electricity in two countries.
unless it is database of russian oligarchys bank accounts in vietnam where they hidden their stolen money. XD
Unfortunately these things usually take months, being done at the speed of bureaucracy.
Who would be responsible for writing the postmortem? Are they required to?
I think it's ENTSO-E, here's their most recent report into an incident on 21 June 2024: https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/system-operations-reports...
For that incident, an expert panel was set up in July, the interim report was published in November, and the final report in Feburary 2025: so it'll take a few months.
I would expect the Spanish parliament to have some means of summoning an explanation, via its local regulator and grid authority. https://www.ree.es/en/about-us/regulatory-framework
Not required, but engineers tend to enjoy this sort of thing. Also, since it affected some 60 million people and EU-wide grid interconnects, someone will have to explain what happened.
Definitely looking forward to this postmortem.
A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways)
"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."
On the bright side. People die from electricity and from operating electricity powered machines, too. So those will be spared. :)
I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.
I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.
I hope somebody building and selling microgrids and energy storage systems is ready to take advantage of this situation. Mass deployment of batteries at the grid edge is a great idea for a lot of reasons, but none more immediately compelling than "the power won't go out if the grid goes down."
It should be mandatory for critical infrastructure like ATMs to have 24hr batteries installed. And some sort of power backup to maintain internet access as well - even if it's just a matter of everyone being allocated a small amount of starlink data or public wifi.
These things have relatively small costs, but make the system much more resilient.
Here's a "real time" map of electricity production and flow between countries: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly
Would be interesting to see if it will register here.
It should take 72 hours to update
I think that must be the scale so you can browse the historical data. The resolution on the slider is 1H when on 72H scale.
so you can clearly see that site is scam/ using nonsense data....
Currently says due to power outage data might be inaccurate for Spain and Portugal.
NO. data are either accurate all the time or it is scam / bad marketing.... what are you saying ?
I don't know why you are so enthusiastic about this site. Whatever, my assumption was that they are displaying the data in 1 hour intervals as the picker suggests and showing a warning currently about the affected regions is consistent with that assumption.
Parts of France are also affected according to Sky:
https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
> Parts of France also appear to be affected, according to Spanish media reports, which said Seville, Barcelona and Valencia were hit by the outage.
The wording in the article makes it look like Seville, Barcelona and Valencia are in France.
It's the perfect time to invade.
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The southwest of France seems ok. At least I still I have power.
France and Italy. Aliens? Russia? EMP?
There's a connected grid across most of continental europe. If Portugal's grid blacked out unexpectedly then Spain's grid could have been made unstable too, which then continue onwards to South of France and Italy.
Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.
So, how do you stop this from cascading further? Did France have to cut them off the grid somehow?
Neither. Apparently a local grid overload and a cascading failure, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause.
Nobody fed the electricity beetles and they are on strike now.
EMP would kill electronics no?
no, most electronics is shielded by default/by law. check UL/CE requirements. but it can make circuit breakers "turn off". EMP meaning nuclear high above, there exist emp devices of size of small family van, but those have range few 100 m/ft
I am currently in my work office in Madrid, main building has electricity so I guess they have some backup generators, the kitchen however is out of service.
According to local newspapers metro network, airport and traffic lights are all down
most office buildings have gas(methane) generator backup.
I saw it on twitter and had to go to BBC to make sure this isn't some joke or hoax. 2025 and we have National level power cuts?
I know it may be rare but I think some day we really need to move or mandate every single flat / home / apartment / living places to have a 12 - 24 hours backup battery included. Something that has 10K+ Cycles, durable and non-flammable. Not only does it make sure our modern lives without sudden interruption, it also solves the renewable energy problem.
Most of the time, the grid is reliable. How much investment do we actually want to prevent a few hours of downtime once in a blue moon?
And even if we do want to invest in large amount of grid storage (which we would need to anyway, if we want to transition to renewables), I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. Its a great way to limit economies of scale and make maintenance/inspection harder.
Mandating battery storage is nonsense. Making the regulatory system better for it is not, though; it would be good to make it possible for consumer battery systems to do "islanding" properly so they can be true backups.
Or at least not making it illegal. Regulate it all you want, make sure it's safe, but please let's let homeowners install a transfer switch if they're willing to pay for it.
In a longer outage it'd be a massive benefit to have even just a few houses here and there that retain power.
> I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible.
why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads.
In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.
Why not? Maybe because I'd rather not have to spend that much of my own capital on something I'd generally never use. I'd rather not spend the maintenance on that thing I'd generally never use. And finally, I'd rather not take up the space in my home with a large thing I'd generally never use.
I'd prefer for the power coming to my house to just not go out. The grid operator can install batteries in places other than my home. The grid operator can maintain them for me. The grid operator can get cheaper loans than I can for installing them, they're staffed with supposed experts in this stuff, just have them handle it on their premises.
Do you have any reasons besides that?
Sure. Having large batteries is an additional fire risk in my home for once again something I'd generally never need. If these batteries are in my home but managed by the grid operator I'd probably have to allow their people into my home to service them which I'd rather not have to do if it's something I'd generally never use.
Also, this further just makes having stable electricity yet another thing in the wealth gap. Only those wealthy enough to afford the high upfront capital costs, the ongoing maintenance cost, and the space to store it get reliable electricity, fuck everyone else! Or we can just focus on investing in a stable and clean grid and share that cost with everyone, all you need is to just be connected.
But hey if I get a massive battery bank I'll have power for when the end times come. I won't be able to go get groceries anymore and eventually the fiber line and radios around me will go quiet but at least I'll be able to play videogames. For a few hours at least.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Eagle Scout, be prepared and all that. I've got a big pile of charcoal, a chunk of propane, a camping stove, several day's supply of water and canned/non-perishable foods, some batteries for lanterns, etc. The cars all get topped off when big storms seem possible. If the big outage comes this will be more worthwhile than being able to turn on the TV for a few hours, and cost significantly less than several dozen kWh of batteries. And if the power is out for more than a week or two I'll have far bigger concerns than being able to post on Hacker News.
You're not wrong about the fire risk, but just to note, house batteries nowadays are almost always LiFePO4 -- which don't catch fire the same way LiPo batteries like to do.
They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.
Fully understood and agreed. That's why I bothered saving that for the second comment, because it's not necessarily that high of a fire risk but it is still a little bit of one. Having that much energy stored in that small of a package will always have some kind of risk of "what happens when that stored energy gets released in an uncontrolled and rapid manner?"
And that said, I do have lots of other somewhat beefy batteries around the house. They do a lot of useful things for me such as power my tools including my lawn mower, string trimmer, hedge trimmer, saws, etc. There is a massive one in the car parked in the garage. In these cases it is a useful trade off of that slight risk as I'm actually getting something normally useful out of it.
The peak load of a house is substantially higher than the per-house peak load of a city. People don't all turn on their ovens/dryers/hairdriers at the same time.
You could distribute this capacity at each house and feed it back to the grid during peak times. But is TCO of 1000 * 100kWh same price as 100MWh worth of capacity?
If you're going to have the battery anyway(a car) its hard to compete with, but once you need more capacity, I'm not sure it makes sense to distribute it quite as much.
because installing and monitoring 1 million small batteries is vastly more work than 100 huge batteries.
How many people will turn off AC and will not bake that cake, or wash clothes, when they know they're going off their own battery vs some electricity distributor's battery shared by others?
And if someone is dumb enough to do high load stuff on their own battery during a blackout, then it's less of a problem for others. Also individual failures will cover less homes.
Incentives and consequences will be different and differently spread.
And on individual level, you can also chose whether you want this or are fine with outage. (I'm against mandating this)
Not if 1 million people install and monitor them instead of 100 people.
100 huge batteries are going to be monitored and maintained far better than 1 million.
Sounds like an incredibly expensive solution to a problem that could be tackled more efficiently at a larger scale.
Didn't we used to pump steam around for heating and now homes have individual furnaces? If the cost for this were about the cost of a furnace I don't see why this wouldn't be viable.
I bought a generator for just this situation.
In Polish cities there are attempts to move in exact opposite way (close individual furnaces) due to rampant pollution during winter (1000% of PM 2.5 norm level of pollution happening occasionally, over 400% PM2.5 norm lasting for weeks etc)
Plenty of places still do, and in those places district heating still is usually the cheapest source of heat.
That's a great example of why this is a bad idea. District heating is a lot more efficient than using individual heat sources. Especially so when the heat being used is heat that would otherwise go to waste (e.g. waste heat from industrial processes).
I get the efficiency obsession, this being an engineer forum, but aren't we talking about resilience?
There is a very, very appreciable difference between moving hot steam around and moving electricity around.
The thing you said doesn't really make sense to me; I'm not sure it's an apt analogy.
I’ve read discussions about preparing for a strong solar flare basically simply involves having on hand spare equipment stored unconnected and that then would also immediately improve repairs and maintenance for regular issues. I don’t know the details but I believe the US is looking at providing funding to the utilities companies to acquire the duplicate extra equipment.
Rich countries should have a strategic transformer stockpile since they have a long lead time and should last forever in storage.
Mandate a battery backup. Instead of requiring the power suppliers to build and maintain reliable energy.
That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.
People seem to love those expensive solutions though.
I know so many people who invested in overly expensive battery storage systems for their solar. Power in Germany is expensive, but even with that expensive power many of those battery systems will never hit a positive ROI. But they’re still happy for the feeling of being „independent“.
I’ll turn 26 in a few months. The first time I experienced a power outage in my life was two weeks ago when a construction worker in our basement drilled into the wrong wall…
It's likely that battery backup solutions won't be expensive for long. Battery prices have been falling exponentially similar to Solar, and there is no reason to think it will slow down anytime soon (there is still room for improvement just from economies of scale).
I predict that home batteries will become a "no brainer" from a financial perspective (for anyone who has the upfront capital to purchase them) within the next 10 years.
Not all of us live in (semi-)detached homes, and I’m also not sure how one would implement this at the building-of-appartments level, as in, who’s going to pay for it and how do you handle the battery storage capacity for hundreds of apartments from the same building in a safe and cheap-enough manner?
I was living in Brooklyn, NY during the 2003 blackout that knocked out much of the northeastern US for a couple of days. In those days we weren't quite so dependent on cell phones and such things. People walked home, since the trains were stopped. Guys grabbed flashlights and directed traffic. We listened to the news on the car radio. After that I went to J&R and bought a wind-up emergency multi-band radio. In the intervening 22 years, I've never used it. Though at the rate things are going, maybe that will change.
“How to waste money and valuable resources” in a nutshell.
Like it or not but we are a species of social animals, you cannot live without relying on others. That's just delusional.
There are degrees of dependence on others, you make it sound as if it's a binary choice.
I don't, the comment I'm replying to does.
Something that stores enough energy to bake cookies will always somehow be flammable.
Gravity storage of water. Not flammable, but could definitely bake cookies.
This is very rare. Not actually worth to make that much fuss unless you are a hospital.
Spot a European at a hundred paces by their reflex that anything happens the _government_ must do something.
If electricity is that important to you, buy your _own_ resilience. Tesla powerwalls and non-tesla equivalents have been available for ages.
Spot an American at a hundred paces proposing that you either have the money to buy batteries yourself, or else you should just eat it and suffer
A Tesla powerwall won't help with trains and traffic lights. Those are important to me as well.
unlike americans, people in europe don't just huddle in their own fortresses afraid to even take a step outside without riding in tanks.
power cuts affect more than just your home.
Is there a La Liga game on perhaps :)
There's the Madrid Open tennis tournament affected. No Swiatek - Shnaider game until they'll get online. The restaurant is lit with candles, but the DJ has power. So there's music. He was clever.
Context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43157259 / https://vercel.com/blog/update-on-spain-and-laliga-blocks-of...
OP I think is joking La Liga got the power turned off to protect their revenues.
For offline messaging over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi without internet or central infrastructure, I saw these recommended by ChatGPT Deep research and they seem current: Bridgefy (Android & iOS) – direct Bluetooth mesh within ~100 m, instant one-to-one & group chat, <1 min install. Berty (Android & iOS) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi; Briar (Android) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi with Tor fallback. Manyverse (Android, iOS, Desktop) – offline-first social feed that syncs posts over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi when peers meet. Can anyone vouch for these or know better?
I’m in Spain. Internet here is very unstable now also.
Regardless of the source of this specific issue, I suspect investment in infrastructure security and resilience is about to ramp up.
Calling attention to how fragile many of our critical systems are is almost certanly a net-positive in the long run.
For those not aware how interconnected the European Grid is: https://storpower.co.uk/the-day-europes-power-grid-came-clos...
Getting two network bars in Madeira. Seems to be affecting 4G/5G now.
The last major European blackout was in 2006:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
I have family in Andalusia and they seem to have dropped off the net. Mildly concerning.
Also, there are currently four different submissions re this on the front page. I'd suggest we dont need any more.
Yup I confirm. Went to turn on the car to hear the radio. Andorra seems to have power from French side, though in Catalunya we do not.
Should have paid the extra €€ to put the solar panels in backup mode…
Mobile network is fully gone on the islands now — it was working until ~10 minutes ago.
Still working in mainland Portugal but it's getting slow, probably severely overloaded.
Yeah, it's back and slow. Sidenote: RTP (National Public broadcaster) is gone.
Confirmed by contacts on the ground in Spain and Portugal.
Not the best news source, but it’s the only one I’ve found so far. HN moderators, feel free to replace it later with a better one.
Supposedly also France is affected (unconfirmed)
This is the first brief article from El País, a leading newspaper in Spain: https://elpais.com/economia/2025-04-28/apagon-electrico-masi...
Translated version: https://elpais-com.translate.goog/economia/2025-04-28/apagon...
Anyone read Blackout[1]? So it begins. Both countries completed (or almost completed) their smart meter rollout…
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)
Madrid Mayor said
> If emergency calls go unanswered, go to the police and the fire stations in person
That's not a statement I expect to see in relation to a developed city
Maybe the grid upgrade should be to DC to get something hopefully more stable?
This is a really good stress test. I’m impressed that communications still seem to work somewhat for now.
CNN story: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/28/europe/spain-portugal-pow...
In contrary to the CNN headline, air traffic doesn‘t seem to be affected. (As one would expect, as airports all have backup power systems)
This outage does not affect the islands, at least in Portugal. Madeira has power.
Spanish islands are also all ok, they have independent networks
They just reported on TV it will be on again in 20min earliest (15:30 CEST)
How can we follow this story? Who's updating in real time?
BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t
The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/28/spain-portugal...
I've heard from friends in France, Portugal and I am in Spain. I saw people are also mentioning parts of Italy.
The "Blackout" novel comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)
A full nationwide power outage affecting not one but three [0] countries.
Sounds like a major infrastructure risk given that it is possible for more than one country to experience a full loss of power.
EDIT: Andorra is also affected, so that is three.
[0] https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250428/10624908/caida-ge...
The European grid is a connected synchronous grid. Usually that would add stability but it also means if a single country's grid blacks out then their neighbours have to respond to that. Portugal and Spain's grids will be intimately connected which won't have helped.
Not something that's easy to test for.
The whole European grid is essentially connected at this point, it's a simple trade of resiliency for efficiency. People just forget about the resiliency part until something goes wrong
Yeah I've been wondering why this seems so centralized. I'd think power would be more decentralized.
Wild that cloudflare was first to report this. At least first I saw.
I guess news networks don’t have comparable access to live metrics
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
> A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause.
It's surprising how vulnerable electric supply can be.
As of:
this is breaking just minutes ago:* https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t (rolling updates)
* http://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20...
* https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2025/0428/1509881-spain-portug...
The Spanish national operator:
* https://www.ree.es/en
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Eléctrica_de_España
Apparently Italy is also affected.
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2025-04-28/directo-cor...
Outage map is down but no blackouts here (NE Italy) atm...
I’m in NW Italy and all seems fine
Tuscany good so far
Edit
However, I can't get the energy provided outage map to load, maybe too many people accessing it
I am getting downvoted for mentioning something from the linked article. Fun.
No
I'm in Portugal. Mobile data was slow when it started, now it's much better.
The sunny weather is very inviting outside for someone with the day off :-)
Local betting site had odds if this was a attack by russia
As of 2 min ago..( 14:32 WEST ) in many parts of Portugal electricity still out, and also Water systems also offline. Report is for some it can take up to 10 to 12 hours before power back up. Probably many locals not reporting here as they are low on battery.
barcelona has been out for the past 20 minutes or so
Yes, it’s happening
I can confirm (I'm from Portugal)
Got reports from Toledo and Madrid
i had an appointment in Barcelona, but can only guess it’s not safe on the roads
I just walk through Eixample, traffic is a bit chaotic and police has trouble managing it. Stay safe!
Traffic lights are out across Iberia apparently, better stay home.
Do people forget how to drive if there are no lights? I can't imagine many people would think "well, there are no lights, which means GREEEEEEEN!". Over here, a traffic light that doesn't work means it's now a stop sign.
That's still a recipe for massive gridlock as treating most traffic junctions as stop signs doesn't scale unless there are traffic cops to manually direct traffic
It won't be fast, but it shouldn't really be dangerous.
I've never seen a traffic cop but I've driven past maybe fifty or a hundred broken or shutoff traffic lights, mainly in our largest city and never got stuck. Local law states that you give cars coming from the right precedence and the crossing self organises around that.
People routinely forget how to drive when the traffic lights ARE working.
Having driven in Madrid when lights were working, I think the stay home advice is strong.
Call me crazy but I'd love to see full power outage at least once in my life
I used to live in an area that regularly had power outages during thunderstorms. I was also once in London during a power cut that took out most of the city centre. It was a strange experience, but not as weird as walking through empty streets in the time of covid.
Maybe just my perception, but power outages seem to be getting rarer with time, though when they do happen they seem to be far larger.
We had one in my country when I was a kid 30 years ago after a substation tripped and took down the rest of the grid. We broke out the candles and chilled I guess. Power was back up in my area that same night.
Well, maybe you can see one now, depending on how far from Spain you live!
In Japan, sometimes earthquakes will cause regional power outages, though they are usually recovered quickly.
Has not happened to me yet in Hong Kong, even through 2 Typhoon Signal 10s.
Hopefully there won't be any loss of life due to this event.
Yeah we only have telecoms and unreliable at times. If power doesnt comeback soon that too will fail.
Same happened in Murcia. Just thought it was a normal power outage!!
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This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.
Is this a joke? Because that seems like exactly the wrong thing, and such a system would itself be a bottleneck for downtime issues.
Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.
no one would/should prevent companies from using also private channels like X, FB, Instagram, etc but enforcing a public channel that doesn't require private citizens to register, accept T&S and share their private data with 3rd party, unrelated private corporations to be informed of critical, public safety information would be helpful.
Aside from the login issue, Twitter has outages too. It really isn't really that hard to replicate posts across multiple services in 2025.
They did post on BlueSky, but not every update so I assume someone is cut and pasting manually...
https://bsky.app/profile/redelectricare.bsky.social
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It's not Musk fetishism. It's network effects. Most people hate X and hated Twitter but people use them because people use them.
This should show people just how powerful network effects are. They are legitimately a force of nature.
I strongly agree, and to me this supports the argument for heavier regulation (or any really)
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Saying things you know to be untrue will not win you political friends in the long run; quite the opposite: it’ll cast doubt on every other opinion you have
Only for those who don't understand sarcasm or other forms of figure of speech and art in general. For those I'll prefer distance anyway, so it's a win-win.
They may not be aware. We had Dutch fire depts do the same, it used to be possible to see tweets without logging in.
While I don't particularly like twitter (X), in a situation like this it probably has a better reach than the website of REE.
That said, twitter should allow for official profiles and organizations to have their tweets (xs?) made public.
You’re kidding right? The overwhelming majority of people do NOT use X or have accounts there. We are in a bubble. (Not making a Musk point here as it was the same before the “exodus”)
They probably did not patch their firmware in years and have their SCADA systems live on Shodan with default passwords...allegedly...
I remember years ago someone scanned the Internet IPv4 space for open unpassworded VNC servers. Many of them looked disturbingly like industrial control systems.
Just take a look at https://infosec.exchange/@shodansafari. A lot still look like that.
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They could definitely just post updates on their website, the infrastructure is there, running, if they want to inform people on Twitter it's just a bonus to message it through the network that is Twitter.
But important/urgent updates only via Twitter is definitely a huge no-no.
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I assume that a major electric provider has the capacity to build a simple status update system where they post. It's much simpler than any "blog platform" case study used to assess junior engineers. You are assuming that it's their IT systems which crashed the electrical network and there's no sign of that at all at this moment, you are misleading in there to try to score a point, stop.
It's far easier to use Twitter but it doesn't mean it should be used, it fences out people like the OP and me, who do not have Twitter nor want to have Twitter, I don't want to be forced into using a private corporation service to get status updates from the electrical network where I live in. It's quite a simple proposition and very reasonable, not sure why you are so incensed by a quite reasonable expectation.
> Also, why do you assume that website wouldn't crash under the sudden 10000x load? It is an utterly useless solution, that wastes time and solves nothing.
Because it can be cached very easily, it's 2025 where setting up this kind of cache is extremely easy compared to 2005.
> Like does your engineering skills suddenly magically evaporate the moment Elon's name is mentioned?
Please, stop, you are too irrational to understand a very simple and reasonable thing, no need to start throwing Elon into this bullshit, just stop here with the rabid lunacy. I was against major corporations only posting updates on Twitter waaaay before Elon bought it, I still stand by it.
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Murcia is also without power. We live in the campo so presumed it was a normal outage. Obviously not
> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added.
from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
> whistleblowers
Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
Prophets
Peters
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.
NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:
Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
Another reason why itcoin is a pipedream too, particularly for third world countries
If an ATM is down, it's down. With Bitcoin you can still use mesh networks. Here's an old article about an example: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-ena...
(Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)
I agree that bitcoin is a poor solution for anyone but a small elite. But as long as you have the mobile network on diesel generators (which you do in countries where power cuts happen regularly), something like M-PESA still works.
You can have physical bitcoins - devices that hold a private key in a tamper free way. The private key holds a fixed amount of BTC
Without power or an internet connection you can't validate that the btc hash is unspent, avoid double spends, or validate that your taking ownership of it made it to the blockchain and was confirmed for a few blocks.
Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
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I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out.
The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal.
This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
If your building has a power outage, that works.
If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist.
And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.
Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems.
Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.
Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.
It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"
Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
In Lisbon's airport they are temporarily back to just stamping the passports without the biometric stuff. There are already reports that the checks are being lax.
I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
Valid point, but there must be a price at the location of the item in the store.
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent.
PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
It's not just stores, pretty much our entire socity runs on cheap power, without it the whole thing falls apart.
Our global society runs on a lot of cheap sources of necessary inputs. Power is just one of them.
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers.
That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
>That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
I guess I was taking the recommendation as a regulation, my mistake.
Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.
> They have to accept cash in the US as well.
Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
Ah okay, that wasn't clear to me, I imagined only being able to use electronic payment types.
But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!
And this is a trial for how a Carrington event will look like.
You mean the part that anything above 130nm technology would be fried?
I don't think this is true, and I would like to see an explanation of how it might be that quantifies the effect: are we talking electric field strength or magnetic field strength? Modern parts are generally better at ESD than old ones, as well.
Why 130nm?
Yes. For the moment I just want to see for how long the AWS Spain Region will stay up...
Unless this extends to many days, the diesel generators will cover this easily.
most datacenters do not use diesel, but gas/methane/natural gas - utility connection, that way you do not need to truck/store anything.
and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.
same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
I just look to Gaza strip as an example how society continues operating under extreme adversity from the western powers, incl. total lack of electricity distribution for more than a year and a half and full blockade of water, food, and medicine.
No need for imaginary scenarios.
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!
Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.
> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.
The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.
most generators in european cities are connected to gas utility so it has essentially unlimited capacity without land traffic.
edit: and europe has almmost always atleast half a year of whole country supply of natural gas in caverns and other storage.
As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
> As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
North America is organized in regional grids:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
US nationwide would be the whole of Europe category, which, I don't believe had ever happened.
Texas, on the other hand, which is easily the size of a country...
Just verified: Texas is larger than Spain and Portugal combined!
The US has three “independent” grids so losing them all would be hard. But I believe at times Texas has gotten close, and East went pretty dark at some point recently.
CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.
2021 was pretty bad in Texas, IIRC
Indeed, and that’s the main problem: you can’t remember or know anything.
It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.
Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.
Except this is Spain and Portugal which combined have 1/3 of the area of Texas, which had a state wide outage recently.
There's five different grids in North America (Eastern, Western, Texas, Alaska, Quebec) so something would have to go very wrong for a nationwide blackout.
US, no, Texas and California are .. not doing so well.
There was a very famous one in 2003.
As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
It was about 7 hours long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. Where I lived it was restored very quickly.
I had a long blackout as a kid during a hurricane in 1985. Once it was safe it was repaired rather quickly.
> our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency,
None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.
> None of that changes the difficulty of a black start.
That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.
Yes
But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around
Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to
As in the German government and most of the political class...
Germany has dozens of links to its neighbours. We don't need much in terms of "black start" capacity, that's just pointless fearmongering by fossil fuel and/or prepper propaganda sites.
As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.
The grid is not just an aggregation of individual sources and sinks; it takes active effort to keep them all working together in a useful way without just collapsing again into another cascading failure. For that reason, your solar inverter doesn't come on until the grid operator wants the solar inverters to come on in your section of the grid.
It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.
However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.
If anything, it shows how little use there is for physical cash , only as emergency backup
"emergency backup" is a very strong, rational use, and should never be neglected.
You can use cash but it mostly does not work in case of big chains or stores. They need to have access to their SAP/ERP software...It is not about payment for a long time.
Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion.
When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
Depending on the country it’s not that easy. Maybe something changed in the meantime but where I am those blocks are prefilled-numbered and stock needs to be controlled.
It’s not like you can (could?) keep a block „just in case” and thus many shopkeepers wouldn’t even bother in case of outages.
Depending where you live a good old trust can be a currency. Humans are great when it comes to adaptation, I bet I could just write on paper name, CC number and leave it on a paper for shopkeeper and everything would resolve just fine..
How do you open the cash register for change when power is out?
> How do you open the cash register for change when power is out?
I've only seen a few but I believe they have springs on the inside and roll on little wheels similar to how desk draws roll. Most can be opened with a key to trigger that event.
With the physical key, everything doesn't need to be electronic you know
Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
Which countries exactly? I've traveled in UK and France and in both countries when the online cash register was down, they opened their physical ledger, made an entry and gave me a physical handwritten paper receipt written with pen and ink. They said they would make enter the same data online when the online cash register comes back up.
I believe this is France (NF525), but I don't think it says "instantly".
My understanding is that this (NF525) only applies to computerised cash registers (software must be certified NF525 compliant), which there is no obligation to use in the first place.
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
I'm sure they'd make an exception.
Source?
Despite the EU having a directive to not make electronic invoicing mandatory, they now allow exceptions that introduce mandatory online invoicing. For example greece romania italy: https://sovos.com/blog/vat/greece-mandatory-b2b-e-invoicing-...
How can this even be a legal requirement?
In some countries whenever you print a receipt, a copy is also sent to the IRS equivalent of that country. Obviously there are events where that can't happen due to technical reasons outside of the store's control.
Which countries? And, again, I doubt that this is the full picture because there are many cases where people simply don't "print a receipt" perfectly legally...
Germany for example mandates printing a receipt. The receipt must be stored in a certified storage inside the cash register and is signed cryptographically, including the hash of the previous receipt such that there is a hash-chain of printed receipts. Therefore each printed receipt that the customer takes home (and maybe at some point hands in to the tax office for some reason) can be used to check the integrity of the cash register storage and all prior receipts in the chain.
https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/neue-rege... https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/kassenbon...
Many other EU countries have similar regulations, and in some cases had them for a long time.
Thanks! European red tape madness strikes again... At least in France cash registers are not mandatory (for now...) so there is a way around this madness.
Force majeure should apply.
Store owners just make out paper receipts in this case, like businesses used to do back in the day
The gas station I worked at used a paper bag when offline. Good, not great.
How did the pumps work when there was no power?
No power is different than no internet, so that was different. We were a 24/7 store (7-Eleven) and sometimes we would close if it was a prolonged power outage. No one has 100% uptime, not even 24 hour gas stations.
They used to have a crank!
He said "offline" not "no power".
Also, fuel station can probably successfully run it's own backup power;)
They don’t, at least not here in the US. In areas with power outages, gasoline stations do not operate.
> When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).
A cash register is not required to make cash transactions
Cashier scribbles furiously to add to cash register later
I’m close to Valencia and we’ve had no electricity for about an hour.
Reported here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819791#43820127
Here too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819914
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Spain and Portugal are quite big and with harsh terrain, I doubt anyone would bother invading in a traditional sense.
But we have been invaded countless times during our history, although the last time was Napoleon in 1808...
Who would even invade Spain and Portugal? E.T?
Well, we love all kinds of tourists. Why not ones that could change the world? :)
#irony
Morocco might (again).
That would be a hell of a plot twist
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Maybe just flexing a bit, establishing dominance?
What beef does russia have against spain and portugal?
https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/presidente/news/Paginas...
Parts of EU.
Ok...? Is there like more to this narrative or are we supposed to buy that russia just hates all of europe for being europe now? Whatever happened to the "rational actor" canard?
Russian establishment DOES hate western civilization, that is not "narrative" that is fact told by them in live tv to your face FOR LAST 70 YEARS. That is not "narrative".
Western style of life is not only EU but also USA. I do not know how people can even doubt this lol.
If they wanted western life in russia, then establishment will make changes to have it there, no ? Russia is NOT democracy, it is tyranny, autocracy. Again it is not narrative it is what they do there lol
clearly yandex translator is not good as gogole translator . ;)
Yeah yeah they hate it so much they send their children to live in Europe and buy properties there.
Hating the west is only an ideology given to plebs
I don't buy this argument, it's the pinnacle of selection bias.
`any != all` after all.
Your argument is essentially; because some Russian people send some of their children to be educated or buy some property in the west (as a portfolio of how many?) that the argument that the state of Russia dislikes the EU holds no water.
To me, it's hardly evidence of anything, just like how some people in the UK fetishise Russia- yet the UK government is actively hostile and condemns without hesitation- Russias actions towards Ukraine.
My argument is not just about "some people", people who are pretty high up in the hierarchy. How about russian ex-president?
The "hate west" narrative is pushed because it makes sense during the war. If Putin decides now praising the west will let him keep the power the propaganda machine will do a 180 turn
it is autocracy, not democracy.
so they HATE west no matter what they say, so you are correct in that.
but you are making wrong conclusion,
machine is not bad thing BUT they are good people.
They ARE bad actors no matter if they use propaganda machine that way or any other way or not use at all. they are bad actors period. propaganda machine is separate thing.
They hate west because by western standards they will be in jail for all LOOTING of russias natural resources and killing and abusing their own citizens. West is punishing people who do bad things. Russian oligarchy kids did nothing wrong, presumably.
contrary to west, in russia you get beaten by police because your children in west posted something on Xtwitter...
Alexei Navalny, Boris Nemtsov, Boris Berezovsky, Sergei Magnitsky, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, Natalia Estemirova, Anna Politkovskaya, yuri Shchekochikhin, Vasily Melnikov , Vladislav Avayev , Sergey Protosenya, Yevgeniy Palant, Yuri Voronov, Ravil Maganov, Vladimir Sungorkin, Anatoly Gerashchenko, Vadim Boyko, Vladimir Makei, Grigory Kochenov, Vladimir Bidenov + Pavel Antov, and thousands of others.
most spectacular was - Pyotr Kucherenko where two men holded him and third put shopping bag on his head, and noone saw nothing in whole plane... except three photos were taking of incident...
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The EU is the main provider of financial support to Ukraine, the country which Russia is currently attempting to invade, along with one of the major provider of weapons and training.
Europe is helping Ukraine it its defense against Russia. Russia has sabotaged a lot of things in multiple EU countries, including Spain. It's not far fetched to imagine Russia being the root cause of this, or being implicated in some way. Even if they are not, they 100% are watching this closely and learn how they can disrupt power throughout Europe.
How would this do anything but weaken the Russian position? The EU is clearly otherwise willing to watch Ukraine fall.
> The EU is clearly otherwise willing to watch Ukraine fall.
All the money, humanitarian aid, weapons, intelligence, training and geopolitical backing beg to differ.
Did Russia say they did it? No.
So you can weaken your opponent without getting the backlash.
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I'm not saying Russia did it, just that they could be the cause of this. Weakening Europe is in their interest, and they already have blatantly done smaller scale sabotage. It wouldn't weaken their position, as you said, Europe is not really interested in taking Russia seriously atm. Sabotages, killings, politician corruption and public disinformation have been common tactics for them for a decade now. Now that Russia's #1 enemy is under their control, I'm not sure they are afraid to take on Europe more directly.
Well, it's been for quite a while now. Acts of micro- (or mini-) aggression like fires, explosives in commercial shipping services, broken sea cables just became daily news.
The only positive aspect of this is after the root cause is found, the grid will become more resilient in the long term (but these kinds of changes typically take long time).
Again, how would these actions do anything but weaken Russia's position given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines? Wouldn't ukraine benefit the most from the perception that Russia is at war with the EU?
Outside of discussing whether Russia is behind this or not, the broader Russian strategy seems aimed at undermining trust in European governments. [1]
The goal would be to create enough pressure from people - frustrated by problems like power cuts — so that governments must withdraw their support for Ukraine.
Any "WW III" fearmongering is similar : intimidate everyone into withdrawing support.
Many European countries have created emergency guides to help citizens preparing for crisis like this one. [2] This, I guess, has the underlying goal of maintaining trust in European governments.
[1] : https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-increasing-hybrid-att...
[2] : https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-commission-urges-sto...
> given the EU's apparent willingness to stay on the sidelines?
... Wait, how are you defining that? Much of the EU is about as close as it is possible to be to being at war with Russia without actually sending in troops.
Spain helped ukraine with planning of this - https://apnews.com/article/russia-moskalik-car-bomb-322ab66d...
so blackout is attack from russia. so stop spreading lies of terrorist russian state.
For the record, I don't think that this particular event is a Russian act of sabotage.
But Russia is an aggressive authoritarian state that was already caught for (smaller) acts of sabotage in EU, some of them quite dangerous. Why they are doing this? Who knows, war in Ukraine was not rational too. Perhaps some people want to be evil just for the sake of being evil.
As a Russian emigrant, I long stopped trying to rationalize Kremlin decisions. Why authoritarians are authoritarians? Who knows. Mad with power or something.
The strategy is not even a secret. Russia sees itself as a major influence of the Europe.
You cannot control stable governments, so you destabilise them with various tools for prolonged periods of time and then you end up with a country which is much easier to influence.
How could this weaken Russia's position without a smoking gun pointing at them?
Same with the undersea cables.
Reading this thread from Russia feels surreal.
We feel similar when watching this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0unhxkWkiKY
Good place as any to ask: do you need a VPN to access the “Western” internet? Is the block on the Russian side, or are Western websites blocking Russian IPs?
No in most cases. Meta products are banned, twitter, discord and youtube (this one mostly works in reality), but pretty much everything else is unaffected.
Some Western side companies banned Russia by IP's like Intel, but in general, my list of websites to tunnel through a VPN is rather short, like a dozen and mostly to unblock youtube as meta and twitter are cancer anyway.
The block is on the Russian side (in most cases), but not all Western sites are blocked (Hacker News is working). Most of Russians know how to use VPNs, though it is extremely inconvenient.
Why is that? We're not saying it's definitely Russia, but exploring the possibility they could be behind this.
After the multiple sabotages, killings, corruption, as well as the invasion of a neighbor country, we have some reasons to think Russia is a bad state actor.
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Why?
not all people in west are that ignorant, atleast half of european public wants putin gone.
(other half is just living life not really caring about putin.)
I understand, but unfortunately, I don’t see any claims that are false.
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Some people close to power in Russia (Dugin) actually seem to believe Russia natural range is from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."
https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p126_10.x...
Dugin's views and influence is greatly exaggerated in Western media.
>renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."
This is a direct lie. Putin has never said this.
And one of the greatest lies that is being spread about Putin that he intends to conquer Europe and recreate Russian Empire.
Spain underinvests in its military. Russian mafias also control much of the costas.
I would surmise that the Russians think that Spain and Portugal are cowed, and want to keep them intimidated and prevent them from increasing their aid to Ukraine.
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Some more-unhinged ultranationalist elements of Russian societies loathe Western culture and what they see as 'decadent' Western values on their culture. This is not new. Xenophobia and hate of the Other has a long and sordid history in Russia.
Moreover, they are unable to just live-and-let-live and actively go out of their way to make other peoples lives miserable. This is due to pervasive zero-sum thinking in Russian strategic thinking. They are fixated on the idea that in order for Russia to 'win', others must suffer and lose.
Russia is an imperialist, terrorist state and wants to see all of Europe in its "sphere of influence"
They have already assassinated People in Spain last year
https://www.politico.eu/article/maxim-kuzminov-russia-ukrain...
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I often have the same thoughts as you because, based on what I’ve seen, their actions aren’t strictly rational. For example, the damage to undersea cables will just be repaired, and it only end up angering everyone. Sometimes they also start local fires. I don’t really understand it either.
I do not really think that this needed to be a russians work tho. Spain and Portugal are really kinda far and it would be massively idiotic move even for them.
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Noth Koera doesn't have any beef with Europe. Whereas the Russian propaganda says quite shocking things about Europe every now and again, not to mention their previous prime minister that is suggesting nuking European cities on Twitter.
North Korea fight in Ukraine, so they could simply be hacking for hire
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Threat from the state or another state? The uks biggest airport was shut down recently in a similar fashion after a fire at a power plant.
> For the past months the mass media has been talking non-stop about this possibility
Where? This is the first I have heard of it.
.. why would the state shoot itself in its own foot?
Local power outages are probably the most common "disaster" one should prepare for.
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Source?
I can confirm, all coworkers from Portugal seem to be affected. Big thing.
There seems to be a disturbing pattern of events.
One of the first things the Russians did when they took the Ukraine War hot, was to cyber-attack their power grid.
Pair this with ongoing Russian 'ransomware' (cyberattacks) on the British food supply, the Russian DDoS attacks against Dutch municipal governments, and the ongoing hybrid-warfare operation in Spain and Italy, to stoke anti-tourism protests, there does seem to be an alarming pattern emerging.
So when are we going to collectively realise that Russia is waging a war of aggression against Europe, and respond accordingly?
-> Power outage -> Wild guess that Russia has been doing it, 0 proof or even hint -> "This is a war of agression, we should respond"
Are you suggesting to attack Russia, based on absolute thin air?
> thin air
Except for the mountain of evil, violent, underhanded and illegal stuff Russia keeps getting caught doing, and has so far escaped scot-free due to Western cowardice?
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As much as I am anti-Russia and against the invasion, this is absolutely not the place to start this flame war.
The thread I answered in had someone playing dumb as if there would be no reason whatsoever to consider Russia a hostile actor, I was responding to that.
Amazing! We need more volunteers on the frontline: https://www.volunteeringukraine.com/en/volunteering-opportun...
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Wasn't the large US/Canada blackout a decade or two ago caused by a tree?
If so, then the question would be if Russia did plant that tree. We should look out for more suspicious trees in our immediate areas.
See some tree squating where it shouldn't? Walnut or Vatnik? You can never be sure...
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Tangentially related, my brain just shot off in that direction, the F35 must be a dream to target then, cyber-wise, for a competent state actor.
> Spain's electricity grid operator Red Electrica has confirmed power outages across the country.
That’s why you still need a strong diesel/diesel-electric locomotive fleet, imagine if Spain had been right in the middle military mobilization and military materiel transport, an event like this one would have stopped then dead in the tracks had they been relying only on electric locomotives.
No, the armed forces have their own fuel locomotives. I imagine any sizeable military does the same thing. Plus most (all?) cargo trains still use fuel. 100% electric is just passenger traffic.
https://www.outono.net/elentir/2021/10/23/the-spanish-army-r...
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong article, but there's this:
> For journeys outside the base, *the Army uses Renfe locomotives*.
which, in my understanding, means that in order to move military materiel (to the borders with France, let's say, or to the closest sea-ports most probably) and tens to hundreds of thousands of mobilised men the Spanish Army does indeed rely on Renfe locomotives, i.e not on their own.
Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption.
This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.
The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.
Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.
This sounds more like a dystopian novel, where only the wealthy can afford stable power and everyone else is left without.
That is basically what happens in South Africa today. There are rolling blackouts and rich people with backup generators and batteries are unaffected. It's gotten to the point where richer cities (like Capetown) have their own power sources to mitigate the problem.
Same situation in California. Power utilities regularly cut power due to mismanagement of wildfire risk every summer.
All the wealthy folks with the means have some variation of either a home battery or a standby generator.
The current system is that everyone pays equally for X amount of stability, and for some people they don't get as much stability as they desire (eg. These people in Spain), whilst others pay more money and than they'd like when they would be fine with 5 minutes outages once a year.
That made sense before technology became available for everyone to make their own choice - but that is no longer the case.
You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff.
Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines.
I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will help if it's an issue with over-demand the grid managers can do rolling blackouts to manage while fixing the supply problems. The grid is just broken at the moment and the solar can't maintain the grid alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverter-based_resource
Large Inverter Based Resources (IBR) such as huge solar parcs, grid-scale batteries or high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) lines can be programmed to behave like rotating generators, or even to smooth out smaller ripples. They also don't necessarily need a leading grid frequency but can be used to generate their own frequency normal to cold-start or resync a grid.
Only "small stuff" IBRs need a leading frequency from the grid and disconnect outside their safety corridor because those usually aren't controllable from some central grid authority. Thus the stupid-but-safe behaviour mandated for them.
This is the exact kind of techbro nonsense that I’ve come to expect from this website. No empathy for your fellow humans and dressed with a side of “computers and code plus finance”.
I thank the heavens that the people who run the electricity system do not share your opinions.
Texas had a pretty free market, with many users on a floating price, didn't work that well either a few years ago when their grid went dawn.
EU electricity market is very similar to it, but interconnected and probably more free market style. A lot of people pay the spot price depending on county and their provider of course.
Oh god.
Let's skip the technical problems in your theory and focus on the social.
People need power to survive. You know, food, hot water, light, work, internet, mobile phones, entertainment, etc. This requires stability, not second by second pricing.
When you put a chicken in an oven, you want to cook that chicken and eat it, feed your family. Electricity price rising in the next few minutes would mean that you either have to risk disease (chicken staying in the dangerous temperatures until the electricity price drops) or being hungry and throwing food away. This is not how you want society to function.
This comment is Dunning-Kruger effect in action…
Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.
The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot of time to add the power plants (or renewable equivalent) to the grid because they must be synchronized.
The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open question, but they certainly appear to be a feasible option.
> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.
No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.
They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.
Having such interdependent grids seems like a market or political problem not a physics problem to me.
Interdependent grids are usually good: they allow you to average out the effect of a single power station failure over a much larger area, and to amortize prices from a wider area of suppliers.
Sure but if you can't cut off failing parts in a sane way it seems like a liability.
Like, what can you do, use some 1000 of MW to melt iron rods or something to give the power stations time to slow down? Free wheels?
The reason why we interconnect grids has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with physics, politics can sometimes lead to disconnections (like how the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid earlier this year) but it comes with great cost and involves careful planning (the fact that the Baltic states remained connected for almost three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give you an hint of how challenging it was).
The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.