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From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:03:43 -0700
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On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:48:59 +0200, Lasse Langwadt <llc@fonz.dk>
wrote:

>On 4/29/25 16:42, Bill Sloman wrote:
>> On 29/04/2025 10:24 pm, Martin Brown wrote:
>>> Spain suffered a very spectacular near total loss of its national grid 
>>> yesterday taking parts of France and all of Portugal down with it. 
>>> This is an unprecedented failure of a supergrid system by cascade 
>>> failure.
>>>
>>> It seems likely they had got the effect of widespread solar PV has on 
>>> load shedding wrong (much like happened in the UK) and so it failed 
>>> completely. Two events a second apart delivered the coup de grace.
>>>
>>> They seem to have ruled out cyber attack and the electricity company 
>>> is now trying to blame "the wrong sort of temperature variations"...
>>>
>>> Their 400kV lines seemed to be taking the blame with the national 
>>> power company blaming exceedingly rare atmospheric phenomena due to 
>>> "large" temperature differences in central Spain. They claimed that 
>>> the magical sounding "induced atmospheric vibration" was to blame.
>>>
>>> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-portugal-power-outage-cause-cyber-attack-electricity
>>>
>>> Another marginally plausible explanation given was that different 
>>> impedances on cables at radically different temperatures on different 
>>> paths messed up the phasing (but the numbers don't look right to me).
>>>
>>> Anyone have any idea what actually happened?
>>>
>>> The only one I am aware of that can take 400kV supergrid down is 
>>> cables clashing together in older pylon configs where they are exactly 
>>> one above the other and resonance effects allowing large amplitude 
>>> standing waves to build up in the spans can occur in 70+mph winds.
>>>
>>> Most UK ones now have a longer central pylon spur so that the lines 
>>> are more widely separated and up-down motion cannot allow them to touch.
>>>
>>> They do sing quite impressively in a gale though. The little weights 
>>> at each end are apparently there to prevent such standing wave 
>>> resonances damaging the pylon structure. Without them some pylons did 
>>> fall down in the distant past during the most extreme of winter storms.
>> 
>> The Guardian's science and technology reporting has never been great.
>> 
>> The idea that renewable sources make the grid frequency harder to manage 
>> sounds like total nonsense.
>> 
>
>that depends, PV doesn't provide inertia like spinning turbines
>
>
>

Nor does it provide local power on gloomy days or at night.