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From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 09:08:32 -0700
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On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 13:24:46 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> 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.

Here's another perspective:

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/energy/trumps-unleashing-american-energy-may-save-us-blackouts-those-hit-spain