Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:59:19 -0700
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On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:27:24 -0400, bitrex <user@example.net> wrote:

>On 4/29/2025 10:57 AM, john larkin wrote:
>> 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.
>> 
>> Spain is a leader in renewable power, shutting down nukes and fossil
>> fuel power plants. One theory is that local lack of sun and wind can
>> be overcome by huge long-distance inter-state and inter-country
>> networks. "The wind is always blowing somewhere."
>> 
>> Politicians are not usually good electrical engineers.
>> 
>> Go green, go dark. Germany is de-industrializing too.
>> 
>
>In 2005 there was 5 GW of photovoltaic solar capacity installed 
>worldwide, 5 GW is now what's being installed worldwide this year every 
>72 hours.

And most of the world goes dark every night.

>
>The only place significant new nuclear is being built is in China, I 
>believe they built about 40 GW in the past decade. The US built way less 
>than that I see why it's even less popular here, venture capital likes 
>making money.

Making money implies efficiency. And vice versa.