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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:53:25 +1000
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On 30/04/2025 12:57 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.

That is the message that your climate change denial web-sites exist to 
peddle. Somebody who was a better electrical engineer than you are might 
detect some of the fallacies in their story.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney