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From: Lasse Langwadt <llc@fonz.dk>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 22:16:08 +0200
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On 4/30/25 08:41, Bill Sloman wrote:
> On 30/04/2025 1:48 am, Lasse Langwadt 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
> 
> But grid scale batteries do - pumped hydro storage has the spinning 
> turbines, but grid scale batteries have invereters, which can reacta lot 
> faster than any spinning turbine, Photovoltaic power is variable so it 
> needs energy storage of some sort to smooth out the variations.

production dropped 15GW in 5 seconds, all the grid batteries in 
Australia combined is about 1/5 of that ....