Path: ...!news.misty.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!news.quux.org!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Bill Sloman Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design Subject: Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 16:53:25 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 58 Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:53:32 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="1beaba84e4b2ae4d867f48feacce2a95"; logging-data="3866587"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+PkP4959AmFdt0W+J5QpkdVjo2FWvg7ms=" User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird Cancel-Lock: sha1:6wuSG95mfQxjKiHCh22WuEzEP58= Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: X-Antivirus-Status: Clean X-Antivirus: Norton (VPS 250430-0, 30/4/2025), Outbound message Bytes: 4020 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