https://blackmon.substack.com/p/mass-blackouts-hit-spain-portugal?utm_medium=ios
Spain and Portugal, both of which generate a majority of their electricity with renewables, were simultaneously hit by widespread power outages on Monday, with no explanation immediately forthcoming about the cause. Some reports said the outages also hit some parts of France.
Cellular service and Internet were reported down throughout both countries, and airports lost power as well, according to sky news:
The extensive rail service in both countries was also impacted, and the metros in major cities like Madrid and Barcelona had to be evacuated:
Here’s an excerpt from a report at Sky News:
Large parts of Spain and Portugal – including Madrid and Lisbon – have been hit by a power outage.
Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it is working with energy companies to restore power.
The Spanish government has convened a crisis meeting at the offices of Red Electrica due to the outage, according to the El Pais newspaper in the country.
It comes as France briefly lost power following the outages in Spain and Portugal, French grid operator RTE said.
Parts of Madrid underground have been evacuated and traffic lights in the city are not working, according to local media.
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADVERT
Play has been suspended at the Madrid Open tennis tournament due to the outage – with Britain’s Jacob Fearnley forced off court in a critical moment during his third-round tie with Grigor Dimitrov.
The loss of power affected scoreboards and the camera above the court.
Maddie Sephton, who is from west London, was on the Madrid Metro when the power outage occurred.
“We got on the train and everything was fine,” she told Sky News. “But then everything went dark.”
She was stuck on the train for 20 minutes until a staff member opened the doors manually.
Mrs Sephton says she was on her way to the airport at the time – and had to exit the station by hiking up 15 flights of stairs with her luggage.
“No lifts are operating – making it difficult for elderly people with limited mobility,” she added.
Above ground, she said that “everyone is just standing around and waiting”.
Bars are unable to take card payments, cash machines are down, and traffic lights aren’t working either.
“I currently don’t have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet – I can’t withdraw any money from the ATM,” she added.
“A couple have offered to let us get a ride in their taxi to the airport. Their flight is at 4.30pm so they’re pretty relaxed – but my flight back to London is at 3pm and I’m nervous.”
I’ll probably have more on this later today as more information is made public.
That is all for now.
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Hasta la vista, baby!
Or as the boss of the recently closed down gas powered generation plant said…”I’ll be back”
Something about the feeder from France to Spain going in to dynamic resonance and shutting down. So the backup like most of Europe is France’s nukes
The resonance results from a phase mismatch reflecting the power back up the connector to form a standing wave. Power in at one end, nothing out at the other, something has to give.
The ‘resonance” is more likely due to electromechanical resonances, i.e. involving inertia of rotating machines connected to the grid, than just with transmission line effects. This is exacerbated by renewable not having features provided by traditional generation such as inherent voltage stabilization, grid inertia and generation varying inversely with frequency.
Exactly what I was thinking after seeing the effects of unreliable power harmonics on the incoming feeds at my steel plant. We have had to reduce some monitoring to reduce the number of nuisance trips on the drives. I will have to check if the feed covered by the MG set doing power factor correction has harmonic issues. The company upgraded a temper mill to modern drives but the feed wasn’t quite big enough to handle the new drives surge currents. so we actually kept a 12,000 Hp MG set to use it”s inertia and power factor correction capability to fix the issue.
Chargpt – whenever two AC paths reconnect (a loop, not a branch), their voltages must match in magnitude, frequency, and phase angle.
If not, you get:
Circulating currents (even if loads are balanced)
Instability or damage if mismatch is large
That’s why utilities carefully control reactive power, impedance, and sometimes use phase-shifting transformers or FACTS devices at key junctions.
Simple branches (one feed, one split) don’t have this problem because there’s no “rejoining” to create conflict.
Just like the west coast states in the US.
Their “backup” for power (and sometimes water) is from other states farther east.
Hydro in a country like Spain known for its long periods of drought. What could go wrong.
THey have a lot of water in the reservoirs at the moment thanks to the rain that produced floods a few months ago. PLus they also have a fairly substantial pumped hydro capability
Just like our backup in Hochul’s NYS is hydro imported from Canada.
So Spain, Portugal are not really 100% renewable are they.. Still reliant on dispatchable supplies.
…and always will be.
I think the claim is that they managed for one whole day to meet electricity demand from renewable resources. Just one day. The day before and the day after, renewables presumably met less than 100%.
Well, yes. 0% is indeed less than 100%.
Humor – a difficult concept
— Lt. Saavik
The claim is exceedingly dodgy. Here’s the actual generation on 16th April. As you can see CCGT and nuclear were running throughout. They only make the claim because exports and pumped storage pumping exceeded the fossil fuel use It’s quite clear that the evening peak at 10pm was only met thanks to fossil fuels even at the domestic demand level (and exports were cut back).
And, apparently, flashlights and candles…
Were we all wrong? Wasn’t the consensus that it would be Germany or GB or even California that would be first to have their renewable grid collapse catastrophically?
Congrats to Spain and Portugal…
Not enough wind in Portugal
Results for Portugal • Choose area
:
80 /C Premina on 10%
Humidity: 49%
Wind: 7 mph
Weather
Monday
Cloudy
Temperature
Precipitation
Wind
5 mph
4 mph
6 mph
5 mph
4 mph
7 mph
9 mph
15 mph
K
기
2 PM
5 PM
8 PM
11 PM
2 AM
5 AM
8 AM
11 AM
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat
Sun
Mon
80° 60°
70° 56°
66° 52°
70° 57°
///
67° 57°
67° 56°
68°
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spains-power-generation-nearly-back-normal-after-monday-blackout-says-grid-2025-04-29/
No. There was less than 900MW flowing from Spain to France when the cut happened, knocking out the supply entirely.
The problems started at the other end of the country with oscillating overvoltages due to too much solar leading to two major transmission lines tripping out 1.3 seconds apart. With very little inertia on the grid that left the rest of the country acutely short of power, and grid frequency fell rapidly to below 47.5Hz knocking out demand and generation with automated disconnections.
“Bars are unable to take card payments …” The end of civilization as we knew it.
Another good reason to keep cash on hand! 🍻
Cant operate electric powered cash registers or the price scanning type checkouts .
Maybe in a bar its fine.
Only with the right bar code.
Geoff S
I wish I had said it myself, Geoff! I though this deserved more than an upvote.
Pharmacies can’t operate without electricity. You can’t rent a car without card payment. Big Brother.
sounds like good news to me. Many people inconvenienced by the foolish move to 100% renewables.
I would be very surprised if the “official” cause determined by an exhaustive investigation places any blame on renewables. It will be something like a cyber attack or terrorists sabotage. Much like the Texas grid failure in 2021, wind and solar will be portrayed as a nonissue and some other part of the system will be blamed.
They already tell the public that solar saved the day.
But not the night!
Robert,
solar is the villain not the white knight.
The grid controller has no control over domestic solar ouput.
Any grid needs minute control of supply and demand balance instantaneously at all times.
They are already saying it was an atmospheric phenomenon that caused it. Someone, somehow, has to get the lies to end before a lot of people get killed.
It was likely control settings issues. Lots of grid add-on generation these days is DC that is electronically converted to AC….That means the old tried and true control systems that kept big spinning power generators in phase….is now in the hands of pimply faced kids with laptop computers who believe that simply finding extra coins in the game will give you more lives…
There is a lot of inertia in a large MG set. The 12000 Hp set with 2 450 Kw 750 volt DC generators at work take nearly a half hour to come to rest from 514 RPM after being shut down. That is with 17 inch shaft running on babbit bearings.
. . . and from there it’s just one itty-bitty, teeny-weeny, step to—TA-DAH!—blaming it on climate change.
Cyber attack: The Chinese flipped the switch on all those solar and wind facilities they manufactured for Portugal, for a laugh.
You mean, like, the PRC version of the StuxNet virus . . . maybe present on a ROM chip on the tiny black box (itself having undisclosed Wi-Fi connectivity) inside each solar panel that is labeled as “voltage regulator”?
Nah . . . that couldn’t possibly happen, could it?
Just need to hope it becomes a regular thing. ! 😉
Otherwise they will not learn.
After watching the Covid psyop, I can see how they can fool quite a few people in believing the shot is safe and effective, masks work, lockdowns work …
It will become regular and no they wont learn just told to pray harder for the carbon god.
A few heretics could be burned though.
If it is a regular thing, let us hope for a good supply of body bags.
/s
No problem…..it is just part of the price of being virtuous…..and no doubt there will be repeats.
It’s actually surprising that it took from April 16 until the 28th for big supply problems to develop to the random blackout point…must have been low industrial demand…like a holiday maybe….
Holy Week and Easter week, lots of vacations and celebrations.
I think wind speed in Spain has been a bit on the low side for the last couple of days. Maximum I can find currently is 5m/s, but 1 or 2 in places. So Spain’s 30GW will be giving about the same as the UK’s 30GW which is 2GW as we’ve got similar wind conditions. There’s a high pressure over most of this part of Europe. How the Solar PV 33GW performed I don’t know.
Whatever the cause we won’t be allowed to know anytime soon.
On the bright side no CO2 involved in electricity generation this afternoon.
I wonder if a stray cloud was the trigger.
Temps in Madrid went from the 50s to the 80s in that time. (55 degrees of April 16; 81 degrees on April 24). They may have upgraded the “grid” but you have to wonder how many homes in the older parts of Europe still employ older technology like plug-in fuses that need to manually be replaced.
Posted in the other thread, reposted here
Story Tip — the Iberian blackout
From the Telegraph
Spain has one of Europe’s highest proportions of renewable energy, providing about 56pc of the nation’s electricity.
More than half of its renewables comes from wind with the rest from solar and other sources. That means Spain’s electricity supplies are increasingly reliant on the weather delivering enough wind to balance its grid.
For much of the last 24 hours, that wind has been largely missing. The website Windy.com, for example, shows wind speeds of 2-3mph, leaving the country reliant on solar energy and old gas-fired power stations.
The weather system that has left Spain bereft of wind is also having similar effects across the rest of Western Europe with the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and others all seeking extra sources of electricity as their wind turbines fall still.
France, for example, has been calling on Spain for extra electricity. The UK, which is also increasingly reliant on wind, was on Monday morning struggling to get any turbine power.
Instead, it was relying on imports from Europe – with the London and South East receiving 58pc of its power from imports, according to the National Energy System Operator (Neso).
The sheer scale of the demands being transmitted between countries and across interconnector cables – especially at a time when wind and other renewable output plummets – may be enough to disrupt grids and power transmission.
The large amount of solar power on the Spanish and Portuguese grids may have also left the Iberian power grid more vulnerable to faults or cyber attacks, according to one expert.
Generators that have spinning parts, such as those running on gas, coal or hydropower, create what is known as “inertia”, which helps to balance the frequency of power on the grid to prevent faults.
Solar panels do not generate inertia on the system, however, and there are known issues with low inertia on the Iberian grid.
At about 10am on Monday, roughly two hours before the power cuts, almost 60pc of Spain’s power was being generated by solar farms, according to transparency data.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/04/28/what-could-be-behind-europes-power-outage/
Wind power in Britain at 7pm 28/04/2025 is 2.08 GW
Now 7.05pm and its down to 1.64GW
Still, we have another 20 minutes of sunlight to rely on.
What happens to solar when they seed the atmosphere with particles to block sunlight?
Discuss among yourselves.
it will effect the wind as well. Wind is solar driven.
If they’re going to use sulphur dioxide, then we can expect acid rain. 😊
Michel,
inertia is required but it is only a damper of frequency, if there is a supply shortfall frequency will drop and needs rapid input of power from dispatchable generation, and or storage to restore supply and demand balance, otherwise if frequency goes out of limits for too long trips will occur. (The opposite is also true if their is a surfeit of power input but may be harder to correct)
They got close, but until they say explicitly that the grid failed because of renewables, the liars in control will stay in control.
Does this tidbit ‘play out’ as kicking-off, playing a part, contributing to Spain’s grid collapse:
A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal’s national electric company REN said.
From: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage
Power line outages or trips are very common, same goes for generators, they will trip when the frequency is out of a very narrow band.
The system is designed to manage with these faults.
The real problem is that Spain in this instance with its non inertia renewables has no sustainable stability when small faults occur
There you go. Forest Fire therefore climate change. They’re spinning the news already.
That ‘fire’ near a line in France was half an hour before the blackout, and theres 8 interconnectors between France and Spain
Someone turned on a light in Bavaria at the exact moment that the power went out in Spain. They should investigate that as a possible cause too.
Then they should ask why Spain’s national power grid isn’t robust enough to withstand a fire in Perpignan or a light in Bavaria.
Some reporter is very confused about geography here. Perpignan and Narbonne are along the Mediterranean coast in southeastern (not southwestern) France. If a high-voltage power line between those cities went down, it might affect Barcelona, but would likely not affect Portugal about 1000 km to the west.
They will cheer themselves on that they made it 12 days.
According to https://x.com/JavierBlas/status/1916857352197701963 there was very little reserve power online to jump in and 78% solar and wind five minutes before the blackout.
hoping our friends in Spain & Portugal will be ok in the coming hours & days. Perhaps this will be the “come to Jesus” wake up call about the inherent weaknesses of a weather dependent power system.
Hopefully you are right about the “come to Jesus” moment. It would be far worse to happen when it is extremely hot or extremely cold–best right now in the spring.
12:30 pm. Midday start of siesta too. Its the ‘new normal’
No schadenfreude from me, as this looks like a serious mess!
The institutional theology around the Carbon God , wont allow that.
some heretics will have to be cast into the flames first
Thanks for the timely post. A colleague who is working in Rota Spain for the Navy posted on a forum and wanted to know if we knew what was happening there. They are hard down with no information as to the cause.
“Congrats to Spain! Nation goes 100% renewable as of April 16th 2025! – But…Then Mass Blackouts Hit Spain, Portugal”
I think they’re just lobbying (virtue signally?) to host the next COP.
Oh now that brings a thought to mind.
Have the next big climate bogsat in Spain and have it conducted during a week long black out.
What happened to the back-up power base load kick in? Was this consideration not part of their calculation and analysis? I wonder what adverse events occurred during this blackout? Anyone hurt or killed?
George,
unless it was alreday running and synchronised it takes too long to get a back up running and connected.
I call BS on being 100% renewable energy unless they don’t count interconnects that run on fossil fuels or nuclear and backups. They can probably show 100% energy generation to meet the need but I doubt it was all being effectively used. They got what they asked for.
Smoke and mirrors. I saw one company claiming 100% renewables. Not the exact figures, but what they say is they use 1 mW per day, and their solar system generates 1 mW per day. Never mind that 1 Mw is generated in the sunshine and they rely on the fossil grid at night. But hey, technically, they “generate” enough renewable electricity to power their operation. To make things more confusing, they do deals with their electricity supplier to only buy “renewable” energy at night to make up the difference. This of course is not actual renewable energy, but energy that has been greenwashed through some accounting credits system.
It’s total and utter BS.
None of these renewable systems can function without fully dispatchable fossil/nuclear backup to catch them everytime they fall.
“but what they say is they use 1 mW per day”
The use 1 milliwatt?
Actually,, they use MWh (Megawatt HOURS).
“1 mW per day” is meaningless – unless you are talking about a miniscule change in the rate of consumption of energy. 🙂
Tell it to the other guy.
And those dispatchable fossil/nuclear backups can’t make a profit so someone has to pay the difference. Exactly, you and me. Wonder why electricity has gone up so much in Europe?
Sky News is reporting that the power company in Portugal is attributing the outage to a “rare atmospheric phenomena.” I wonder if that means it’s rare for the wind to subside at the same moment clouds block the sun.
By “rare atmospheric phenomena” they mean “weather”!
I predict that because of climate change, it will happen more often. The obvious solution is to build more solar and wind to fight climate change.
When a generator runs out of coal or gas its called lack of planning.
The ‘rare’ phenomena could be low wind speed over much of western Europe they still should have manged by rotating blackouts …lol
That would be “rare geologic phenonena”.
Almost certainly the failure was AC reactance as renewables cut in and out of the network. Nothing unusual beyond wind and clouds. The problem only gets worse as you decentralize power generation. The NE power failure years ago was network reactance in the grid.
Attribution to underlying cause overlooks simple trips on transmission equipment owing to near-random occurrence of unforeseen failure-causing events, such as –
A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal’s national electric company REN said.
Chalk it up to loss of grid-tie (a stabilizing source and resource) as well as perhaps some number of critical MWs feeding into the Spanish network from France …
From: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage
Grid transmission lines trip for many reason all the time.
Resilience is built-in to manage a small blip in 10s of GW load …or not.
Sounds like a cloud came over.
And it was laughing maniacally the whole time.
Short of converting the electrical grid to DC this is only going to get worse as more and more renewables are networked into the grid. Each connection needs to be phase matched.
Why is phase matching unsolvable?
It is a problem in the category of its only money. They need to use motor generator sets with big flywheels and lots of big batteries instead of inverters to connect the solar and wind machines to the grid, but it is very expensive and is a lot less “efficient”.
The bigger question, why are they relying on phase matching BEFORE the problem has been solved?
Inductance and capacitance must be adjusted whenever the network changes..
It’s a distributed network with multiple resonant frequencies and stuff going on/off giving you spike transients
It’s a standard electrical engineering problem
https://gtuttle.net/circuits/topics/rlc_transients.pdf
Doesn’t matter if you match the phase etc it’s the transient that is the problem so you don’t want loads going on/off quickly. The easiest way to smooth the behaviour is grid inertia so you minimize the transients.
They were warned about the problem but you have a mix of activists with politicians ears and young power engineers still green behind the ears (all the old guys get forced out because they sound alarm).
East Coast Australia has a history of nasty grid oscillations that will bite them in the arse soon as well.
re: “Short of converting the electrical grid to DC”
I think the dynamics of large interconnected devices in the network will still have instability as a parameter to contend with; Going AC only removes the phase angle relationship between generations sources and their contribution of energy to the grid. Power flows and response times will still play a part, as will ‘inertia’ inherent in spinning resources.
True enough. Load mismatch can trip a DC or AC network.
And what DC voltage will be chosen for both household use and for long transmission line distribution. Hint: the lower the voltage, the higher the current for a given level of power transmission, and transmission lines are sized based on current load.
Compared to AC-AC voltage transformers, DC-DC voltage converters (via motor-generator mechanical means or via solid state electronics) are tremendously inefficient at high power levels.
Attribution models are currently running at predicting 0% chance that the power outage has been caused by an increase in renewable energy.
So nice of Spain to do the experiment for us, so we don’t have to! Oh wait….
Suggest the Spaniards study some German, especially their wonderful word “Dunkelflaute”.
The new word is Hellbrise, just the contrary phenomen, to much sun and/or wind and no use.
I suggest that the new word is trägheitslos – inertia-less.
Or trägheitsfreie – inertia-free.
Maybe a well-publicised vote to see which sounds best.
I think the word is dummkopf.
Ruinables!! 100%
It sounds like there was a transmission line trip, then the Spain side collapsed.
The collapse shouldn’t have happened. Transmission lines trip sometimes.
It is possible that most of the energy on the Spain side had no ability to support the system frequency. Even if there was the right amount of power, it couldn’t get stable so it collapsed.
Fossil and nuclear plants support frequency. Wind and solar follow frequency but can’t support it.
No one reads prior posts (before posting):
A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal’s national electric company REN said
.
From: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal-and-parts-of-france-hit-by-massive-power-outage
That voltage line carries 2.8 GW, I believe.
Thats ALL the interconnectors between the 2 countries capacity- its through 4 DC lines and others
theres 11 AC interconnectors with Portugal
Where is a mention of a fire in your link?
Read the complete text, near the end, as quoted
The fire disrupted transmission line was half an hour before the blackout. They grid supply adjusted to loss one of 8 interconnectors in micro seconds.
I also think that this interconnector went down in July 24, 2021, but there was enough inertia in the system that the Spanish were able to cope.
‘This separation caused a significant reduction in the Iberian frequency, ….’
8 interconnectors of varying voltage between Spain and France .4 are more recent DC links.
But if Spanish side of the grid loses frequency stability then they all trip in micro seconds to protect Frances grid. Although it appears some parts of France were blacked out too.
Another comment focusing on AC and DC.
A natural gas driven generator makes AC, which gets sent down wiring for an iPhone charger that converts to DC to charge a battery, which the phone uses to make AC in switching power supplies, which gets converted to several DC, which drives AC from crystal oscillators as clocks for the processor and transceiver, which runs on DC power and makes AC waves at RF frequencies to communicate over the air with cellular, bluetooth and WLAN. The problem is real, well understood, dates to European men in funny stalkings and has been solved many times. Solar sucks as a grid solution for many reasons, conversion between AC and DC is not the end-all.
“stalkings”
Huh?
Actually, the truth is that there was a strong conflict (the “War of Currents”; see https://www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power ) between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century as to whether the US grid should be based on AC or DC power transmission. Edison championed direct current (DC), while Tesla and George Westinghouse advocated for AC, which ultimately proved to be more efficient and practical for powering large areas and thus became the US (and most of the world’s) standard for their electrical grids.
To the best of my knowledge, Thomas Edison was not an immigrant from Europe and neither Edison or Tesla wore “funny stalkings”.
stockings?
Devolution in process per UN Agenda 2030. Awards to follow.
One would think the Green Blob
would have learned after South Australia or Texas.
The Green Blob doesn’t learn, it demands.
Plus isolated Broken Hill industrial city in Australia.
Surrounded by solar and wind farms but when some pylons for the long distance AC fossil supported power line came down all the reserves and backups came to nothing.