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If anyone’s interested check out the actual electrical content channel on YouTube for a basic theory dumbed down on what happened, there is swearing and an East Midlands accent to contend with though.
upgrading this reply with a link
I gave up on that video when he talked about that Spanish blackout happening in the UK in the future and taking out supplies to a wide area.
It has already happened in 2019 though LFD saved the country as a whole - https://www.drax.com/opinion/britains-blackout/#chapter-1
And also 2008 - though again it was contained.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/may/28/power.cuts
These are technical problems or situations not deemed likely enough to design out, not storms or the like, and quite different in terms of what happened.
It happens all over he time at some level.
This was just a big one.
He references large scale outages like this one - https://www.neso.energy/document/152346/download - and that the blackouts themselves aren’t faults but deliberate load shedding to preserve the balance supply and demand and the all important 50Hz
EDIT - same event as the Drax Global link
The graph/timeline on the NESO(/ESO) doc shows how quickly things can go wrong - it's a 2 minute period. I'm waiting to see a similar report for the Spain event, there must be reasonable awareness of the root causes by now.
Yeah, load shedding seems to confuse casual observation a lot, you see wholesale drops in generation at about the same time as the actual issue and it's perfectly natural to assume which way round it happened, but it's definitely both confusing people and also helping support false narratives.
I don't believe it to be connected (sorry!), but I've put this here rather than start a new thread. Watch out you motor-homers 🙂
However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.
Looking like the initial event caused transient instability resulting in a variety of protections doing their job to avoid damage to the equipment they were looking after - but the protection settings were for a mainly rotating plant system, which they didn’t have. Based only on listening to rumours from folk I know not to be daft and adding a little of my own knowledge (I’ve been either working in or running a team that design the network connections for generators and other demand since the late 90s, but there’s still plenty I don’t know)
Worth noting that after one of the two GB events I mentioned (I want to say 2008 but my memory isn’t perfect) we were round changing the RoCoF / LoM protection settings on generation to account for this sort of thing.
PS - there’s going to be a lot of chatter about 1) lack of inertia and 2) why you can’t run a system without heavy rotating plant.
To which the answer is, 1) it’s not the 1950s anymore, low inertia is just a fact and we need to work with it, and 2) yes you can, you do have to operate it and protect it slightly differently though.
We already run low inertia systems with no rotating plant, albeit on a small scale. We already started to make the protection changes to allow it on a wide scale 10 years ago in GB, albeit there will be more changes needed.
For anyone wondering about igm's post up there...
RoCoF protection is Rate of Change of Frequency
LoM protection is Loss of Mains.
I'm not going to pretend I didn't have to look them up!
I saw one writeup which basically said "grids grow organically over long, long timescales out of many many parts and are the sum of the lessons learned from previous failures and always trail a little bit behind the current parameters, and are full of best guesses and outdated requirements or previous not-quite-right best guesses from previous decades, this just looks like the needs have changed and the grid hasn't quite adapted correctly and hasn't had the small shocks to learn from before it had a big shock. Also every national grid is at least a little bit different and weird compared to every other grid".
I have no idea if that's truly accurate but it seems pretty convincing as an overarching explanation, I assume they're a heap of legacy and things that replaced things that replaced things that replaced things that were built on day one of the grid, a mix of forward planning and backwards drag and best guesses and previous changing needs? And that pretty much no national grid actually looks like what you'd design if you sat down and designed one instead of growing it over decades.
I don't believe it to be connected (sorry!), but I've put this here rather than start a new thread. Watch out you motor-homers
I said similar on the EV thread. I've sat through some hair on end briefings at work in the last year or so about how sophisticated 'nations with interests counter to our own' have become with their attacks (yes, already attacks) and while people dismiss as spy novel stuff, it is frighteningly real.
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/what-we-do/countering-state-threats
We happily plug phones into cars, allow the car to access our data, etc. and potentially the other way, with cars adding stuff to phones. We then plug them into our work networks, or use them to access business information like emails and documents. We're taking steps to ensure eg: Huawei are not part of of the telecoms networks, i suspect similar will eventually follow across a variety of other areas, maybe not in all cases but I can well imagine no PRC made equipment in power networks, and no connecting work phones to PRC cars for certain industries, etc.
Before I packed in work certain work areas already wouldn’t use MG cars due to security concerns about them and data harvesting.
@Northwind I said very similar things many times
For amusement, I’m not convinced there is anyone who could design an electricity grid (I’m closer to that person than many and I don’t think I could). There are lots of folk who can design bits of grids. And most senior academics who, say, advise government departments & quangos on how to reinforce grids don’t really know for to reinforce grids.
Defintely engineering as an art not a science.
make sure the pot noodle stack is properly maintained, I only found out last week that the big pot noodles have bigger noodles!!!.
What you need are the big pots of ramen noodles, they’re wonderful! Koka or Nongshim bowl noodles are what I buy from the B&M stores in town. Koka are a Singapore brand…
and Nongshim are Korean…
...We then plug them into our work networks...
USB data access was stopped for us a couple of years ago for this reason. No phones, memory sticks etc. can understand the rationale, but man it's a functional pain in the arse.
The report is out.
Quick summary here... https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/spanish-blackout-report-power-plants-meant-to-stabilize-voltage-didnt/
Any predictions whether all the right wing media will be reporting "Net zero wasn't responsible for Spanish power cuts after all".
Any predictions whether all the right wing media will be reporting "Net zero wasn't responsible for Spanish power cuts after all".
Well that report was put out by Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Deep State or someone, so I will stick to Net Zero as the cause. I’ve Done My Research.
Any predictions whether all the right wing media will be reporting "Net zero wasn't responsible for Spanish power cuts after all".
The Torygraph published a ridiculously misleading article basically claiming that it was all the fault of renewables / Net Zero / woke energy.
archive.ph/1z7le
Any predictions whether all the right wing media will be reporting "Net zero wasn't responsible for Spanish power cuts after all".
Well that report was put out by Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Deep State or someone, so I will stick to Net Zero as the cause. I’ve Done My Research.
You've captured the conspiracy theorists zeitgeist perfectly there, good work! 🤣 🤣
Any predictions whether all the right wing media will be reporting "Net zero wasn't responsible for Spanish power cuts after all".
The Torygraph published a ridiculously misleading article basically claiming that it was all the fault of renewables / Net Zero / woke energy.
archive.ph/1z7le
Yeah they seem to be blaming solar panels being switched off as they were creating too much free electricity. 🤦🏻♂️
A video came up on my Insta yesterday (no idea why) that blamed the outage on Israel.
it claimed that “Spain and Portugal both announced that they were no longer going to sell arms to Israel, and a day or two later Mossad hackers instigated the blackout. Spain and Portugal have since both reversed their decisions and will now sell selected arms to Israel”
A video came up on my Insta yesterday
Not everything you see on the internet is factual.