Thanks for the nudge @judith

Yes, I do have more technical information on the likely causes of the Iberian Outage,
but please appreciate that I'm already busy communicating with Councillors, my MP and NESO on the issue,
and they must take priority over this Forum!

I suggest readers here look back at the causes of the outage which affected Britain on 9th August 2019.

The Spanish grid operators were slower to act than National Grid ESO was six years ago.

In our case, ESO called on two other sources of generation which were then on standby.
Both failed, leaving grid frequency to fall to 48.8Hz...
... and ESO implemented widespread Load Shedding across England and Wales to prevent the grid frequency falling further.

Spain tried to retain the wider grid connections for too many seconds.

It was the French who intervened to isolate the rest of mainland Europe and allow just Spain and Portugal to go into blackout.

Posted by: @allyfish

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One failure should not cause a cascade effect eventually bringing an entire grid down

The cascade effect is more likely when the energy mix in an area contains too much power from sources connected to the grid using inverters.

That's principally solar-farms and BESS (Battery Energy Storage Systems).

I'll write more later on why the Iberian grid lack resilience,
and why there's not enough data here in UK to understand the risk level.

I totally support you informing councillors MPs and NESO about potential root causes and hopefully they will understand enough to know ‘something must be done’ .

When your time allows I look forward to reading why Iberian grid lacks resilience and why we lack data. I have read a couple of reports about the cascade of load shedding and why it was needed on the Aug 19 power cuts. They are interesting in their different perspectives and also what they don’t say(!)

Posted by: @judith

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I wasn’t surprised to read that the Telegraph believes that renewable energy was the problem for yesterday’s Iberian power cuts. Clearly it won’t have helped since it has no inherent inertia, (a technical term for traditional generators having large flywheels that run at nearly a constant frequency).

As usual the FT may have got closer to root cause in their report of power lines subject to overheating and carrying too much power in suddenly very warm air. That caused the frequency to change.

I look forward to finding out eventually to what was really the problem! Our colleague @transparent is usually better informed than the rest of us.

Ok... until Red Eléctrica de España offer their conclusions everyone else is just running on their imaginations. Although I concur that of course the Telegraph and all the usual anti-renewables suspects are going to mine this until the pips squeak.

The funny thing is I just gave a presentation in London that included the Spanish & Portuguese grids a few days ago... great timing! And I have live monitoring facilities for both. Neither blinked all day yesterday so I had a ring-side seat. I'll leave it at that for now.  😁

Coincidently, the other day Spain also achieved a full weekday on 100% renewables. 

There's a few points that fed into whatever was the initial cause - the original suspicion was on an 'anomalous atmospheric phenomenon' but now they are working on another technical cause which I'll keep to myself so as not to add to speculation. I dunno. 

Spain/Portugal are a combined market with minimal inter-connectors to the rest of Europe. It's technically referred to as 'Islanded'.  This serves them incredibly well and allowed them to weather the energy crisis of 2022/23 better than the rest of Europe because they were permitted by the EU to temporarily de-couple from the European market.

This was called the 'Iberian Exception'. Spain wanted to cut the French interconnectors temporarily too but the EU said no. Anyway, they are a mutual market/infrastructure setup with good hydro underpinning too.

Unlike Britain, they have been working on their grid for a long time - building it out and keeping it up to date. I had an amazing little tech lesson with one of their engineers yesterday, which considering what was happening, was extraordinary. Really patient guy. 

What I will say is they were super efficient at recovering, it's a huge country with complicated terrain and varying weather conditions. They will learn fast but this will probably twist their arms to facilitate more European interconnectors as 'French donations' helped them out yesterday. (They've been resisting for a long time but the rest of Europe wants a piece of their pie and connections to N Africa).  

Spain has superb engineers and the country pulls together extremely well. Yesterday was no exception with deliveries of refreshments direct to trains, hospitals unaffected, and so on.  

Plus the PM (Señor Guapo - Mr Handsome 😂) gave public updates throughout the day, 3 Provincias - Andalucía, Estramadura and Madrid went temporarily into emergency powers and the King rolled his sleeves up and got to work alongside everyone else. Spain is one of the most pragmatic countries I have ever encountered. The emergency powers were rescinded within hours but it is probably a hint at the geographical source of the problem. 🤫

Disclaimer: half my family is Spanish. 😂

Already, everyone I know is remarking on how much they learned about keeping cash in the house along with radios, etc., 

Outside of Spain, it always fascinates me how there's often a little undercurrent of racism whenever there's a drama - as if those southern Europeans (yes, Italy cops it too) are not 'quite up to scratch'. Oh boy.... I hate to say it but returning to the UK after years of living and working in Spain was like coming to what used to be referred to as a 'third world country'. 

@judith

"Clearly it won’t have helped since it has no inherent inertia, (a technical term for traditional generators having large flywheels that run at nearly a constant frequency)."

 

I love this! A lovely graphic way to explain, I may have to ask you for an interview one day. 🙏🏻😊

Now you know why your parish council keeps sending round flyers telling you to keep cash, tins of soup and a radio etc., 😁

I just want to add (but it's too late to edit), that apart from the very patient, personal explanations from the Spanish engineer yesterday, information was kept updated throughout the day, press calls were regular and open to questions, and everything was really transparent.

There's a real lesson to be learned by all of Europe in how this was handled - transparency and accessibility was key and they did that really well. 

It kept the public calm, they were comfortable saying 'we don't know yet' or 'we thought this but now we know we were wrong'. And it worked - a big drama was defused by a 'no drama' approach.