Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

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.

In 2005 there was 5 GW of photovoltaic solar capacity installed worldwide, 5 GW is now what's being installed worldwide this year every

The only place significant new nuclear is being built is in China, I believe they built about 40 GW in the past decade. The US built way less than that I see why it's even less popular here, venture capital likes making money.

that depends, PV doesn't provide inertia like spinning turbines

And most of the world goes dark every night.

Making money implies efficiency. And vice versa.

Nor does it provide local power on gloomy days or at night.

In message <vuqgef$1of93$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> writes

You can wind back the Spanish Gridwatch to when it went TU and see what was happening up to the event. France and Portugal both vanish ,

No. Every possibility is being investigated, and the government has promised to say it, and claim damages if there is a culprit.

Cool. The government can collect damages from itself.

In principle they can disconnect any residential installation with a smart meter (although they are normally prohibited from doing so). And anyone with a SMETS1 "smart" meter is wide open for a bad actor to flip their power on and off deliberately to bring the UK network down.

Some university researchers had no real bother!

They can drop out entire blocks of switchgear to take a given region or zone offline (as would happen if a fault condition trips a breaker).

The big problem on a really sunny day is that an individual house roof

They drop say 100MW of load or approx 500k houses @ 200W but with 2% of them generating 4kW then they also drop off 40MW of local generation.

So the net load shedding is only 60MW which isn't enough to restore the balance and then the cycle repeats until it hits the low frequency total panic limiter. UK stopped it spreading by manual override dropping more than the algorithm wanted but leaving a big area without power.

It didn't help that by the time they did that the low frequency had put a lot of electric trains into a disabled state requiring a hard reset by a qualified service engineer visit and at random positions on the intercity train lines. The guys who could do that were in short supply.

Nope. It is private companies.

What we do here is insanely bad forest management that builds incredible fuel loads. So when a fire explodes, government conjectures an ignition source and sues some private party. Unless it was lightning; it's hard to sue God.

When unemployed people are cold and hungry in the dark, they may reconsider voting Green.

Gosh, multiple layers of bad engineering. All that stuff used to work

The Greens will have to wait in line.

Treasury Secretary Bessent said he is not currently concerned about the risk of empty store shelves, stating, "We have some great retailers. I assume they preordered."

It's some good stuff these people are smoking. US retailers learned _nothing_ from COVID, other than how to raise prices.

The Greens will have to wait in line.

Treasury Secretary Bessent said he is not currently concerned about the risk of empty store shelves, stating, "We have some great retailers. I assume they preordered."

It's some good stuff these people are smoking. US retailers learned _nothing_ from COVID, other than how to raise prices.

(total loss in the peninsula)

For those that can follow spoken Spanish, there has just been a detailed explanation on Radio Cadena Ser. Aimar Bretos interviewed Jorge Morales on Hora 25:

Direct link to mp3, starting from 31:30

and:

Or, if that fails:

Continues on

Waiting for the podcast to appear [...] got it.

Could be that the day of the $5 tee shirt and the $7 prescription glasses (shipping included) are mostly over.

China is considering selling all that cheap stuff to their own people! Fancy that. They might have to pay them enough to afford it.

It's too late, capital is already moving on to Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, Africa, El Salvadorian prison slave labor..

"The Dutch Disease" posits that having one valuable resource, like oil or something, makes the elites rich and impoverishes most citizens. China's resource is cheap labor, and exports make the elites, the CCP, rich.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Trump's tarriff war winds up benefiting the working people in China. Maybe that's his plan.

Some people have air conditioners and electric tea kettles.

I think some people have "electric fires", namely resistive space heating. Maybe horribly inefficient electric water heaters.

Most of our heat comes from natural gas, which is very reliable.

But yes, one rooftop solar powering 30 houses is not reasonable.