Experts warn the UK faces a similar threat to its grid as reliance on wind and solar grows.

TELEGRAPH VIEW

The massive power cuts that affected Spain and Portugal are a reminder of how vulnerable modern society is to a collapse in the electricity grid for whatever reason. [emphasis, links added]

Everything stopped, from supermarket checkouts to air traffic control systems. Rail transport on the Iberian Peninsula was paralysed for hours. On the roads, traffic lights failed, causing huge jams, while in Madrid, the Metro closed its stations.

The mobile phone and internet networks collapsed, while shops shut when their electronic tills failed.

The governments in both countries were clearly caught on the hop with few official pronouncements and no obvious emergency plan.

Rumours of a cyberattack were discounted, and experts pointed to the undue reliance on solar power, which makes grids less resilient against shocks than gas and coal-fired generators.

Britain is particularly at risk both because of its switch to renewables as part of the Government’s aim to decarbonize the grid by 2030, and a heavy reliance on imported electricity.

In January, during an anti-cyclonic period of no sun or wind, a blackout was only averted because of electricity from Norway through the 450-mile interconnector.

Without it, the country might have suffered a cascading blackout similar to that in Spain and Portugal. Who is to say such help will continue?

There is resentment in Norway, a country accustomed to cheap and abundant energy, at the higher bills they face to bail out the UK, and the government in Oslo fell over green energy policies.

Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, has recently been on a crusade to debunk criticisms of his net-zero strategy. He has claimed that “fossil fuels simply cannot provide us with the security or the affordability we need.”

But seeking to eradicate them from our electricity generation within five years risks both security and affordability. Has the impact on the grid of a move mostly to renewables been properly considered?

The closure over the next three years of aging nuclear power stations, delays in building new ones, and rising demands for electricity will leave the UK facing a crunch point in about 2028.

The chances that wind, solar, and other renewables will fill the gap are fanciful.

People rely on their governments to keep the lights on, but as we saw in Spain and Portugal, the impact goes far beyond that. The backlash against politicians who let it happen will be immense.

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Top image of electric rail passengers stranded in Valencia. Sky News/YouTube screencap

Read more at The Telegraph

Via Climate Change Dispatch

Blackout

IRINA SLAV

On Monday, around noon, the Iberian Peninsula blacked out. Everyday life ground to a halt, including several hospitals, which, although they had backup generators, did not have backup water supply. As some of us know from bitter experience, once the power’s out, so’s the water because the water reaches us mostly courtesy of electrically-powered pumps. When the power goes down, the water goes down.

Trains stopped. Planes were grounded. Ice cream melted in the vats. Worst of all, people got stuck in hair salons with unfinished haircuts. One might say, if one is dramatically inclined, that Spain and Portugal got a taste of the Apocalypse in an electrified world.

What actually happened, per Reuters: “A massive blackout that hit most of the Iberian Peninsula on Monday was due to a sudden, large drop in power supply that caused the grid interconnection between Spain and France to trip, according to Spanish grid operator REE.

The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss.”

Almost 24 hours later, the cause is still unclear, at least according to official statements. On Monday, Portugal’s grid operator said it was Spain’s fault, of sorts, attributing the blackout to “a rare atmospheric phenomenon” called “induced atmospheric vibration”, which it described as, per the above-linked BBC live coverage stream as follows: “due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 KV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’.”

Now, let’s see. It’s late April in Europe. Mornings, at least here, in Bulgaria, are rather cool but by 10 am the sun has spoken and the air has warmed. How much of an extreme temperature change could occur in a such a sudden manner, in late morning, as to cause the loss of 15 GW of power generation in 5 seconds? I don’t know. Neither do the authorities, it seems, and neither do the grid operators. But we all know what’s going to happen, right? They’ll grab the “rare atmospheric phenomenon” and run with it, blaming the blackout on climate change and using it as argument to build even more solar in this sunniest part of Europe.

Speaking of, here’s what friend and fellow resistance member David Blackmon wrote yesterday: April 16, 2025: Spain Runs 100% on Renewable Power. April 28: Blackouts. And here’s what Bloomberg wrote around the same time Reuters first reported the blackout. The universe does love irony: European Power Prices Drop Far Below Zero as Solar Output Surges. The story focuses on this last weekend when electricity prices in Belgium, for instance, dropped to an amazing -266 euro per MWh. So, Europe got a lot of sun over the weekend, panels produced a lot of electricity but sadly, people did not rush to use that electricity. That’s a bummer but there appears to be an even bigger bummer. It’s called inertia.

Energy consultant Kathryn Porter was the first to mention it, at least on my timeline: “Spain has been worrying about grid stability due to low inertia particularly at lunchtime. Low inertia makes the grid less stable and it becomes harder for system operators to respond to grid faults leading to cascading blackouts. Unless this is a terrorist attack of some sort I’d say low inertia was a factor in the extent of the outage,” she wrote on X. But Kathryn Porter is no fan of wind and solar. She’s from the Dark Side. Let’s hear it from someone greener.

Javier Blas of Bloomberg had this to say about the state of his native Spain’s grid: “Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore no much inertia. Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW) Snapshot at 12.30pm local time (outage was 12.35pm)”

Then I came across this paper from 2020: Future low-inertia power systems: Requirements, issues, and solutions – A review. You would never believe what the paper says so I’ll quote straight from it.

Quote 1: “Photovoltaic (PV) arrays require power electronic dc–ac inverters to integrate with the grid and do not offer an inertial response to a grid, and wind turbines need variable frequency ac – dc – ac converters, which decouple the wind turbine inertia from the grid.”

What’s an inertial response? The ability of power generators to respond to imbalances between supply and demand for electricity in the blink of an eye if not less. Coal, gas, and nuclear can do it. Wind and solar can’t. Honestly, it’s complicated enough to get the wind and solar electricity into the grid as it is, let alone rely on them to respond to fluctuations in demand.

Quote 2: “The reduced inertia in the power system leads to an increase in the rate of change of frequency (ROCOF) and frequency deviations in a very short time, under power imbalances that substantially affect the frequency stability of the system.” I just randomly bolded a section of that sentence with no ulterior motives whatsoever.

Meredith Angwin warned about this in her masterpiece “Shorting the Grid”. She also wrote an article with the gist of it. Robert Bryce reported there’s a pretty good chance it was solar that tripped the Iberian grids. John Kemp also detailed the problems — and the importance of inertia. But I guarantee you the authorities, the grid operators, and anyone in an official capacity will blame climate change. The truth is simply way too inconvenient.

Others warned about it, too. In this piece from 2021, I related reports of one smaller-scale blackout that highlighted the problem but, of course, no one heeded the warnings. Here’s one final quote, if you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing:

“Utilities know about the problem. “It is not a question about if a blackout in some European regions will happen, it is only a question of when it will happen,” Stefan Zach, head of communication at Austrian utility EVN, told Bloomberg. “A blackout might happen even in countries with high standards in electricity grid security.””

P.S. Wind and solar also suck during grid restart after a blackout. And the restart itself seems to be such a complicated affair the fact that electrical people managed to restore most of it so (relatively) fast is a monumental accomplishment.

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This article (Blackout) was created and published by Irina Slav and is republished here under “Fair Use”

*****

Net Zero Watch warns of growing grid instability

PAUL HOMEWOOD

London: 29 April 2025
For immediate release

Net Zero Watch warns of growing grid instability

With more than 50 million EU electricity consumers suffering blackouts yesterday, campaign group Net Zero Watch has reiterated its warning that the UK power grid is also becoming increasingly unstable.

Grid analysts have suggested a high likelihood that the extent of yesterday’s blackout in Iberia was a result of the Spanish grid operating almost entirely on renewables at the time. The stability of power grids depends on so-called ‘inertia’, a resistance to rapid change that is an inherent feature of large spinning turbines, such as gas-fired power stations, but not of wind and solar farms. Too much renewables capacity on a grid can therefore mean inadequate inertia. As a result, in grids dominated by wind and solar, faults can propagate almost instantaneously across grids, leading to blackouts.

In a recent Net Zero Watch paper, entitled Blackout Risk in the GB Grid, energy system analyst Kathyn Porter pointed out that our own electricity system is also becoming increasingly unstable. Large fluctuations in grid frequency – the first sign of problems – are becoming much more common.

In the past four years, the upper operational [frequency] limit was breached around 500 times in each winter season…the number of such breaches has also been growing steadily, which is consistent with falling grid inertia…and a perception that the grid is becoming less reliable.

In addition, Ms Porter points out that the GB grid experienced a ‘near miss’ at the start of the year.

Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:

For 20 years, every aspect of the grid has been subordinated to the concerns of the eco-warriors. It’s no surprise that our electricity system is now both unaffordable and dangerously unstable. We can no longer afford to have energy policy determined by fantastists.

Notes for editors

Kathryn Porter’s paper can be downloaded from the Net Zero Watch website.

SOURCE: Not a Lot of People Know That

Featured image: Pixabay

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