Spain and Portugal Hit With Worst European Blackout in Years

Yeah, that's exactly what they've been doing - I have a windup radio and some electric network expert was explaining it.

Power has been back up were I live since about an hour ago but before I was listening on the radio as they kept announcing places coming back up during the afternoon and evening.

It looks like a planned gradual turnup

Areas around Lisbon also coming back up, not sure how many though.

I get it, I'm just poking fun a bit.

I'm pointing to an old one because the causes are well known, there isn't any current propaganda campaign to confuse people about it, and its a wide-area unanticipated failure.

Going through that experience is what made me eventually buy a solar generator when I had the money in the right spot. I've felt really unsafe until I managed to get one figured out. Jumped on a Black Friday deal *during the pandemic and got a DJI Power 1000 and two solar panel sets for $500.

I've given it a fair shake at this point, and just with the light in my enclosed back yard, I am collecting almost 400W/h, which is more than enough to run the fridge for a few days by cycling the power so it runs for only a few hours total per day.

I really really recommend folks explore solar these days. Battery storage technology has really, really improved since the early 2000s. Solar panels aren't meaningfully any more efficient, but the real advantage these days is that panels are dirt nasty cheap if you are willing to wait on freight times. You can even buy a $30 panel rated at 6W and connect it to a USB power bank and run your vapes, Flipper Zero, etc on solar!

Daily Fail

I think that one is coming from the UK Daily Mail which is generally unreliable.

Yeah, I mean, this comment here wreaks of nonsense...

"An excess of solar generation in the grid could have contributed to the incident. Spain has reported an unprecedented number of hours with negative power prices in recent months as more solar and wind power gets injected into the grid. Still, the oversupply of power hasn’t previously caused blackouts in the country. "

I'm in northern Ontario and I was out driving around away from home in another nearby town when the 2003 North American black out happened. I found out about it because I needed gas and every gas station was down. Everyone had to gather at the one station in town with a back up generator.

When I talked to my friends about it after, one friend I know was a technician at one of the hydro power generating centers in the far north told me he had missed an opportunity to catch the cascade. He said they have people monitoring everything all the time and usually they can spot a cascade power outage coming their way of given enough time. He said the stations in the north had time and his was just in the edge of being able to react in time but he was in the toilet when it happened! .... he left his post for a few minutes like he always did and just at that moment, the cascade happened and it passed their station. I laughed at him and joked that he was probably asleep at the time.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but it's odd that you'd point to events from the 1960s when we have blackouts every summer in Texas now, lol.

During one of these events, it's really common for all kinds of misinformation and rumors to fly, and even to come from otherwise trustworthy people.

I'll note that the US had some very large-scale blackouts in the 1960s which were caused by fairly ordinary technical problems.



Yeah, I'm in Portugal and while it's true that we still had signal, all I could really use was WhatsApp. Any website I tried to use took way too long to load - just unusable.

It was too weak to use. It was connected but with no bars. It was probably well outside the city where they still had power

That Edge connection could’ve been useful if every app and website weren’t loaded with six trillion tracking scripts and 10MB’ worth of JavaScript frameworks.

That kind of facility tends to have its own backup power, often with a week or so of fuel stockpiled on-site.

Back when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was a period where the only building with power was a datacenter. The lights prompted soldiers to break in, and the system admin wound up having to pretend that they'd discovered evidence of somebody nefarious forcing the door, so they'd clear the building and leave.

Yeah, it's the same here, but what's interesting is that the rest of the infrastructure for Internet connectivity to the rest of the World beyond that is still up.

At the very least the routers and the top level network cables connecting us to the rest of Europe (Portugal is pretty peripheral) and/or the underwater cables to the US are still powered up and working.

About a month ago, almost the whole city (northern Germany) lost power for about forty minutes. My signal was down to an unusable edge connection. I really don't know what the rules are

In the US, the towers that provide mobile service are required to have a few hours worth of battery backup. The EU may require more, but I'd expect them to go down not too long after the main grid goes out.

Curiously, we still have mobile internet ;)

We're I am now (small city in Portugal) the water on the taps is already almost down to a trickle (guess the pumps use power from the grid).

Already cooked two meals worth of fast perishables (i.e. meat) from the fridge just in case the power is down longer than just today and in the expectation that the pumps for the natural gas network also run from the grid.

At the moment the portuguese defense minister won't rule out a cyber attack, and the task force created to investigate it says it seems like the problem originated outside Portugal.

We already have power in my city. I think most of Spain is already up. But some cities still down, I think Madrid is still having issues as I have not been able to contact people from there.

Cause still unknown.

Do they get hit with a lot of non-European blackouts?