Re: Causes of the Gran Apagón (Spain), first oficial report

On 18/06/2025 08:39, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
 [...]

...the minister for
ecological transition, Sara Aagesen

[...]

the
"system did not have enough dynamic voltage capacity".

[...]

did not absorb all the voltage
they were supposed to when tension was high," she said,

 The usual nonsense we have come to expect from 'factual' reports.
Ignorant minister?  Ignorant reporter?  ...or both.

That is partly due to machine translation out of the Spanish.
Long and short of it was they didn't have enough dynamic inertia in the system and when it reached high noon something had to give.
Icarus syndrome - quite literally!
In addition the network failed to protect itself from the abnormal state and so went completely dark rather than dropping off the main offenders. I suspect that the French interconnect dropping out was the coup de grace but without the official timeline being published that is a guess.
A graph of power, frequency and line voltage minute by minute over the relevant few hours would be *very* interesting to examine.
It is odd that they don't explain why it failed so spectacularly quickly. The final grid collapse took 5s and then it was all over.
--
Martin Brown