Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 9/05/2025 4:20 pm, Tom Del Rosso wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:

Spain suffered a very spectacular near total loss of its national grid
yesterday taking parts of France and all of Portugal down with it.
This is an unprecedented failure of a supergrid system by cascade
failure.
It seems likely they had got the effect of widespread solar PV has on
load shedding wrong (much like happened in the UK) and so it failed
completely. Two events a second apart delivered the coup de grace.

 It looks like they spent a lot more effort simulating climate than they
did simulating the grid system.

Simulating the climate is science, and nobody spends a lot on that. Simulating the grid system is business, if it is done right, but there are lot of different mechanisms active in regulating the grid, and most of them are commercial in confidence, so only the businesses that make the mechanisms know enough to be able simulate them, and it takes a regulatory agency to force all the businesses involved to get together to work out how their various mechanisms will interact.
Regulatory capture means that the agency is unlikely to force the businesses to do it.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney