Miscalculation by Spanish power grid operator REE contributed to blackout

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/spanish-blackout-rep...

> The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.

> As the voltages rose, they approached a threshold at which power plants need to disconnect from the grid to protect their equipment. But the report found that some of the plants disconnected before the threshold was reached. And with each disconnection, the voltages on the grid continued to rise, causing plants to disconnect in multiple Spanish provinces. At that point, things spun out of control, with the grid frequency dropping. That led to it falling out of sync with its connection to France, causing the shutdown. The blackout had long since passed the point of intervention.

> It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed to restore the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.

> The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.

I wonder if they’d say the same if this had happened in, say, Hungary.

Playing devil's advocate, policy can be set by inertia (i.e., no one is fired for buying IBM). So a government loyalist can have the motivation to implement a policy change that breaks away from conservative biases towards how a problem is solved. You already see how the criticism is that things weren't done as they were always done, aka "Don't touch it to not break it". The problem with this approach is that conservative approaches are not inherently safer: their primary value is to serve as scapegoat and create responsibility voids. See for example how some critics attack how nuclear was not singled out as baseline, when under this scenario nuclear would be by design the first system being pulled from the network.

Spain is being criticized for implementing a policy to shift the country's energy supply away from fossil+nuclear and towards renewables. Naturally there will be growing pains. Attacking the regulator based on shifts in policy only underline that the attacks are political, thus complaining that the top stop was handed to a politician actually justifies the move as clearly the position is responsible for managing the political side of the policy shift.

Yeah, it's changed from its seeming origins. Yes it's number go up! But being able to turn that extra juice, that NEEDS to go somewhere back into 'cash' is certainly on my list of positives.

Obviously, it's lower than batteries and lower or on par with storing as sand/thermal (I guess location and season dependant on this one).

One other perk, now that I rant about thermal, is being able to absorb this extra energy, do some calculations and then provide (location/season) heat. Seems like the calculation aspect is the 3 birds one stone, to me.