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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

There are multiple comments in this thread suggesting that the outage in Spain was caused by wind power.

This has also been suggested by various politicians and others in front of a microphone or a camera without any basis in fact whatsoever. There is a (by now remote) chance that indeed wind power (or renewables in general) were the primary cause but the evidence points in an entirely different direction, the lack of control authority and undampened oscillations getting out of control. In such a situation various safety protocols dictate that sections of the grid disconnect and go into island mode or switch off altogether. This to prevent damage to the grid and to all of the grid connected devices. As these outages go, I think it was handled extremely well, the main question remaining is what the root cause was and what should be done to avoid a repetition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

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France was not affected and guarded the rest of Europe because the have reliable, dispatchable power.

It’s not really surprising that an electricity grid becomes fragile if you remove large rotating masses which can act as power reserves which can react to power variations immediately.

Rotating mass is a suspect in this case, not necessarily the primary one but the lack of control authority in the presence of frequency fluctuations is the exact opposite of what you are suggesting. It means that something with a fairly large amount of source/sink capability caused a local stability issue. Almost all modern grid connected windmills are - and this may surprise you - connected to the grid using inverters because that gives them a much better chance at following the grid fluctuations than the older direct connected types did (which did have the potential to cause issues and which resulted in much higher start-up speeds than the present crop). These inverter based interconnects give response times that rotating mass based systems can only dream of, resulting in much smaller errors in phase and thus voltage tracking.

The European grid is stupendously reliable, far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans (datacenters, hospitals, telcos and some others excepted). France is doing ok but do not pretend that without France this outage would have spread further. The Iberian peninsula has one of the weaker and heavier loaded grids in Western Europe, in spite of the above, they should have probably invested more into their infrastructure but Spain has a lot of other issues it needs to deal with which cost it a fortune every year in terms of crop losses, fires and floodings. Both Spain and Portugal (and to a lesser degree Italy and Greece) are in the line of fire when it comes to climate change damage.

> far more reliable than any other power grid worldwide to the point that most houses and business do not have backup power plans

What modern power grids typically have backups for individual residences and businesses? I haven't noticed that in Europe, Japan or South America; and it's certainly not normal in the US.

In Canada and the US it is fairly common to have a genset in rural areas where the power goes out multiple times per year due to fallen trees, lightning and maintenance. And I did not write that it is the grids that have backups, it is the businesses and the residences that have backups. For instance, my rural Canadian gas station had a 6.5KW backup generator to ensure the pumps and the freezers would keep running when the power would go out.

Battery storage, solar, and wind can all operate as grid forming and provide synthetic inertia when provisioned to do so. Thermal grid services are not required for grid reliability.

Europe has languished on battery storage deployment, and as they rapidly deploy it, it will improve grid reliability.

https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-storage-significantly...

France guarding the rest of Europe, that's funny! The connection had to be dropped because it did not have the capacity to supply Spain with enough power at that moment. And the connection is so small, because the French do not want competition from cheaper Spanish power generators.

I did not mean to suggest that the outage in Spain and Portugal were caused by wind power or just renewables.

It's more related to me in terms of when you look at the economical impact of energy, what sizes are in play. Just reading 4.6B Euro is a bit vague to understand to me, at least without having that put into perspective.

Another topic that has been surfacing every now and then is Electricity theft, partially for in-door cannabis plantation in occupied apartments. Which Endesa is valued 2B Euro per year.

https://www.endesa.com/en/press/press-room/news/energy-secto...

Generally renewables do pose new challenges onto the grid, unfortunately conservatives/fascists are using that for FUD - making a technical conversation harder on that topic.

https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2025-Iber...

Even in the hypothetical scenario that renewable energy being more expensive than fossil energy (in production), the climate catastrophe and the impact of that on the economy is undeniable magnitudes bigger than any investment we could currently do to shift quicker stronger to renewable resources.

Spain will need to make some very hard choices, they have a relatively - by European standards - fragile grid and some weak interconnects. This situation has been flagged years ago but so far priorities have been to do other things first. The outage has definitely given people food for thought and I expect that when the final report is presented that it will come with some recommendations on how to prevent future recurrence. In particular the voltage / frequency regulation aspect of some of the local grids will become a focal point because these have the potential to destabilize much larger sections than just their own. The real puzzler to me is that there were multiple signals of pending grid instability and no action was taken when they easily could have, this is the bit that I'm most interested in learning about.

I look at energy companies about twice every year in some detail and I know that the typical grid operator is extremely careful and pro-active on this subject (at least, in NL and Germany, my work area, they are), the energy market has introduced some potential for abuse and for instability but so far that seems to be under control. Which makes me quite curious about what the root cause here was.

> Spain will need to make some very hard choices

Thankfully there is now more focus and financing available to elevate the network quality - right? Portugal has added 1% onto the electricity price for that purpose alone: https://www.energy-storage.news/portugal-to-invest-e400-mill...

I've followed "expert testimonials" in the Austrian news over the past years, and even there the importance of grid safety is a common theme - there seems to be some gap, even in the networks that on the surface level appear to be tolerant.

> I know that the typical grid operator is extremely careful and pro-active on this subject

That's really good to hear, unfortunately standardization is extremely slow moving and even though a potentially "safe grid" may be much more at risk during "hybrid-war times" (or other civil unrest, as seen in Berlin this year).

https://positive.security/blog/blinkencity-38c3

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