Comment by miduil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by miduil | Hacker News Reader

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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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