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jacquesmyesterday at 10:33 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

miduilyesterday at 11:31 PM

> 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