Massive blackout hits Spain and Portugal

Fuck it. I am not traveling outside the US this year. Too much havoc.

[quote]urged people not to speculate as to the cause of the outage

I'm sure EVERYONE immediately ceased speculating as to the cause of the outage.

All those back rooms in the gay bars (and I hear EVERY gay bar in Spain has one) will be at capacity for the time being.

[quote] The operator, Red Electrica, said it would likely take six to 10 hours to restore power in the country and urged people not to speculate as to the cause of the outage.

That statement alone, makes the whole situation seem 100 times more suspicious.

How scary

How does the power go out across an entire country?

I mean, Puerto Rico I can understand.

But Spain? Portugal? They're in Europe.

WTF?

Those poor people! Stuck in elevators, in operating rooms! The sick people and babies in ICUs. Fuck!

That is terrifying and dangerous. At least with a storm, you expect to lose power. This is just horrible for them.

At least it's still cool, and not in the middle of Summer.

Madrid usually reaches 100 in the Summer.

If the power went out in the middle of a heat wave, that would be much, much worse.

"According to Portugal’s electricity grid operator REN, the incident was triggered by “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines, caused by extreme temperature variations in Spain. This rare event, known as an “induced atmospheric variation,” led to synchronisation failures across the interconnected European electricity network, causing successive disturbances and widespread outages.

However, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stated on Monday that there was still no definitive information regarding the cause of the widespread power blackout."

R9 - that's a lot of words from REN that mean nothing to anyone else but them.

R7 spells out the real world impact of something like this. People may have died. (Although most hospitals have generators and fail-over systems).

r7 hospitals have generators and apparently they have up to 10 days worth of energy. I do feel bad for those in elevators and such.

It's been a terrible day for Spain and Portugal. I hope everything is back up and running by tomorrow morning.

Spain is a vey big country. Weird for an entire country to be down.

I know Spain isn't as big as the USA, but is it normal for an entire country to be on the same grid?

It’s Putin!

If this was the US you would have Europeans bleating and sneering.

R1 Good thinking! The USA is the safest place to be, led by our stable genius Great Leader. And guns. Hundreds of millions of guns. If there's one place to live and feel safe, in world gone to hell in a hand basket, it's God's Blessed America.

... testing...

related?

R19 - that's very interesting.

Did the grid overproduce? (e.g. Solar?) Meaning it saw 100% capacity so it shut down somehow?

I know that many US electric companies have to run the extra solar electricity they can't use into the ground or give it away free to other states.

99% of the power in Spain has been restored.

I am in the south and the outage lasted 5 hours, a little longer for parts of Madrid. The streets were full from 12.30 with people chattering about the outage, initially conferring with neighbors about the scope of the problem then speculating on the cause and the wait for the resumption of power.

Mobile data lasted erratically for a half hour or so, but with no connection to Spanish sites and news sources initially then nothing. I confirmed the national scope (plus Portugal) from BBC website headlines.

During the outage some bars were open, a few restaurants powered by gas, and not much else. Presumably the unavailability of electronic payment systems was a big factor in what businesses could eek by without electricity during daylight hours. Schools stayed open, from what I saw and read, the teachers going off plan and the parents coming around to collect the kids as usual at the usual hour.

A video of the resumption of power in Madrid which took place later than in my city and over the course of a few hours.

'Rare atmospheric phenomenon' behind huge outages in Portugal and Spain

Well that’s a lot of bullshit at R9.

R16 that is because you live in a shithole dictatorship where school shootings became the norm.

It's a warning to the rest of the world, "See what we can do!".

(I really believe this). I believe an oligarch or dictator could be partially or wholly responsible. Most likely Putin, but not definitively.

That's an interesting take, R25.

You could be right.

But I don't think they could do this to the U.S., because we're not all on the same electrical grid.

R26

True, but hitting a couple of large grids would still be enough to cause havoc and “terror”.

[quote]hitting a couple of large grids would still be enough to cause havoc and “terror”

We have sufficient.

R22 what the hell does that even mean?

[quote] Eduardo Prieto, head of operation services, has said that there were two “disconnection events”, barely a second apart, just before the blackout on Monday.

[quote] He said the incidents took place in the south-west of Spain, where there is substantial solar generation.

In Datalounge terms. The Iberian electrical grid couldn't handle getting DPd.

Solar power plants in Andalucia.

You may have seen them as film locations.

More than 50% of Spain's energy is from renewable sources (solar, wind, and, to lesser extent, hydro and bio-energy.)

It's just a power outage, why has this captured DL's imagination so? The big one are rarer, sure, but they happen. They get fixed and life goes on.

Sometimes I get the feeling people are secretly almost hoping for a zombie apocalypse or something similar. To save them from themselves, I don't know.

Damn squirrels!

R32 - because it was an entire nation, not localized like most people experience after a storm or other. When an entire nation goes dark - that's a huge failure and should be cause for alarm because there is no room for defense against any situation.

No communication, no lights, no intelligence, no security - some really awful stuff could have happened if there were bad agents involved.

And as of yet - no real explanations or plans for preventing it in the future.

R1 that's hilarious.

Why couldn't it have been the limeys in the UK? Please please please

I enjoyed this.

R36 - many of them were in Benidorm but hangover-slept their way through the whole outage.