Late April. Summer in the trade winds. The planes have been grounded. Air traffic control is silent.
The trains are stranded at stations. Others are yet to leave the depot at all.
The year 2025. The country is Spain. It has been plunged into total blackout.
“Anomalous oscillations” on long-distance high-voltage lines were identified as the cause.
These synchronisation failures tripped a series of sustained power disruptions, across the European system.
Portugal and France, whose citizens were not remotely connected to the governance in effect, were directly impacted.
The shared grid giveth and also taketh away. A collapse of fifteen gigawatts of power in the system to be more specific.
When synchronous systems fail they do so comprehensively. Let us backtrack.
Throughout spring, Spain’s midday solar generation had several times exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.
On 28 April an abnormality in the power flow of the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, regarded as the most sensitive point of the Spanish network left the Iberian Peninsula in near total isolation.
Australian working class families sympathise. By 12.30pm solar photovoltaics had dropped sharply. They went from generating 18,000MW to 8,000MW. In mere seconds. Siesta time!
At a conference six days earlier at the European Parliament on the future of nuclear energy attended by experts from all over Europe, one keynote speaker warned that under the current energy policies, blackouts would become the norm, not a coincidence.
Steady inertia is needed to maintain proper frequency. Haphazard integration of a host of renewable systems leads to insufficient assistance and unstable physical reserves amounting to a network that can no longer sustain its own demand.
Spain had a dearth of sources at its disposal that could be activated to meet the demand as needed. Nuclear, co-generation, and natural gas, all considered ‘dispatchable resources’ accounted for less than 20 per cent of its power mix.
Adding insult to injury, three of five hydroelectric jumps that should have been designated as bootable plants, were out of service at the time.
Power was eventually pulled from Morocco and France to restore the network.
France was able to act swiftly primarily because it has the largest nuclear fleet in Europe.
The blackout lasted for 11 hours, making it the longest power outage in the history of Spain. Digital pay systems were paralysed. Supply chains neutralised. Thousands of people were stuck. Some on inactive elevators.
For the moment speculation is still rife as to exactly how it all went wrong. But the when, the who, the what and the why are not so tricky to surmise when policies that penalise base energy, the critical infrastructure to providing stability to the system, lay waste to the energy sector.
But rather than being an absolute presupposition, western governments view hard facts as limits to perception.
By 9pm the stars were ablaze in the night sky over Iberia. The zodiac, now undiminished by the earthly glow of artificial light, was out in full force. The dilemma now was to tell apart the celestial objects that were real from the many new synthetic satellites.
