By: Vader's Lovechild

Vader's Lovechild
Tue, 29 Apr 2025 15:23:56 +0000

Fraser, your diagnosis is almost certainly wrong. The national power outage (or NPO as we would call it in the UK) occurred just before noon in one of the sunniest parts of Europe. A shortage of solar power is not going to be the problem, unless God turned the sun off over the Iberian peninsular. Almost certainly there was a grid failure, which then caused – for safety reasons – the rest of the grid to shut down. Once the grid shuts down the power stations, whether fossil or not, also shut down so they don’t damage themselves generating GW of power they can’t transmit.
Once the grid is down a ‘dark start’ is required which requires very large amounts of external power from standby generators to start up power stations and operate the massive switchgear that controls the HV grid. A dark start takes time and requires careful coordination, so that you don’t further damage the grid or your power stations. Current UK planning assumes that a full NPO here would take at least 72 hours to fully recover from.

What will be interesting to know, and it probably won’t be freely available, is the number of deaths this event caused. People will have died on the roads through loss of streetlights, traffic lights and warning signs. People will have died because they had a medical emergency that couldn’t be quickly responded to, and people needing life sustaining medical devices at home will have died. Sadly, I won’t be surprised if the death toll is over 1,000.

There is a lot to be critical of with net zero, but grid failure has lots of other reasons. As the Spanish have found out, the near total collapse of mobile telephony and the internet which comes with power loss is very nasty, and is a problem that didn’t exist 20 years ago. This is a lifestyle problem, not a net zero problem.