Good morning tooters. Bit of a different morning today, I have no power! No one in my area has power & hasn’t since just after 1am, what fun. Stayed in bed until 7.30am keeping warm & waiting for full light & deciding what to do. It’s around 4c now, so pretty chilly, but only my feet are cold & it will be a lovely day by the time it gets to the max of 23c this afternoon. According to ausnet the power could be out all day. I must admit it has thrown me a bit, it’s been a long time since any real outage here but I can work around it for now. I removed my little portable induction cooking plates & the cover I have over the gas cooktop. Found some matches as the little gun thingy (tech term) has died. I now have a cup of tea & have boiled a couple of eggs. I’ve got the mocha pot out that I use when house sitting & can make coffee. So I’m good for food & cooking - yay! My daughter & the grandkids were going to be coming round later, miss 7 wants to give me something from the schools Mothers Day stall. I’m not sure if I’ll end up down there instead, just waiting for her to get back to me. I would like to be able to fully charge my devices, so may well go down there. I think I might drop into the supermarket too & get another gas lighter gun thing & matches - can you still buy matches 
. I have candles if necessary for tonight.
Have a great #Sunday everyone. Stay warm & have a lovely day.
#Weather #PowerOutage #MothersDay #Autumn
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#poweroutage
Last week's #PowerOutage in Spain was a wake-up call for many people. I personally found out at 12:35 that my printer wasn't responding, and seeing that our house was without electricity, I went out on the street, like several neighbours. Through them, I got fragments of news, some had still mobile data connection, while most had no network coverage whatsoever.
1/X
Power outage in Spain and Portugal still a mystery, but leaders vow to solve it and prevent a recurrence https://www.byteseu.com/967889/ #electricity #EuropeanUnion #Portugal #PowerGrid #PowerOutage #PowerOutages #Russia #Spain
The headline here said:
"Spain, Portugal turn power back on, seek answers after one of Europe's worst outages"
(CBC news, "world" section)
They had a sub-7 hour outage.
I guess their electric grid is a lot better than the North American ones, that occasionally suffer multi-day outages.
Eg, ice storms, electromagnetic storms, excessive demand events (those last in Texas).
So kudos to Spain for quick recovery.
#PowerOutage
So, how did we, as a family, cope with the #blackout in Granada?
We bought fresh tomatoes and bread with some spare cash, and fished some canned tuna out from the back of the cupboard.
We played board games, and, with the little one, made an old cathode-ray TV out of a cardboard Bauli colomba box, so we could hear some (unicorn!) news. Then we went to bed and read in the dying light until our eyes flickered shut.
#PowerOutage
But a couple decades ago, I lived outside the city limits on a rural power cooperative with above ground infrastructure and we encountered multiple hour outages every few years. Being also on well water and having a disabled child, our contingencies were: 5 gallon filled water container and a small generator (for some lights, gas furnace fan and ignition and refrigerator).
With our climate crisis and possible deathly heat waves, air conditioning contingency may prove critical. 2/2
#PowerOutage
Reading about the Spain/Portugal widespread and lengthy power outage got me thinking again about contingencies. I live in a city with a large medical center and multiple tech industries, and robust electric power infrastructure. I cannot recall a power outage lasting more than a few minutes in multiple decades. So our contingencies are just battery backups for computer, Wi-Fi, and TV so a 5 minute outage does not even disrupt anything we're doing. 1/x
This very interesting article basically says it was likely to be either human error or a system fault that caused the Iberian apagón or grid shutdown.
Not an excess of wind or solar, not a cyber attack, not a weather abnormality.
However, because of the uneven and rapid expansion of solar and wind, the system relies on quick corrections to rebalance frequency & voltage. Seems likely there was a system fault to do with the rebalancing mechanism.
The Spain/Portugal power outage is fascinating to me, as an energy storage professional.
Lots of theories flying around about the cause. Atmosphere, cyberattack, renewables.
Power grids keep balance via their AC frequency. In the US, it's 60Hz. If the frequency is a little above 60, then there is a surplus of generation. If the frequency is below 60, there is a surplus of demand. Generators and loads respond to this - it's called frequency response.
Last year in Virginia, in data center alley, there was a frequency disturbance that caused a large number of data centers to drop off the grid onto backup power, leaving a huge surplus of generation. It almost collapsed PJM. (I'm actually working on a project to mitigate this using very large batteries).
Spain lost 15GW of generation in seconds. My speculation is frequency went out of spec, for whatever reason, which caused a ton of solar and wind generators to island themselves, and the situation amplified itself. #theory #spain #poweroutage
“Sometimes the weather has no sense of narrative convenience.”
Terry Pratchett; The Truth
#Discworld #PowerOutage #SpainPortugal #WeatherFightsBack #ZeroDayVibes
If there's anything we could learn from yesterday's #SpainBlackout is that running software on the cloud that could run locally... is a terrible idea.
#LocalFirst software should be prioritised by companies and public administrations.
I don't think Spanish people will learn the lesson this time (I'm Spanish, so I know what I'm talking about from first hand experience).
I foresee some small groups will react, and start spreading the word, but it will take many other disasters like this one for people to finally understand.
After 14 hours without electricity in most of Spain, we are now back online in #Granada. Lots of panic here in the city. Some decided to make the most of it and party, some decided to prepare for the worst and look after their closest. Some worried about work and deadlines. Some played cards and admired the stars. Among other things, I helped an elderly neighbour break back into her apartment with an old London Transport Oyster card.
Lots of questions remain ...
Ganz geil aber, dass so ein dramatisches Ereignis wie der Zusammenbruch des gesamten Stromnetzes stattfindet und es sich innerhalb von 24 Stunden praktisch erholt.
Und dass es im ganzen Land keine größeren Zwischenfälle gibt, dass die Reaktion ruhig und die Menschen umsichtig sind. 
It's well known that all national power grids are on the brink of collapse. This is the way the grid systems have always worked. Any outage will need to be isolated as soon as possible to avoid a cascade failure of the whole grid (or grids, since many national grids are highly interconnected).
The recent #poweroutage is a great reminder that #preparedness is not a joke. You should have provisions and enough stockpile to manage at least 72 hours, preferably a week in a pinch.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-commission-urges-stockpiling-emergency-supplies-2025-03-26/
Now that Spain is on the #PowerOutage news, I wrote a small #rstats package to retrieve some data from REE: https://ropenspain.github.io/resios/
I hope (data) newspapers like @civio will make good use of it. I get daily estimation of prices with it, so it should work for indicators 545 and 544. Let me know if there is something that doesn't work.
Massive power outage brings most of Spain and Portugal to a standstill http://newsfeed.facilit8.network/TKQw7w #PowerOutage #Spain #Portugal #IberianPeninsula #Blackout
"A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal's national electric company REN said.
Reports on a rare atmospheric phenomenon which have also been circulating have been denied by REN to private channel SIC.
Meanwhile, the Spanish National Intelligence Centre has not ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, while the Portuguese government has also suggested the same.
However, "no evidence has yet been identified that points to a cyberattack" to justify the blackout, Portugal's National Cybersecurity Centre (CNCS) said in a statement on Monday.
"Such a widespread grid failure is extremely unusual and could be caused by a number of things: there could be a physical fault in the grid which brings down power, a coordinated cyber attack could be behind it, or a dramatic imbalance between demand and supply has tipped the grid system over the edge," Taco Engelaar, managing director at energy infrastructure experts Neara told Euronews."
"A fire in the south-west of France, on the Alaric mountain, which damaged a high-voltage power line between Perpignan and eastern Narbonne, has also been identified as a possible cause, Portugal's national electric company REN said.
Reports on a rare atmospheric phenomenon which have also been circulating have been denied by REN to private channel SIC.
Meanwhile, the Spanish National Intelligence Centre has not ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack, while the Portuguese government has also suggested the same.
However, "no evidence has yet been identified that points to a cyberattack" to justify the blackout, Portugal's National Cybersecurity Centre (CNCS) said in a statement on Monday.
"Such a widespread grid failure is extremely unusual and could be caused by a number of things: there could be a physical fault in the grid which brings down power, a coordinated cyber attack could be behind it, or a dramatic imbalance between demand and supply has tipped the grid system over the edge," Taco Engelaar, managing director at energy infrastructure experts Neara told Euronews."