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Business Standard
29-04-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Here's why restarting a power grid after massive collapse is so hard
It's unclear what caused the initial disruption or why it cascaded so dramatically into a widespread failure. But, notably, Spain has been one of the leaders in rolling out wind and solar generation Bloomberg It's a worst case scenario that grid operators plan for but hope never to encounter. After one of the worst blackouts in Europe in more than a decade, electricity grid operators in Spain and Portugal are trying to get networks back up and running from the ground up. The initial estimate from grid operator Red Electrica was that restoring all power supply in Spain may take between six and 10 hours. By Monday evening, that was looking optimistic — at 9pm Madrid time, there was 17.3 gigawatts of demand on the grid, about two thirds the amount seen just before the blackout happened, according to grid data. It's not clear what caused the initial disruption, or why it cascaded so dramatically into a widespread failure. But it's notable that Spain has been one of the leaders in rolling out wind and solar generation, at a time when governments and grid operators across Europe are grappling with questions about resilience as renewable power takes an ever-larger share of the region's energy mix. When there has been a failure on the entire grid, a complex process called a 'black start' is needed to restore the network gradually. Smaller, often diesel, generators are used to start bigger ones, in a process that creates 'islands' of power which connect together on the main transmission network to gradually restore the grid. European rules require grids regularly test their black-start capability, so operators should have a clear plan to follow. But the process is painstaking and complicated. 'These islands of power then need to be all synchronized together,' Simon Gallagher, managing director at UK Network Services, said in a post on LinkedIn. 'Not simple and again, takes time and has to be very controlled.' Essential services like hospitals will have their own on-site back up generation, usually diesel engines and stores of fuel. Other commercial entities like data centers also pay to have emergency back up generators and batteries to secure supply. Frequency Factor So far, the only information about what caused the crisis was a comment from grid operator Red Electrica that the blackout was a result of 'oscillation,' which suggests a disruption in the grid's frequency or voltage — both crucial factors for maintaining stability. The frequency, which normally stays pretty steady around 50 hertz, is the heartbeat of the grid. Frequency monitoring specialist Gridradar said it identified a rapid movement in frequency just after noon in Spain — right before the blackout hit. Such oscillations can cause chain reactions that ultimately lead to a blackout. It's not known what caused the initial disturbance. But it's possible it was exacerbated by the large share of energy being generated by renewable sources at the time. To maintain the right frequency and maintain stability, the grid needs kinetic energy, which is created by the spinning turbines of thermal plants. This kinetic energy can't be supplied by wind turbines or solar panels so Spain and Portugal need coal, gas or hydro plants connected. Loose Ties Another point of vulnerability for Spain is that it lacks interconnections, meaning it doesn't have many of the huge power cables that connect to neighboring countries. These lines that allow imports and exports are seen within Europe as a way to add energy security. For Spain, it means that if it has too much power for example on a sunny day, it has only a few routes out of the network. If it doesn't have enough supply, there aren't many options for neighbors to step in and help. Past Blackouts Grid collapses are extremely rare and operators will typically do whatever they can to avoid them, including implementing rolling power cuts to protect the system. The last time there was a blackout on this scale in Europe was in 2006 when there was an outage affecting 15 million homes in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Since then, renewable energy has been built out at a rapid scale across the region, creating more challenges for grid operators to balance huge swings in supply when it's sunny or windy. Frequency was a major contributor of blackouts in Texas during an extreme winter storm in February 2021. Freezing weather and ice forced gas plants to trip offline en masse, causing frequency to plunge and other power plants to trip offline, resulting in cascading failures.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
The scramble to uncover what caused Europe's biggest power outage
What exactly caused the massive power cuts that swept Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France? That is the question on the lips of every energy expert in Europe – and theories abound. Spanish authorities suggested they were investigating the possibility of a cyber attack on grid infrastructure, while some officials in Portugal initially said it was caused by a freak weather phenomenon before backtracking. Both say the exact cause is still unknown. At the same time, others have warned that Spain's growing reliance on renewable energy, particularly solar power, may also have contributed to the crisis. With details still thin on the ground, much of this remains speculation, with authorities still scrambling to figure out what went wrong. But one thing is for certain: The outage on Monday was of nightmare proportions for grid operators. It was so severe that it took out the national networks of Spain and Portugal, knocking out power for tens of millions of households, and will require a complicated procedure which could take days to put right. 'They need to get the grid up and running again urgently, because major grid outages are really dangerous things,' says Michael Liebreich, an energy consultant. The outages knocked out traffic lights, electric-powered trains and mobile phone networks, with hospitals and other emergency services forced to switch over to emergency generators. Such outages are extremely rare in developed countries and are difficult to recover from, due to the need for supply and demand on electricity networks to be finely balanced. In Spain and Portugal's case, grid operators will now have to carefully restore power across the country in a choreographed fashion. Simon Gallagher, managing director of the energy consultancy UK Networks Services, says teams will likely split the national grids into sections and start up power stations locally before 'stitching' the network back together in stages. 'It will probably take up to a week or more,' he says. 'It's catastrophically bad and I think people will start to realise that over the next few days.' That is the priority for now. But experts say the nature of the power outage is concerning for a number of reasons, with no clear information yet provided about the cause. 'This is mature technology, modern power grids are designed to cope with this kind of thing and temperature fluctuations so there is a big question over what's happened here, and it all seems very strange,' adds Gallagher. Just hours into the outage, Portuguese energy company REN (Rede Eletrica Nacional), the local equivalent of the National Grid, initially claimed the blackouts had been caused by 'extreme temperature variations' in Spain. It later clarified the statement, with Joao Conceicao, REN board member, saying late Monday that one possible cause was 'very large oscillation in the electrical voltages, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system'. But experts believe if the original weather theory holds, it suggests that sudden changes in temperature caused unusual wind activity which may have interfered with high voltage transmission lines – perhaps by blowing them into each other - and caused an electrical fault. Others said that in high temperature or high humidity conditions, power cables can interact with electric charges in the atmosphere, causing them to vibrate. Prof Chenghong Gu, an electrical engineering expert at the University of Bath, said: 'This vibration can cause fatigue of conductors … and in very extreme cases, failures of conductors.' Yet such a fault should be a relatively simple problem to deal with for experienced grid operators. The mystery is why this one led to cascading failures that spread so catastrophically across Spain and Portugal's entire electricity system. One possible answer is Spain's growing reliance on solar and wind farms for power. Electricity systems rely on so-called 'inertia', which is a by-product of power stations that have spinning parts – such as those running on gas, coal or hydropower. Inertia is caused by the natural velocity of the spinning parts, and is a core component of any electrical system. These plants have turbines that can speed up or slow down to help adjust the power frequency, which must be kept within certain limits at all times for the lights to stay on. Inertia also helps to protect the system from faults that cause sudden drops in frequency, as it gives grid operators more time to take actions that will stabilise the system. But solar panels and wind turbines do not generate inertia because they do not have the same spinning parts. And before Monday's power cuts, they were generating almost 80pc of Spain's power, according to transparency data. There was also less gas-fired power on the system as demand at lunchtime tends to be low, meaning that any sudden drop in frequency – such as one caused by a transmission line fault – would have been harder to deal with than usual. Kathryn Porter, an independent energy analyst, explains: 'If you have a grid fault, it can cause a frequency imbalance and in a low-inertia environment the frequency can change much faster. 'If you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly enough.' Duncan Burt, a former British grid operator who is now strategy chief at Reactive Technologies, agrees. 'If you have a very high solar day, like Monday, then your grid is less stable, unless you've taken actions to mitigate that,' he says. However, he believes low inertia alone was not enough to cause the serious outages seen in Spain and Portugal and that weather conditions on Monday do not appear at first glance to have been particularly unusual. 'In Iberia, it is known they are headed towards a low-inertia situation. But it is quite early to see anything this severe,' he adds. 'There is definitely something deeper going on.' Tom Smout, an analyst of electricity grids and markets at LCP Delta, contrasted France's resilience to such events with Spain's relative vulnerability. 'France is resilient to these problems because it has a lot of nuclear power plus hydroelectricity which have stable and predictable outputs,' he says. 'Spain has lots of renewable energy and not much storage, so it has a lot of issues with generation levels rising and falling with the weather. 'In European terms Spain and Portugal is also a relatively small and isolated part of the European grid and that makes it more vulnerable to these events.' Ironically, it also comes just days after the International Energy Agency warned that grid stability was a major issue countries needed to be alive to as they moved towards increasingly electrified energy systems. Yet what exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one. 'We're deep in engineering country here,' warns Liebrech. 'It is just really hard to know until they have properly investigated. 'Could it be a cyber attack? Sure. It could also just be that a very weird thing happened that has never happened before.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
28-04-2025
- Climate
- Telegraph
The scramble to uncover what caused Europe's biggest power outage
What exactly caused the massive power cuts that swept Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France? That is the question on the lips of every energy expert in Europe – and theories abound. Spanish authorities suggested they were investigating the possibility of a cyber attack on grid infrastructure, while some officials in Portugal initially said it was caused by a freak weather phenomenon before backtracking. Both say the exact cause is still unknown. At the same time, others have warned that Spain's growing reliance on renewable energy, particularly solar power, may also have contributed to the crisis. With details still thin on the ground, much of this remains speculation, with authorities still scrambling to figure out what went wrong. But one thing is for certain: The outage on Monday was of nightmare proportions for grid operators. It was so severe that it took out the national networks of Spain and Portugal, knocking out power for tens of millions of households, and will require a complicated procedure which could take days to put right. 'They need to get the grid up and running again urgently, because major grid outages are really dangerous things,' says Michael Liebreich, an energy consultant. The outages knocked out traffic lights, electric-powered trains and mobile phone networks, with hospitals and other emergency services forced to switch over to emergency generators. Such outages are extremely rare in developed countries and are difficult to recover from, due to the need for supply and demand on electricity networks to be finely balanced. In Spain and Portugal's case, grid operators will now have to carefully restore power across the country in a choreographed fashion. Simon Gallagher, managing director of the energy consultancy UK Networks Services, says teams will likely split the national grids into sections and start up power stations locally before 'stitching' the network back together in stages. 'It will probably take up to a week or more,' he says. 'It's catastrophically bad and I think people will start to realise that over the next few days.' That is the priority for now. But experts say the nature of the power outage is concerning for a number of reasons, with no clear information yet provided about the cause. 'This is mature technology, modern power grids are designed to cope with this kind of thing and temperature fluctuations so there is a big question over what's happened here, and it all seems very strange,' adds Gallagher. Just hours into the outage, Portuguese energy company REN (Rede Eletrica Nacional), the local equivalent of the National Grid, initially claimed the blackouts had been caused by 'extreme temperature variations' in Spain. It later clarified the statement, with Joao Conceicao, REN board member, saying late Monday that one possible cause was 'very large oscillation in the electrical voltages, first in the Spanish system, which then spread to the Portuguese system'. But experts believe if the original weather theory holds, it suggests that sudden changes in temperature caused unusual wind activity which may have interfered with high voltage transmission lines – perhaps by blowing them into each other - and caused an electrical fault. Others said that in high temperature or high humidity conditions, power cables can interact with electric charges in the atmosphere, causing them to vibrate. Prof Chenghong Gu, an electrical engineering expert at the University of Bath, said: 'This vibration can cause fatigue of conductors … and in very extreme cases, failures of conductors.' Yet such a fault should be a relatively simple problem to deal with for experienced grid operators. The mystery is why this one led to cascading failures that spread so catastrophically across Spain and Portugal's entire electricity system. One possible answer is Spain's growing reliance on solar and wind farms for power. Electricity systems rely on so-called 'inertia', which is a by-product of power stations that have spinning parts – such as those running on gas, coal or hydropower. Inertia is caused by the natural velocity of the spinning parts, and is a core component of any electrical system. These plants have turbines that can speed up or slow down to help adjust the power frequency, which must be kept within certain limits at all times for the lights to stay on. Inertia also helps to protect the system from faults that cause sudden drops in frequency, as it gives grid operators more time to take actions that will stabilise the system. But solar panels and wind turbines do not generate inertia because they do not have the same spinning parts. And before Monday's power cuts, they were generating almost 80pc of Spain's power, according to transparency data. There was also less gas-fired power on the system as demand at lunchtime tends to be low, meaning that any sudden drop in frequency – such as one caused by a transmission line fault – would have been harder to deal with than usual. Kathryn Porter, an independent energy analyst, explains: 'If you have a grid fault, it can cause a frequency imbalance and in a low-inertia environment the frequency can change much faster. 'If you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly enough.' Duncan Burt, a former British grid operator who is now strategy chief at Reactive Technologies, agrees. 'If you have a very high solar day, like Monday, then your grid is less stable, unless you've taken actions to mitigate that,' he says. However, he believes low inertia alone was not enough to cause the serious outages seen in Spain and Portugal and that weather conditions on Monday do not appear at first glance to have been particularly unusual. 'In Iberia, it is known they are headed towards a low-inertia situation. But it is quite early to see anything this severe,' he adds. 'There is definitely something deeper going on.' Tom Smout, an analyst of electricity grids and markets at LCP Delta, contrasted France's resilience to such events with Spain's relative vulnerability. 'France is resilient to these problems because it has a lot of nuclear power plus hydroelectricity which have stable and predictable outputs,' he says. 'Spain has lots of renewable energy and not much storage, so it has a lot of issues with generation levels rising and falling with the weather. 'In European terms Spain and Portugal is also a relatively small and isolated part of the European grid and that makes it more vulnerable to these events.' Ironically, it also comes just days after the International Energy Agency warned that grid stability was a major issue countries needed to be alive to as they moved towards increasingly electrified energy systems. Yet what exactly happened remains unclear for now. And the real answer is likely to involve several factors, not just one. 'We're deep in engineering country here,' warns Liebrech. 'It is just really hard to know until they have properly investigated. 'Could it be a cyber attack? Sure. It could also just be that a very weird thing happened that has never happened before.'
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
A Fire Plunged Heathrow Into Darkness. A Nearby Data Center Kept Humming. Why?
A gleaming new data center sits less than half a mile from the electric substation where a fire plunged Heathrow Airport into darkness last week. The data center's own power was also cut that day. But no one who relied on it would have noticed, thanks to a bank of batteries and backup generators designed to kick in instantly. Meanwhile it took officials at Europe's busiest airport close to 18 hours to bring its terminals and runways back into operation, causing global travel delays and underscoring the vulnerability of Britain's infrastructure. It is a striking contrast that energy experts say can be explained largely by one word: Money. 'The data center industry is relatively young. They are more attuned to the cost of a catastrophic failure,' said Simon Gallagher, the managing director at UK Networks Services, which advises clients on the resilience of their electricity networks. He said most of the world's airports — including Heathrow — have not been willing to make the big investments necessary to build total backup systems. Even at an airport the size of Heathrow, which officials have described as equivalent in power use to a small city, it is possible to create backup systems robust enough to maintain normal operations during a catastrophic power failure, Mr. Gallagher and other engineering experts said. But it could cost as much as $100 million and would likely take years to put in place. So far, most airports have chosen not to make the investment. 'It comes down to a cost-benefit analysis,' Mr. Gallagher said. 'At the minute, there seems to be an assumption that it would cost too much.' The Airport Heathrow officials were quick to point out after Friday's incident that the airport has backup power in place for its most critical systems: runway lights and the tower's traffic control safety systems. If a plane had needed to land that day, it could have done so safely. But the airport had no way to power the rest of the sprawling and complicated facility: the vast terminals, filled with shops and restaurants, moving walkways and escalators. Cut from the grid, there was no power to move bags to the claim area, or for ticket counters or bathrooms. First opened at the end of World War II, Heathrow has been expanded and updated over the decades. The result has been a patchwork of older and newer electrical cables and systems carrying an ever-increasing demand for power. 'The grid is old,' said Najmedin Meshkati, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California. 'For aviation, for the grid and for other safety critical systems, the older that they get the more important maintenance becomes.' What Heathrow does not have are backup generators that could supply the 40 megawatts of power required at peak times to maintain normal operations. Instead, on Friday, engineers at the airport had to manually reconfigure switches at another substation to temporarily reroute available power to Heathrow. That took hours, and because the airport's systems had been sitting without power, it took even more time to boot them back up, followed by rounds of testing. The Substation The airport's primary power source is the Hyde North substation about a mile away, owned and operated by National Grid Electricity Distribution, the private power company responsible for the area. Two of the substation's transformers were taken offline by the fire. The cause is still under investigation, but the police said Tuesday they had found 'no evidence' of suspicious activity. John Pettigrew, the chief executive of National Grid, told The Financial Times that there was 'no lack of capacity' in the area after the fire. Energy experts said that is correct: The places where there is an actual lack of power tend to be developing countries and war zones. The challenge, though, was making use of the area's ample power once Heathrow's connection to Hyde North was severed. Thomas Woldbye, the chief executive of the airport, told the BBC that he was proud of the employees who worked through Friday to switch their systems to use power from two nearby substations. But he said that Heathrow would now assess whether to install 'a different level of resilience if we cannot trust that the grid around us is working the way it should.' Heathrow did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The Data Center The airport's leaders might want to examine their corporate neighbor just to the north. The Union Park data facility, run by Ark Data Centres, is a six minute walk from the Hyde North substation. Inside, computers run 24 hours a day, powering the cloud services and artificial intelligence that are at the heart of modern banking, commerce, research and government operations. Huw Owen, the company's chief executive, said its electrical supply was interrupted when the fire broke out. But sophisticated sensors detected the loss of power and instantly shifted to batteries that operate much like an uninterruptible power supply system for a personal computer. That gave the facility's generators time to spin up, and they soon took over. 'It's a well-rehearsed, well-known process,' Mr. Owen said in an interview. 'It's this mind-set that resilience and keeping everything powered is absolutely front and center of our world.' Mr. Owen said the company installed the costly generator backup system despite expectations it might never be needed. A permitting application prepared for the company in December described the possibility of a power outage as 'extremely rare.' 'It would require a catastrophic regional failure on the grid, or at the supplying power station, and would likely impact not only the site but the surrounding London area,' the summary notes. 'As a result, the grid connection is considered to be highly reliable as demonstrated in the grid reliability letter provided with the application (calculated as 99.999605%).' The Decision Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the BBC after the fire, 'I don't want to see an airport as important as Heathrow going down in the way it did on Friday.' But how to avoid it in future? The challenge in making electrical upgrades to places like Heathrow is determining how to pay for it when high energy costs are straining consumer budgets. In the past, airport investment has often been passed on to customers in the form of higher ticket prices on airlines. Mr. Gallagher, the consultant on electrical network resilience, noted that new airports in places like Dubai were built with the kind of backups that could keep terminals open. And a few older airports, like Schiphol in Amsterdam, have upgraded their facilities with large generators. But if Heathrow's management wants to follow suit, experts say, they will need to accept that it requires a large investment to prevent a crisis that may not happen again for many years. 'It's a hell of a lot easier to build it from Day 1 than it is to try and retrofit stuff,' Mr. Owen said of Heathrow and other old airports. 'They are as capable of instigating resilience at those sites as I am, but they're now going to have to retrofit, whereas I built it from Day 1.'
