What caused the massive blackout in Spain and Portugal? • FRANCE 24 English

Spain and Portugal were hit by a massive blackout, disrupting daily life and services. Authorities are working to determine the cause of the outage. Meanwhile, power has been mostly restored, and normal activities have resumed.
#Spain #Portugal #blackout

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40 comments

  3. I fainted during the blackout, around 22.00 hours in Portugal. Since then, I have been weak and sore, especially in my legs. Has anyone else experienced something similar during the blackout?

  9. Have you noticed that so many of the solar flares that impacted the Earth did not have the effect the astrological community expected. Possibly the flares DID have an impact just not the one the scientists expected. Instead of expended energy lighting up the poles, the ions became part of the Earth's IONOSPHERE. Perhaps they are becoming a 'bed' of ions separate from the ionosphere, or perhaps they are creating an energy similar to 'ball lightening, a plasma seemingly self directed. The effect on Earth would seem similar to 'ball lightening' which scientists have yet to understand.

  17. If the people of those countries don't know by now PRECISELY what and WHO caused it, then there's no hope of saving their countries. They voted for the problem for many years.

  19. 15 gigawatt , 60% of energy dropping is a lot of energy to suddenly lose. Wonder how that happened. There reason doesn’t seem accurate.

  21. I don't understand this narrative of "12 GW suddenly losted" In my country you just say "Tension dropped in 12GW" Energy doesn't GET LOST nor DISAPPEAR. Whatbare you saying? Are you dumb or just want some excuse for problem? Are you trying to blame someone else? Someone "stole" your energy? For God sake! 🙄

  23. The old soviet went broke, because it was not allowed to criticize the ideology. Similarly, in 2025, we in the west are NOT allowed to criticize the green ideology.

    The film refuse to touch upon the obvious. Solar and windmills are "high risk" generation, that can zero out in 5 seconds, given a sudden change in the wind and weather. Average sun is present 40% of the time, and wind is present about 30% of the time. erratic power generation that can best be described as the "ENRON scandal recreated. "

  24. " In a traditional power grid dominated by heavy spinning machines — coal plants, gas turbines, nuclear reactors — small disturbances, even from severe weather, are absorbed and smoothed out by the sheer physical inertia of the system. The heavy rotating mass of the generators acts like a shock absorber, resisting rapid changes in frequency and stabilizing the grid.
    But in an electricity system dominated by solar panels, wind turbines, and inverters, there is almost no physical inertia. Solar panels produce no mechanical rotation. Most modern wind turbines are electronically decoupled from the grid and provide little stabilizing force. Inverter-based systems, which dominate modern renewable energy grids, are precise but delicate. They follow the frequency of the grid rather than resisting sudden changes…. "

  27. Just trying to scare people 😊
    Just showed not to buy electric cars and don't agree to digital currency

  30. If you are here in the U.S., don't worry, it WILL happen to you. If you are not prepared, like me, you just have to grin and bare it.

  31. Soon the Elite powers will be able to do a world wide blackout..image just 2 days without power,it will be absolutely chaos..You think the covid scam era was crazy.Watch this space.

  33. No one in that meeting room has a clue what actually happened, yet they're about to make decisions that affect everything. Classic case of confident ignorance in action. These rooms are where information gaps meet political pressure, creating a perfect storm of groupthink and status preservation. The more complex the crisis, the less they understand, yet the more certain they appear. Watch as they choose media-friendly solutions over effective ones, while nodding wisely at each other. Dunning-Kruger effect on full display – when the least informed are the most confident. This is how disasters become catastrophes.

  34. Hmm, since it has been restored, it's not a big deal for now. But clearly this needs to be intensely studied and steps need to be taken to improve resilience of the grid.

  36. Partly because France has never been a fan of strengthening its connection with Spain. Why let Spain sell cheap renewable energy to Europe when you can sell expensive nuclear energy yourself? Thanks with the black-start rebooting though.

  38. We were told 15 years ago that solar storms might cause inductive damage on electric infrastructure of all kinds. This looks like that so far…

  40. I'm still waiting for an explanation. What I've gathered is one power station in southern Spain went offline, then very shortly after another one went offline. The connection to the EU grid then was lost for some reason.

    Two possibilities, I think.

    1. Cyber-attack – They publicly said it wasn't a cyber-attack almost right away. How exactly could they even know that fast. You really can only say there isn't evidence for a cyber-attack because spotting them can very hard. -I've been doing tech work including cyber security for 2+ decades…

    2. Usage of inverters in their grid. With the solar and wind power generation, those inverters will follow a frequency, not maintain one themselves. It's possible they didn't have enough turbines running and when a couple were lost, there was an oscillation in the frequency which the inverters actually made worse as they kept trying to match an oscillating frequency. As the inverters tried to match the frequency, the oscillation got so severe it tripped the entire grid offline. They had the power from the EU to do a startup at least and didn't need to do a true "black startup".

    Option 2 is the most likely, but the lack of information keeps option 1 a possibility. Solar and wind are good, but they need to engineer the whole system, not just parts of it.

    I still don't understand why two turbine generators went offline, and they lost the EU power though. It's possible they lost the EU power because they got too far out of frequency. I just don't know how their system is "wired" up exactly.

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