I’m just visiting the Algarve.
Luckily I found some store that had a free open wifi network (they had a server room so still had power). There were people lining up to use payphones (interestingly they still have them here).
Otherwise, no wifi, no data, no phone network, so no information on the whole situation. Can’t pay by card. Had a bag of chips for dinner because I can’t cook. Couldn’t book accommodation or a bus. Shops used pen, paper and calculator but took only cash. People barely have cash at hand and ATMs were out too.
I don’t know what I could’ve done without money if this would have lasted even longer.
I am in southern Spain right now. Power came back about 30 minutes ago.
It is interesting how quiet a city can be.
Without cars cities are pretty quiet
Today’s episode of “Malfunction or Moscow?”
Auto-translated:
15:31 : Ribera says that nothing points to the blackout in Spain and Portugal being intentional
The vice president of the European Commission (EC) for the Clean Transition, Teresa Ribera, says that the blackout recorded in Spain and Portugal is one of the “most important” in recent years and points out that nothing allows us to think that it has been intentional. “There is nothing that allows us to make us think that there is anything intentional,” Ribera also said in statements to the press. (EFE)
Speculation is fun, but … :)
Thanks! Yeah it’s important to stick to the evidence. Otherwise it’ll seem like cyber attacks are much more prevalent than they actually are which helps Putin. But it’s hard not to have that initial reaction when hearing about fires and blackouts in Europe lately.
What really scared me is the internet service and mobile networks went down a few minutes (like, 2-3 minutes) after the main power.
Comms switch centers and cell towers are supposed to have batteries to keep them running for a while. But they went black almost immediately.
During the day we got some short moments of connectivity. Short and sparse.
There are things that I’d like to have some explanation for.
That’s not what happened in the entirety of Spain. I’m from one of the least affected areas (basque country) where the blackout only lasted ~2h. My cellphone had 4g connection the entire time.
Good to know, and somehow good news.
Aux power is probably not suited to deal with an outage of this scale. They probably reserved whatever they had at their disposal for emergency calls. Unless those didn’t work either in which case damn.
At this very moment, the tower my cellphone hooks to is not providing 5G connectivity. But when I went out to have breakfast and walked just one block I got a good one. So maybe some equipment was damaged by whatever happened (and has still not been repaired, which is understandable).
Yes that’s quite likely too
And introducing guest star “… Washington!?”
I wouldn’t rule out Beijing either. They always got a folding chair somewhere.
i thought spain and china are on good terms, or at least compared to most other eu countries
I don’t know about their relationship, I just know that chinese tech took root too deep in too much critical infrastructure in Europe.
Spain wouldn’t be a primary target and if they would be in their national grid they would most likely hide there until they have a reason for using it (like put pressure or take revenge). Russia on the other hand has already been proven to sabotage stuff in the EU, their main goal being creating chaos and unrest. If it would be either of them, I think Russia is by far a more likely culprit. But let’s not jump to conclusions too fast either. You are right China is capable of causing something like this.
Both Spanish and Portugese officals have been talking about the possibility of a cyber attack. The fact that hours later we do not know what happened makes that unforunatly a possibility.
I’ve also seen resports from credible sources discounting that possibility. So it’s probably wise not to jump to conclusions.
Some data carriers with difficultues and broadcasting stations worked but on the street level trains, metros and traffic lights are still off in many places after 10 hours.
The Spanish and Portuguese presidents are saying that they don’t dismiss any hypothesis, but the only info beoadcasted through the news were that there was an overload in some point of the grid that created a domino effect and left all the system without voltage
I don’t think Spain has a president. It is a kingdom
Spain is a parliamentary monarchy, the King is the head of the Estate and a symbolic figure but doesn’t have power over the Parliament. In Spain we don’t use the title “prime minister” we have a President of the government and a president for each of the 16 autonomic regions (similar to federated estates).
You are right, of course. But the Spanish PM is called ‘President of the government’, and informally, ‘President’.
The entire peninsula has no power at all? How on earth does that happen?
I hope everyone’s safe.
Electricity network requires that production and consumption are always equal. If there is too little production, the frequency (Hz) goes down and if too little consumption, the frequency goes up. If frequency goes too far every electric device pretty much breaks.
This is why there is automation in the network that tries to balance the network (reserve production and consumption). BUT if shit hits the fan, and frequency goes too bad, it automatically takes load off or production off the network. This often causes domino effect, you take load off, which causes over production, and again you take production off and loop is ready. In minutes the whole network falls like domino blocks, one by one.
There was lots of luck (and probably skill and preparation) that they were able to stop it. Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.
Cold starting whole Europe would have taken week. You need to start small islands, and connect them together slowly. Balancing load and production.
Source: I work in electricity production and distribution.
Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.
The connection between the Iberian peninsula and the rest of Europe isn’t all that high-capacity. That’s been a known weakness in the grid for a long time.
There are always some bottle necks on the network, but the frequency is same on all mainland Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous_Area
It is possible that this bottle neck saved the whole European grid coming down.
We are. But thank you for the concern.
Europe has a highly interconnected grid. Usually that works in everyone’s favor by providing much better stability than smaller grids. It appears there are ways to take down the entire grid too though.
Extreme weather phenomenon. Something about a wave reveberation.
A cyberattack? We will know, in time. For now, this is an ongoing issue and a Carrington event is equally possible. Or, just a human error. Look for past outages, it could happen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
That’s not the way a grid would fail during a Carrington event: you’d see big induced voltages along an east-west line. What happened in this case were fluctuations without any notable geographical alignment.
Anyway you can always check space weather at https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/specialist-forecasts/space-weather
I give this UK Met Office link because the US center, NOAA SWPC, may be subject to attack by MAGA fanatics. The US and the UK are the only western countries with 24/7 space weather operations centers. There’s another one in China but (not surprisingly) their area of interest for geographic impacts is China.
There’s only medium space weather activity at the moment, which is about as quiet as things get at this active phase of the solar cycle.
I’d say that we’re still in the nobody knows stage on what the cause of the grid outage is, though the two main theories are a cyber-attack or anomalous thermal fluctuations causing instability in long transmission lines. It’s probably best to withhold judgement until people who know what they’re doing have looked into it more.
Thanks!!!
There has been no space weather event remotely close to a Carrington one
Canada would be more susceptible to that than Spain. Also, there were no large CMEs in the last few days.
I think it would be more widespread if it was a true Carrington event. Might still be a mini one. Actually kind of rooting for this to be the case because then the only bad actors are the politicians and power company administrators that have ignored the warnings. Might lead to reforms worldwide.
It would depend on where it was solar noon at the time the CME hit. But there haven’t been any massive CMEs (Carrington size) anyway, so whatever the cause was, it had nothing to do with solar activity.
Whatever the cause, this doesn’t look good. About 60 million people without power.
At least in Valencia there’s cell service, as I was able to WhatsApp some family there to check on them.
Some cell towers have battery backups.
Damn squirrels
After the apocalypse, one of the few surviving humans will find a stepdown station with a fried squirrel in it.
I laughed…
