Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

Scale and immediate impact

• Commenters across Portugal and Spain report simultaneous loss of power, including major cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Lisbon) and Andorra; parts of France briefly affected, Italy largely not.
• Traffic lights, metros, some airports, and water systems were disrupted; people avoid driving due to chaotic intersections.
• Outage duration varied widely by area (from under an hour to most of the day), with some regions cheering when power returned.

Interconnected grid and cascade behaviour

• Multiple comments explain that most of continental Europe is a single synchronous AC grid; Iberia is relatively weakly connected (low interconnect capacity) but still coupled.
• A failure in one part can cause frequency excursions, triggering automatic trips of generators and lines, leading to cascading disconnections until the disturbance “runs into” a more resilient area.
• Others note earlier near-miss or regional European incidents with similar dynamics (frequency drops, underfrequency load shedding, distributed generation tripping out).

Cause: emerging picture, still debated

• Early media and operator statements suggest a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” causing large temperature variations in interior Spain, leading to oscillations (“induced atmospheric vibration” / conductor gallop) on 400 kV lines and synchronization failures.
• Some reports previously pointed to a fire in southern France damaging a high‑voltage line, but the French operator later denied a direct link.
• Several commenters caution against premature cyberattack theories and criticize sensational reporting; cause still treated as not fully resolved.

Black start and restoration process

• Grid engineers describe how widespread trips force a staged restart (“black start”‑like), bringing generators and regions online gradually while keeping frequency near 50 Hz.
• Iberian TSOs reportedly restarted from the north and south, using domestic hydro and thermal plants and progressively decoupling from Spain/reequilibrating.
• Multiple links to ENTSO‑E data show a sharp drop of ~15 GW in Spanish demand and near‑total loss of certain generation types, followed by steady recovery at a controlled pace.

Telecoms and critical infrastructure

• Mobile networks, fibre backhaul, and data centres generally stayed up for hours on batteries and generators, though capacity degraded and some regions lost coverage entirely.
• Old PSTN and telco design culture of extreme survivability is discussed; hospitals, airports, and exchanges usually have substantial backup.

Cashless society, resilience, and behaviour

• Lack of ATMs and card systems during the outage revives arguments for keeping cash and low‑tech fallbacks (paper receipts, manual ledgers).
• Others argue that multi‑hour nationwide blackouts are so rare that mandating home batteries or cash handling everywhere would be disproportionate; debate centers on where to place resilience (household vs grid vs critical infrastructure).

Renewables, inertia, and grid design

• Some point out Spain was recently operating at very high renewable shares; they suspect low “spinning” inertia made the system more fragile to disturbances.
• Engineers push back on simplistic “blame renewables” narratives: inverter‑based resources can be programmed to provide synthetic inertia and grid‑forming behaviour, but many small solar/wind units today simply disconnect on anomalies.
• There is detailed discussion of frequency control, load shedding schemes, and the difficulty of managing a high‑renewables, highly distributed grid during black and brown starts.

Markets, regulation, and investment

• Comparisons are drawn to the 2003 US Northeast blackout, UK and Texas events, and Balkan outages; commenters stress that big failures are usually multi‑factor (technical, operational, and economic).
• Some emphasize that incentives and regulation (capacity markets, black‑start payments, maintenance budgets) shape resilience more than technology alone.
• Others argue the event will likely spur more investment in grid hardening, storage, and possibly strategic spares, but note past experience shows such investigations and reforms take months or years.