A full grid black start is orders of magnitude more complex. You’re not just reviving one machine — you’re trying to bring back entire islands of infrastructure, synchronize them perfectly, and pray nothing trips out along the way. Watching a rig wake up is impressive. Restarting a whole country’s grid is heroic.
A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity.
We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications and financial systems. And yet, public awareness of the infrastructure behind it is shockingly low. We tend to notice the power grid only when it breaks.
We’ve neglected it for decades. In many regions, burying power lines is dismissed as “too expensive.” But compare that cost to the consequences of grid collapse in extreme weather, cyberattacks, or even solar storms — the stakes are existential. High-impact, low-frequency events are easy to ignore until they’re not.
That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Most people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.
Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.
The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.
Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.
This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.
I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.
Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.
It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.
The UK keeping its own time just makes things easier for it IMO.
Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?
Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267
We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected.
I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears an hour ago.
If the grid frequency goes too far out of range then power stations trip automatically, it's not an explicit decision anyone takes and it doesn't balance load, quite the opposite. A station tripping makes the problem worse as the frequency drops even further as the load gets shared between the remaining stations, which is why grids experience cascading failure. The disconnection into islands is a defense mechanism designed to stop equipment being too badly damaged and to isolate the outage.
Last actual load value for Spain at 12:15: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Last actual load value for France at 12:00: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Everything dropped to zero except wind and solar, which took huge hits but not to zero. I expect those have been disconnected too, as they cannot transmit to the grid without enough thermal plant capacity being online, but if the measurement at some plants of how much they're generating doesn't take into account whether or not they were disconnected upstream they may still be reporting themselves as generating. You can't easily turn off a solar plant after all, just unplug it.
Either that, or they're measuring generation and load that's not on the grid at all.
Rooftop solar for example just shows as a reduction in demand, not 'generation' per se.
It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.
The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.
The complex process of configuring the transmission network to bring grid power to each power plant in succession is the same.
But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?
My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.
Currently the main driver of battery deployments is not so much energy price time arbitrage as "fast frequency fresponse": you can get paid for providing battery stabilization to the grid.
(for the UK not Spain: https://www.axle.energy/blog/frequency )
So if you have a smarter solar panel, or a smart battery, you can stabilize the grid. I’m assuming that all of the traditional software complexity things in distributed systems apply here: you want something a little bit smart, to gain efficiency benefits, but not too smart, to gain robustness benefits.
My intuition is that bringing the market into it at small timescales probably greatly increases the efficiency significantly but at the cost of robustness (California learned this “the hard way” with Enron)
> Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat
If the electronic controller is “ahead of” (leading) the grid, then that heat would come from the solar plant; if it is “behind” (following) then that heat comes from the grid. Is that right? And likely, solar plants opted for the simplest thing, which is to always follow, that way they never need to worry about managing the heat or stability or any of it.
I wonder if the simplest thing would be for large solar plants to just have a gigantic flywheel on site that could be brought up via diesel generators at night…