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Except that's not true: an auto shutdown only occurs at 47.5 Hz, at least in Germany, some countries have the limit even lower: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unterfrequenz
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Thanks for the clarification. However the idea behind this hypothesis is that the inertia stored in physical generators is mostly responsible for keeping the grid stable and as less inertia exists in the grid the risk of this goes up.

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/spain-portugal-power...

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Sponsored by the fossil fuels industry... Also, Texans are not in a good position to lecture others about power network stability :-D

The official investigation is not over yet, but the head of the Spanish power network has already said that this cannot be related to renewables: https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250430/10632617/beatriz-...

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Is that a reliable source? The guy started blaming this on renewables hours ago even though no one seems to know exactly what happened.
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Good enough for what? I've read the article. It's speculating that solar could be the culprit as it was the main source of energy at that time, but the grid operator couldn’t say what exactly failed, only that they had "two separate losses of power generation in southwestern Spain, a second and a half a part".

If you look at the generation stats[0][1], everything from nuclear to gas to solar dropped. And it was solar and wind that kept producing most of the energy for hours after the failure.

If renewables were the cause of this blackout, then fine, but that's not what the WSJ article says. The guy who wrote the tweet you linked to was blaming renewables 2 or 3 hours after it had happened and the tweet contained wrong information, as pointed out by a different comment here. To me, it's not a good source.

Just to be clear, if renewables were the main reason behind this blackout, then let's blame them and point out their weaknesses and see what we can do to mitigate them (batteries?). What we shouldn't do is jump to conclusions before we know what the heck happened.

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[0] https://i.imgur.com/J375gbQ.png

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

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I don’t think the argument (at least the one I’m curious about) is about renewables causing it but that with a growing portion of the grid coming from renewables a black start becomes more and more difficult.

I understand the physics behind this claim although I’d add a huge caveat that I’m not a power grid expert so put the comment here to see comments from experts

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The guy is an American political journalist, his opinions here have exactly zero value to me.
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His opinions or his facts?
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His facts have no sources, so also worthless.
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