[HN Gopher] Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
___________________________________________________________________
Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout
Author : Rygian
Score : 166 points
Date : 2026-03-20 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.entsoe.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.entsoe.eu)
| darkwater wrote:
| The fact that there is not a single root cause but several ones
| makes me instinctively think this is a good report, because it's
| not what the "bosses" (and even less politicians) like to hear.
| ragebol wrote:
| Yep, sounds like "This was bound to happen at some point"
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| Which on some level is exactly "what the bosses and
| politicians want to hear"
|
| When it's everybody's fault it's nobody's fault.
| drob518 wrote:
| Exactly.
| darkwater wrote:
| In some ways, yes, but yet it's what reality is. There was
| probably some last factor kicking in that triggered the
| cascade, but there were probably many non-happy-paths not
| properly covered by working backup/fallback strategies. So
| a report could totally still tell "it's X fault", pointing
| the finger there. Government would blame the owner of X,
| some public statement about fixing X would be made and then
| the ones working in the field should internally push toi
| improve/fix their own (reduced) scope.
|
| I don't know what will come of this report in the next
| months/years, I will keep an eye on it though, since I live
| in Spain :)
| lyu07282 wrote:
| But EU's liberalized energy market gives us resiliency and
| low prices for electricity! /s
| galbar wrote:
| But not across the Pyrenees :_)
| drob518 wrote:
| Frequently, when you see these massive failures, the root cause
| is an alignment of small weaknesses that all come together on a
| specific day. See, for instance, the space shuttle O-ring
| incident, Three-Mile Island, Fukushima, etc. These are complex
| systems with lots of moving parts and lots of (sometimes
| independent) people managing them. In a sense, the complexity
| it the common root cause.
| amelius wrote:
| It usually starts with a broken coffee machine.
| drob518 wrote:
| When that happens, get ready.
| linuxguy2 wrote:
| It's like the Swiss Cheese model where every system has
| "holes" or vulnerabilities, several layers, and a major
| incident only occurs when a hole aligns through all the
| layers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
| Ringz wrote:
| I use this model all the time. It's very helpful for
| explaining the multifactorial genesis of catastrophes to
| ordinary people.
| anonymars wrote:
| Also perhaps worth a read:
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080416-00/?p
| =22...
|
| "You've all experienced the Fundamental Failure-Mode
| Theorem: You're investigating a problem and along the way
| you find some function that never worked. A cache has a
| bug that results in cache misses when there should be
| hits. A request for an object that should be there
| somehow always fails. And yet the system still worked in
| spite of these errors. Eventually you trace the problem
| to a recent change that exposed all of the other bugs.
| Those bugs were always there, but the system kept on
| working because there was enough redundancy that one
| component was able to compensate for the failure of
| another component. Sometimes this chain of errors and
| compensation continues for several cycles, until finally
| the last protective layer fails and the underlying errors
| are exposed."
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've had that multiple times. As well as the closely
| related 'that can't possibly have ever worked' and sure
| enough it never did. Forensics in old codebases with
| modern tools is always fun.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > As well as the closely related 'that can't possibly
| have ever worked' and sure enough it never did.
|
| I had one of those, customer is adamant latest version
| broke some function, I check related code and it hasn't
| been touched for 7 years, and as written couldn't
| possibly work. I try and indeed, doesn't work. Yet
| customer persisted.
|
| Long story short, an unrelated bug in a different module
| caused the old, non-functioning code to do something
| entirely different if you had that other module open as
| well, and the user had disciverdd this and started
| relying on this emergent functionality.
|
| I had made a change to that other module in the new
| release and in the process returned the first module to
| its non-functioning state.
|
| The reason they interacted was of course some global
| variables. Good times...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Global variables... the original sin if you ask me.
| Forget that apple.
| roenxi wrote:
| > See, for instance, the space shuttle O-ring incident
|
| That wasn't really a result of an alignment of small
| weaknesses though. One of the reasons that whole thing was of
| particular interest was Feynman's withering appendix to the
| report where he pointed out that the management team wasn't
| listening to the engineering assessments of the safety of the
| venture and were making judgement calls like claiming that a
| component that had failed in testing was safe.
|
| If a situation is being managed by people who can't assess
| technical risk, the failures aren't the result of many small
| weaknesses aligning. It wasn't an alignment of small failures
| as much as that a component that was well understood to be a
| likely point of failure had probably failed. Driven by poor
| management.
|
| > Fukushima
|
| This one too. Wasn't the reactor hit by a wave that was
| outside design tolerance? My memory was that they were hit by
| an earthquake that was outside design spec, then a tsunami
| that was outside design spec. That isn't a number of small
| weaknesses coming together. If you hit something with forces
| outside design spec then it might break. Not much of a
| mystery there. From a similar perspective if you design
| something for a 1:500 year storm then 1/500th of them might
| easily fail every year to storms. No small alignment of
| circumstances needed.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| In reality the "swiss cheese" holes for major accidents
| often turn out to be large holes that were thought to be
| small at the time.
|
| > [Fukushima] No small alignment of circumstances needed.
|
| The tsunami is what initiated the accident, but the
| consequences were so severe precisely because of decades of
| bad decisions, many of which would have been assumed to be
| minor decisions at the time they were made. E.g.
|
| - The design earthquake and tsunami threat
|
| - Not reassessing the design earthquake and tsunami threat
| in light of experience
|
| - At a national level, not identifying that different
| plants were being built to different design tsunami threats
| (an otherwise similar plant avoid damage by virtue of its
| taller seawall)
|
| - At a national level, having too much trust in nuclear
| power industry companies, and not reconsidering that
| confidence after a number of serious incidents
|
| - Design locations of emergency equipment in the plant
| complex (e.g. putting pumps and generators needed for
| emergency cooling in areas that would flood)
|
| - Not reassessing the locations and types of emergency
| equipment in the plant (i.e. identifying that a flood of
| the complex could disable emergency cooling systems)
|
| - At a company and national level, not having emergency
| plans to provide backup power and cooling flow to a damaged
| power plant
|
| - At a company and national level, not having a clear
| hierarchy of control and objective during serious
| emergencies (e.g. not making/being able to make the prompt
| decision to start emergency cooling with sea water)
|
| Many or all of these failures were necessary in combination
| for the accident to become the disaster it was. Remove just
| a few of those failures and the accident is prevented
| entirely (e.g. a taller seawall is built or retrofitted) or
| greatly reduced (e.g. the plant is still rendered
| inoperable but without multiple meltdowns and with minimal
| radioactive release).
| roenxi wrote:
| To be blunt; that isn't an appropriate application of the
| swiss cheese model to Fukushima. It isn't a swiss cheese
| failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event.
| Risk models won't help there. Every engineered system has
| design tolerances. And that system will eventually be hit
| by a situation outside the tolerances and fail. Risk
| models aren't to overcome that reality - they are one of
| a number of tools for making sure that systems can
| tolerate situations that they were designed for.
|
| If Japan gets traumatised and changes their risk
| tolerance in response then sure, that is something they
| could do. But from an engineering perspective it isn't a
| series of small circumstances leading to a failure - it
| is a single event that the design was never built to
| tolerate leading to a failure. There is a lot to learn,
| but there isn't a chain of small defence failures leading
| to an unexpected outcome. By choice, they never built
| defences against this so the defences aren't there to
| fail.
|
| > Many or all of these failures were necessary in
| combination for the accident to become the disaster it
| was.
|
| Most of those items on your list aren't even mistakes.
| Japan could reasonably re-do everything they did all over
| again in the same way that they could simply rebuild all
| the other buildings that were destroyed in much the same
| way they did the first time. They probably won't, but it
| is a perfectly reasonable option.
|
| Again I'm going from memory with the numbers but doubling
| the cost of a rare disaster in a way that injures ...
| pretty much nobody ... is a great trade for cheap secure
| energy. It isn't a clear case that anything needs to
| change or even went wrong in the design process. Massive
| earthquakes and tsunamis aren't easy to deal with.
| drob518 wrote:
| I'm not sure why you think those are not a confluence of
| smaller events or that something outside the design spec
| isn't one of those factors. By "small," I don't mean
| trivial. I mean an event that by itself wouldn't
| necessarily result in disaster. Perhaps I should have said
| "smaller" rather than "small." With the O-rings, the cold
| and the pressure to launch on that particular day all
| created the confluence. With Fukushima, the earthquake
| knocked out main power for primary cooling. That would have
| been manageable except then the backup generators got
| destroyed by the tsunami. It was not a case of just a big
| earthquake, whether outside or inside the design spec,
| making the reactor building fall down and then radiation
| being released.
| burningChrome wrote:
| This is the same thing that happened with the 35W bridge
| collapse in Minneapolis. The gusset plates after the disaster
| were examined and found to be only 1/2" thick when the
| original design called for them to actually be 1" thick. The
| bridge was a ticking time bomb since the day it was built in
| 1967.
|
| As the years went on, the bridge's weight capacity was slowly
| eroded by subsequent construction projects like adding
| thicker concrete deck overlays, concrete median barriers and
| additional guard rail and other safety improvements. This was
| the second issue, lining up with the first issue of thinner
| gusset plates.
|
| The third issue that lined up with the other two was the day
| of the bridges failure. There were approximately 300 tons of
| construction materials and heavy machinery parked on two
| adjacent closed lanes. Add in the additional weight of cars
| during rush hour when traffic moved the slowest and the
| bridge was a part of a bottleneck coming out of the city.
| That was the last straw and when the gusset plates finally
| gave way, creating a near instantaneous collapse.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| There are ways to aggregate these into a single resilience
| score for policy makers with only moderate loss of detail but
| it's unpopular.
| red_admiral wrote:
| Yes, a lot of modern engineering is good enough that single-
| cause failures are very rare indeed. That means that failures
| themselves are rare, but when they do happen, they're most
| likely to have multiple causes.
|
| How to explain that to non-engineers is another problem.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| They need more battery storage for grid health, both colocated
| at solar PV generators (to buffer voltage and frequency
| anomalies) and spread throughout the grid. This replaces
| inertia and other grid services provided by spinning thermal
| generators. There was no market mechanism to encourage the
| deployment of this technology in concert with Spain's rapid
| deployment of solar and wind.
| z2 wrote:
| There are non-battery buffers available too--I recently got
| rooftop residential solar installed, and learned that my area
| is covered by a grid profile requiring that the solar system
| stay online through something like 60 +/- 2Hz before shutting
| down completely, and ramping down production linearly beyond
| a 1Hz deviation or so. The point is to avoid cascading
| shutdowns by riding through over/undersupply situations,
| whereas an older standard for my area would have the all
| solar systems cut off the moment frequency exceeded 60.5Hz
| (which would indicate oversupply from power plant generators
| spinning faster via lower resistance).
|
| In my system's case, switching to this grid profile was just
| a software toggle.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| This is grid following, very effective for small scale
| generation. It does not work for large scale generation
| though when the grid is relying on that voltage and
| frequency from the utility scale renewable generation
| ("grid forming"). When those large generators exceed their
| ride through tolerance, batteries step in to hold voltage
| and frequency up until the transient event ends or
| dispatchable generators called upon spin up (currently
| fossil gas primarily, but also nuclear if there is headroom
| to increase output). Thermal generators can take minutes to
| provide this support (called upon, fuel intake increased,
| spinning metal spins faster), batteries respond within
| 250-500ms.
|
| Tesla's Megapack system at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in
| Australia was the first example of this being proven out at
| scale in prod. Batteries everywhere, as quickly as
| possible.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| In this very specific case, battery storage would not have
| helped (in fact, it would have worsened the problem). One of
| the issues in the failure is renewables, but not because of
| intermittence. It's because of their ~infinite ramp and them
| being DC.
|
| Anything that's not a spinning slug of steel produces AC
| through an inverter: electronics that take some DC, pass it
| through MOSFETs and coils, and spits out a mathematically
| pure sine wave on the output. They are perfectly
| controllable, and have no inertia: tell them tout output a
| set power and they happily will.
|
| However, this has a few specific issues:
|
| - infinite ramps produce sudden influx of energy or sudden
| drops in energy, which can trigger oscillations and trip
| safety of other plants
|
| - the sine wave being electronically generated, physics won't
| help you to keep it in phase with the network, and more
| crucially, keep it lagging/ahead of the network
|
| The last point is the most important one, and one that is
| actually discussed in the report. AC works well because
| physics is on our side, so spinning slugs or steel will self-
| correct depending on the power requirements of the grid, and
| this includes their phase compared to the grid. How out-of-
| phase you are is what's commonly called the power factor.
| Spinning slugs have a natural power factor, but inverter
| don't: you can make any power factor you want.
|
| Here in the spanish blackout, there was an excess of reactive
| power (that is, a phase shift happening). Spinning slugs will
| fight this shift of phase to realign with the correct phase.
| An inverter will happily follow the sine wave measured and
| contribute to the excess of reactive power. The report
| outlines this: there was no "market incentive" for inverters
| to actively correct the grid's power factor (trad: there are
| no fines).
|
| So really, more storage would not have helped. They would
| have tripped just like the other generators, and being
| inverter-based, they would have contributed to the issue. Not
| because "muh renewable" or "muh battery", but because of an
| inherent characteristic of how they're connected to the grid.
|
| Can this be fixed? Of course. We've had the technology for
| years for inverters to better mimic spinning slugs of steel.
| Will it be? Of course. Spain's TSO will make it a requirement
| to fix this and energy producers will comply.
|
| A few closing notes:
|
| - this is not an anti-renewables writeup, but an explanation
| of the tech, and the fact that renewables are part of the
| issue is a coincidence on the underlying technical details
|
| - inverters are not _the_ reason the grid failed. but they
| 're a part of why it had a runaway behavior
|
| - yes, wind also runs on inverters despite being spinning
| things. with the wind being so variable, it's much more
| efficient to have all turbines be not synchronized, convert
| their AC to DC, aggregate the DC, and convert back to AC when
| injecting into the grid
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree with your detailed assessment, but importantly, I
| argue more battery storage would've allowed for the grid to
| fail gracefully through rapid fault isolation and recovery
| (assuming intelligent orchestration of transmission level
| fault isolation). Parallels to black start capabilities
| provided by battery storage in Texas (provided by Tesla's
| Gambit Energy subsidiary). When faults are detected, the
| faster you can isolate and contain the fault, the faster
| you can recover before it spreads through the grid system.
|
| The storage gives you operational and resiliency strength
| you cannot obtain with generators alone, because of how
| nimble storage is (advanced power controls), both for
| energy and grid services.
|
| > Can this be fixed? Of course. We've had the technology
| for years for inverters to better mimic spinning slugs of
| steel. Will it be? Of course. Spain's TSO will make it a
| requirement to fix this and energy producers will comply.
|
| This is synthetic inertia, and is a software capability on
| the latest battery storage systems. "There was no market
| mechanism to encourage the deployment of this technology in
| concert with Spain's rapid deployment of solar and wind."
| from my top comment. This should be a hard requirement for
| all future battery storage systems imho.
|
| _Potential analysis of current battery storage systems for
| providing fast grid services like synthetic inertia - Case
| study on a 6 MW system_ - https://www.sciencedirect.com/sci
| ence/article/abs/pii/S23521... |
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.est.2022.106190 - Journal of
| Energy Storage Volume 57, January 2023, 106190
|
| > Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) already
| play a major role in ancillary service markets worldwide.
| Batteries are especially suitable for fast response times
| and thus focus on applications with relatively short
| reaction times. While existing markets mostly require
| reaction times of a couple of seconds, this will most
| likely change in the future. During the energy transition,
| many conventional power plants will fade out of the energy
| system. Thereby, the amount of rotating masses connected to
| the power grid will decrease, which means removing a
| component with quasi-instantaneous power supply to balance
| out frequency deviations the millisecond they occur. In
| general, batteries are capable of providing power just as
| fast but the real-world overall system response time of
| current BESS for future grid services has only little been
| studied so far. Thus, the response time of individual
| components such as the inverter and the interaction of the
| inverter and control components in the context of a BESS
| are not yet known. We address this issue by measurements of
| a 6 MW BESS's inverters for mode changes, inverter power
| gradients and measurements of the runtime of signals of the
| control system. The measurements have shown that in the
| analyzed BESS response times of 175 ms to 325 ms without
| the measurement feedback loop and 450 ms to 715 ms for the
| round trip with feedback measurements are possible with
| hardware that is about five years old. The results prove
| that even this older components can exceed the requirements
| from current standards. For even faster future grid
| services like synthetic inertia, hardware upgrades at the
| measurement device and the inverters may be necessary.
| cyberax wrote:
| One problem that happened here is the _voltage_ spikes as the
| synchronous generation went away. Voltage _spikes_ on
| generation going away seem insane, but it's a real
| phenomenon.
|
| The problem is that the line itself is a giant capacitor.
| It's charged to the maximum voltage on each cycle. Normally
| the grid loads immediately pulls that voltage down, and
| rotating loads are especially useful because they "resist"
| the rising (or falling) voltage.
|
| So when the rotating loads went away, nothing was preventing
| the voltage from rising. And it looks like the sections of
| the grid started working as good old boost converters on a
| very large scale.
| wortelefant wrote:
| It is very carefully worded, but variable renewables are
| holding the smoking gun here. This is why spain now requests a
| better connection to french nuclear now. This reckless
| overbuild of variable generation is a valuable negative
| example, wind and solar without adequate hydro or nuclear is
| dead
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's lack of experience managing variability, not variability
| itself.
|
| Wind and solar are _very far_ from dead, but they do need
| some adjustments - as the report makes clear.
| algoth1 wrote:
| As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt
| back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty
| cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours
| the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked
| by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing
| of interest to be conquered xD
| pfortuny wrote:
| The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.
| nunobrito wrote:
| In Germany a few months prior saw CCC publishing a method for
| destabilizing energy grids using radio waves a cheap
| hardware: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-
| controlling-st... and presented an attack vector to which
| most infrastructure in Europe is exposed.
|
| About 4 hours before the grid collapse on the 28th of April
| 2025 was recorded the largest purchase of Monero in the past
| 3 years (to remember: monero is coin of choice for special
| operations), making it surge +40% in 24 hours. The initial
| Spanish reports mentioned conflicting power information from
| dozens of locations at the same time which is consistent with
| a sequential attack using the blinkencity method so the grid
| itself is forced to close down.
| rob74 wrote:
| Well, if that's really the cause, then thanks CCC, I guess.
| For such a serious vulnerability which is probably non-
| trivial (not to mention expensive) to patch, is it really
| responsible to give only 3.5 months of time before
| disclosing it (according to slide #56
| https://cdn.prod.website-
| files.com/5f6498c074436c349716e747/..., they notified EFR
| about the vulnerability on 2024-09-12 and disclosed it on
| 2024-12-28)?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I didn't even know about it until the next day - totally off
| grid, and starlink for internet access - and no mobile signal
| where we live to give it away either.
| bluebarbet wrote:
| Might have been less fun if it had been in the depths of
| winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime
| made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the
| "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.
| unmole wrote:
| We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?
| burkaman wrote:
| It can get pretty bad
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Filomena
| pvaldes wrote:
| Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North
| and the inner part of the country can have crude winters,
| specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between
| -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For
| comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean
| is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one
| of the most diverse countries in Europe.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| and then people accuse social media of making people
| paranoid...
|
| you are able to be paranoid on your own just fine
| andyferris wrote:
| My theory is that social media simply increases the
| connectivity and reach (of the "rumour mill" or what have
| you) and thus it amplifies an existing social "failure mode".
|
| (That and earlier mass media was heavily moderated and
| regulated, while things like Facebook or twitter/X are
| basically a free-for-all).
| Oarch wrote:
| It was fun and exciting at first. However when phone batteries
| started getting low and the streetlights were still off you
| could see that changing. Candles and the relaxed Spanish
| attitude to life helped a lot :)
| singhrac wrote:
| I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so
| I'm very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every
| major grid operator around the world is going to study this and
| make improvements to make sure this doesn't happen on their grid.
|
| In a lot of ways it's like investigations into airplane crashes.
| Rygian wrote:
| Obligatory read: https://how.complexsystems.fail/
| jacquesm wrote:
| 472 pages. That's going to be a nice bit of reading this weekend.
| It is very nice to see such a comprehensive report as well as the
| fact that it was made public immediately.
| dvh wrote:
| Maybe practical engineering will make a video about it
| jacquesm wrote:
| I like reading.
| wedg_ wrote:
| I was supposed to fly home from Santiago de Compostella when the
| blackout happened. Me and my girlfriend had checked out of our
| hotel and headed to the bus stop to take the bus to the airport.
| The blackout had already started but we didn't realise (in
| hindsight, I do remember the pedestrian crossing not working. But
| I didn't think much of it). Anyways our flight was cancelled and
| it was clear we needed somewhere to stay the night.
|
| I immediately rebooked the same hotel, but when we got back there
| the receptionist had left so you had to check in over the phone
| instead. Except WhatsApp wasn't working. Then mobile data went
| down. And before long we were walking through the old town going
| hostel to hostel looking for a place to sleep, as everything got
| darker and darker (due to the lack of powered street lighting).
| The old town in almost pitch black was pretty scary!
|
| We ended up breaking back into the hotel, borrowing a bunch of
| towels from a laundry cart in the hallway and sleeping in this
| lockable room we found in the basement.
|
| Besides that somewhat stressful part, it was a really strange but
| fun experience to see the city without power: no traffic lights,
| darkened shops with lots of phone lights, cafes still operating
| just with only outdoor seating and limited menus, the occasional
| loud generator, and most of all the people seemingly having a
| great time in spite of it.
|
| I would've loved to have stayed out all night exploring the city,
| but finding somewhere to sleep that night was a bit more
| pressing!
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Can't read all of this since it's 424 pages but i want to point
| out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage.
| Not on a per capita basis. It's beating all of Europe combined
| outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-
| battery...
|
| We did have many many problems previously. The state of South
| Australia went out for a couple of weeks at one point in similar
| cascading failures. This doesn't happen anymore. In fact the
| price of electricity is falling and the grid is more stable now
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/19/power...
|
| This price drop is inline with the lowered usage of gas turbine
| peaker plants (isn't that helpful right now? No need for
| blockaded gas for electricity).
|
| A lot of people say it can't be done. That you can't have free
| power during the day (power is free on certain plans during
| daylight due to solar power inputs dropping wholesale prices to
| negative) and that you can't build enough storage (still not
| there but the dent in gas turbine usage is clear).
|
| It's one of these cases where you've been lied to. Australia
| elected a government that listened to reports battery+solar is
| great for grid reliability and nuclear was always going to be
| more expensive.
| postexitus wrote:
| You need grid connected storage where you have (unpredictable)
| renewables. That doesn't negate the benefits of Nuclear
| baseload power. In an ideal mix, you need both, and also Gas
| for emergencies. One is not better than the other, they have
| different roles in a balanced grid.
| drtgh wrote:
| Plus, related (storage), you do not want to put hydroelectric
| in water reservoirs targeted to population consumption, as
| you could find out one summer that the reservoirs are empty,
| the result of such water being used with the intention of
| generate electricity, or even used as inertial stabilizer for
| renewables.
|
| This is the moment were at the news you read "There's a
| drought because it isn't raining" and similar excuses, when
| in reality your five years of water's reservoirs become
| reduced to half -or one third- due they focused the
| electricity production over the population real water demand.
|
| I mean, hydroelectric needs at least two level's reservoirs,
| one to generate electricity (or even exclusive two level's
| reservoirs with water pumps for this), and the next one,
| absolutely untouchable by the electric companies, targeted as
| water storage for the population/agriculture, the classic
| more than five years reservoir, for real.
| adrianN wrote:
| Nuclear has a hard time existing in a net with dominant
| renewables during most of the year. Down-regulating nuclear
| absolutely kills its profitability. What you want is power
| plants with low capex that can be profitable with just a few
| hundred hours at full capacity per year. For example you can
| burn hydrogen.
| gpm wrote:
| Nuclear has the same issue as (unpredictable) renewables, it
| is incapable of cost efficiently following the demand curve.
| As a result, just like renewables, it requires a form of
| dispatch-able power to complement it (gas, batteries, etc).
| Solar and nuclear fill the exact same role in a balanced grid
| - cheap non-dispatchable power.
|
| Or at least nuclear would if it was cheap, but since its
| costs haven't fallen the same way that the costs of other
| energy did... well new nuclear buildout really doesn't have a
| good role at all right now, it's just throwing away money.
|
| Solar and nuclear complement eachother fine - because their
| shortfalls (darkness for solar, high demand for nuclear) are
| mostly uncorrelated... a mix of non-dispatcahble power with
| uncorrelated shortfalls helps minimize the amount of
| dispatchable power you need... but batteries have made it
| cheap enough to transform non-dispatchable power to
| dispatchable power that nuclears high costs really aren't
| justifiable.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| A case can be made that nuclear could potentially be cheaper
| than renewables plus batteries in Northern Europe when
| targeting 100% zero carbon electricity. (It seems unarguable
| that renewables can get to 80% zero carbon electricity more
| cheaply).
|
| But they're not really complementary in that one can't fill
| in for the gaps in the other. So the case for new nuclear
| gets more and more uneconomic the more cheap renewables we
| deploy.
| preisschild wrote:
| > Australia elected a government that listened to reports
| battery+solar is great for grid reliability and nuclear was
| always going to be more expensive
|
| The report you mean (csiro) was wildly biased though. They
| based their nuclear power cost estimate on a nuclear reactor
| that was never deployed anywhere (Nuscale) instead of "normal"
| nuclear power plants that have been deployed for decades.
| mastax wrote:
| Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or
| EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of
| those programs.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The NuScale cost was what the project itself announced. And
| they hadn't even started building yet. The latest reports
| also include large scale nuclear power.
|
| I find it funny when people get outraged because all CSIRO
| does is use real world construction costs easily proving how
| unfathomably expensive new built nuclear power is.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| And people might not know what the CSIRO is. They are the
| Australian governments research body, separated from the
| current political party. They aren't some private company
| or political group. I don't think you could have a more
| neutral and unbiased viewpoint.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Exactly. And they have well established methodology
| publishing a consultation draft asking for review. Then
| following that review publish a final version half a year
| later.
|
| Followed by updating the methods for the next iteration
| to cover any gaps discovered, like only including SMR and
| not large scale nuclear.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| The CSIRO report appears to have cost estimates for "normal"
| nuclear power plants too. Large scale
| nuclear $155-$252/MWh. Solar PV and wind with storage
| $100-150/MWh.
|
| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-22/nuclear-power-
| double-...
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| If someone wants a "quick and dirty" answers - there's
| presentation linked
| https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c...
|
| page 11 contains "Full root cause tree" - one image with all the
| high level info
| mythern wrote:
| That was quite the interesting read!
| wedge01 wrote:
| 0.63 Hz and 0.2 Hz grid instability. Oh my.
| christkv wrote:
| Lol it took about an hour for us to realize there was a blackout
| as our house had switched to island mode. Ended being the sort of
| organization point of the area for the neighborhood as we could
| provide mobile charging and light until the power came back
| around 22 at night
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