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Title: Spain's Government Blames Huge Blackout On Grid Regulator and Private
Firms

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/06/17/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The Spanish government has
said that the national grid operator and private power generation companies
were to blame for an energy blackout that caused widespread chaos in Spain
and Portugal earlier this year. Shortly after midday on April 28, both
countries were disconnected from the European electricity grid for several
hours. Businesses, schools, universities, government buildings and transport
hubs were all left without power and traffic light outages caused gridlocks.
While schoolchildren, students and workers were sent home for the day, many
other people were stuck in lifts or stranded on trains in isolated rural
areas. In the immediate aftermath, the left-wing coalition government did not
provide an explanation, instead calling for patience as it investigated.
Nearly two months after the unprecedented outage, the minister for ecological
transition, Sara Aagesen, has presented a report on its causes. She said the
partly state-owned grid operator, Red Electrica, had miscalculated the power
capacity needs for that day, explaining that the "system did not have enough
dynamic voltage capacity." The regulator should have switched on another
thermal plant, she said, but "they made their calculations and decided that
it was not necessary." Aagesen also blamed private generators for failing to
regulate the grid's voltage shortly before the blackout happened. "Generation
firms which were supposed to control voltage and which, in addition, were
paid to do just that did not absorb all the voltage they were supposed to
when tension was high," she said, without naming any of the companies
responsible. The day after the outage, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez suggested
that private electricity companies might have played a role, saying that his
government would demand "all the relevant accountability" from them. However,
the new report on the blackout also raises questions about the role of
Beatriz Corredor, president of Red Electrica and a former Socialist minister,
who had previously insisted that the grid regulator had not been at fault.
Aagesen said there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the blackout. The
government also maintained that Spain's renewable energy output was not to
blame.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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