The groundwork for the blackout will inevitably come back to a buildout and reliance of renewable sources that do not have spinning mass that can do frequency synchronization.

There are costly means to compensate for the lack of spinning baseload but actually building these devices have been neglected, to no ones surprise.

Sounds like these systems are extremely vulnerable to sabotage. But adding more complexity such as distributed digitally controlled loads will not necessarily make the situation much better.

Unfortunately, you can't simply hand-feed 100 coal into all the Spanish thermal plants and then plop down two more to be on the safe side until you've fixed supply...

It's even worse in satisfactory imo, because the game is build around your fabs consuming wildly varying amounts of power throughout their production cycle... And after a power loss, they'll not only need the initial burst (can be handled via batteries) but will also now all be synchronized to have their power spikes at exactly the same moment.

Dyson sphere program is the by far most forgiving in that regard. You can overdraw to something like 200% before it becomes really problematic, and even that quickly resolves itself the moment you get more power online

Dropping from 32 to 8 GW usually means that an interconnected grid has fragmented into islands. If an island has a blackout, you need to black start it and resynchronise it with other islands.

Why is that? Are turbines easier to speed regulate than diesel engines?

I imagine a lot of sunshine in Tunisia (not too familiar with your country) , is there a big transition to solar?

Can't answer for aluminium, but I can answer for window glass: One of our plants was threatened by massive flooding 2021, threatening the float glass oven (which doesn't float itself despite the name). It was closed off with insulation, turned off, and everyone hoped for the best and no steam explosion. In the end, only the cellars with the control equipment flooded and it could be gradually (as the control cabinets were checked and restarted) brought up again without loosing too much heat a day later.

In short: Heat Inertia of large molten bodies is massive with good insulation. If the time is too long tho, only dynamite will dismantle a solid chunk of material again.

In some cases they don't have any practical ability to.

The Texas winter storm resulted in a lot of scrap at semiconductor lines due to power loss. There are industries that are completely dependent on grid power. You can't generate enough on site to back up 100% of your operation. Think about how much power one EUV source consumes.

The only reason Samsung is building additional factories in Texas is because the local utilities are effectively treating them as a critical load. The new plants are right by the ERCOT operation center and likely have access to the same cranking paths that the grid uses for black starts.

Power guarantees and insurance.

They are also frequently situated close to reliable power sources such as nuclear or hydro, usually fed by more than one generating station.

A friend of mine lived close to a brick plant his power NEVER went out.

I am in Barcelona too. The combination of no power and patchy internet was the perfect recipe for rumors to spread, which was fun to observe. I went for a walk since I couldn't work and saw tons of people socializing, drinking beers (more than usual), and young people playing without their phones. It'll be a special day to remember, I think.

Spain and Portugal had to deny a fake social viral that said power was out across most of Europe and the Russians were cutting undersea cables.

On the upside, more people at all levels are going to be more prepared if it happens again.

A security guard at my workplace actually told me they had "received a call" about power being out in Romania as well. I'm not sure how that one rumour spread.

I'm close to a refinery and seeing black smoke coming out 5 minutes later of the blackout was a bit of a scare tbh.

Most information was spread by car radios. Rest were people asking and talking to each other.

As long as the beer is cool, you only need CO2! Great off grid mechanism. Or N2 in case of Guinness.

I never have any cash on me. That would’ve sucked.

How warm is "too warm"? I find cold beer, and cold soft drinks as well, quite repulsive. I usually try to order without ice entirely, and if I receive any bottles or cans, I permit them to come to room temp before consumption.

Refrigeration is sort of a scourge to those who enjoy food. We are so used to simply freezing our esophagus and not tasting anything! Food is kept cold because it lasts longer, not because it tastes better.

Sure, refrigeration makes restaurants and grocery stores possible. But it also presents challenges to cooking and it's very resource-intensive -- think about it -- basically everyone everywhere is always running their refrigeration -- that's a huge load on any system.

At an extremely abstract level, it is conceptually simple, but most inverters are designed with safeguards to prevent exactly this. They only produce power when the grid is up, and in phase with it.

Because if not sequenced and interlocked, islanding behavior can result in back-powering parts of the grid that are supposed to be disconnected and down for maintenance, or creation of desynchronized islands that then cause more damage when reconnected.

This is absolutely a problem that operators need to solve. Radio synchronization is possible, neighborhood islanding could be beneficial, etc. There are entire village-wide micro-grids in remote places where everyone's inverters do perform these functions, it just hasn't been embraced in monopoly environments yet.

For instance, relays that close isolated parts back onto the main network would need to be phase-aware, to only reconnect if it's safe to do so. You could mandate that all island-mode inverters center themselves around 50.1 or 60.1Hz in the absence of outside influence so there's certain to be phasing opportunities. Distribution networks would need more switches to provide positive isolation during maintenance. And all of these things would need huge amounts of interoperability testing. It's possible, but it has a cost.

Initial estimates went from "No idea" to "Could take days".

In the end it took about 12 hours to restore most of the power in two countries. There are some knock-on effects from trains being in the wrong places, but a solid result overall.