Europe

Without cars cities are pretty quiet

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15:31 : Ribera says that nothing points to the blackout in Spain and Portugal being intentional

The vice president of the European Commission (EC) for the Clean Transition, Teresa Ribera, says that the blackout recorded in Spain and Portugal is one of the "most important" in recent years and points out that nothing allows us to think that it has been intentional. "There is nothing that allows us to make us think that there is anything intentional," Ribera also said in statements to the press. (EFE)

Speculation is fun, but ... :)

And introducing guest star ".... Washington!?"

Both Spanish and Portugese officals have been talking about the possibility of a cyber attack. The fact that hours later we do not know what happened makes that unforunatly a possibility.

Electricity network requires that production and consumption are always equal. If there is too little production, the frequency (Hz) goes down and if too little consumption, the frequency goes up. If frequency goes too far every electric device pretty much breaks.

This is why there is automation in the network that tries to balance the network (reserve production and consumption). BUT if shit hits the fan, and frequency goes too bad, it automatically takes load off or production off the network. This often causes domino effect, you take load off, which causes over production, and again you take production off and loop is ready. In minutes the whole network falls like domino blocks, one by one.

There was lots of luck (and probably skill and preparation) that they were able to stop it. Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.

Cold starting whole Europe would have taken week. You need to start small islands, and connect them together slowly. Balancing load and production.

Source: I work in electricity production and distribution.

We are. But thank you for the concern.

Europe has a highly interconnected grid. Usually that works in everyone's favor by providing much better stability than smaller grids. It appears there are ways to take down the entire grid too though.

I don't think Spain has a president. It is a kingdom

Some cell towers have battery backups.

That's not the way a grid would fail during a Carrington event: you'd see big induced voltages along an east-west line. What happened in this case were fluctuations without any notable geographical alignment.

Anyway you can always check space weather at https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/specialist-forecasts/space-weather

I give this UK Met Office link because the US center, NOAA SWPC, may be subject to attack by MAGA fanatics. The US and the UK are the only western countries with 24/7 space weather operations centers. There's another one in China but (not surprisingly) their area of interest for geographic impacts is China.

There's only medium space weather activity at the moment, which is about as quiet as things get at this active phase of the solar cycle.

I'd say that we're still in the nobody knows stage on what the cause of the grid outage is, though the two main theories are a cyber-attack or anomalous thermal fluctuations causing instability in long transmission lines. It's probably best to withhold judgement until people who know what they're doing have looked into it more.

There has been no space weather event remotely close to a Carrington one

Canada would be more susceptible to that than Spain. Also, there were no large CMEs in the last few days.

I think it would be more widespread if it was a true Carrington event. Might still be a mini one. Actually kind of rooting for this to be the case because then the only bad actors are the politicians and power company administrators that have ignored the warnings. Might lead to reforms worldwide.

After the apocalypse, one of the few surviving humans will find a stepdown station with a fried squirrel in it.

I laughed...