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, cafés 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!
By wedg_ 11 hours ago
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.
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.
By darkwater 13 hours ago
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.
By red_admiral 11 hours ago
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.
By drob518 13 hours ago
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.
By burningChrome 6 hours ago
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.
"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."
By anonymars 12 hours ago
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.
By jacquesm 10 hours ago
> 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.
By roenxi 11 hours ago
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).
By cpgxiii 8 hours ago
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.
By roenxi 3 hours ago
> It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event
First of all, the design basis accident is a design choice by the developers of the plant and regulators. The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA.
> 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.
This is absolute nonsense. For the cost of maybe maybe tens of millions at most in additional concrete to build the seawall a few meters higher, the entire disaster would have been avoided entirely (i.e. plant restored to operation). With backup cooling that could have survived the tsunami (a lower expense than building a higher seawall), all that would have happened at Fukushima Daiichi is what happened at its neighbor Fukushima Daini (plant rendered inoperable, no meltdown, no significant radioactive release). Instead, we are talking about a disaster that will cost a (current) estimated $180 billion USD to clean up (and there is no way this estimate is realistic, when the methods required to perform the cleanup barely exist yet).
By cpgxiii an hour ago
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.
By drob518 6 hours ago
If Fukushima get hit by a disaster that is outside the design spec then the engineering root cause of the failure is established. There isn't some detailed process needed to figure out how a design should tolerate out-of-design events. And there isn't a confluence of smaller events, it is a very cut and dry situation (well, unstable and wet situation I suppose). There was one event that caused the failure. An event on a biblical scale that was hard to miss.
If you want Fukushima to tolerate things it wasn't designed to tolerate or fail in ways it wasn't designed to fail in then the swiss cheese model isn't going to be much help. You're going to need to convince politicians and corporate entities that their risk tolerance is too high. Which in a rational world would be a debate because it isn't obvious that the risk tolerances were inappropriate.
By roenxi 3 hours ago
It usually starts with a broken coffee machine.
By amelius 13 hours ago
When that happens, get ready.
By drob518 5 hours ago
Yep, sounds like "This was bound to happen at some point"
By ragebol 13 hours ago
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.
By cucumber3732842 13 hours ago
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 :)
By darkwater 11 hours ago
Exactly.
By drob518 13 hours ago
But EU's liberalized energy market gives us resiliency and low prices for electricity! /s
By lyu07282 6 hours ago
But not across the Pyrenees :_)
By galbar 5 hours ago
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
By wortelefant 8 hours ago
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.
By TheOtherHobbes 7 hours ago
There are ways to aggregate these into a single resilience score for policy makers with only moderate loss of detail but it's unpopular.
By OgsyedIE 13 hours ago
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.
By toomuchtodo 9 hours ago
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.
By z2 9 hours ago
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.
By toomuchtodo 9 hours ago
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.
By cyberax 7 hours ago
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
By tuetuopay 8 hours ago
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.
> 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.
By toomuchtodo 8 hours ago
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
By algoth1 13 hours ago
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 :)
By Oarch 8 hours ago
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.
By bluebarbet 9 hours ago
We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?
By unmole 9 hours ago
Outside, right now, it is about 6 degrees C. Much of Spain is a high plateau where you're entirely dependent on sunshine for warmth in winter.
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.
By pvaldes 5 hours ago
Why do you use Fahrenheit?
By lava_pidgeon 2 hours ago
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.
By madaxe_again 12 hours ago
Rumour huh.
By chr15m 2 hours ago
and then people accuse social media of making people paranoid...
you are able to be paranoid on your own just fine
By NooneAtAll3 9 hours ago
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).
By andyferris 3 hours ago
The hack thing spread wildly, indeed. Weird experience.
By pfortuny 12 hours ago
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.
By nunobrito 11 hours ago
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)?
By rob74 6 hours ago
IMHO wouldn't make much a difference, the issue had been known to them for years up to that point. To a large part still exists, the Spanish grid only committed to upgrade the hardware after this incident. Even so it will require about another year to complete the upgrade over there.
I don't follow in detail the news on other European nations but haven't seen much focus on hardening their security until they actually get breached. A recent example (albeit different attack vector) would be the Polish grid: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/wiper-malware-targe...
page 11 contains "Full root cause tree" - one image with all the high level info
By NooneAtAll3 9 hours ago
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.
By jacquesm 12 hours ago
Maybe practical engineering will make a video about it
By dvh 7 hours ago
I like reading.
By jacquesm 3 hours ago
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.
By AnotherGoodName 10 hours ago
> 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
That makes no sense. Those are projections and for battery only. Europe today has around 100GW energy storage, Australia has around 6GW.
By the_mitsuhiko 2 hours ago
For the discussion of replacing gas peaker plants pumped hydro isn’t as useful as grid connected battery storage which is the focus of the above discussion.
By AnotherGoodName an hour ago
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.
By postexitus 9 hours ago
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.
By gpm 7 hours ago
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.
By laurencerowe 5 hours ago
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.
By adrianN 8 hours ago
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.
By drtgh 8 hours ago
> 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.
By preisschild 8 hours ago
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.
Was the Nuscale cost estimate somehow worse than AP1000 or EPR(2)? That seems very unlikely to me given the history of those programs.
By mastax 7 hours ago
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.
By ViewTrick1002 6 hours ago
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.
By AnotherGoodName 5 hours ago
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.
By ViewTrick1002 3 hours ago
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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