Spain excludes cyber attack

The Spanish grid operator has excluded a cyber attack as the cause of a huge stream that on Monday with paralyzed Spain, Portugal and parts of France.

Eduardo Prieto of Red Eléctrica said that provisional findings suggest: “There was no kind of interference in the control systems” to imply an attack that Portuguese Prime Minister Luís Montenegro took the day before.

But the exact reason behind the cut is still unclear.

The grid operator said on Tuesday that they “cannot draw conclusions” until they receive concrete data. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that researchers were trying to determine the cause and then take all the necessary measures “to ensure that this no longer happens.”

Information drips from what happened at the time of the cut, which leads to theories about what it could have caused. Experts told the BBC that it was probably caused by various failures.

This is what we know and what questions remain unanswered.

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Sánchez said on Monday evening that 15 GW of electricity – the equivalent of 60% of the question at that time – “suddenly lost from the system … in just five seconds”.

Mr. Prieto said during a press conference on Tuesday that there were two “decoupling events” hardly a second apart in southwestern Spain, where there is a considerable generation of solar energy.

An issue to which the Spanish grid manager may have referred was when energy companies identify a mismatch of supply and demand for electricity that can lead to instability and temporarily disconnect to protect their systems.

Sánchez, however, later said that the power outages “was not a problem of excessive renewable energy sources”. He said there was no failure of coverage – what the supply means – and there was a relatively low demand for electricity that was quite normal in the days that ran to the crisis.

So what exactly happened? It is unclear, especially since many systems in the electricity supply fail quite often, not only renewable energy sources and disruptions on this scale on average come somewhere in the world once a year.

The mismatch between demand and electricity offering can change the frequency of the electricity grid, which is 50Hz in Europe and the UK.

If that frequency changes from a narrow range, this can lead to damage to equipment.

“When a large company detects that the frequency comes out of their tolerance, they can go offline to protect their equipment,” said Prof. Hannah Christensen at the University of Oxford.

If many companies do that quickly in succession, the “step-by-step effects” can have and lead to a blackout, she added.

But when it comes to renewable energy sources, operators have very accurate weather forecasts in the short term to predict when there will be a surplus of the wind of solar energy, so they adjust the power supply accordingly, said Prof Christensen.

Renewable power has various challenges for fossil fuel energy “because of its intermittency,” she said, but it is a known problem that is planned.

“It is a bit confusing that this would not have been predicted,” she said.

Prof Keith Bell, at the University of Strathclyde, added that “if a system depends on solar energy and wind, they design a system to display it,” which suggests that the extra delivery of energy from renewable energy sources would have been no surprise to the grid.

“Spain has a lot of experience with wind and solar energy, and a long-term system of prediction again and its impact,” he said.

“All kinds of systems fail,” he added. “Things can and do wrong, whether it comes from renewable energy sources, fossil fuels or nuclear energy. This can be the Swiss cheese model, where the gaps are coordinated in the system.”

Red Eléctrica also suggested that the drop caused a stranger to stumbled between Spain and France.

Two basic technologies are used to connect parts of a grid or countries – a standard transmission line that carries alternating flows, and increasingly high -voltage lines with direct voltage.

Spain has a high -voltage line that was taken into use seven years ago, which means it was well tested, said Prof Bell.

The Iberian peninsula is often called a “electricity island” because it depends on just a few connections by the Pyrenees with France, which means that it can be vulnerable to failures.

Sánchez said that power was brought online again thanks to connections with France and Morocco, as well as gas and hydropower sources.

The Raster of Portugal, run, refuted initial reports, attributed to the desk on Monday, which said the Black -out was caused by a rare atmospheric event.

The message in the Portuguese said that “because of extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were abnormal oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as” induced atmospheric vibrations. “

“These oscillations caused synchronization errors between the electrical systems, which led to successive disruptions in the interconnected European network.”

However, Ren spokesperson Bruno Silva told AFP on Tuesday that the grid operator “did not issue this statement”, without giving further details.