Terrific episode. But I think it is possible to be more specific about the cause not of the various events, but of the cause of the only thing that matters ... the black system. This is because what happened in Spain was closely analogous to what happened in South Australia in 2016.
There was an initial event. Then a bunch of following events. People want to know why the system went black. The system didn't go black because of the initial event. Losses of generation are normal in any grid.
In the South Australian blackout of 2016, the initial event was a loss of generation when some transmission towers fell over in a storm. That didn't cause the blackout. Previous and larger losses of generation didn't cause a total black system. Because those previous losses occurred in a grid with more inertia. Following that initial LOG in 2016, our interconnector (with the next door state) failed ... exactly like the Spain-France interconnector. But again, South Australia had had other losses of our interconnector, again without going black. In those other cases, it happened slowly enough (because of inertia) to enable sufficient (automated) load shedding to avoid a complete failure. In Spain the interconnector failed. Is this the first failure? If not, then it is the change of grid inertia between previous failures and the current one that is the root cause of the blackout. Meaning that all the other events are just normal events that the system prior to its loss of inertia had handled successfully. I'll bet the Spanish also have automated load shedding schemes that also didn't get to work because the loss of inertia allowed everything to happen too fast.
Terrific episode. But I think it is possible to be more specific about the cause not of the various events, but of the cause of the only thing that matters ... the black system. This is because what happened in Spain was closely analogous to what happened in South Australia in 2016.
There was an initial event. Then a bunch of following events. People want to know why the system went black. The system didn't go black because of the initial event. Losses of generation are normal in any grid.
In the South Australian blackout of 2016, the initial event was a loss of generation when some transmission towers fell over in a storm. That didn't cause the blackout. Previous and larger losses of generation didn't cause a total black system. Because those previous losses occurred in a grid with more inertia. Following that initial LOG in 2016, our interconnector (with the next door state) failed ... exactly like the Spain-France interconnector. But again, South Australia had had other losses of our interconnector, again without going black. In those other cases, it happened slowly enough (because of inertia) to enable sufficient (automated) load shedding to avoid a complete failure. In Spain the interconnector failed. Is this the first failure? If not, then it is the change of grid inertia between previous failures and the current one that is the root cause of the blackout. Meaning that all the other events are just normal events that the system prior to its loss of inertia had handled successfully. I'll bet the Spanish also have automated load shedding schemes that also didn't get to work because the loss of inertia allowed everything to happen too fast.