Chris Nelder 🤘Jun 20
Hat tip to John Kemp for admitting that he was wrong to blame Spain's blackout on excessive reliance on inverter-based renewables and insufficient inertia, and 👏 for his very decent explainer on what actually happened. https://jkempenergy.com/2025/06/19/spains-blackout-blamed-on-poor-voltage-control/
Spain’s blackout blamed on poor voltage control

19 June 2025 Spain’s massive blackout was caused by overvoltage on the transmission system and the failure of the country’s generators to compensate by absorbing more reactive power, according to t…

JKempEnergy.com
Show threadnotsoloud

@chrisnelder
I've seen claims that batteries can contribute reactive power.

This report mentions a lot of different possibilities for stabilizing the system, but not batteries. Don't they work, or are they just not very useful in this context?

Jun 20 at 6:54amWeb
Show threadChris Nelder 🤘Jun 20
@notsoloud You have read the report John refers to in footnote 1 (from a Spain’s Council of Ministers)?
Show threadnotsoloudJun 20
@chrisnelder
No, merely the blog post by John Kemp.
Show threadTomJun 20

@notsoloud @chrisnelder

The report recommendations are more about structural and policy changes rather than specific technologies but it does explicitly recomend boosting storage.

https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/media/v2/D561FAQFkgdKj7eP5ww/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/B56ZeCFyj0G0AY-/0/1750234259775?e=1750896000&v=beta&t=VoW723jzL46IhicftkqDR_LVgMDUFLgp0PWJYGrmoco