The fact this event is trending in four different posts all are currently in the front page of HN says a lot! Hope moderators combines them all under one unified thread. See also:

There are reports of widespread power cuts in Spain and Portugal (bbc.co.uk): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820163

Spain, Portugal and parts of France hit by power outage (euronews.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820177

Nationwide Power Outages Also Disrupt Internet Traffic in Portugal and Spain (twitter.com/cloudflareradar): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819914

I dont think there were any on the front page when I submitted it. ( May be they weren't upvoted ) Because I thought such big news someone should have done it before me.

You missed the biggest one,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819791 (123 comments)

I've emailed the mods to alert them.

Because it's not on the front page, despite the large number of up-votes and comments.

A tactic I've seen to "disappear" articles is to flag and then immediatly unflag them.

Apparently this spans more countries? Very strange. Possibly a cyberattack or sabotage?

Growing up in Spain I've never experienced anything like this (not there at the moment, but friends have told me over WhatsApp).

Possibly some kind of rare cascade failure where it might have been on the edge for a while, and some small event happened that tripped things, similar to the american northeast blackout in 2003. High demand, plus a power station going offline meant more demand on some interconnects, which shorted on trees and were cut off, putting more load on other lines until the entire system collapsed

Grids are widely interconnected. Problems on one grid can and do cascade to another.

The last major European blackout was in 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819791

In Portugal here. Lost power about 1 hour ago. Reading the news while batteries last.

Reported here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819791#43820127

Here too:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43819914

For the past months the mass media has been talking non-stop about this possibility, and asking us to have an emergency kit ready - that was clearly a threat from the state, and they have executed it.

I saw it on twitter and had to go to BBC to make sure this isn't some joke or hoax. 2025 and we have National level power cuts?

I know it may be rare but I think some day we really need to move or mandate every single flat / home / apartment / living places to have a 12 - 24 hours backup battery included. Something that has 10K+ Cycles, durable and non-flammable. Not only does it make sure our modern lives without sudden interruption, it also solves the renewable energy problem.

Most of the time, the grid is reliable. How much investment do we actually want to prevent a few hours of downtime once in a blue moon?

And even if we do want to invest in large amount of grid storage (which we would need to anyway, if we want to transition to renewables), I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. Its a great way to limit economies of scale and make maintenance/inspection harder.

> I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible.

why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads.

In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.

Sounds like an incredibly expensive solution to a problem that could be tackled more efficiently at a larger scale.

Didn't we used to pump steam around for heating and now homes have individual furnaces? If the cost for this were about the cost of a furnace I don't see why this wouldn't be viable.

I bought a generator for just this situation.

There is a very, very appreciable difference between moving hot steam around and moving electricity around.

The thing you said doesn't really make sense to me; I'm not sure it's an apt analogy.

I’ve read discussions about preparing for a strong solar flare basically simply involves having on hand spare equipment stored unconnected and that then would also immediately improve repairs and maintenance for regular issues. I don’t know the details but I believe the US is looking at providing funding to the utilities companies to acquire the duplicate extra equipment.

@ksec is from california.

Mandate a battery backup. Instead of requiring the power suppliers to build and maintain reliable energy.

That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.

“How to waste money and valuable resources” in a nutshell.

Like it or not but we are a species of social animals, you cannot live without relying on others. That's just delusional.

There are degrees of dependence on others, you make it sound as if it's a binary choice.

This is very rare. Not actually worth to make that much fuss unless you are a hospital.

Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption.

This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects.

The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting them choose how much they are willing to pay for reliability.

Such an market has a huge stabilizing effect on demand, meaning a major incident would probably only have fairly small impacts on system frequency and embedded solar wouldn't disconnect.

This sounds more like a dystopian novel, where only the wealthy can afford stable power and everyone else is left without.

This comment is Dunning-Kruger effect in action…

Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do.