Disclaimer: I can't really vouch for any of this, but let me tell you what's being discussed in the press over here.
This is Government's version and it shows.
REE boss was put there by the ruling party. Still they try to paint REE as a private operator now. It's not. Like many other orgs, it's a mix of private and public capital, ultimately controled by the government.
It's suspected that the blackout was caused because she overruled technicians' opinion, looking for a solar % record.
Not "enough thermal power stations" carefully avoids mentioning nuclear, that they want to erradicate.
Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
AshamedCaptain · 35m ago
> Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
And where are those leaks, if one may ask?
French-side the only generation station that actually was ejected from the network that day was, precisely, a nuclear power plant. [1] A non-specific "moar nuclear!" cry seems therefore a bit hard to believe.
This doesn't make the point you think it makes. Nuclear power plants are supposed to go offline in unstable grid conditions. This ensures they don't overheat, equipment isn't damaged, and that they can be taken offline in a safe, rather than unsafe manner.
AshamedCaptain · 54s ago
Your point is not really a point either: every power plant can be ejected in such cases, and not just nuclear ones. The remark here is that it precisely happened to a nuclear first.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
Doesn't have to be nuclear, can be anything that provides reactive power and grid services, i.e. grid forming battery storage. The problem is this service is needed on the Spanish grid, but isn't paid for in the market. Pay for it and the grid services will be provided. Resources below. Mind you, doesn't have to be a Tesla battery, just has to be a battery with power controls (grid forming) and some lithium cells for fast response (vs sodium for longer duration discharge).
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
Grid forming services are indeed paid for, according to this very same article:
> Power plants "should have controlled voltage and, moreover, many of them were economically remunerated to do so. They did not absorb all the reactive power that was expected," Aagesen said.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
It is possible I misread or misunderstood something on the topic with regards to compensation for grid services in the article. With that said, before jumping to solutioning (although I am a strong proponent of batteries based on their performance, capabilities, and cost as of this comment), I would like to see more information and data as to which generators were signaled to change their output when the grid started to fault and were unable or unwilling to (failure to appropriately manage output and/or field excitation to absorb reactive power, etc) and if improvements to the electricity market are required. Without root cause, we cannot effectively solve.
gred · 1h ago
> REE boss was put there by the ruling party.
Yeah, these public / private entities can get ridiculous. Her background is legal and political: Secretary of Women and Equality, Spokesperson for Housing, Minister of Housing, State Secretary of Housing and Urban Construction, etc. But she's a party loyalist and she took a few business classes, so it's all good.
serial_dev · 1h ago
I mean it could be good enough, as long as she listens to the experts and doesn’t think that “these nerds are preventing me from making history and breaking records” (assuming what parent comment says is true).
gred · 58m ago
Sure, but even better would be if she had experience in the industry to judge tactical advice she is given and set strategic direction. Otherwise the best she can do is "not get in the way".
7952 · 1h ago
Well nuclear is a thermal power station.
spspeaker · 2h ago
Where the hell are you getting that from?
mocmoc · 58m ago
100% this. In the conversations , it's cristal clear
Dr_Knows · 1m ago
@narag excellent recap. "carefully avoids mentioning nuclear" -- the nuclear operator/s decided not to supply electricitiy on that day.
Rygian · 57m ago
For me the keywords are "capacidad de control de tensión insuficiente" (insufficient voltage control capacity) which was already a known issue for years.
REE asked back in 2019/2020 to create a new real-time dispatch mechanism for reactive power, because Spain still relies on fixed dispatch based on emails, phone calls, even snail mail. There was a pilot project in 2022 which was successful (dispatching in less than 5 seconds) but proved to be very expensive, and therefore incompatible with the European Union's directives on creating market-ready regulation processes [1].
Interesting read. I reminded me of some stories a German guy who used to work for a Spanish utility told me (the guy lost his job at one of the first closed German nuclear facilities and now worked at the museum of a pumped storage power plant): he told us that the Spanish utility he worked for waited far too long to kick in gas power plants waiting for prices to rise further making tons of money by risking stability. I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network. (Actually he also told us that some utilities legally abuse the pumped storage to trade energy between networks). So it seems there are some strange incentives and necessities in today's system , that might explain the failures to react in time.
b3orn · 44m ago
> I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network
The term for this is synchronous condenser. According to the system stability report 2023 [0] there were three of these in Germany in 2023 (source is in german, the term you're looking for is rotierender Phasenschieber). It is not clear if these are converted generators, most likely they are not former nuclear power plants, but likely located at the sites of former coal power plants because of the existing grid nodes. For the future this is a concept that is investigated to provide reactive power, in that case from former coal power plants.
> I also learned from him that a lot German nuclear facilities are still running there generators only as weight to stabilize the network.
We aren't. Pretty much the first things that get dismantled is the turbines and machinery that has no radiation exposure because you need space to maneuver, buffer, dismantle and decontaminate everything else that's coming out of the innards of the plant and actually is contaminated.
Maybe you can get some remaining use as reactive power provider done during the ~1 year that it takes for the bureaucracy to process the actual permit for dismantling [1] - but even during that time, restarting it again is practically impossible after the main coolant pipes have been flushed [2] (that happened shortly after the plant had been formally taken offline and all the uranium pellets were removed from the core, although I can't find out how many months that took - but it did happen in the same year as the shutdown, so less than 8 months).
The only thing that's being kept connected to the grid after that is the small portion that supplies the cooling for the cooldown pools where the freshly removed uranium pellets deplete enough material that they can be stored in CASTOR containers [3]. In addition, the high-voltage switching equipment is being kept alive in Landshut's case as the area of the former NPP is planned to be the end point of the SüdOstLink national grid expansion link and the power is supposed to be transferred from Ohu to the wider regional/state grid using the existing tie-ins of the former NPP [4].
If you want I can try to contact the utility handling the teardown about specifics, I live a few kilometers from there after all, but I doubt they're going to share much information given the obvious threat of Russian espionage.
It's also a workplace safety issue. You absolutely do not want electricity anywhere where you do not vitally need it, particularly no high voltage.
Biblis A is used for syn-con, which I presume is what the person the GP spoke to was talking about.
kragen · 2h ago
That's fantastic information, thanks! When will the report be made public?
diggan · 2h ago
Last I heard they were aiming for sometime between July and October to have the full technical report ready and shared with the parlament and the EU commission.
tux3 · 2h ago
My understanding is that it was supposed to be released later today. It's 8PM in Spain right now.
ZeroGravitas · 1h ago
I think a gas plant lying about it's availability was eventually discovered to be a root cause of the South Australia blackout a few years back.
demarq · 45m ago
Wasn’t it supposed to be Russia
b3orn · 36m ago
No, it was supposedly induced atmospheric vibration.
This is Government's version and it shows.
REE boss was put there by the ruling party. Still they try to paint REE as a private operator now. It's not. Like many other orgs, it's a mix of private and public capital, ultimately controled by the government.
It's suspected that the blackout was caused because she overruled technicians' opinion, looking for a solar % record.
Not "enough thermal power stations" carefully avoids mentioning nuclear, that they want to erradicate.
Private companies are requesting the records of CECOEL conversation to be published, some have leaked their logs. In one of those, REE technicians readily admit that oscilations are caused by not enough nuclear in the mix.
And where are those leaks, if one may ask?
French-side the only generation station that actually was ejected from the network that day was, precisely, a nuclear power plant. [1] A non-specific "moar nuclear!" cry seems therefore a bit hard to believe.
[1] https://www.edf.fr/la-centrale-nucleaire-de-golfech/les-actu...
China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")
Tesla Megapack in Texas Supports the Grid and Keeps the Lights On [Gambit Energy Storage] - https://www.tesla.com/videos/gambit-megapack - September 30, 2021
Tesla’s giant battery in Australia [Hornsdale Power Reserve] reduced grid service cost by 90% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17051066 - May 2018
Tesla Powerpacks Balancing the Grid in Terhills, Belgium [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVHQFrGzThg - May 14, 2018
> Power plants "should have controlled voltage and, moreover, many of them were economically remunerated to do so. They did not absorb all the reactive power that was expected," Aagesen said.
Yeah, these public / private entities can get ridiculous. Her background is legal and political: Secretary of Women and Equality, Spokesperson for Housing, Minister of Housing, State Secretary of Housing and Urban Construction, etc. But she's a party loyalist and she took a few business classes, so it's all good.
REE asked back in 2019/2020 to create a new real-time dispatch mechanism for reactive power, because Spain still relies on fixed dispatch based on emails, phone calls, even snail mail. There was a pilot project in 2022 which was successful (dispatching in less than 5 seconds) but proved to be very expensive, and therefore incompatible with the European Union's directives on creating market-ready regulation processes [1].
[1][ES] https://www.eldiario.es/economia/competencia-reconocio-julio...
The press release is here: https://www.miteco.gob.es/es/prensa/ultimas-noticias/2025/ju...
The term for this is synchronous condenser. According to the system stability report 2023 [0] there were three of these in Germany in 2023 (source is in german, the term you're looking for is rotierender Phasenschieber). It is not clear if these are converted generators, most likely they are not former nuclear power plants, but likely located at the sites of former coal power plants because of the existing grid nodes. For the future this is a concept that is investigated to provide reactive power, in that case from former coal power plants.
[0]: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...
We aren't. Pretty much the first things that get dismantled is the turbines and machinery that has no radiation exposure because you need space to maneuver, buffer, dismantle and decontaminate everything else that's coming out of the innards of the plant and actually is contaminated.
Maybe you can get some remaining use as reactive power provider done during the ~1 year that it takes for the bureaucracy to process the actual permit for dismantling [1] - but even during that time, restarting it again is practically impossible after the main coolant pipes have been flushed [2] (that happened shortly after the plant had been formally taken offline and all the uranium pellets were removed from the core, although I can't find out how many months that took - but it did happen in the same year as the shutdown, so less than 8 months).
The only thing that's being kept connected to the grid after that is the small portion that supplies the cooling for the cooldown pools where the freshly removed uranium pellets deplete enough material that they can be stored in CASTOR containers [3]. In addition, the high-voltage switching equipment is being kept alive in Landshut's case as the area of the former NPP is planned to be the end point of the SüdOstLink national grid expansion link and the power is supposed to be transferred from Ohu to the wider regional/state grid using the existing tie-ins of the former NPP [4].
If you want I can try to contact the utility handling the teardown about specifics, I live a few kilometers from there after all, but I doubt they're going to share much information given the obvious threat of Russian espionage.
It's also a workplace safety issue. You absolutely do not want electricity anywhere where you do not vitally need it, particularly no high voltage.
[1] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/genehmigung-fuer-rueckb...
[2] https://www.bayerische-staatszeitung.de/staatszeitung/politi...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_(Kerntechnik)
[4] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/tennet-stellt-suedostli...