What prompted a system-wide failure in Spain’s power grid on Monday? Thus far, officials in Spain and Portugal remain tight-lipped, leading to a free-wheeling speculation market for armchair sleuths. Was it sabotage? Incompetence? Or bad public policy that made the grid unable to adjust to variables?
Jim Geraghty has a great round-up this morning at NRO, some of which will be covered here, but he also sets the scale of the failure in stark terms. The Spaniards claim that 15 gigawatts of supply suddenly dropped out twice in two seconds, forcing the grid to shut down rather than suffer catastrophic damage. How much is 15 gigawatts? Jim explains:
Even if you’re not that familiar with electricity, you probably remember Doc Brown gasping about “1.21 gigawatts” in Back to the Future, and what an enormous amount of electrical power that was in 1955. According…
