Not necessarily. It can be the worst outage in decades, while being the first of this specific type of outage.

So THERE!

Headline is actually correct, if meaningless. It was also the best, most yellow, least wet and most foretold outage of its kind with regards to any timeframe that actually included it. You get that when you just have one of them.

What these people were trying to say is that as a power outage, it was the worst in decades in Europe. These things are not common here. I have experienced a total of two localized ones that lasted less than a minute in the last 25 years. The specific TYPE of outage was a first. But using reasonable models or competent risk management and acting on the results would have prevented it. The ones that messed up were just trying to do things cheaply and ended up cheaper than possible. On top of the bad infrastructure, and messed-up planning, Spain has a very weak (too weak) link to the European grid. Incompetent greedy assholes at the grid operator, no doubt. These never learn proactively.

That said, this will likely also be the last outage of its type in Europe for a long, long time. Because anybody risking something like this again will find themselves without a connection to the European grid. And then it just becomes localized incompetence. This was a threat to the whole grid.

The title is saying that this was the first power outage of the kind of outage that it was. The power outage was also the worst in 30 years.

It actually just needs solid engineering as a fix. This was a management problem and maybe engineering failure. It could have been done right and would have been clear how to do so. My guess is greed and political pressure are ultimately to blame.

> They rolled out a ton of renewables but they didn't properly build out the infrastructure to handle how renewables work so they ran into problems. Basically they cut some corners when they started building out.

Sort of like that. From the fine article...

> Critics were quick to point to Spainâ(TM)s heavy reliance on renewable power, without enough measures to avoid power surges. The government denied that, but the grid started using more gas-powered turbines that help stabilize the network after the blackout.

They had the tools to maintain the stability of the electrical grid but chose not to use them. They are using them now to prevent a repeat event.

> It's pretty typical but it's also pretty easy to fix the article describes exactly what they need to do and says they are doing it. So there's really not a lot to see here. It just means you can't cut corners on your infrastructure spending if you want a modern functional civilization

There may not be "a lot" to see here but there is something to see. This was a very large power outage, it cost them a lot of money, and cost them something like a dozen lives. From what I could tell half of those deaths could be considered Darwin Award levels of doing stupid shit but the other half were cases of peopl

It seems to me that just about every place that hopped onto the renewables bandwagon early did the same including China.

These were terrible decisions that hurt later adoption and public sentiment

> The Spain outage is just another example of why the proper operation of utilities - water/energy/etc - should not be subservient to the demands of shareholder dividends and C-suite bonuses.

Not every problem is solved by having more government.

I'm of the belief that government incentives to use more renewable energy was a contributing factor. The fine article points to how Spain is acting to prevent a repeat of this outage by using more natural gas power. If all they had to do to stop this outage from happening was to power up a natural gas power plant then why didn't they? Might it be government incentives to burn less natural gas?

There's no profit in seeing the lights go out so there's co