The Spanish grid collapse - by Alex Chalmers

Last week, we released our first article from Issue 19, on how the FDA secretly liberalized animal drugs. Yesterday, a significant portion of Spain and Portugal’s electricity transmission system stopped working in the span of five seconds. Spain, Portugal, and parts of France and Belgium lost power, in what is likely to have been Europe’s largest ever blackout. To be clear, we don’t know the immediate cause of the outage. The Spanish grid operator said that a sudden outage caused the grid interconnection between France and Spain to trip. This resulted in the two countries’ energy systems disconnecting momentarily, triggering a sudden change in frequency. Before tens of millions of people lost access to power, it appears that frequency across the Spanish grid dropped by about 0.15 hertz. Electricity grids rely on alternating current, which is current that regularly changes direction, switching back and forth in a regular pattern. Frequency is the rate at which this current oscillates. I

Last week, we released our first article from Issue 19, on how the FDA secretly liberalized animal drugs. Yesterday, a significant portion of Spain and Portugal’s electricity transmission system stopped working in the span of five seconds. Spain, Portugal, and parts of France and Belgium lost power, in what is likely to have been Europe’s largest ever blackout. To be clear, we don’t know the immediate cause of the outage. The Spanish grid operator said that a sudden outage caused the grid interconnection between France and Spain to trip. This resulted in the two countries’ energy systems disco