Analysis: ‘Spain was running its grid with very little of what’s called ‘dispatchable spinning generation’ – Therefore, power plants were not able to ‘quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable’

Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little of what's called "dispatchable spinning generation" (also known as inertia). ... "Dispatchable spinning generation" means power plants, like gas or nuclear, that can quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable. The name "spinning" refers to the turbines that traditional generation plants such as coal, gas, nuclear that use spinning turbines help with this. Traditional plants provide this with their spinning turbines, but renewables don't, making the grid more fragile if you don't have a way to very rapidly load-balance in the case of an outage. This likely contributed to the outage that hit Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, as the grid couldn't handle sudden disruptions well.

By Marc Morano

April 29, 2025
10:45 am

Would large scale Bitcoin mining deployment have prevented the power outages in Spain/Portugal?

Short answer: “Yes”

Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little of what’s called “dispatchable spinning generation” (also known as inertia).

The image below… pic.twitter.com/3Q10ZoAqv8

— Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) April 29, 2025

GRID INERTIA & SPANISH BLACKOUT:

An analogy in an article from @ENEC_UAE CEO Mohammad al-Hammadi contains this useful metaphor, from @QvistStaffan's team at Quantified Carbon.

Small or medium-sized disturbances on the grid become very difficult to manage and can cascade into… https://t.co/j8QUsogBS9 https://t.co/y5mpfHb5Fk

— Mark Nelson (@energybants) April 28, 2025

Seems the Spain blackout was caused by a spike of solar power on the grid, a problem that was highlighted and forewarned.

Going woke now can take a country to the dark ages pic.twitter.com/V4aCL32cWe

— Vitamvivere_1 (@Vitamvivere_1) April 29, 2025

Analysis: ‘Spain was running its grid with very little of what’s called ‘dispatchable spinning generation’ – Therefore, power plants were not able to ‘quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable’

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Analysis: ‘Spain was running its grid with very little of what’s called ‘dispatchable spinning generation’ – Therefore, power plants were not able to ‘quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable’

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