Pan-Iberian blackout

Works in Progress is no news source, but they’ve managed to publish an article on the topic within 24 hours:

Every country in the world has a grid designed around the large rotating generators used in nuclear, coal, and gas power plants. They rely on heat boiling water into steam to drive spinning turbines. These generators usually weigh over 100 tonnes and spin at over 3,000 revolutions per minute, meaning that they contain significant kinetic energy, like a very heavy spinning top. If supply drops, the rotor will begin to decelerate, but some of its momentum will be converted into electrical energy. This ‘inertia’ will buy the grid the few seconds it needs to activate its fast-response systems – deploying energy from battery storage and firing up small gas powered engines. This means that frequency should not fluctuate outside a small band even when a large generator trips. Solar panels, on the other hand, directly convert sunlight into electricity without the use of rotating turbines.

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The European Network of Transmission System Operators warned at the start of this year that: ‘Reduced system inertia is a natural consequence of the lower number of directly connected rotating masses of synchronous generators to the grid. The stability support traditionally granted by these generators … will no longer be available in an almost exclusively RES-dominated [renewable energy source] system. This will expose the electricity system to the risk of being unable to withstand out-of-range events like system splits that were previously manageable.’

This is in the context of Spain running entirely on renewable energy for the first time ever just few days before the blackout.

The article also discusses different possible solutions to the inertia problem.

Another aspect of the blackout is that if the problem was not fixed quickly, all the stuff running intermittently on generators would just shut down and restarting the grid from such a state is a lengthy, painful and often manual process. Excellent Practical Engineering has a video on the topic. It was shot when Russia started attacking energy infrastructure in Ukraine, but it comes handy in this case as well.

Luckily, we’ve avoided the nightmare scenario. That being said, I’ve already seen estimates that the blackout will cost Spain 0.5% of GDP in 2025. El País reports that at least five people have died. Just imagine what the impact would have been if the grid had to be blackstarted!

Here’s Luis Garicano with economist’s (or maybe recovering politician’s) take:

It is interesting to consider how we reached a point where discussing basic engineering realities became taboo. […]

In this environment, even raising questions about grid stability or reliability was met with accusations of climate skepticism or fossil fuel advocacy.

Many of us — myself included — assumed that grid operators, utilities, and industry would intervene if truly catastrophic policies were being implemented. We trusted that leaders like Angela Merkel and Mark Rutte would get sound advice and make sensible decisions. This faith in technocracy proved misplaced as political imperatives consistently overrode technical concerns.

Why did the simple message that the energy transition would be clean and, at the same time, good for jobs and energy security and growth take hold? Here is my hypothesis (I am writing a paper soon to be out arguing this). Politicians correctly identified that climate, with its slow to materialize and small domestic benefits, is a hard sell in any democratic polity. Voters understand that they can free-ride, and understand that they are unlikely to face themselves the true cost of climate change (which will fall on their children). To successfully push green policy, it was not possible to sell a complicated narrative. The message, as often in politics, became unidimensional: not only was green policy beneficial for the environment, but it would also create green jobs, higher growth, and was generally unimpeachable. Ifs and buts could not be acknowledged, lest voters start doubting a policy considered necessary. It is not a dissimilar story to many that have been at the root of the growing lack of confidence of voters in politicians and experts.

In other news, Euractiv reports that finger pointing has already begun in Spain:

As investigators begin the search to identify the root of the problem, the political stakes are high. Madrid presented a “regrettable image” to the world by mishandling the crisis, said Núñez Feijóo, leader of the centre-right opposition party Partido Popular, on Tuesday.

“What was once again demonstrated yesterday is that we have an excellent country and an incompetent government. I say this with considerable sadness”, Feijóo told Spanish broadcaster Telecinco.

Right-wing politicians hope to topple the left-wing government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Far-right Vox leader Santiago Abascal said the PM “takes advantage of the chaos” comparing him to a looter – “The worst for Sánchez is yet to come,” he said in the senate.

This is exactly the case of a technical problem, where only a cool, blameless analysis could lead to identifying the problems and adopting efficient measures to avoid such accidents in the future — trying to assign blame only leads to those involved covering their asses and hiding the important information. I’ve written about this problem just a few days ago.

So please, do have some respect for the folks who must have been working around the clock to fix the outage — let them do their work without intentionally trying to sabotage them.

The Joys of Immigration

Remaining in Spain, here’s a great podcast by Rasheed Griffith and Diego de la Cruz on the topic of immigration for Latin America to Spain:

As of 2025 […] nearly 20% of Spain’s population was born outside the country.

In Spain, with population of 50 million, that amounts to 10 million immigrants, which is a significant portion of the total immigration into Europe:

23% of all European naturalizations in the given year happen in Spain. […] In some years we've done 50% of them.

And most of those people are from Latin America.

Given all the bad news in media about the immigration to Europe, about the Islamic terrorism in France, foreign gangs in Sweden (from the right), mishandling of refugees and rise of populist anti-immigration parties (from the left), this largest immigration flow to Europe actually seems to work pretty well.

As for Spain, I don't think there was any contestation to this migration coming in from Latin America for a very long time because they're essentially filling in for jobs that Spaniards do not take up initially.

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However, the same is not necessarily true with the Northern African and Middle Eastern migrants.

There is contestation against that sort of migration, and that has become a bit more problematic because there is this sense that these migrants do not always integrate. These migrants take in public subsidies and money, and there is some truth. There is some propaganda behind that discourse.

[…]

Vox, which is the populist right in Spain, has spoken about this extensively, and it has caught on as one of its key or core messages. But I don't think they're targeting Latin Americans either in their discourses, it's mostly focused on the Northern African and Middle East countries, which essentially ties down to Moroccans.

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And just to give a quick number when it comes to this conversation globally. So people outside of Europe tend to, when they think migration issues, they often think the UK, or I think Germany, for example, now, especially with the AFD rise in particular. So Germany's population between 2000 and 2003 increased by 3%. During the same period, 2000 - 2003, Spain's population increased by 19%.

And yet, when you think of immigration problems, you don't think of Spain? You think Germany or you think the UK.

It’s a lot about the cultural homogeneity:

Latin Americans, who represent the bulk of the migration coming to Spain, speak the same language, pray to the same God, and dance to the same music.

[…]

Rasheed: Shakira will come to Madrid and perform 10 concerts in the Real Madrid stadium, and sell out all 10 concerts back to back.

At the same time, you would have Rosalía, a famous Spanish singer would go to Bogotá, sell out concerts every single time she's there.

Diego: And Latin Americans probably support Real Madrid, if they have good taste in football, if they don't, they probably support Barcelona.

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Rasheed: Spanish-born people listen to Latino music. Latino-born people listen to Spanish music.

Diego: The most popular show on Netflix that was ever produced in Spanish was called "Money Heist" in Spanish, "La Casa de Papel"; it was produced in Spain, where it was not a hit. Latin Americans made it a hit, and then Spaniards started watching.

"Elite" is a teen drama, a high school drama. Highly sexualized, though, for high school. But my high school wasn't like. But the Latin American population that watches this on Netflix made it such a hit that it became a bigger hit here. Reggaeton singers reference the Spanish actresses on the show. So that's how much the cultures overlap. It's as if you're speaking of the same conversation. I have students in my university coming from both sides of the ocean, and it's like teaching the same group.

In a way, Spain is better integrated with Latin America than with the rest of Europe.

That being said, this huge immigration flow is not the only one that works well in Europe. There are also Brazilians coming to Portugal, or, on the other side of the continent — mostly in Poland and Germany — also the millions of the Ukrainian refugees.

Landammann is a womann!

Canton Appenzell Innerrhoden, the last in Switzerland that gave women the voting rights (1991), has a new president (Landamann) and for the first time it’s a woman.

Switzerland is often mocked for introducing universal suffrage on the federal level only in 1971. But in fact, it’s a pretty impressive achievement. Swiss constitution can be changed only via referendum, which means that the majority of voters (all men at the time) must have voted to give women the voting rights. That’s an equivalent of white people in pre-civil-war US south having a referendum and freeing the slaves.

Elsewhere in the world, the universal suffrage was imposed on the voters from above and, more likely than not, against their will.

I often think about where’s the trade-off between the resentment caused by such imposition by an act of parliament and the harm caused by the victory being delayed for one additional day. Switzerland is an interesting case study here. Should other countries be more like Switzerland? Or should rather Switzerland be more like the other countries?

A hole in a child’s heart

Excessive regulation can have pretty terrible effects. GDPR, For instance, EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, caused web traffic and revenues to fall by 10-15%. Market became more concentrated, with large firms, that can afford the cost of compliance, gaining larger market share. Venture capital deals in fell by 26.1%.

And that’s exactly the kind of argument that nobody, except few economists and progress studies weirdos, gets worked up about.

An ordinary person does not think on the margin. They hear that website revenue fell by 12% and they think: “Well, it’s good for privacy. We can afford that.” But what they really mean is that they personally can afford it. They don’t consider that for every slump in the economy, there are people on the margin, those who would have had a house otherwise, but now they are homeless, those who would have got medical care otherwise, but now they won’t.

Taking the worse possible anecdote and presenting it prominently feels like cheating, but it is likely the only way to convey the above feeling to the general public. And Die Zeit has done just that. The piece is called ominously “A hole in a child’s heart” (in German, beyond paywall):

Haas wanted to use a small pair of forceps to pinch off a piece of heart muscle tissue for examination—normally no problem. But this time, he was missing the right guide sheath. It’s a curved piece of plastic through which he inserts the forceps to the correct location in the heart. The tried-and-tested sheath is no longer available; it has disappeared from the market. Haas had to improvise, using a different model. Its tip, however, is significantly harder. "And then, despite all precautions, this tip suddenly made a hole in the heart."

A hole in the heart is an emergency; it's a matter of life and death. The child's chest had to be opened immediately, and the hole had to be sutured under high pressure. All because a piece of plastic worth a few euros was missing.

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[At fault is EU’s] Medical Devices Regulation MFDR. This 2017 regulation stipulates that medical devices must be recertified every five years. Now it's taking full effect, and it's clear that for many manufacturers, the complex certification process isn't worthwhile. This is especially true for rarely sold products, such as those for baby surgeries, which manufacturers are now discontinuing in droves.

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The doctors were forced to establish a kind of emergency aid community. They have medical supplies transported from town to town by taxi, if necessary. "We help each other out and barter like we used to in the Eastern Germany," says Haas.