"But what about renewables? Given Spain’s status as a European leader in solar and wind, some have wondered if green energy might have played a part. Both the government and Redeia (the grid operator) are adamant: renewable energy was not the culprit. In fact, at the moment the grid crashed, renewables were supplying a massive 59% of Spain’s electricity. As Redeia’s own operations chief put it, “Had conventional power plants done their job, there would have been no blackout.”
The vast majority of radio listening during the blackout was to FM
https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/spanish-radio-figures/
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I agree Roger - AM should be kept alive, for this & many other reasons. LW Radio 4 could be kept on with a smaller TX not so greedy of power. For one example for the UK.
It seems the Spanish fault, was the sudden loss of a lot of available power from some Solar power, probably from some combining station with a fault.
This caused the rest of the system, to be unable to meet the load, 50hz frequency would have dropped to a lower frequency & other generators would have automatically disconnected as well - along with interconnections to the rest of Europe - thus Spain ended up with virtually no power, apart from standby Generators for Hospitals & UPS systems.
That's as I understand it from the info from Red Electric.
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Interesting to see that, during yesterday's power cut (where did 'outage'come from - Oh yes, the US!) a Spanish Government spokesman suggested that people should turn on their AM radios if they had one!
Given the developed world's reliance on a fragile technology, maybe some governments may think again (or maybe not!)
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Long Live AM - RogerT 29/4/2025, 9:47:11
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