SOME SPECULATIONS ABOUT THAT EUROPEAN BLACKOUT

Last week, almost in the middle of our make-up vidchat on Monday, reports began to filter through the chatroom that there was a widespread and extensive electrical power blackout across Europe. This came on the heels of a blog I had written the previous week about Chinese electrical transformers that had been discovered to contain backdoors. This in an of itself would not be all that surprising, because electrical equipment like that should have some means of being shut down if emergency circumstances require it. But the impression conveyed by those stories was that the "backdoors" in question were more along the lines of "secret passageways in the walls" than publicly known access. The implication was clear to many people: China's government was up to its usual tricks and could shut down the West's power grids any time it chose to do so, forgetting all the while that China's chief trading partner was precisely the West.  But one must suppose that power-mad greedy grifters are capable of anything. Just witness the contemporary history of the U.S.A.

But there are stories that are now beginning to circulate on what may have happened. When the phenomenon first occurred, the public story being circulated as to its cause was that there was "an upper atmospheric disturbance."  This led many to suspect some sort of sudden solar activity, but that did not appear to be forthcoming. Then we were told of "sudden oscillations" that began to appear a few hours before the actual black. (This story sared by many of you, this version by E.E. with our thanks):

What caused the Spain and Portugal blackouts? Experts say incident is a warning

Firstly, note that the blackout covered virtually all of the Iberian peninsula, and it needs to be said: digital "currency" advocates take note :

Millions across Spain and Portugal were left in the dark on Monday as an unprecedented power outage brought much of the Iberian peninsula to a standstill.

It took almost 23 hours for Spain’s electrical grid to declare that systems were back up and running as normal, with the outage affecting traffic lights, street lamps, payment terminals, and screens. Domestic and international transport was badly hit with metro systems grinding to a halt and communication networks faltering, leaving many wondering what had gone wrong. Hundreds of flights were canceled at airports across Spain and Portugal.

So then we got the "solar power usage plunge for five minutes" explanation:

The issue has been narrowed to two separate incidents of power generation loss in the south west within seconds of each other that caused instability in the electrical systems and then an immediate disconnection from the French network for almost an hour.

In a span of just five minutes, between 12.30pm and 12.35 pm local time on Monday, solar PV generation plunged by more than 50 per cent. A sudden outage saw the equivalent of 60 per cent of demand in Spain drop out within five seconds.

Mr Sanchez said: "We will find out what happened in those five seconds."

And that, of course, explains exactly nothing. Not to be bested on the "nonsense-as-explanations" front, the Portuguese electrical power authorities gave us the "atmospheric extreme temperature fluctuations causing extreme oscillations" explanation:

Meanwhile, Portugal's operator, REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionais), initially suggested a "rare atmospheric phenomenon" in Spain, involving extreme temperature variations, could have caused vibrations in high-voltage lines.

Spain agreed:

Experts say a proper investigation will take time – and that the cause remains uncertain. Spain's grid operator, Red Eléctrica de España (REE), spoke of a "very strong oscillation in the electrical network" that led to the country's disconnection from the wider European power system.

But a Chinese professor at the University of Cardiff was not buying, and said it was nonsense, unless of course there were factors like high winds and an extending case of Nuttyfornia-style anomalies with the power grid:

But many experts are sceptical of those claims.

“I am not familiar with this term,” Dr Jianzhong Wu, professor of multi-vector energy systems at University of Cardiff, said. “It is not widely used or frequently encountered in power system engineering.

“‘Induced atmospheric vibration’ could mean unusual physical movements of power lines caused by rapid and extreme changes in atmospheric conditions, such as temperature shifts or localised weather phenomena,” he explains.

“These vibrations can alter the electrical properties of transmission lines or trigger protective mechanisms designed to prevent damage, leading to unexpected disconnections. Alternatively, it could refer to unusual changes in electricity demand and generation caused by rapid atmospheric shifts.”

Dr Wu says there isn’t enoughh information available to make an assessment on the cause.

But a Spanish criminal court wasn't having any of that either:

On Tuesday, Spain’s top criminal court said it would investigate the huge power outage to find out if a cyberattack against Spanish critical infrastructure may have caused the blackout in nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula.

If that were the case, Judge Jorge Calama would investigate it as a crime of terrorism, a court document showed.

However, REE has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack in its preliminary assessment.

Notably, we're not told why REE ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack.  Some people focused on the sudden drop in solar power being supplied as the explanation, but that too was quickly scotched:

With both Spain and Portugal increasingly relying on renewable energy sources like solar and wind, questions have been raised about their role in the outage. Experts were quick to dismiss this as the primary cause, however.

Daniel Muir, a senior European power analyst at S&P Global, told Politico that "the nature and scale of the outage makes it unlikely that the volume of renewables was the cause."

“There was sufficient conventional generation available, with nuclear, hydro, cogeneration and thermal technologies all on the system prior to the event and ... available to the operator,” he said.

But to add significant strangeness to this whole affair, V.T. sent along the following article (with our gratitude) about some electrical anomalies in Great Britain prior to the blackout:

Britain struck by unusual power activity hours before blackouts in Spain and Portugal

Note the following:

Britain’s grid operator has confirmed it is investigating unexplained changes in electricity frequency seen early on Sunday morning and also in the evening. The system’s frequency must be kept within specific limits for the lights to remain on.

Control room staff noticed the first incident at around 2am at the Keadby 2 gas-fired power plant in Lincolnshire, as well as the Viking Link interconnector between the UK and Denmark. Then, power plant failures were again seen at around 6pm.

But, while all that is true, it's not related at all to the power blackout:

However, a spokesperson said it is “highly unlikely” the events over the weekend are connected to each other or to the massive system failures that hit the electricity network in Spain, Portugal and parts of France on Monday.

Again, we're not told why they don't think the incidents are not connected; we're merely told that they are not connected. Talk about a crazy coincidence theory!

Finally, E.E. also sent along this article (again, with our gratitude), and it rewards careful reading, for it at least attempts to explain those "atmospheric vibrations" and why they might be related to the black out, and, incidentally, it affords a basis for our high octane speculation of the day:

Did ‘induced atmospheric vibration’ cause blackouts in Europe? An electrical engineer explains the phenomenon

Note what is said about those atmospheric vibrations:

Wind can also cause transmission lines to vibrate. These vibrations are characterised by either high amplitude and low frequency (known as “conductor galloping”), or low amplitude and high frequency (known as “aeolian vibrations”).

These vibrations are a significant problem for grid operators. They can place increased stress on grid infrastructure, potentially leading to blackouts.

To reduce the risk of vibration, grid operators often use wire stabilisers known as “stock bridge dampers”.

Then there's those high atmospheric vibrations, which, let it be noted, are longitudinal waves of compression and rarefaction :

In fact, “induced atmospheric vibration” is not a commonly used term, but it seems likely the explanation was intended to refer to physical processes climate scientists have known about for quite some time.

In simple terms, it seems to refer to wavelike movements or oscillations in the atmosphere, caused by sudden changes in temperature or pressure. These can be triggered by extreme heating, large-scale energy releases (such as explosions or bushfires), or intense weather events.

So far, so good. But this is where it gets very interesting, for what causes these atmospheric vibrations?

These types of atmospheric waves are usually called gravity waves, thermal oscillations or acoustic-gravity waves. While the phrase “induced atmospheric vibration” is not formally established in meteorology, it seems to describe this same family of phenomena.

The article even follows this up with a picture of clouds showing the "gravity" or "gravito-acoustic" waves as they travel along the wave fronts, rather like a surfer riding an ocean wave. To call such waves "gravity" waves or "gravito-acoustic" waves may seem at first glance to be quite a stretch, until one remembers that the atmosphere is nothing but matter, with a mass, and mass responds to gravity's effects by concentrating (compression). Its affects in the atmosphere are thus almost exactly the same as sound (or music): the longitudinal wave compresses and rarefacts the physical medium.

So how does this relate to our high octane speculation of the day?

Very simply, and this may be shown by asking the following question: what might cause such gravito-acoustic waves to form? They don't just "happen". There are three potential answers to this question: (1) they are the result of natural geophysical and local solar system processes (some of which we do not completely understand), or (2) they may be the result - whether intended or unintended - of the human creation and use of technologies such as ionospheric heaters, which can create and steer systems of high and low pressures, and presumably, oscillate them, or (3)  and my most favored explanation: they are the result of the combination of the first two. In other words, we have the technology to do (2), but we do not yet understand precisely its effects on complex planetary (and solar-) systems as in number (1).

Then, of course, we might entertain possibilities (4) and (5), with number (4) being a cyber-attack or event, perhaps being performed in conjunction with (2) and the deliberate manipulation of such atmospheric waves by technologies, which would lead to possibility (5) the joint and coordinated use of cyber attacks with systems engineering technologies such as ionospheric heaters to study the results not only on the electrical system but on the human system.

Given all the head-scratching revealed in the articles, plus the fact that none of them are entertaining the possibility of numbers (2), (3), and (5) is an indicator that there is a potential agenda afoot, one perhaps revealed by the closing paragraphs of the last article:

Under growing environmental and electrical stress, centralised energy networks are dangerously vulnerable. The increasing electrification of buildings, the rapid uptake of electric vehicles, and the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources have placed unprecedented pressure on traditional grids that were never designed for this level of complexity, dynamism or centralisation.

Continuing to rely on centralised grid structures without fundamentally rethinking resilience puts entire regions at risk — not just from technical faults, but from environmental volatility.

The way to avoid such catastrophic risks is clear: we must embrace innovative solutions such as community microgrids. These are decentralised, flexible and resilient energy networks that can operate independently when needed.

Strengthening local energy autonomy is key to building a secure, affordable and future-ready electricity system.

We have too much "environmental stress" (which we're probably causing via those ionopsheric heaters and other systems engineering technologies from the black projects world), so we need "microgrids" that built local resilience and redundancy into an otherwise centralized system. In other words, we need lots of local reactors - thorium, fusion, you name it - to meet the enormous power demands our soon-to-be-realized-artificial intelligence-and-cashless-societies-fantasies require. Watch for it, because they'll start pushing the microgrid concept in order to "sell" digital currencies as being "safe".

Wait for it, folks, because that's my bet as to what's perhaps really going on. Time of course, will tell...

See you on the flip side...

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