[spspeaker]

Grid forming services are indeed paid for, according to this very same article:

> Power plants "should have controlled voltage and, moreover, many of them were economically remunerated to do so. They did not absorb all the reactive power that was expected," Aagesen said.

[toomuchtodo]

It is possible I misread or misunderstood something on the topic with regards to compensation for grid services in the article. With that said, before jumping to solutioning (although I am a strong proponent of batteries based on their performance, capabilities, and cost as of this comment), I would like to see more information and data as to which generators were signaled to change their output when the grid started to fault and were unable or unwilling to (failure to appropriately manage output and/or field excitation to absorb reactive power, etc) and if improvements to the electricity market are required. Without root cause, we cannot effectively solve.

[toomuchtodo]

Spain had resources to prevent a blackout, but they didn't respond - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44311685 - June 2025

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/06/spanish-blackout-rep...

> The Iberian grid is capable of handling this sort of thing. But the grid operator only scheduled 10 power plants to handle voltage regulation on the 28th, which the report notes is the lowest total it had committed to in all of 2025 up to that point. The report found that a number of those plants failed to respond properly to the grid operators, and a few even responded in a way that contributed to the surging voltages.

> As the voltages rose, they approached a threshold at which power plants need to disconnect from the grid to protect their equipment. But the report found that some of the plants disconnected before the threshold was reached. And with each disconnection, the voltages on the grid continued to rise, causing plants to disconnect in multiple Spanish provinces. At that point, things spun out of control, with the grid frequency dropping. That led to it falling out of sync with its connection to France, causing the shutdown. The blackout had long since passed the point of intervention.

> It may be tempting to view the cascading failures as a sign of incompetence on the part of the grid operators. But these are the same operators who managed to restore the process of black-starting the grid to normal operations within a matter of hours. There should (and undoubtedly will) be questions about the low number of plants dedicated to grid stabilization, but that can be handled with a simple policy fix. An equally focused correction can likely address any problems at the problematic facility that triggered the whole chain of events.

> The real issue is why so much hardware on the grid didn't follow its operating specifications, either disconnecting early or failing to respond properly to the calls for stabilization.

[toomuchtodo]

The official report on the blackout in Spain and Portugal was just released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44300906 - June 2025