Reading List 05/03/25
Blackout in Spain and Portugal, Chinese robot adoption, energy maneuverability theory, the Florida real estate market, battery manufacturing cancellations, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at the blackout in Spain and Portugal, Chinese robot adoption, energy maneuverability theory, the Florida real estate market, battery manufacturing cancellations, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer piece about WWII shipbuilding that will be out next week.
One other item of note, I was on Packy McCormick’s podcast Hyperlegible last week.
Spain and Portugal blackout
On Monday a huge power occurred in Spain and Portugal, with much of the countries without power for hours. From the Financial Times:
Spain and Portugal on Monday were hit by a complete power outage, leaving trains stranded in tunnels, office workers stuck in lifts and mobile phone services cut, in the biggest blackout in Europe for two decades…
At 12.33pm local time on Monday, the frequency on Spain’s electricity grid suddenly dropped, from the 50 hertz level at which the grid’s operator tries to maintain it, to 49 hertz, according to Aurora Energy Research, a consultancy.
A move bigger than 0.1 hertz forces many power stations to automatically switch off for safety reasons. Any loss of power in Spain has an immediate knock-on effect in Portugal, which relies heavily on its neighbour for electricity supplies.
What triggered the frequency to fall in the first instance is not yet clear. On Tuesday, Eduardo Prieto, director of operational services at Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica, blamed an unexpected loss of generation in south-west Spain, home to a lot of solar plants. Other theories include electricity cable damage.
BBC has a nice graphic showing the sudden decline and resumption in power demand.
Much of the blame is being placed on excessive use of solar energy, which (by default) doesn’t have the grid-stabilizing effects that power sources which use large, rotating masses (such as anything with an electric generator) do. From another Financial Times article:
Spanish grid operator Red Eléctrica has said that it still does not know the exact cause of the outage. Chief executive Beatriz Corredor denied that renewables “made the system more vulnerable” in an interview with El País on Wednesday.
But André Merlin, the founder and former chief executive of France’s grid operator RTE, told the Financial Times: “Two-thirds of [Spain’s electricity] production was made up of non-controllable resources. These non-controllable resources . . . don’t contribute to the stability of the internal electrical system.”
On Twitter Mark Nelson shared a nice graphic illustrating the importance of inertia to stabilize the grid.
Small or medium-sized disturbances on the grid become very difficult to manage and can cascade into wider instability and outages when the grid is in a low inertia condition, as was the case Monday in Spain just before the massive ongoing blackout
But batteries can also act as frequency stabilizers, and apparently Spain makes it somewhat difficult to use batteries to stabilize the electrical grid. From Austin Vernon on Twitter:
Fun fact: 1 megawatt of batteries provides the same amount of frequency regulation as 10 megawatts of spinning generation.
Another fun fact: Spain has been slow to change the rules that allow batteries to participate in frequency regulation markets.
Don't be like Spain!
Eric Schmidt on space-based data centers
Several weeks ago we noted that Eric Schmidt had recently become CEO of struggling rocket startup Relativity Space:
Relativity Space started as one of a crop of start-ups angling to manufacture rockets that can carry smaller payloads of around two tons or less, up to low to medium Earth orbit. It has now moved to focus on medium- to heavy-lift rockets with a higher payload capacity. Some of these companies focus on building cheaper, reusable rockets to launch commercial payloads — usually satellites — into space for a fraction of the cost of legacy manufacturers that use pricier, disposable rockets…
In recent years, Relativity Space has run into challenges. It launched its small Terran 1 rocket once, in 2023, and it failed soon after liftoff. A month later, Relativity Space announced it would retire Terran 1 to focus on the Terran R, a larger rocket that would compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The start-up has moved away from focusing entirely on 3-D printed materials and has begun incorporating more traditionally made parts in building its rockets.
At the time it wasn’t amazingly obvious what was motivating Schmidt. But apparently one reason is that Schmidt sees space-based data centers as a way to resolve the data center power problem. Via Twitter:
We previously briefly looked at space-based data centers here. Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of space startup Varda, comes out as skeptical.
SemiAnalysis on Microsoft data centers
Also on the subject data centers, SemiAnalysis has a deep look at Microsoft’s data center spending:
The market has been focusing on “2GW of lease cancellations” which only covers non-binding LOIs, not firm contracts. This fails to mention that Microsoft has ~5GW of pre-leased capacity under binding contracts that will start operations between 2025 and 2028. In reality, Microsoft walked away from significantly more than 2GW of non-binding contracts over the last 2 quarters. The firm was in discussion with virtually every single vendor for capacity in mid-2024 and has since completely frozen new leasing activity.
While the leasing slowdown is material, these changes are not material to the short and medium term and only impact 2027+. The more important slowdown of Microsoft’s changes to their self-build datacenter plans. Our research indicates that Microsoft is freezing 1.5GW of near term self-build datacenter projects – projects that were previously scheduled to go online in 2025 and 2026.
Microsoft is freezing multiple (but not all) self-build projects across the globe with an immediate impact on capacity for 2025 and 2026 – as highlighted earlier to our Datacenter Model clients. Numerous multi-hundred-MW Microsoft campuses have shown underwhelming progress, despite our research indicating that these projects have secured energy and all necessary approvals. This is a deliberate move by Microsoft to slow the expansion of its self-built capacity.
In other data center news, Meta is upping its data center spend for this year.
Chinese robotics investment
The New York Times has a good piece about robot adoption in China. It’s still perhaps underappreciated the degree to which China is no longer just a source of cheap labor, and that their manufacturing processes are highly advanced and automated (increasingly with Chinese-built robots and automation). Robots are being used not just in large-scale operations but in small companies with just a few employees:
Elon Li’s curbside workshop in Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southeastern China, has 11 workers who cut and weld metal to make inexpensive ovens and barbecue equipment. He is now preparing to pay $40,000 to a Chinese company for a robotic arm with a camera. The device uses artificial intelligence to observe how a worker welds the sides of an oven, and then duplicates the action with minimal human intervention.
Only four years ago, the same system was available only from foreign robot companies and cost nearly $140,000. “Before, I never would have imagined investing in automation,” Mr. Li said, adding that a human employee “can only work for eight hours a day, but a machine can work 24 hours.”
…In Ningbo, a huge factory for Zeekr, a Chinese electric carmaker, had 500 robots when it opened four years ago. Now there are 820, and many more are planned.
Cheerfully trilling Kenny G tunes to warn any people of their approach, robot carts haul aluminum ingots to an automated elevator, which lifts the blocks of metal to a furnace at the top of a 40-foot-tall Chinese-made machine. Once molten, the aluminum is cast into the shapes of various car body panels and other components. More robot carts, and the occasional human driving a forklift, take the components to a warehouse.
…Car factories in the United States also use automation, but much of the equipment comes from China. Most of the world’s car assembly plants built in the past 20 years were in China, and an automation industry grew up around them.
Chinese companies also bought overseas suppliers of advanced robotics, like Kuka of Germany, and moved much of their operations to China. When Volkswagen opened an electric car factory a year ago in Hefei, it had only one robot from Germany and 1,074 robots made in Shanghai.