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German t-online.de news portal here reports how yesterday large areas of central and southern Germany saw the power fail yesterday due to “snow and storms.”

In some locations the power was out for hours, t-online.de reports. Of course snow itself has little to do with the power going out. Rather the power outages are signs of an increasingly unstable power grid due in large part to the wildly fluctuating feed-in of volatile wind and solar energy.

Yesterday late evening’s storm and its winds led to wild fluctuation in the European power grid at around 8 p.m. The grid frequency critically dropped well below the 50 Hz value, which meant more power was being consumed than generated.

Austrian power grid expert Herbert Saurugg tweeted:

Und schon wieder ein Rekordausschlag bei der Frequenz um 20 Uhr: 49,856 Hz. Damit wurden 2/3 der Reserve eingesetzt 😤. Bei 49,80 Hz treten die erste Lastabwürfe ein. pic.twitter.com/YkRWonjmMA — HerbertSaurugg (@herbertsaurugg) February 27, 2020

In English: “And again a record low peak frequency at 8 p.m.: 49.856 Hz. That’s two-thirds of the reserve power used. At 49.80 Hz the first load drops occur.”

That means had the frequency dropped just a bit more, possible emergency grid switchoffs would have been needed, and so a widespread blackout was narrowly avoided.

The blackouts that did occur led to “many disruptions” to rail and auto transportation, t-online writes.

As of the time of writing this article 12:55 CET, hours-long power outages continued to hamper much of southern Germany:

Image screenshot: https://stromausfall.org