Britain Narrowly Escaped a Grid Blackout in June 2026

East-west transmission wouldn't have helped here. France is less than an hour ahead, so the solar curve is going to look virtually identical. What really helped is that France had spare hydro capacity able to quickly compensate for the shortage. If anything, the UK's limited north-south transmission capacity making the use of Scotland's spare capacity impossible should be a bigger priority.

With the grid increasingly relying on decentralized solar and short-term battery storage, you just cannot operate it like you would with a bunch of on-demand essentially-unlimited fossil fuel plants. It is going to need a huge mentality shift from an operational perspective, and a large overhaul of the power trading market in general.

Not really! There were several systemic failures:

1. It happened due to forecasting errors. Nothing remarkable happened that day, there were no sudden station trips or natural disasters. The margin was gone mostly due to planned maintenances combined with incorrectly forecasting demand. Whether the root cause is decentralized PV or not, the core issue is that the lowest frequency ever recorded happened on a totally unremarkable day. That can't be said to be the system working correctly.

2. The UK had to suddenly cut exports that had already been agreed and paid for, outside of normal systems. That puts it in a bad situation in future where allies may now do the same in reverse. A sudden unannounced cut in exports can be absorbed by the European grid but might not be absorbed by the British grid, which is smaller.

3. There were no EMNs issued and in the aftermath whistleblowers inside NESO claimed control room staff had been forbidden from taking notes or letting people know what happened. Information about this came out via newspaper articles in a drip drip months after the event. We're talking about this now and not in June because of this. That lack of transparency can't be said to be the system working.

4. The French were able to ship power hundreds of kilometers across France and under the sea to the south of England, but the UK couldn't move power the much smaller difference from its own north to south. That's another form of planning failure.

> Removing solar isn't helpful (that would just move the problem to earlier in the day.)

That depends what you think the problem is. The root of the event was forecasting errors, and the root of those come from the apparent difficulty of predicting how decentralized solar behaves especially at a sub-region level. Removing solar, or simply having never built it at all, actually would fix that problem.

All of this was predicted decades ago by conservatives so it's no good to just despair that they will "make hay" from being right (nobody will benefit from a big UK blackout, it will be bad news for everyone). They warned repeatedly that putting too much solar/wind into the grid will destabilize it and create huge price increases. Both of those warnings have come true in Europe. Solar/wind aren't reliable and so need thermal/hydro that's staffed, warmed up and ready to spin at a moment's notice but government policy ignores this and the stresses are now showing - both engineering and political (the apparent need for whistleblowers shows this).

N.B. the root cause of the Iberian blackout was a solar farm malfunctioning and desynchronizing from the grid, and when the control room tried to bring gas generation back online to stabilize things they couldn't do it fast enough because the plant was cold. It had been taken offline in the morning to make way for solar.

Source: it was in the (local) news, plus I was in rather close proximity.