121–130 of 146 posts
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Decentralizing would mean more frequent local power outages as you cannot meet demand with local generation. Decentralizing would force lower efficiency on power generation.
Decentralization doesn't mean you can't have a market for energy, and interconnections.
I just find the timing amusing to be honest. If both Russia and the US are vulnerable to cyber attacks on the power grid, there is no doubt in my mind that Argentina is much more vulnerable.
There was a coronal hole open these days, any chance this is related to sun activity?
seems unlikely given the very low sun spot activity in our current minimum
Power grid hacking exercise?
We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days. After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood c…
It's very sad that while you are going through all this, in other parts of the world where the situation is far better, the only interest in Venezuela seems to be how they can use it to support their political claims. For instance in Spain, leftist people refuse to acknowledge how bad the situation is because they link Chavez and Maduro with their ideas and somehow think that it would show weakness in their ideology,…
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It isn't really though. A cascading failure can knock out an entire grid. The Northeast blackout is an example. A line goes out. while (there some lines are still live): The current redistributes itself among neighboring lines. Neighboring lines trip end BlackStart() BlackStart() is fun. Having your plants and grid down is like having a dead battery (plants use ~30% of the electricity they gen on themselves) and no o…
What do you do for a living, and how can I learn more about it? This stuff fascinates me and you've explained it really well.
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> south of Brazil That sounded strange to me, since Brazil imports power from Uruguay and Argentina through somewhat small DC links, and if only them failing is enough to cause a blackout in Brazil, something was probably not configured correctly. So I went looking, and according to https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2019/06/16/apagao-deixa-m... "deixou sem energia toda a Argentina, Uruguai, Paraguai e sul do Brasil"…
According to Paraguayan news [1] (Spanish), the failure was on the Argentina side of the Yacyretá hydroelectric (which is shared by Argentina and Paraguay), not at the plant itself. Only a few Paraguayan towns close to the hydroelectric itself were affected, while Argentina and countries it resells electricity to were out of power.
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It's very sad that while you are going through all this, in other parts of the world where the situation is far better, the only interest in Venezuela seems to be how they can use it to support their political claims. For instance in Spain, leftist people refuse to acknowledge how bad the situation is because they link Chavez and Maduro with their ideas and somehow think that it would show weakness in their ideology,…
In the United States it's the same, but the left don't even take it as an example of socialist failures. Instead they attribute the state of Venezuela to having been the consequence of American interventionism. It's actually a tragedy, because the lessons to be learned from the failure of socialism come at the cost of countless lives, the least we could do is come away with something of utility.
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In the event that there's a phase mismatch, I assume that gets physically transmitted back to the generating device? (Mode subject to type of device) Or am I over-trivializing it? E.g., will an out of phase turbine have a physical resistance against it, as a consequence of the rest of the grid?
Of a sort. If it's a phase mismatch of a few degrees, the generator may attempt to physically rotate to match the phase. This kills the generator. Also, less amusingly, anyone nearby at the time. If it's a larger mismatch, then that's more likely to fry the wiring before too much other damage happens. On rare occasions generators get connected while they are (exactly) 180 degrees out of phase; this is a dead short, a…
Diesel units in hospitals will sync to each other as much as 30 degrees out of sync because just get thing online because it the load is critical.
I've also been told two second hand reports of the breaker closing drastically out of sync. One was a person closing the breaker manually when the unit was stopped. It essentially just puts a fault on the machine and it trips right away. Another case the close circuit was poorly designed and has only one relay, whose contacts eventually failed but happened to fail welded closed, and in conjunction with a poorly maintained breaker that developed a variable delay between the close coil being energized and actually closing. It made a big boom like faults do but the unit synced after the relay was replaced and breaker maintained and is fine.
Maybe medium and larger units with more inertia have tighter tolerances. Over certainly heard of broken shafts and generators being ejected through concrete walls.
A nice party trick is to do phase matching instead of syncing with slip so I can keep the unit exactly in phase with the grid as long as the grid doesn't wobble too much. This keeps the sync scope needle exactly at 12 o clock so you can close the breaker to put the unit online at will. Unfortunately i don't often get the budget for The additional inputs to get the nice phase difference signal so I can't perform my trick.