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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

bbc.com

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#241

Post by throw0101b »

leereeves wrote: post #181
pmlnr wrote: post #167

> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.

> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.

I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#243

Post by BozeWolf »

bradly wrote: post #207
lpapez wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion. When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

The gas station I worked at used a paper bag when offline. Good, not great.

How did the pumps work when there was no power?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#244

Post by pcblues »

A line that disturbed me with just how widespread the outage is. (And also people will die from it in all sorts of weird ways)

"In an update, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica says it's beginning to recover power in the NORTH and SOUTH of the country."

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#247

Post by hem777 »

UltraSane wrote: post #156
chii wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads. In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.

because installing and monitoring 1 million small batteries is vastly more work than 100 huge batteries.

Not if 1 million people install and monitor them instead of 100 people.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#248

Post by paganel »

nicoburns wrote: post #216
moooo99 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to love those expensive solutions though. I know so many people who invested in overly expensive battery storage systems for their solar. Power in Germany is expensive, but even with that expensive power many of those battery systems will never hit a positive ROI. But they’re still happy for the feeling of being „independent“. I’ll turn 26 in a few months. The first time I experienced a power outage in my…

It's likely that battery backup solutions won't be expensive for long. Battery prices have been falling exponentially similar to Solar, and there is no reason to think it will slow down anytime soon (there is still room for improvement just from economies of scale). I predict that home batteries will become a "no brainer" from a financial perspective (for anyone who has the upfront capital to purchase them) within th…

Not all of us live in (semi-)detached homes, and I’m also not sure how one would implement this at the building-of-appartments level, as in, who’s going to pay for it and how do you handle the battery storage capacity for hundreds of apartments from the same building in a safe and cheap-enough manner?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#249

Post by bombcar »

ironick09 wrote: post #237
mschuster91 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now. Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much…

As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!

The US has three “independent” grids so losing them all would be hard. But I believe at times Texas has gotten close, and East went pretty dark at some point recently.

CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#250

Post by pjc50 »

carlos-menezes wrote: post #147
EZ-E wrote: post #14

Looking forward to the postmortem

Who would be responsible for writing the postmortem? Are they required to?

I would expect the Spanish parliament to have some means of summoning an explanation, via its local regulator and grid authority. https://www.ree.es/en/about-us/regulatory-framework
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