Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal • Hacker News Board

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#251

Post by littlestymaar » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #178

littlestymaar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is Dunning-Kruger effect in action… Believe it or not, but maintaining an electricity grid is a massive undertaking, and the people in charge of it knows the topic much better than you do. The problem isn't a market problem, it's a physics problem: having a synchronized grid of AC current with many producers over a wide area is a real challenge, even when the underlying issue is resolved it takes a lot o…

Having such interdependent grids seems like a market or political problem not a physics problem to me.

The reason why we interconnect grids has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with physics, politics can sometimes lead to disconnections (like how the Baltic states disconnected from the Russian grid earlier this year) but it comes with great cost and involves careful planning (the fact that the Baltic states remained connected for almost three years after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give you an hint of how challenging it was).

The bigger the grid, the more efficient and resilient it is (and managing electric grids on islands is a nightmare), but it comes with a significant complexity and means restarting from zero is harder.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#252

Post by Calwestjobs » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #179

Calwestjobs wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Currently says due to power outage data might be inaccurate for Spain and Portugal.

NO. data are either accurate all the time or it is scam / bad marketing.... what are you saying ?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#253

Post by red_admiral » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack.

There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages

I remember the day when the Swiss railway power network went down for a day (in 2005) because one power line was down for maintenance and someone pressed the wrong button and produced a short circuit somewhere else. It's a bit like the incidents in planes were one engine has a problem and the crew shut down the other one by mistake.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#254

Post by DebtDeflation » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

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.

I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#255

Post by bilekas » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #183

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.

> 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…

> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.

The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#256

Post by throw0101a » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:28 PM UTC

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!

> 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!

Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

North America is organized in regional grids:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#257

Post by brohee » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

deeThrow94 wrote: post #45

atemerev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parts of EU.

Ok...? Is there like more to this narrative or are we supposed to buy that russia just hates all of europe for being europe now? Whatever happened to the "rational actor" canard?

Some people close to power in Russia (Dugin) actually seem to believe Russia natural range is from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

"Putin channels ultranationalist discourse, such as the Izborsk Club and the neo-fascist Alexander Dugin, in calling for quasi-religious rebirth of Russian dominance, an agenda that seeks to swallow “Little Russia” into a renewed Russian empire that stretches from “Lisbon to Vladivostok,” a phrase popularized by Dugin and repeated by Putin."

https://brill.com/view/journals/joah/4/1-2/article-p126_10.x...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#258

Post by bilekas » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

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.

That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..

> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#259

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

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!

US, no, Texas and California are .. not doing so well.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#260

Post by immibis » Mon, Apr 28, 2025, 12:30 PM UTC

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!

There was a very famous one in 2003.

As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.