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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#271

Post by leomca »

terom wrote: post #225
brohee wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit : I was misreading the confusing Rte site... Entsoe actually a lot more readable. France went from importing to exporting around the incident. https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-... https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

That graph doesn't seem to make a very clear distinction between historical, real-time and predicted values... I think the event happened at 12:30 local time or so. There seems to be some kind of recurrent daily pattern where the French - Spanish interconnect switches from Spain -> France imports to France -> Spain exports at around that time, and then back again in the late afternoon.

Yes, France was importing 884MW from Spain at 12:45, 198MW at 13:00, no net flow at 13:15, and Spain has been importing up to 265MW since: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#272

Post by throw0101a »

lpapez wrote: post #189
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.

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.

> When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#274

Post by bbddg »

bilekas wrote: post #258
leereeves wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#275

Post by dijit »

libertine wrote: post #170
amarcheschi wrote: post #107

Some parts of Spain are slowly coming back online https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267

The crazy thing is how is Twitter still being used to communicate these events.

Agreed.

It's crazy how momentum can carry a business.

To use a potentially controversial example, Microsoft products (Office, Windows) are still extremely entrenched despite the overwhelming majority of knowledgable people agreeing that they're on a steep downward trajectory and the alternatives have long since surpassed them.. leading to this[0] recent video from Pewdiepie...

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#276

Post by myself248 »

throw0101b wrote: post #241
leereeves wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent.

PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#277

Post by PhilippGille »

skc wrote: post #219
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.

Another reason why itcoin is a pipedream too, particularly for third world countries

If an ATM is down, it's down. With Bitcoin you can still use mesh networks. Here's an old article about an example: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/samourai-and-gotenna-ena...

(Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#278

Post by littlestymaar »

japanuspus wrote: post #182
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…

The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid. Also, nobody in the field disagrees that in the more distributed grid we are seeing today, more endpoint communication and control could lead to more resilience. Whether pricing signals are the best path is a more open que…

> The fact that the post you reply to includes such technical details as frequency-based pricing, indicates that the author has an above-average understanding of the technicalities of the power-grid.

No it doesn't. The fact that it's being said in a comment full of nonsense tells me that they don't have “above-average understanding”. They probably have read something, once, and now thinks they are an expert, that's literally what Dunning-Kruger is about.

They seem to believe that the equilibrium of supply and demand is all that matters, when it's just one piece of the puzzle and among the easiest to manage. Large, nation-scale, failures like this one are very unlikely to be caused by a lack of supply alone and markets are nowhere near fast enough to help preventing these.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#279

Post by gwbas1c »

immibis wrote: post #260
ironick09 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was about 7 hours long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. Where I lived it was restored very quickly.

I had a long blackout as a kid during a hurricane in 1985. Once it was safe it was repaired rather quickly.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#280

Post by Calwestjobs »

sph wrote: post #97
EZ-E wrote: post #14

Looking forward to the postmortem

Accidentally dropping the production database doesn’t seem that big of deal in comparison to killing the electricity in two countries.

unless it is database of russian oligarchys bank accounts in vietnam where they hidden their stolen money. XD
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