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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

#301

Post by myself248 »

netsharc wrote: post #173
pcardoso wrote: post #132

In Portugal here. Lost power about 1 hour ago. Reading the news while batteries last.

Amazing/curious that all the infrastructure to feed news to your phone still works. I can imagine a poorly-built systems would have some infrastructure without UPSes, and in all that chain of technology, there'll be an element or more without power. Not saying Spain/Portugal would necessarily be more prone to have poorly-built infrastructure, I assume the whole world runs on half-assery.

If their networks are built like the ones I've worked on, everything has at least a little battery, but only some of it has generators to keep going after that.

So some or most cellular towers will have generators, and their fibers will backhaul through repeaters, some or most of which will have their own generators. When it gets back to the MTSO, that will definitely have large diesel turbines on site and at least 24 hours of fuel with priority refueling contracts.

I'd expect there to be a lot of outages, for instance where all the towers in a region end up backhauled through a site where the generator fails or was never installed for some reason. But there will also be a lot of places that stay up in some capacity because, more or less by happenstance, all the fuel tank permits got approved and all the equipment actually worked.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#304

Post by Dma54rhs »

dist-epoch wrote: post #155
londons_explore wrote: post #130

Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption. This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects. The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting the…

Texas had a pretty free market, with many users on a floating price, didn't work that well either a few years ago when their grid went dawn.

EU electricity market is very similar to it, but interconnected and probably more free market style. A lot of people pay the spot price depending on county and their provider of course.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#305

Post by sybercecurity »

ta1243 wrote: post #212
stavros wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A street parade under my windows continues nonetheless. I mean, what else are you gonna do without power?

Usually? Sex. At least that's what everyone believes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/from-here-to-maternity/

Well, sex and looting, and maybe inventing new music genres.

The legend is that hip hop and sampling started after the blackout in NYC. Some electronic and music stores were looted and the recording equipment eventually ended up in the hands of musicians looking to make a new sound: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/new-york-c...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#306

Post by peab »

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

You can have physical bitcoins - devices that hold a private key in a tamper free way. The private key holds a fixed amount of BTC

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#307

Post by ptsneves »

trgn wrote: post #299
ghc wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whistleblowers Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.

Prophets

Peters

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#308

Post by mrtksn »

Calwestjobs wrote: post #252
mrtksn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I don't know why you are so enthusiastic about this site. Whatever, my assumption was that they are displaying the data in 1 hour intervals as the picker suggests and showing a warning currently about the affected regions is consistent with that assumption.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#309

Post by leomca »

nacnud wrote: post #70

There's a map of realtime load flow here: https://gridradar.net/en/wide-area-monitoring-system (currently shows Spain and Portugal as 'offline')

The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show

Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...

Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...

Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF...

The filters can be used to see similar data for Portugal

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#310

Post by immibis »

raverbashing wrote: post #218
kortilla wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.

Yes But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to

The grid is not just an aggregation of individual sources and sinks; it takes active effort to keep them all working together in a useful way without just collapsing again into another cascading failure. For that reason, your solar inverter doesn't come on until the grid operator wants the solar inverters to come on in your section of the grid.

It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.

However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.

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