The "Blackout" novel comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(Elsberg_novel)
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#322You can see the crash on the ENTSO-E live data: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio... Three quarter of the production disconnects from the grid between 12:30 and 13:00, with only a bit of solar and onshore wind sticking around.
Portugal has an even bigger relative drop in load, from 5852MW at 11:00 hours -> 613MW at 13:00 hours - these seem like 1 hour averages.
[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#323Earlier 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!
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.
2021 was pretty bad in Texas, IIRC
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Without power or an internet connection you can't validate that the btc hash is unspent, avoid double spends, or validate that your taking ownership of it made it to the blockchain and was confirmed for a few blocks.
Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#325I saw it on twitter and had to go to BBC to make sure this isn't some joke or hoax. 2025 and we have National level power cuts? I know it may be rare but I think some day we really need to move or mandate every single flat / home / apartment / living places to have a 12 - 24 hours backup battery included. Something that has 10K+ Cycles, durable and non-flammable. Not only does it make sure our modern lives without su…
Most of the time, the grid is reliable. How much investment do we actually want to prevent a few hours of downtime once in a blue moon? And even if we do want to invest in large amount of grid storage (which we would need to anyway, if we want to transition to renewables), I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. Its a great way to limit economies of scale and make maintenance/inspection ha…
Mandating battery storage is nonsense. Making the regulatory system better for it is not, though; it would be good to make it possible for consumer battery systems to do "islanding" properly so they can be true backups.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#326> "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 worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#327[flagged]
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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#328Apparently Italy is also affected. https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2025-04-28/directo-cor...
I am getting downvoted for mentioning something from the linked article. Fun.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#329This sounds big enough to require a black start. Unfortunately, those are slow and difficult. If an entire nation trips offline then every generator station disconnects itself from the grid and the grid itself snaps apart into islands. To bring it back you have to disconnect consumer loads and then re-energize a small set of plants that have dedicated black start capability. Thermal plants require energy to start up…
It seems Spain lost 15GW of load, but is still running 10GW of load: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?
Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#330> "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
I agree that bitcoin is a poor solution for anyone but a small elite. But as long as you have the mobile network on diesel generators (which you do in countries where power cuts happen regularly), something like M-PESA still works.