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> 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.
Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
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France and Italy. Aliens? Russia? EMP?
There's a connected grid across most of continental europe. If Portugal's grid blacked out unexpectedly then Spain's grid could have been made unstable too, which then continue onwards to South of France and Italy. Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.
> Spain's electricity grid operator Red Electrica has confirmed power outages across the country. That’s why you still need a strong diesel/diesel-electric locomotive fleet, imagine if Spain had been right in the middle military mobilization and military materiel transport, an event like this one would have stopped then dead in the tracks had they been relying only on electric locomotives.
https://www.outono.net/elentir/2021/10/23/the-spanish-army-r...
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 networ…
Portugal has no electricity as we speak. Funny enough telcos and 4G/5G are fine for now, I'm guessing batteries and diesel backups kicked in and are doing their job.
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."
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> 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…
> 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.
That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.
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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…
They're definitely doing a black start: https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267 We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected. I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears a…