Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 1001 posts

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#361

Post by everfrustrated »

ksec wrote: post #110

I 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…

Spot a European at a hundred paces by their reflex that anything happens the _government_ must do something.

If electricity is that important to you, buy your _own_ resilience. Tesla powerwalls and non-tesla equivalents have been available for ages.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#362

Post by api »

belter wrote: post #336
davedx wrote: post #242

[flagged]

They probably did not patch their firmware in years and have their SCADA systems live on Shodan with default passwords...allegedly...

I remember years ago someone scanned the Internet IPv4 space for open unpassworded VNC servers. Many of them looked disturbingly like industrial control systems.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#363

Post by megous »

UltraSane wrote: post #156
chii wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure pushing this down to the individual house is sensible. why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads. In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.

because installing and monitoring 1 million small batteries is vastly more work than 100 huge batteries.

How many people will turn off AC and will not bake that cake, or wash clothes, when they know they're going off their own battery vs some electricity distributor's battery shared by others?

And if someone is dumb enough to do high load stuff on their own battery during a blackout, then it's less of a problem for others. Also individual failures will cover less homes.

Incentives and consequences will be different and differently spread.

And on individual level, you can also chose whether you want this or are fine with outage. (I'm against mandating this)

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#364

Post by OgsyedIE »

davedx wrote: post #242

[flagged]

This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#365

Post by paganel »

fer wrote: post #354
paganel wrote: post #230

> 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.

No, the armed forces have their own fuel locomotives. I imagine any sizeable military does the same thing. Plus most (all?) cargo trains still use fuel. 100% electric is just passenger traffic. https://www.outono.net/elentir/2021/10/23/the-spanish-army-r...

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong article, but there's this:

> For journeys outside the base, *the Army uses Renfe locomotives*.

which, in my understanding, means that in order to move military materiel (to the borders with France, let's say, or to the closest sea-ports most probably) and tens to hundreds of thousands of mobilised men the Spanish Army does indeed rely on Renfe locomotives, i.e not on their own.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#366

Post by boxed »

OgsyedIE wrote: post #364
davedx wrote: post #242

[flagged]

This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.

Is this a joke? Because that seems like exactly the wrong thing, and such a system would itself be a bottleneck for downtime issues.

Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#367

Post by hersko »

red_admiral wrote: post #253

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…

I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC.

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

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#369

Post by belter »

As of 2 min ago..( 14:32 WEST ) in many parts of Portugal electricity still out, and also Water systems also offline. Report is for some it can take up to 10 to 12 hours before power back up. Probably many locals not reporting here as they are low on battery.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#370

Post by matthewdgreen »

boxed wrote: post #366
OgsyedIE wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This complaint needs to be passed to European regulators at either BEREC, ACER or DG Connect, since using a loginwalled site is a violation of EECC directive 2018/1972. Ideally they can just designate 1 approved site that all utilities should harmonize on using for their status updates.

Is this a joke? Because that seems like exactly the wrong thing, and such a system would itself be a bottleneck for downtime issues. Using twitter has the huge advantage that spikes in users in Spain for checking this stuff is a rounding error in the normal traffic so is very unlikely to take down the status page.

Aside from the login issue, Twitter has outages too. It really isn't really that hard to replicate posts across multiple services in 2025.
Post reply on HN