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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#421

Post by Finnucane »

Loughla wrote: post #120
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…

Mandate a battery backup. Instead of requiring the power suppliers to build and maintain reliable energy. That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.

I was living in Brooklyn, NY during the 2003 blackout that knocked out much of the northeastern US for a couple of days. In those days we weren't quite so dependent on cell phones and such things. People walked home, since the trains were stopped. Guys grabbed flashlights and directed traffic. We listened to the news on the car radio. After that I went to J&R and bought a wind-up emergency multi-band radio. In the intervening 22 years, I've never used it. Though at the rate things are going, maybe that will change.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#422

Post by jpmattia »

Wobbles42 wrote: post #404
hersko wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.

Can you blame them? Just look at how they've been treated in the last few hundred years.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#424

Post by cesarb »

pjc50 wrote: post #320
leomca wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain loses around 15GW of demand at the same time: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh... I don't think we're able to tell from the data if one is the cause of the other, are we? Since if production was lost, load would have to be shedded to balance the grid, and if load was lost (e.g. due to a transmission failure), production would have to be disconnected to balance the grid.

Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf) That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequ…

> probably with the usual suspects popping up to blame renewables

Renewables were a factor in the blackout here in Brazil a couple of years ago: the models used by the system operator did not correspond to reality, many solar and wind power plants disconnected on grid disturbances quicker than specified. That mismatch led the system operator to allow a grid configuration where a single fault could lead to a cascade (more power was allowed through a power line than could be redistributed safely if that power line shut off for any reason), and that single fault happened when a protection mechanism misbehaved and disconnected that power line. The main fix was to model these solar and wind power plants more conservatively (pending a more detailed review of their real-life behavior and the corresponding update of the models), which allowed them to correctly limit the power going through these power lines.

If you want an excruciating level of detail, the final 614-page report is at https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R... (in Portuguese; the main page for that incident is at https://www.ons.org.br/Paginas/Noticias/Ocorr%c3%aancia-no-S...).

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#425

Post by Calwestjobs »

bilekas wrote: post #255
mschuster91 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction. I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lin…

most generators in european cities are connected to gas utility so it has essentially unlimited capacity without land traffic.

edit: and europe has almmost always atleast half a year of whole country supply of natural gas in caverns and other storage.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#426

Post by floatrock »

scoot wrote: post #403
pjc50 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Report on a smaller event in the UK: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/publications/investigation-9-august... (see linked pdf) That started from a combination of a lightning strike and generator trip, but turned into a local cascade failure as lots of distributed generation noticed that the frequency was under 49Hz and disconnected itself. I suspect the Spanish situation will be similar - inability to properly contain a frequ…

Is 50Hz really that important these days – i.e. more important than maintaining power? (Honest naive question.)

If you have a switching power supply brick for your tiny USB device, not really.

If you have a large spinning inertial mass like a factory motor or a power generation turbine, it's extremely important. Imagine a manual car transmission, but there's no slip-clutch, you need to perfectly align engine with the wheels rotating at 300mph, and the inertial mass you're up against if it's not perfectly synchronized is a freight train.

That's why generators trip offline in a blackout cascade if the frequency deviates out of spec. The alternative is your turbine turns into a pile of very expensive shiny scrap metal.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#427

Post by luke-stanley »

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#428

Post by lenerdenator »

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…

We live in a society filled with systems that can have "normal accidents".

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#429

Post by martinald »

ethbr1 wrote: post #407
martinald wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, something similar happened in the UK a while back. Full info here: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/sites/default/files/docs/2020/01/9_... Key points that started it were (you can see the chain of events in the doc): 2.4.1. At 16:52:33 on Friday 9 August 2019, a lightning strike caused a fault on the Eaton Socon – Wymondley 400kV line. This is not unusual and was rectified within 80 milliseconds (ms) 2.4.2. The fault af…

Curious question for someone familiar with power at grid-scale -- How granular is load shedding? And how is this measured / tracked? In my head, I'm thinking of generators/plants, connected by some number of lines, to some amount of load, where there are limited disconnection points on the lines. So how do grid operators know what amount of load will be cut if they disconnect point A123 (and the demand behind it) vs…

They don't really disconnect it like that in these circumstances (as in they choose what to disconnect). As far as I know generation plants will start disconnect when grid frequency is 51Hz (at least in the UK) automatically as it's all starting to go very wrong. This is what causes this huge cascade effect. Roughly speak less frequency means there is more demand than supply and the other way round for higher frequencies.

This has changed a lot though, as even home batteries afaik will start discharging if they start noticing the frequency dropping to provide some support on generation. But if it's dropping too fast and too quickly it won't help.

But yes they do have very granular info on all the HV sources and how much load is on them.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#430

Post by nottorp »

rcarmo wrote: post #125
mrtksn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure "offline" means that? Romania looks offline and when I checked their CNN they were reporting live from Spain about the blackout without mentioning Romania. Here: https://tv.garden/ro/F83BfecjsD6BjR

They were probably put offline as the network is rebalanced. That just means they (Romania) don’t contribute to the network.

Our government said we're fine with our local generation and are even exporting 200 MW (possibly to our eastern neighbors?).

I definitely had no problems with electricity all of today (on the eastern side). And there was nothing in the news about local outages either.

Funny enough, there were news before the Easter holidays that they're preparing for extremely reduced demand by shutting down facilities.

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