491–500 of 1001 posts
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I was recently told by an electrical engineering lecturer that the black start plan here in Ireland is to use the DC interconnectors with the UK to provide startup power to a synchronous generator.
Did he mention the UK's plan in case they have a full blackout?
A fire in the south-west of France, which damaged a high-voltage power line has also been identified as a possible cause: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
Surely there is more than 0 redundancy so that one power line failure would never result in this level of catastrophe.
Called N-1 criterion. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingency_(electrical_grid)#...
And it depends. During https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout N-1 criterion was supposed to be holding, in practice not even N-0 was holding and network crashed.
Few years ago nearly entire day European network was sitting on N-0 due to multiple issues in Poland, caused by a heat wave and deeper root causes. There are many power plants and power lines where any further issue would cause Europe-wide blackout.
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"emergency backup" is a very strong, rational use, and should never be neglected.
You can use cash but it mostly does not work in case of big chains or stores. They need to have access to their SAP/ERP software...It is not about payment for a long time.
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> 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.
Why not? Maybe because I'd rather not have to spend that much of my own capital on something I'd generally never use. I'd rather not spend the maintenance on that thing I'd generally never use. And finally, I'd rather not take up the space in my home with a large thing I'd generally never use. I'd prefer for the power coming to my house to just not go out. The grid operator can install batteries in places other than…
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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…
In this case, we are dealing with a widespread grid incident. The various grid protection mechanisms have been triggered to prevent interconnection overload. In addition, the generators are trying to correct the grid frequency to exactly 50Hz. At 49Hz, more power must be generated; at 51Hz, less power must be generated. However, if the frequency varies too much, there are also protection mechanisms to prevent the turbines from overspeeding or amplifying frequency variations.
The grid is complex, and normally this type of incident is limited to one cell of the electricity distribution grid. A blackout is a domino effect, when a minor event triggers a chain reaction that disconnects more and more elements from the grid.
Th grid operator will have to restart or reconnect the power plants one by one, restore power to stations and sub stations. All of this must be done in a specific order before power can be restored to consumers. All of this takes time, requires resources (you need men on the ground), and the slightest error can lead to further outages.
Some consumers are prioritised, such as hospitals, transport infrastructure, telecoms and water networks. Many critical pieces of equipment have UPS systems, but these are not always designed for such long outages or have not been tested for years. There are patients with home equipment who will struggle.
This is why rotating load shedding is preferable. The outages are not too long and vital infrastructure is not affected (or less so).
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> 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.
The peak load of a house is substantially higher than the per-house peak load of a city. People don't all turn on their ovens/dryers/hairdriers at the same time. You could distribute this capacity at each house and feed it back to the grid during peak times. But is TCO of 1000 * 100kWh same price as 100MWh worth of capacity? If you're going to have the battery anyway(a car) its hard to compete with, but once you need…
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Mobile internet still works.
Cell towers have backup generators?
To remember: in the early hours of this morning there was a huge purchase/transfer of monero that increased the price +30% (highly unusual) and a few hours later before lunch time we see Iberia disconnected from the grid. Monero is the favorite payment coin when ordering real cyber attacks.
This 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…
The fewer resources we dedicate to grid resilience and modernization, the harder black starts become. And as grids get more complex and interdependent, recovering from total failure becomes exponentially harder. A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity. We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications an…
Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.
The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.