511–520 of 1001 posts
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.
Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand. Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question. I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were ac…
> Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? So this is a complicated subject in itself, and a full answer won't fit inside this textbox. Some bullet points: - Grid stability is maintained by batteries, but not literally. The "batteries" in question are typically rotating generators, i.e. turbines, wind, literally anything where you have an electrical coupling to a lot of physical inertia. Th…
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I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which i…
Yeah, hence I mention batteries specifically in my question. I guess a renewable grid will need a lot of batteries. And presumably these are highly dispatchable?
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The best source for data seems to be the European grid operator themselves: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/dashboard/show Spain's demand: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh... Spain's generation: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio... Spain's import/export with France: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF... The filters can be used to see simi…
Interesting that the recovery (edit: of load graph) is going at relatively steady 600 MW/hour, it will be a while if the pace continues the same way.
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The frequency aspect of a black start is presumably a bit easier in Europe because there's an interconnected synchronous grid so they can bootstrap it from France essentially. It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.
Does the source of "truth" matter? You still have to turn everything off, bring your generators up, each in sync and then allow load back on slowly. The UK keeping its own time just makes things easier for it IMO.
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…
>an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this? I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence
Some are harder than others, and some have random flaws which nobody can really predict.
Spain seems in the transition to renewables, so it's possible that they have some flaws because they are still in the process, or because it's something which never happened before and is unknown territory. Also, Spain had some economic problems in the last decade, maybe someone build to cheap or was even cheating somewhere.
> Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?
Hospitals should have backup-systems. Traffic should be able to stop in time. I guess the most problematic parts are people stuck in elevators and other spaces which only open electrical, as also the loss of cellular phone-connections for calling helpers.
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> 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.
> None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. 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.
It might be faster to instead black start several independent power islands in parallel, and connect them together as a final step. At least in my country (Brazil), that's how it's done for large-scale blackouts, even when some of the country still has power; it was done that way for the partial blackout in 2023, and there's a written procedure on how to do it (which is available on the operator website, if you know where to look). In 2023, some areas failed to black start for one reason or another, and had to wait for power from the outside; other areas managed to black start as expected, and were then synchronized with other areas until everything came back together.
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A monkey took out the whole grid in Sri Lanka this year https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
If that's all it took to turn Srilanka off.Even if that country lags behind western Europe, what would it take for a few humans who intentionally cut off power. Trying to stay on the facts, this incident is likely accidental but some people even the very workers at energy companies could send a message for, I don't know. A pay raise?
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…
In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform. A full g…
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…
That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.