Remember folks, there's about 1% chance of a Carrington event occurrence every year. We're simply not ready.
Would help if fossil fuel industry would stop pumping out anti-climate change propaganda.
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow! Battery capacity has gotten cheap. It's always fascinated me during disasters how independent telecomm can be. Kudos for all the engineering that went into it! I.e. even when any other conceivable dependency is down, the networks keep running.
Old-school PSTN folks looked at XKCD 705 and chuckled. Late to the party, pal. The telephone network was designed from the ground up to be completely independent of _everything_ except fuel deliveries. If grid power is up, that's convenient, but it's totally not required. In many places, that's because telegraph and telephone lines got there before the power grid did. Lines running along railroads connected communiti…
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
It almost sounds like running a large motor/generator with a large flywheel on it, just for the purposes of frequency stabilization and flattening load spikes, may be a good idea in a large solar installation. The downside is the mass and the bulk, and the cost of copper. The upside is zero reaction time.
It is in fact a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_syste... I believe (but I am 0% expert) these are mostly but not exclusively used for adding inertia to the system, rather than real energy storage.
Close, but you're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_condenser
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#564Older readers may remeber the Northeastern blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada that was caused by cascading overloading, I believe originally triggered by high loads due to hot weather and poor vegetation maintenance under lines. I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading. https://en.m…
I have such great memories of the blackout. I was in college at the time, so obviously indestructible.
The first night, we had 2 grills with 10ft high flames roaring but I would say in a controlled fashion. The cops quickly asked us to not do something dumb like that anymore and we agreed.
Memories of the local party stores selling 40oz's for pennies on the dollar, as the outage would last days but the booze would not. It didn't really turn into anything bad for us in SE Michigan other than a fun story I can tell my internet pals about 20 years on.
If I recall correctly, we were also somehow the first house in the neighborhood to get power restored...I remember playing a Dreamcast with a hacked NES emulator running Rampart 2 player. I never made good on it, but I always said I wanted to make a shirt that read "I blacked out in the black out of '03"...which is probably for the best.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I can appreciate the ability to revert to hand cranking an air compressor, yet I can't help but feel that the 99.99% of events, you'd be better served with keeping a two stroke gas engine ready to go. Air compressors tend to have parts just as or more vulnerable to environmental factors, and you get a lot more power for less elbow grease out of a two stroke.
In 99.99% of real-world scenarios, the rig would have other options to bootstrap a black start—like fully charged air tanks, backup power from a support vessel, or even emergency battery systems. The hand-cranked air compressor is really a last resort tool. We test it during commissioning to prove it could work, but in most cases, it’s never used again in the rig’s working life. It’s there for the rarest situations—like if a rig was abandoned during a hurricane, drifted off station, and someone somehow ended up back onboard without normal support. It’s a true "everything else failed" kind of backup.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#566This 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…
This is literally like Factorio.
If your Factory uses too much power, theres not enough energy to run the power plants generation, which decreases your power production. Death spiraling until theres no power.
You have to disconnect the factory, and independently power your power plants back up until you have enough energy production to connect your factory up again.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia. Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
> Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% This is (a) incredibly impressive to achieve and (b) definitely the point at which the battery infrastructure needs to catch up in order to reduce the risk of such incidents.
I was just thinking that grid scale batteries could be extremely useful in a black start situation.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
“induced atmospheric vibration” on 400KV lines is the current theory
I would _love_ to understand more about how this atmospheric state impacted the vibration of power lines. Sounds exotic.
I’m no expert but I think it has to do with this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex-induced_vibration
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp
Edit: might be a completely different kind of oscillation than I was thinking of. https://news.sky.com/story/spain-portugal-power-outage-lates...
So I would also like to understand how this works :)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Even the water control system for a big French Dam:
"115 batshit stupid things you can put on the internet in as fast as I can go by Dan Tentler" - https://youtu.be/hMtu7vV_HmY
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can appreciate the ability to revert to hand cranking an air compressor, yet I can't help but feel that the 99.99% of events, you'd be better served with keeping a two stroke gas engine ready to go. Air compressors tend to have parts just as or more vulnerable to environmental factors, and you get a lot more power for less elbow grease out of a two stroke.
Not being at all qualified to comment (though I work for a power company), I'd think the hand crank air compressor wouldn't suffer from no spark or bad gas.
Stale gas was my guess for the plan. Maintaining an emergency system is one of those things that is easy to neglect.