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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#571

Post by tzs »

chippiewill wrote: post #442
mike_hearn wrote: post #319

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 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.

Isn't that backwards? When grids interconnect via DC wouldn't there no longer be a need for the grids to synchronize frequency?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#572

Post by [deleted] »

hersko wrote: post #367
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

[deleted]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#573

Post by sva_ »

refulgentis wrote: post #556
nunobrito wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because to buy that much monero so fast is only possible with bitcoin, which is traceable by governments and interested parties. An estimated 305 million USD of monero were purchased this morning before the grid shutdown. That was a +50% increase on the monero price, something that never happened before in the last 11 years of the coin. Quite a record. Quite a coincidence.

How do we know there was a huge purchase? Monero can't be tracked.

... You can see trading volume on the markets though, if it was bought with something like BTC

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/monero/

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#574

Post by maxerickson »

roughly wrote: post #500
Vox_Leone wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, this is the turkey’s dilemma - life on a farm is a lot better than life in the wild for 51 out of the 52 weeks of the year. 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, th…

What are some examples of modern system collapse?

We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#575

Post by bob1029 »

pfdietz wrote: post #521
bob1029 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thermal plants require energy to start up It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.

That's true of some kinds of thermal generators, but not all. Simple cycle gas turbines can come up very quickly (think jet engines). Or your car's engine.

> Simple cycle gas turbines can come up very quickly

In some cases yes. Modern combined cycle plants can take as little as 30 minutes to ramp to full output. Older designs can take upward of 4-6 hours.

If you have steam as an indirection, that's when things take a really long time. Natural gas turbines are a more direct cycle.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#576

Post by GeoAtreides »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #558
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #490

Earlier 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)

> very little dispatchable spinning generation Makes the case for favouring flywheels over batteries.

flywheels are batteries, of a different kind (and density) than lithium or lead ones.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#577

Post by yannvon »

I experienced it first hand in Madrid. This was much scarier than I would have imagined.

News travelled extremely slow: phone coverage was just barely enough to receive a couple text messages every 15 minutes or so. News spread on the street, I even saw a group of 20 people hunched around someone owning a hand-held radio in the streets.

Just before power was restored, things started to get worse, as the phone coverage went completely out (presumably batteries were depleted). People were in between enjoying the work-free day, and starting to worry about how tomorrow would look like if power didn't come back.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#579

Post by wongarsu »

k7sune wrote: post #526
wongarsu wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A synchronous interconnect provides not just a source of truth but also stabilizes your grid frequency. If you have an isolated grid you have to match generation to demand to keep the grid frequency stable. If you have a 1GW interconnect that means you can mismatch generation and demand by up to a gigawatt and still be fine. I imagine that makes for a much faster startup procedure

If the isolated grids all each synced to a source of truth first (GPS?), would it be possible for them to immediately connect afterwards?

You can connect two running grids. Earlier this year the Baltic countries disconnected from the Russian grid, and synchronized and then connected to the European grid.

I imagine you can get close enough by syncing to a shared time source like GPS or the DCF77 signal, as long as you communicate how the phase is supposed to match up to the time source. Or at least you could get close enough that you can then quickly sync the islands the traditional way.

The question is if it's worth the effort and risk. Cold starting a power grid is a once in a lifetime event (at least in Europe, I imagine some grids are less stable) and Spain seems to plan to have everything back up again in 10 hours. Maybe if the entire European grid went down we would attempt something like that by having each country start up on their own, then synchronize and reconnect the European grid over the following week.

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

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#580

Post by ivape »

nunobrito wrote: post #509
stavros wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know there was a huge purchase? Monero can't be tracked.

Because to buy that much monero so fast is only possible with bitcoin, which is traceable by governments and interested parties. An estimated 305 million USD of monero were purchased this morning before the grid shutdown. That was a +50% increase on the monero price, something that never happened before in the last 11 years of the coin. Quite a record. Quite a coincidence.

How do you think this has to do with Spain though?
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