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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#581

Post by Xelbair »

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…

"Just in time" is a phrase I hate with vehement passion. You aren't optimizing the system, you're reducing safety marigns - and consequences are usually similar to Challanger.

This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.

Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.

What's even more annoying that we have solutions for a lot of those problems - in case of electric grids we have hydroelectric buffers, we have types of powerplants that are easier to shutdown and startup than coal, gas or wind/solar(which cannot be used for cold start at all).

The problem is that building any of this takes longer than one political term.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#582

Post by baq »

kennysmoothx wrote: post #566
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…

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.

They should allow you to build automatic rate-of-change-of-power-generation breakers...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#583

Post by whall6 »

xyst wrote: post #561
1970-01-01 wrote: post #496

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.

Fossil fuels increase grid stability?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#584

Post by pfdietz »

bob1029 wrote: post #575
pfdietz wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Combined cycle turbines do have a steam component (that's where the word "combined" comes from). The waste heat from the combustion turbine front end is used to make steam in the back end.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#585

Post by eddd-ddde »

kennysmoothx wrote: post #566
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…

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.

In my server I hooked up a sound alarm to a set of capacitors. Too low of a charge indicates higher power consumption than production, allowing you to unplug certain low priority loads. I also have some emergency coal generators ready to go at the flick of a switch if needed.

Man I need to go play some more.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#586

Post by cybergibbons25 »

oilman wrote: post #475
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…

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…

Black out on a rig or ship is very different to black start of a national electricity grid.

Most vessels will experience a blackout periodically and the emergency generator start fine, normally on electric or stored air start, and then the main generators will come up fine. It's really not delicate, complex or tricky - some vessels have black outs happen very often, and those that don't will test it periodically. There will also be a procedure to do it manually should automation fail.

There are air starters on some emergency generators that need handling pumping. These will also get tested periodically.

The most complex situation during black out restoration would be manual synchronisation of generators but this is nothing compared to a black start.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#587

Post by morning-coffee »

zdragnar wrote: post #519
oilman wrote: post #475

Earlier 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.

Based on how difficult it can be to start my chain-saw, snow-blower, and motorcycle after they've sat without being run for a while, I'd not recommend a gasoline-powered engine to be the only thing on stand-by.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#588

Post by xenadu02 »

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…

This is why solar requires redundant data links to the operator in CA now. Mine has it. During instability they can command my system to accept larger voltage and frequency excursions than would normally be allowed to prevent a "pile-on" where an excursion causes solar to make the problem worse.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#589

Post by wongarsu »

oersted wrote: post #560
jslakro wrote: post #180

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...

I'm seeing some reports saying that a significant frequency oscillation happened, which triggered automatic shut-downs, which cascaded. Could an event like this have that effect? I suppose it makes sense that it was an automatic shutdown rather than infrastructure failing on such a wide area. And then once it's shut down, a black-start is a logistical challenge as other comments have explained. I'm also seeing some r…

The grid is supposed to tolerate any single failure, even under full load. Of course sometimes the first failure is a fire or equipment malfunction and the second failure is a planning failure or someone pressing the wrong button.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#590

Post by baq »

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 a piano is out of tune, you'll hear it, perhaps even flinch.

if a high power transformer goes out of tune... it melts or blows up (or both); it'll try to shut itself down before that. getting it back on becomes a problem if other transformers do the same thing, which is apparently what happened in the whole country.

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