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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

bbc.com

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#621

Post by exe34 »

maxerickson wrote: post #574
roughly wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For the people who died of normally preventable death during covid while the health services were overwhelmed, the damage is irrecoverable. The chips shortage lasted years. Every year we become more, not less, dependent on the supply chain working. Every year we become less, not more, resilient.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#622

Post by WinstonSmith84 »

nerder92 wrote: post #554
nunobrito wrote: post #487

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.

A quick Google seems to point into another direction: https://crypto.news/moneros-50-price-pump-likely-tied-to-330...

yes (of course) .. It's fascinating how always people love to jump to conspiration theories .. If it were a cyberattack (and so far it isn't proven at all), it would be nothing less than a state sponsored cyber attack to be able to get down the electrical grid from 2 EU countries - and obviously no "reward" such as crypto would be involved behind the scene

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#623

Post by AdamN »

wongarsu wrote: post #589
oersted wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Grey failures are harder for large systems to handle. If a chunk goes hard down that's usually easy. Something like voltage oscillations that trigger cascading failures in a sequence can lead to negative feedback loops that bring it all down.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#624

Post by switch007 »

red_admiral wrote: post #486
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…

Update: BBC news says something something hot weather, EU council says it doesn't look like a cyber attack.

Hot weather? Huh? It's spring

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#625

Post by croes »

luke-stanley wrote: post #483
luke-stanley wrote: post #427

For offline messaging over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi without internet or central infrastructure, I saw these recommended by ChatGPT Deep research and they seem current: Bridgefy (Android & iOS) – direct Bluetooth mesh within ~100 m, instant one-to-one & group chat, <1 min install. Berty (Android & iOS) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi; Briar (Android) – E2E-encrypted over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi with Tor fallback. Manyverse (Andro…

Whoever downvoted, a comment explaining why would be nice, when the cell tower generators are out, and there is only phone battery left, offline communication options could be useful, I'm glad I'm not in that position right now.

Maybe because you don’t have to ask ChatGPT for what could have been a simple web search.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#627

Post by croes »

pmlnr wrote: post #167

> "I currently don't have any internet service and just €15 in my wallet - I can't withdraw any money from the ATM," she added. from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal... This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

There isn’t much you can buy with cash either if there is no electricity.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#628

Post by moonlanders »

yannvon wrote: post #577

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 coverag…

Similar experience in a town in Madrid's metropolitan area.

Electricty went down (something kind of frequent). My UPS kept PC up, and alarm system with sim and small UPS mantained wifi up for an hour or so.

Scary moments started when people I was in a call with in Portugal texted 'Grid is out'. Later no phone signal nor data.

At first, it might seem people running towards supermarkets an overreaction on being without TikTok for a couple of hours, but you have to live how scary it is to experience this in Europe's current political status to know 60 million people (plus industry) in three countries are out of the grid.

If you see Snowden's film (this might not be the most trustworthy source) it is exactly how CIA's agent describes the feasable attack towards these countries. Again, not a valid source, but I'd love to understand if that could be feasable.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#629

Post by maxerickson »

exe34 wrote: post #621
maxerickson wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of modern system collapse? We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.

For the people who died of normally preventable death during covid while the health services were overwhelmed, the damage is irrecoverable. The chips shortage lasted years. Every year we become more, not less, dependent on the supply chain working. Every year we become less, not more, resilient.

I don't think it's crass to separate the deaths that occurred from a novel disease from the impact it had in society. In the medium term, it's a blip, never mind the long term. There's a huge chunk of society that thinks there was a huge overreaction!

The chips shortage has been difficult, but it's also been little more than an inconvenience when you look at it in terms of goods being available to consumers or whatever.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#630

Post by genewitch »

the_duke wrote: post #520
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…

Just to highlight this: the last significant power outage in Western/middle Europe was 2003. [1] 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 popu…

> a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.

And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this?

Why will the US allow this, eventually?

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