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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#671

Post by Tireings »

tantalor wrote: post #653
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…

> hand-crank a tiny air compressor Is that what Dr. Sattler is doing in this scene from Jurassic Park ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoW4vXnkhJw

Ah shit now I want that panel for my dream house

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#672

Post by Tireings »

martinald wrote: post #385
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…

Interestingly it seems that the black start drill is considering a smaller zone of impact than what has happened here. Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016. This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have genera…

Those small solar panels probably go directly to the next consumer.

You need to calculate for it but I don't think this would be a problem

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#673

Post by dark-star »

guerrilla wrote: post #553
dark-star wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't be ready for everything and anything shrug

We can be significantly better prepared for most things.

no matter how well we're prepared for anything, we can still be significantly better prepared for most things...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#674

Post by anovikov »

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…

Power never went out in a country completely. At the lowest point consumption was ~40% of normal for that time of day.

Ukraine went through many black starts in the first winter of Russian strikes against energy. I guess they built a skill of recovering it quickly enough that it started happening faster and easier every next time.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#675

Post by guerrilla »

dark-star wrote: post #673
guerrilla wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can be significantly better prepared for most things.

no matter how well we're prepared for anything, we can still be significantly better prepared for most things...

No, not realistically. There are physical and economic constraints. There's no reason to over-prepare either. It's absurd to remain as catastrophically vulnerable as we are though.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#676

Post by ethbr1 »

BenjiWiebe wrote: post #596
zdragnar wrote: post #519

Earlier 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.

As an ex small engine mechanic, I'd advise against using a 2 stroke for something like that. A 4 stroke would be a better bet. Better yet would be a natural gas/propane 4 stroke, since gasoline goes stale and plugs carburetors. Small diesels could be an option but they're harder to pull start for a given size.

Do you have any small engine mechanic books you'd recommend?

They're my kryptonite, but I accept it's mostly my ignorance.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#677

Post by lillecarl »

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…

I love the "analog" handcranked air compressor to 7MW generator escalation, it really captures human ingenuity.

I wonder however how being part of the "continental Europe synchronous grid" affects this, and how it isolates to Portugal and Spain like this.

But yeah there are a lot of capacitors that want juice on startup that happily kills any attempt to restore power. My father had "a lot" of PA speakers at home and when we tripped the 3680w breaker (16A 220v) we had to kill some gear to get it back up again. I'm also very sure we had 230v because I lived close to the company I worked for and we ran small scale DC operations so I could monitor input voltage and frequency on SNMP so through work I had "perfect amateur" monitoring of our local grid. Just for fun I got notifications if the frequency dropped more than .1 and it happened, but rarely. Hardly ever above though since that's calibrated over time like Google handle NTP leap seconds.

I love infrastructure

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#679

Post by pyrale »

Vox_Leone wrote: post #471
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 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…

Burying lines is not a panacea, it generates massive reactance changes compared to a classic line.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#680

Post by pbhjpbhj »

throwup238 wrote: post #544
gwbas1c wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is part of the largest interconnected grid in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?

Yes because they have to bring it all back up in phases so that they only face the load spike* from one interconnect at a time, which can take some time and can fail if there’s unknown damage like the GP said. It really depends on the region though because almost all large hydroelectric dams are designed to be primary black-start sources to restore interconnects and get other power plants back up quickly in phase wit…

Presumably emergency phone comms still work(?) so they could issue instructions to do a phased (heh!) restart to avoid every fridge/air conditioner/whatever restarting at once. Not sure how successful that would be however.
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