Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still working in mainland Portugal but it's getting slow, probably severely overloaded.
Yeah, it's back and slow. Sidenote: RTP (National Public broadcaster) is gone.
RTP came back for me an hour or so ago.
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
We will use better technology for electronic transactions. Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure.
You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.
That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#683This 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.
I've been thinking EXACTLY this while listening to FM radio for the last 7 hours (we didn't even have phone line)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#684I 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…
I think this is where F-droid and Briar have a (short-lived in this instance) chance to shine. Since Briar allows communication between phones without access to the Internet, and F-droid allows to direct transmit apps between phones as well.
I wonder what similar solutions exist in the iOS ecosystem.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability. I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollu…
> thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability. Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the…
> stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat
It's the other way around: Cards are flat because a carbon imprint doesn't afford the merchant any payment guarantee by the card issuer anymore anyway. (In other words, the "floor limit" above which cards require electronic authorization is now zero.)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#686Carrington event?
There would be a broader area affected.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related talk in Berlin 5 months ago detailing how to shutdown energy grids using only radio waves: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st...
Not really relevant, but the talk was in Hamburg
yes really relevant/related, as that talk also mentions that a sub-1 Hz variation of the nominal 50 Hz is already enough to cause blackouts - which is also the case for the current blackout: https://x.com/Nexuist/status/191687508022891747
the talk discusses further aspects of the European energy grid which are relevant for the current situation.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#688Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mandating battery storage is nonsense. Making the regulatory system better for it is not, though; it would be good to make it possible for consumer battery systems to do "islanding" properly so they can be true backups.
Or at least not making it illegal . Regulate it all you want, make sure it's safe, but please let's let homeowners install a transfer switch if they're willing to pay for it. In a longer outage it'd be a massive benefit to have even just a few houses here and there that retain power.
Where is it illegal?
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#690This 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…
Oh damn, I thought this was a problem only in Dyson Sphere Program, lol