691–700 of 1001 posts
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> 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
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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…
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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.
The power plants with direct connections have hard lines and black-start procedures that get power out to the most important customers like telecom infrastructure, which provides the rest of the comms. In a real world full restart it’s going to mean organizing workers at many substations to babysit old infrastructure so cellular is pretty much mandatory.
> "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.
I wonder if stores would be able to sell anything without power. My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
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.
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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…
Two days ago someone cut a whole overland power pylon in Germany…
Link please?
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Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion. When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
Most retail workers are GenZ and struggle to understand what this would even look like because they’ve never conducted any transaction without POS computers (for looking up prices, for tallying them, for figuring tax and total, and computing change), so even if a dusty manual in the stockroom technically spells out a method of ringing sales using nothing but pen and paper and maybe a solar calculator, I would be surprised if any of the clerks working any given day would have the initiative to initiate an offline protocol. Most likely the store manager would usher customers out, lock up the store, keep the staff for 30 minutes to see if it came back on, and then go home.
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Yeah, we just told you that via Signal - that’s how we built the networks :) (No relation to the other infamous Signal chat :)) There should be 4-8 hours of battery backup on every site - at least.
> we just told you that via Signal Who are you and what's Signal?
Older readers may remeber the Northeastern blackout of 2003 in the US and Canada that was caused by cascading overloading, I believe originally triggered by high loads due to hot weather and poor vegetation maintenance under lines. I was an an adjacent area at the time and iirc we were saved by our nuclear operator releasing some insane amount of steam to bring the supply down and avoid more overloading. https://en.m…
Full grid failures are almost certainly never down to a single cause.