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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#771

Post by brewdad »

bsder wrote: post #714
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…

>It's one reason it's a good idea to always have some cash at home. Most places are so dependent upon electricity that they can't even take cash during a blackout. And they don't even have the mechanical machines to take a credit card imprint anymore.

The last of my raised number credit cards went away last month. Those old machines will only get a blank rectangle from me. Sad, because I did actually use one of those about 3 years ago when a rural gas station had power but no network.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#772

Post by worldsayshi »

somat wrote: post #695
kennysmoothx wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same with Satifactory, The larger powerplants need a lot of energy for their infrastructure to run and an overload will trip breakers and shut the whole grid down, a naively designed grid death spirals very easy. My factory was needing increasingly complicated black start systems so I started putting the powerplant infrastructure on a self contained islands. something a factory overload would not trip, it was somethi…

Thinking about this makes me wonder how all real world power plants aren't designed to survive a grid outage? Why would you ever need to black start a real power plant? Like, can't you design it so that it disengages from the grid rather than shutting down in a catastrophic outage like this? Or make it only take on a fraction of the load or something?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#773

Post by chipsrafferty »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#774

Post by jadyoyster »

userbinator wrote: post #769
rini17 wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are now ubiquitous wireless POS terminals for card payments that can be recharged from emergency sources of electricity(like cars). As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. Of course this only little alleviates the disruption.

As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.

Surprisingly mobile networks seemed to stay up in Portugal. I'm not sure to what extent and if they lasted for the whole duration of the blackout. They definitely limited consumer use though.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#775

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

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…

I wonder if someone could build a realistic scenario into a game -- let's say some sort of smaller scale black start for, say, a space station. And throw in a unknown computer architecture for the in-game computers so that players need to RTFM to figure out how it works.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#776

Post by cyberax »

7952 wrote: post #753
bob1029 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thermal plants require energy to start up It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.

Can thermal stations be kept running without any laod?

Sure. But not cheaply. And ramping up the power still takes time.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#777

Post by brewdad »

seb1204 wrote: post #768
switch007 wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot weather? Huh? It's spring

Spring is nowadays the best time for the grid and renewables. Low consumption as heating period is coming to and end, air conditioning is not required yet and the sun can be strong already providing lost if solar power output. I can imagine with a grid and a huge growth of solar generation that there are a myriad tripping stones that can upset the balance.

For areas utilizing hydro, spring tends to bring the strongest annual flows due to snow melt.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#778

Post by cogman10 »

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…

> 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 population might not even be able to buy food for days.

So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike.

When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve.

As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back.

You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#779

Post by artursapek »

ithkuil wrote: post #647
genewitch wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't know but I find it very practical to not carry piles of cash in my pocket and home and know that we're less likely to get robbed just because of the cash we have. I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.

Cash is extremely easy to conceal. fear of burglary is a ridiculous reason not to have some saved for a rainy day

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#780

Post by Jare »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #746
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…

My son was at the university outside of Barcelona, and I lost contact with him for 6 hours. He was traveling home, and I knew that the roads had no working semaphores, and there were dozens of incidents... I lost some years today. My son is fine, thanks to a random person (“the man with a rabbit”) who just decided to give a lift to my son and his friend to the edge of Barcelona.

Glad you are all ok. There have been many stories of people supporting and helping each other, very uplifting in these troubled days.
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