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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

#811

Post by toofy »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #701
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #659

What caused it? The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns. REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior of Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induce…

[flagged]

its pretty normal not to know immediately when something with this many variables stumbles. it may take a bit, but they'll figure it out.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#812

Post by theteapot »

mikewarot wrote: post #760
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people knew how crappy, insecure, and unreliable nuclear computer systems were, there'd be a lot more existential dread about cyber security

Almost all computers are insecure, not just the systems in nuclear stations. Most operating systems are based on ambient authority, which is just a disaster waiting to happen.

What's the alternative?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#813

Post by EasyMark »

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…

no one has emergency fm radios there? I thought that was pretty much ubiquitous. that's the first I'd go to check what was going on I think, other than my phone

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#814

Post by inkyoto »

bill3478 wrote: post #802
citrin_ru wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.

Many supermarket chains (in the West at least) have satellite links at their major locations because they can't afford to close a store just because the local ISP had an issue. The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.

Firstly and most importantly, a cash register needs a power outlet. It is highly contestable that every single Western supermarket out there has a diesel generator down in the back / storage room that will kick in in an instant if a power outage begins.

Lest also forget the Crowdstrike drama where many supermarkets simply went dark, in some instances for nearly 24 hours, despite working communication links. But I digress.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#815

Post by Xorakios »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #775
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.

Awesome idea!

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#816

Post by sterlind »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #775
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.

make it so! the fun of reverse engineering systems I don't understand to fix them is half the reason I joined this industry.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#817

Post by miki123211 »

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…

We're slowly reaching this point with the internet too.

I feel like to many technologists, the internet is still "the place you go to to play games and chat with friends", just like it was 20 years ago. Even if our brains know it isn't true, our hearts still feel that way.

I sometimes feel like the countries cutting off internet access during high school final exams have a point. If you know the internet will be off and on a few days a year, your systems will be designed accordingly, and if anything breaks, you'll notice quickly and during a low-stakes situation.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#818

Post by miki123211 »

citrin_ru wrote: post #669
the_duke wrote: post #520

Earlier 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…

> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.

And in many places in Europe, registers are literally required by the government to be this way, for VAT fraud avoidance reasons.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#819

Post by bgwalter »

The privatization of infrastructure in Europe has been a disaster. The only area where at least prices went down are telecommunication companies.

The postal services are worse now. Railway is more expensive and a disaster. Energy prices are sky high and apparently now we also see unreliability.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#820

Post by tonyarkles »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #558
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably didn't help that before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little dispatchable spinning generation, and therefore not much inertia. Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78% Nuclear: 11.5% Co-generation: 5% Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)

> very little dispatchable spinning generation Makes the case for favouring flywheels over batteries.

Just to clarify this a little bit… flywheels are cool for absorbing transients and providing short-term hold-over during a blip but don’t have great long-term capacity.

http://claverton-energy.com/active-power-article-flywheel-en... as a smaller scale example. $330/kW but at that price it only has 15 seconds of carry-over, basically just enough to get the diesel generator fired up.

Spinning reserve in the grid is equipment that capable of long-term generation very quickly. In the case of hydroelectric dams, they will often cut off the water supply to some of the turbines and use air pressure to push the water out of the way; the generator attached to the turning essentially turns into a motor and keeps the turbine spinning. If you need to bring it online, you open the water valve and let the air out.

Similar situation with natural gas-fired simple cycle turbines. They’re sitting there running at low output. Need more? Just add fuel. For combined cycle it might take a bit for the boiler to warm up for full output but having the first stage running full tilt will get it warmed up fast.

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