Madrid Mayor said > If emergency calls go unanswered, go to the police and the fire stations in person That's not a statement I expect to see in relation to a developed city
She's generally imitating Trump's playbook, no surprise.
Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
901–910 of 1001 posts
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#902I'm from Spain, electricity is almost fully restored in my area. But my fiber network is still down, same with the buildin elevators.
People do not realise that when the backup supplies (batteries, diesel, whatever...) get drained, a cold start of non electric infrastructure could also be needed because syncornizing a mesh of unstable IT systems is tricky by itself, in some cases needing physical access.
EDIT:: typos
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#903This 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.
More than cash it was important yesterday to have the following in case it would have lasted longer:
- a battery powered am/fm radio with spare new batteries
- some candles and matches
- food reserves for a few days that don't need refrigeration: bread, anything in can, pasta, rice...
- some kind of gaz or alcohol stove, dry wood or bbq charcoal: you can always make a fire in the middle of the street where there is no risk of burning things around.
- water reserve (I always have like 24L of drinking water) and since I hate waste I regularly fill jerrycans when waiting for hot water in the shower that I use for manual washes (kitchenware or gears).
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#904I'm from Spain, electricity is almost fully restored in my area. But my fiber network is still down, same with the buildin elevators. People do not realise that when the backup supplies (batteries, diesel, whatever...) get drained, a cold start of non electric infrastructure could also be needed because syncornizing a mesh of unstable IT systems is tricky by itself, in some cases needing physical access. EDIT:: typos
What network are you on? I'm outside Mataro and with Vodafone, got internet connection and power restored some time early morning/late night (after 02:00, before 09:00)
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#905Europe still has many megawatts of solar with inverters that disconnect when detecting any grid disruption. This is the absolute worst thing to do when there is a shortage of power - you immediately make the shortage worse and more grid disconnects. The real fix is a grid with second by second pricing based on system frequency, and every individual user allowed to set a daily 'spend cap' of euros/dollars, letting the…
You require inertia in the grid to maintain frequency and other stability stuff. Solar PV is great but is mostly grid-following so cannot operate on it's own. As I understand it you need a minimum fraction of power generation to be large spinning turbines. I think this problem can be mitigated with add-on rotational mass style kinetic energy batteries or something like that. I don't think variable energy pricing will…
What about large scale distributed containerised Iron Salt batteries?
I've seen some papers saying that they help stabilise grids.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#906Earlier quoted context omitted.
cash is all well and good but if the tills dont work most stores wont be able to serve you. corner shops, vape shops and barbers will be ok though
I was able to buy some groceries and pay with card. The tills had a battery backup and the network infrastructure that supports card payments was apparently working. That said, lots of people hit the cafés and had to resource to cash payments. There was also lots of people buying bottled water at the shops. So basically, you could divide people in two groups. Those that took it like an extra Sunday, and those that to…
Most people around here seemed to be balanced. Yes, a lot of people outside at bars/cafes enjoying a spare Sunday, but also preparing quietly and slowly in case it takes longer time. All the stores ran out of batteries, radios and such, at least the ones we visited, and I only managed to make one card payment around 13:30 sometime, after that internet stopped working 100% until the night. Almost no super markets were open around here, maybe one or two who had generators it seems.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#907On a slight side note if anyone has any good references to read on grid stability and resilience please reply.
Ex Electronic Engineer interest.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#908Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ukraine can share some experience with forced black starts.
Ukraine is interesting in this context because there are so many generators. In the richer parts of Odesa I've even found it hard sometimes to tell whether or not the grid power is on as literally every single building had sufficient backup generators to keep the lights on (also, many big businesses seemed to run their generators even when the power was on, I presume as a civic-minded way to add generation capacity o…
Generators are not in sync with the grid though. And that's the hardest part.
Here's why generators were running here despite the grid being available. A generator has a very short lifetime and in order to prolong it, some owners learned to run those in the very optimal schedule. Which sometimes requires a minimum amount of time to run in a single cycle. Thus if you started it you are committed to run for X hours.
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#909Knowing what I know about powersystems, it's a miracle electricity ever works and the people who manage it are silent heros. Please buy them a drink
Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal
#910I 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…
Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other canned food.
All gas stations closed because they could not sell gasoline/diesel. Today there are lines on all gas stations, people filling their car tanks and bottles..
Oh, let me tell you about electric cars! Many people had to spend the night somewhere away from home because they could not charge their cars.. My sister (with her job's electric car) had to stay the night some 200km away from home, and since the ATMs (Multibanco) didn't work, she didn't have physical money to pay for food. Luckily a stranger paid for the food (yogurt and some cookies). Petrol cars, because of their range, had better luck!
Pure fear and panic..
I can only blame the authorities (Portuguese/European) for not having contingency plans for keeping people informed, and thus letting fear spread like wildfire.