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All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

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Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#111

Post by rtkwe »

amelius wrote: post #90
amaterasu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trivialising the problem, but whichever station energises the grid first becomes the reference. An operating grid has what may as well be infinite inertia (it isn't infinite of course), so new stations coming online must match it (or try and change the phase of the grid to match theirs). I visited a power station in Melbourne many years ago, and they have the shattered remains of a turbine and generator that was…

Ok but imagine a circular grid of N nodes. Following the circle, the stations are connected to the grid. Of course there is a small, inevitable mismatch at every connection. Then, when connecting the last node, you might get a problem which can only be solved by adjusting the settings at the other nodes.

The grid doesn't really pass through each of the points though so you don't really get the frequency mismatch between one side of a node on the grid and another. Instead of a ring of nodes it's closer to a ring with nodes hanging off of it so you never really get two frequencies observed at one power station because it's only connected to the rest of the grid at a single point.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#112

Post by cryptonector »

EGreg wrote: post #78

I really take no pleasure in saying this THE PROBLEM IS CENTRALIZATION!!!! In this case, of the electric grids. In USA there are a few huge transformers that can be knocked out with an EMP, carrington event or otherwise, and plunge the USA into a similar situation. We need to decentralize: Electric grids (solar, etc.) Cellphone towers and ISPs (mesh networks) Social software and collaboration (open source software pl…

Decentralizing would mean more frequent local power outages as you cannot meet demand with local generation.

Decentralizing would force lower efficiency on power generation.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#113

Post by dredmorbius »

Filligree wrote: post #102
mulmen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this, it is very informative and not something I had considered before. I'm curious about the statement about renewables though because it seems that with wind or solar the production is very irregular even in normal operation. Doesn't that mean there has to be some technology to balance individual generator differences which would make re-starting those installations easier? Re: Nuclear, how much energy i…

"Nuclear poisons" refers to neutron-absorbing substances produced through transmutation. When the reactor shuts down, it will continue to produce these for some time after the shutdown -- Xenon-135, particularly. This proves problematic during reactor startup. Since it's absorbing neutrons, the controllers would need to retract the control rods further out than during steady state in order to achieve a replication ra…

True.

Xenon poisoning was discovered at the Hanford, Washington, B reactor during the WWII Manhatten Project.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#115

Post by dredmorbius »

cryptonector wrote: post #112
EGreg wrote: post #78

I really take no pleasure in saying this THE PROBLEM IS CENTRALIZATION!!!! In this case, of the electric grids. In USA there are a few huge transformers that can be knocked out with an EMP, carrington event or otherwise, and plunge the USA into a similar situation. We need to decentralize: Electric grids (solar, etc.) Cellphone towers and ISPs (mesh networks) Social software and collaboration (open source software pl…

Decentralizing would mean more frequent local power outages as you cannot meet demand with local generation. Decentralizing would force lower efficiency on power generation.

An incidence/severity trade-off.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#116

Post by rafaelm »

soyyo wrote: post #97
rafaelm wrote: post #51

We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days. After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood c…

It's very sad that while you are going through all this, in other parts of the world where the situation is far better, the only interest in Venezuela seems to be how they can use it to support their political claims. For instance in Spain, leftist people refuse to acknowledge how bad the situation is because they link Chavez and Maduro with their ideas and somehow think that it would show weakness in their ideology,…

Yeah, the situation right now is a political tug of war between the left and the right. The people get stuck in the middle. It really sucks.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#117

Post by cr0sh »

kragen wrote: post #69
L_Rahman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but deeply interesting to me and especially so as I travel around South America. I am completely fascinated by the home infrastructure choices in different parts of the world. I'm currently in Sao Paulo and the hot water setup is a little scary. There's no hot water reserve or hot water plumbing at all. The only hot water source is in the shower. It's heated electrically in real time by a 5000W appliance that…

Yeah, electric showers are common in much of Latin America. In theory you could build them to be safe, but often they aren't. I showered with a tank-based electric shower today: you fill the tank, plug it in until it's hot, unplug it, step underneath, and open the valve. This arrangement has less risk of electrical shock, but it's far less convenient. Because the power was out, I filled it with hot water from the tan…

> In theory you could build them to be safe, but often they aren't. I showered with a tank-based electric shower today: you fill the tank, plug it in until it's hot, unplug it, step underneath, and open the valve.

Do any homes have things set up like most homes in the United States - that is, a central water heater of 40 gallons or more that supplies all taps in the house?

Something else we have here, but aren't as common, are "instant on" heaters; they come in two fashions:

1) Tankless - basically similar to the "electric showerhead", except much higher wattage and installed usually below the sink for both sink and shower usage (if in a bathroom). Water flows in and thru a very tiny holding tank, is rapidly heated, then passed to the tap.

2) Recirculation - in this system, the hot water side of things is basically connected in a loop fashion to the main water heater, and is circulated with a pump. The main water heater, IIRC, can also be smaller. The lines are also all insulated. Hot water is circulated around, turn it on, there it is.

In the usual system, though, you turn on a tap and wait for it to "warm up"; our American wastefulness in action I guess (but technically, at least in most non-rural areas, that water goes down the drain and into the sewer system, where it is taken back to the water purification plant, and is essentially turned back into drinking water - while it doesn't all return, due to evaporation, leaks, etc - the majority I would surmise does, so while still wasteful, it isn't as terrible as you might imagine - but you do still have to pay for that extra water, which is where it does hit ya).

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#118

Post by EGreg »

cryptonector wrote: post #112
EGreg wrote: post #78

I really take no pleasure in saying this THE PROBLEM IS CENTRALIZATION!!!! In this case, of the electric grids. In USA there are a few huge transformers that can be knocked out with an EMP, carrington event or otherwise, and plunge the USA into a similar situation. We need to decentralize: Electric grids (solar, etc.) Cellphone towers and ISPs (mesh networks) Social software and collaboration (open source software pl…

Decentralizing would mean more frequent local power outages as you cannot meet demand with local generation. Decentralizing would force lower efficiency on power generation.

Decentralization doesn't mean you can't have a market for energy, and interconnections.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#119

Post by pdonis »

kragen wrote: post #85
pdonis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5000W seems like a very low power draw for heating on the spot. Heating water requires about 4000W per degree Celsius for a flow rate of 1 liter/sec; a typical shower flow rate is maybe a third of that, so call it 1000W per degree Celsius of heating. So 5000W would only give about 5 degrees Celsius of heating, which doesn't seem like much.

While you're right that 5000 W is only 1.2 kelvin liters per second on water, typical shower flow rates are about 8 ℓ/minute, 133 mℓ/s in SI units, and at that flow rate you get about 9°C of heating. This may be a reason electric showers are more popular in tropical countries like Brazil, Perú, and Costa Rica: ΔT = 9° gets you from 28° to 37° just fine. And you always (well, usually) have the option of lowering the s…

> typical shower flow rates are about 8 ℓ/minute

This is a fair bit slower than a typical US flow rate (which is about 5 gallons/minute or about 20 liters/minute). So yes, with a slower flow rate and hotter water to begin with I can see it being usable.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#120

Post by kragen »

el_isma wrote: post #109
kragen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tracked the cellphone network status continuously, but here in Buenos Aires, I had a VoIP call from 8:30 to 9:00 which worked fine. Until it didn't, at about 9:00, but that's par for the course with fucking Movistar. I was using cellphone data because the power was out in the house. I didn't realize it was out in the entire country. Here in Argentina, municipal water is totally reliable (I've never heard of…

> Uruguay has much less use of natural gas, for regulatory reasons: gas appliances can only be installed indoors if the room in which they are installed has a window to the outside that cannot be closed, thus removing the risk of explosions in the case of a gas leak. Consequently in Uruguay gas stoves are almost unheard of, and nearly all cooking is electric. Many hot-water heaters in Uruguay are still the gas-powere…

Thank you for the correction! Serves me right for being so credulous.
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