No it didn't. A lack of redundancy caused an islandwide outage.
According to the report the faulty busbar caused a frequency drop, I doubt this could have been prevented by having more redundancy, the failure mode was more complex than that.
Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
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Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#112Not nearly the same thing but this reminds me of the Playstation game, Ape Escape. Real classic.
Definitely one of my favorite games on the original PlayStation and a great fit for the newly added capabilities of the DualShock controller
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#113No it didn't. A lack of redundancy caused an islandwide outage.
Technically, the monkey caused the island wide grid to fallback to the (reduced) redundancy mode of their power station...
> Sunday's disruption also affected the island's only 900 MW coal fired power plant, causing it to operate in safe mode, the CEB said. "All efforts are being made to restore the grid to full capacity but power cuts will be implemented to manage peak demand hours in the night," the CEB statement added.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#114can coming into contact with a single transformer disrupt power to the entire island?
Yes.
Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island, power grid USED to be fed with a single transformer before the state funded a power company to take over and properly re-grid it.
Silly as it may sound, outage was easily triggered by a wildlife (beavers by flooding, hawk-arial-nest, chipmunk tunnels, male-deers pushes it, badgers weaken foundation, even bees and ants) by disrupting poles that support the grid.
They'll trip the breakers at the transformers.
Even leak PCB oil from within a transformer to a point of melting the copper winding coil inside the transformer, but that was a manufacturing flaw, not nature intervention.
So yeah, it seems harder to do and less frequent without monkey, but non-monkey-disruptor has been known to happen.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#115I presume the monkey got fried.
I guess that all depends upon whether or not it was a super-conducting monkey.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#116Related: just today came across this post on X.. "Sri Lanka will become next Bali as long as it gets fiber." https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220
As a local, Sri Lanka turning into Bali is one of my biggest anxieties at the moment. I've grown up around the hospitality industry all my life, it's not a good outcome for locals. Tourism should be considered an auxiliary industry not the primary industry.
I agree. Its highly volatile, and has a huge environmental impact.
The ups and downs of tourism during the civil war illustrated it clearly. So did the impact of the Ukraine war (there used to be a lot of Russian tourists).
I was shocked by how cheap hotels had once again become when I last went back to Sri Lanka (2023)
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#117It is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that this is the country which recently attempted to institute a fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general infrastructure management are unflattering. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
What happened was that they ran out of forex and couldn't buy it any more. The government subsidises it heavily.
Not really, the government tried a short term solution to a lack of forex, which caused a drop in agricultural productivity which lead to much worse consequences about an year later.
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#118It is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that this is the country which recently attempted to institute a fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general infrastructure management are unflattering. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-ban-d...
The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
The wikipedia page is one sided and only puts the case for calling iu a genocide. As a mixed race and entirely ethnic minority Sri Lankan who lived there for much of the civil war I do not think genocide is an accurate characterisation, although there were certainly many atrocities.
It was also made possible by the populations fear of the other side who were extremely nasty ethnonationalists, "ethnically cleansed" areas under their control, and were the inventors and most prolific users of the modern suicide bomb (the type the west associates with Islamic terrorists). A common response to criticism of the killing of civilians during the war were things like "we are fighting fascists".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eel...
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#119BBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys.
This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do. Wouldn't it be nice if we could call it the humane thing to do? In general, "humane" seems to stop with human lives, despite the fact that we like to style ourselves caretakers of this planet.
[0] https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/mammals
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ZpLHZzWv93X70kvP2...
Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage
#120The title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I interned at a power company I saw them install “squirrel guard” insulating equipment terminals
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