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Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

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Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#71

Post by roenxi »

drob518 wrote: post #59
roenxi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> See, for instance, the space shuttle O-ring incident That wasn't really a result of an alignment of small weaknesses though. One of the reasons that whole thing was of particular interest was Feynman's withering appendix to the report where he pointed out that the management team wasn't listening to the engineering assessments of the safety of the venture and were making judgement calls like claiming that a compone…

I’m not sure why you think those are not a confluence of smaller events or that something outside the design spec isn’t one of those factors. By “small,” I don’t mean trivial. I mean an event that by itself wouldn’t necessarily result in disaster. Perhaps I should have said “smaller” rather than “small.” With the O-rings, the cold and the pressure to launch on that particular day all created the confluence. With Fuku…

If Fukushima get hit by a disaster that is outside the design spec then the engineering root cause of the failure is established. There isn't some detailed process needed to figure out how a design should tolerate out-of-design events. And there isn't a confluence of smaller events, it is a very cut and dry situation (well, unstable and wet situation I suppose). There was one event that caused the failure. An event on a biblical scale that was hard to miss.

If you want Fukushima to tolerate things it wasn't designed to tolerate or fail in ways it wasn't designed to fail in then the swiss cheese model isn't going to be much help. You're going to need to convince politicians and corporate entities that their risk tolerance is too high. Which in a rational world would be a debate because it isn't obvious that the risk tolerances were inappropriate.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#72

Post by lava_pidgeon »

pvaldes wrote: post #65
unmole wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?

Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.

Why do you use Fahrenheit?

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#73

Post by nunobrito »

rob74 wrote: post #55
nunobrito wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany a few months prior saw CCC publishing a method for destabilizing energy grids using radio waves a cheap hardware: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st... and presented an attack vector to which most infrastructure in Europe is exposed. About 4 hours before the grid collapse on the 28th of April 2025 was recorded the largest purchase of Monero in the past 3 years (to remember: monero…

Well, if that's really the cause, then thanks CCC, I guess. For such a serious vulnerability which is probably non-trivial (not to mention expensive) to patch, is it really responsible to give only 3.5 months of time before disclosing it (according to slide #56 https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5f6498c074436c349716e747/... , they notified EFR about the vulnerability on 2024-09-12 and disclosed it on 2024-12-28)?

IMHO wouldn't make much a difference, the issue had been known to them for years up to that point. To a large part still exists, the Spanish grid only committed to upgrade the hardware after this incident. Even so it will require about another year to complete the upgrade over there.

I don't follow in detail the news on other European nations but haven't seen much focus on hardening their security until they actually get breached. A recent example (albeit different attack vector) would be the Polish grid: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/wiper-malware-targe...

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#74

Post by chr15m »

algoth1 wrote: post #9

As someone who lived through the blackout it was wild. I felt back into the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era. It was pretty cool actually. The rumor mill spread so fast that Within hours the official word on the street was that we were getting hacked by a foreign military and people were joking that we had nothing of interest to be conquered xD

Rumour huh.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#75

Post by chr15m »

christkv wrote: post #69

Lol it took about an hour for us to realize there was a blackout as our house had switched to island mode. Ended being the sort of organization point of the area for the neighborhood as we could provide mobile charging and light until the power came back around 22 at night

That's epic, congratulations on your foresight!

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#76

Post by bluebarbet »

unmole wrote: post #35
bluebarbet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might have been less fun if it had been in the depths of winter. The fact that it was a balmy sunny day in springtime made it a pleasantly novel experience, I agree. Of course, the "sunny day" seems to have been correlated.

We're talking about Spain. How bad could a winter really be?

Outside, right now, it is about 6 degrees C. Much of Spain is a high plateau where you're entirely dependent on sunshine for warmth in winter.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#77

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #26

Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery... We did have many many problems previously. The state of South Australia went out for a couple of weeks at one point in similar cascading failures. This does…

> Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright

That makes no sense. Those are projections and for battery only. Europe today has around 100GW energy storage, Australia has around 6GW.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#78

Post by AnotherGoodName »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #77
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #26

Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright https://www.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-battery... We did have many many problems previously. The state of South Australia went out for a couple of weeks at one point in similar cascading failures. This does…

> Can’t read all of this since it’s 424 pages but i want to point out that Australia is beating Europe on grid connected storage. Not on a per capita basis. It’s beating all of Europe combined outright That makes no sense. Those are projections and for battery only. Europe today has around 100GW energy storage, Australia has around 6GW.

For the discussion of replacing gas peaker plants pumped hydro isn’t as useful as grid connected battery storage which is the focus of the above discussion.

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#79

Post by cpgxiii »

roenxi wrote: post #70
cpgxiii wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality the "swiss cheese" holes for major accidents often turn out to be large holes that were thought to be small at the time. > [Fukushima] No small alignment of circumstances needed. The tsunami is what initiated the accident, but the consequences were so severe precisely because of decades of bad decisions, many of which would have been assumed to be minor decisions at the time they were made. E.g. - The desi…

To be blunt; that isn't an appropriate application of the swiss cheese model to Fukushima. It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event. Risk models won't help there. Every engineered system has design tolerances. And that system will eventually be hit by a situation outside the tolerances and fail. Risk models aren't to overcome that reality - they are one of a number of tools for mak…

> It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event

First of all, the design basis accident is a design choice by the developers of the plant and regulators. The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA.

> Again I'm going from memory with the numbers but doubling the cost of a rare disaster in a way that injures ... pretty much nobody ... is a great trade for cheap secure energy. It isn't a clear case that anything needs to change or even went wrong in the design process. Massive earthquakes and tsunamis aren't easy to deal with.

This is absolute nonsense. For the cost of maybe maybe tens of millions at most in additional concrete to build the seawall a few meters higher, the entire disaster would have been avoided entirely (i.e. plant restored to operation). With backup cooling that could have survived the tsunami (a lower expense than building a higher seawall), all that would have happened at Fukushima Daiichi is what happened at its neighbor Fukushima Daini (plant rendered inoperable, no meltdown, no significant radioactive release). Instead, we are talking about a disaster that will cost a (current) estimated $180 billion USD to clean up (and there is no way this estimate is realistic, when the methods required to perform the cleanup barely exist yet).

Re: Entso-E final report on Iberian 2025 blackout

#80

Post by roenxi »

cpgxiii wrote: post #79
roenxi wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be blunt; that isn't an appropriate application of the swiss cheese model to Fukushima. It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event. Risk models won't help there. Every engineered system has design tolerances. And that system will eventually be hit by a situation outside the tolerances and fail. Risk models aren't to overcome that reality - they are one of a number of tools for mak…

> It isn't a swiss cheese failure if it was hit by an out-of-design-spec event First of all, the design basis accident is a design choice by the developers of the plant and regulators. The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA. > Again I'm going from memory with the numbers but doubl…

> The decision process that produced that DBA was clearly faulty - the economic and social costs of the disaster so clearly have exceeded those of a building to a more serious DBA.

That isn't clear at all. We're effectively sampling from the entire globe and we've had 2-3x bad nuclear disasters since the 70s. Our safety standards appear to be overcautious given the relatively small amount of damage done vs ... pretty much every alternative. The designs seem to be fine. I'm still waiting to see the justification for the evacuations from Fukushima; they seemed excessive. People died.

> For the cost of maybe maybe tens of millions at most...

You haven't thought for long enough before you typed that. For this particular disaster, sure. But hardening against all the possible disasters is what needs to happen when you become less risk tolerant. It is the millions of dollars to prevent against this disaster multiplied by the number of potential disasters that you have to consider. Safety is expensive.

The numbers aren't small, safety of that magnitude might not even be economically feasible. To say nothing of whether it is actually sensible. And once you get into one in 500 or thousand year events, some really catastrophic stuff starts happening that just can't be reasonably defended against. San Francisco and its fault springs to mind, I forget what sort of even that is but it is probably once a millennium or more often.

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