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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

#821

Post by jaharios »

sebastiennight wrote: post #684
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…

I think this is where F-droid and Briar have a (short-lived in this instance) chance to shine. Since Briar allows communication between phones without access to the Internet, and F-droid allows to direct transmit apps between phones as well. I wonder what similar solutions exist in the iOS ecosystem.

Until you have to charge your phone.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#822

Post by fredo2025 »

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…

It’s not just restarting it that’s difficult. There are the side effects like what happened in NY: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977

> have some cash at home

For maybe the first 24 hours at a grocery store, and then not so sure. Would your neighbors sell you supplies and food? Maybe not? And so many places now depend on cashless transactions and doubtful they have pen, paper, lockbox, and safe as a contingency plan.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#823

Post by caf »

7952 wrote: post #753
bob1029 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thermal plants require energy to start up It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.

Can thermal stations be kept running without any laod?

This capability is called "Trip To House Load".

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#824

Post by anonzzzies »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #496

Remember folks, there's about 1% chance of a Carrington event occurrence every year. We're simply not ready.

Last big outage here in Spain, we got a generator, wind turbine, solar and battery. All cheap Chinese stuff as it doesn't happen often, as a result, this event was barely noticeable to us. Especially the wind turbine did well the entire day and night until the power came back a few hours ago.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#826

Post by sgarland »

kryogen1c wrote: post #749
oilman wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform. A full g…

> have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator Similarly, the US Navy maintains banks of pressurized air flasks to air-start emergency diesels. Total Capacity being some multiple of the required single-start capacity

On a sub, anyway, the diesel is always started with air, not just in emergencies. Makes a cool sound as it comes up.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#827

Post by vlachen »

ale42 wrote: post #732
oilman wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 99.99% of real-world scenarios, the rig would have other options to bootstrap a black start—like fully charged air tanks, backup power from a support vessel, or even emergency battery systems. The hand-cranked air compressor is really a last resort tool. We test it during commissioning to prove it could work, but in most cases, it’s never used again in the rig’s working life. It’s there for the rarest situations—l…

Nice to see that at least in some places people are actually thinking to almost-impossible scenarios and taking them into account. I have the feeling that it's quite unlike most infrastructure development nowadays, unfortunately.

The key is the responsible party's skin in that particular game. A drilling rig is a very large, very expensive, and very lucrative man-made island. The backed-up backups have backups. Not only could it be very far away from support vessels, capable of bringing it online in every situation, every minute not in production is money thrown overboard.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#828

Post by iancmceachern »

kryogen1c wrote: post #749
oilman wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform. A full g…

> have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator Similarly, the US Navy maintains banks of pressurized air flasks to air-start emergency diesels. Total Capacity being some multiple of the required single-start capacity

I understand some old radial airplane engines were started with what were essentially shotgun cartridges

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#829

Post by rcxdude »

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.

flywheels don't really work synchronously, though. Or at least, if so, they're not very useful as storage. Inverters can simulate inertia just fine, in fact they can simulate a much larger inertia than the corresponding power of spinning generation, leading to greater grid stability (whether connected to batteries or solar/wind, though without batteries its a little 'brittle' if you run near 100% output, as the power needed may suddenly disappear, so this is probably not good practice for the system as a whole. And you still need some give in your inertia so the grid can actually communicate about supply and demand)
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