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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#841

Post by Mr_Minderbinder »

kortilla wrote: post #194
lpapez wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cash is not really relevant to this particular discussion. When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.

A cash register is not required to make cash transactions

Why would an employee tracking device be necessary to make transactions? It is just people without a cash position performing mental gymnastics in an attempt to justify it, by trying to bring it down to the level of electronic payment methods they convince themselves that, in a similar event, they would be no better off with cash, when in fact they almost certainly would. A merchant who refuses cash on account of a disabled cash register, under these circumstances, is not a serious one, since to do so would be to refuse all business. Those merchants who are so encumbered by scale and bureaucracy that they would be completely incapacitated should be circumvented.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#842

Post by amirhirsch »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #724
lenerdenator wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember talking to my ex's dad about his job, which involved planning refuels of a large nuclear-powered generation station in the Lower Midwest. The words "it's a miracle it works at all" routinely popped up in those conversations, which is... something you don't want to hear about any sort of power generation - especially not nuclear - but it's true. It's a system basically built to produce "common accidents". I…

If people knew how crappy, insecure, and unreliable nuclear computer systems were, there'd be a lot more existential dread about cyber security

I built control computers for nuclear reactors. Those machines are not connected to a network and are guarded by multiple stages of men with automatic machine guns. It was designed to flawlessly run 3x boards each with triple-modular-redundant processors in FPGA fabric all nine processors instruction-synced with ECC down to the Registers (including cycling the three areas of programmable fabric on the FPGAs). They cycle and test each board every month.

What’s your source?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#843

Post by fsckboy »

WalterBright wrote: post #836
lillecarl wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the "analog" handcranked air compressor to 7MW generator escalation, it really captures human ingenuity. I wonder however how being part of the "continental Europe synchronous grid" affects this, and how it isolates to Portugal and Spain like this. But yeah there are a lot of capacitors that want juice on startup that happily kills any attempt to restore power. My father had "a lot" of PA speakers at home and…

I saw some ancient footage of an Me-109 fighter engine being started. A tech jumped on the wing and inserted a hand crank into a slot on the side. He threw all his might into turning it, and then after a delay the propeller started turning and coughed into life. I realized the tech must have been winding up a flywheel, and then the pilot engaged a clutch to dump the flywheel's inertia into the engine. The engineer in…

>Me-109 fighter

point of trivia: Messerschmitt, yes, but Bf-109, produced by Bayerische Flugzeugwerke.

you don't want to get your flugzeug works confused

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#844

Post by skissane »

rimeice wrote: post #754
MisterTea wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the northeast blackout hit in 2003 in NYC I dont remember any panic. We still had house phones and they still worked in the blackout thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability. I stopped by a friends house and we then went on a walk. Some stores were open and cash was accepted. We hung out later that night and had a few beers. The sky was amazing as there was next to no light pollu…

2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones. I’ve been in Lisbon today and it’s surreal being 100% cut off from friends and family back home and a big relief power is back on, we’ve become very used to and reliant on seamless instant connection. Our mindsets and how we live our lives with that instant communication is totally different to 22 years ago.

> 2003 was over two decades ago. Most people didn’t have mobile phones let alone smart phones.

Maybe it depends on the country, but my memory of 2003 is almost every non-elderly adult I knew (in my own upper-middle class milieu) already had a mobile phone. Not a smart phone as we understand the term today, but a lot of phones back then had primitive smarts that are now largely forgotten, such as WAP/WML browsers (which maybe not many people used, but I certainly remember using one), JavaME applets (vaguely remember using them too-maybe post-2003, but higher end 2003 phones definitely could run them), vendor-specific mobile app formats such as Symbian

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#845

Post by dbetteridge »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #737
tpmoney wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The words "it's a miracle it works at all" routinely popped up in those conversations, which is... something you don't want to hear about any sort of power generation - especially not nuclear - but it's true. Funny thing is, those are the exact words I use when talking to people about networking. And realistically anytime I dig deep into the underlying details of any big enough system I walk away with that impressi…

This is one of the key insights in my early SRE career that changed how I viewed software engineering at scale. Components aren’t reliable. The whole thing might be duct tape and popsicle sticks. But the trick for SRE work is to create stability from unreliable components by isolating and routing around failures. It’s part of what made chaos engineering so effective. From randomly slowing down disk/network speed to u…

Everything is chaos, seek not to control it or you will lose your mind.

Seek only to understand it well enough to harness the chaos for more subtle useful purpose, for from chaos comes all the beauty and life in the universe.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#846

Post by photonthug »

amirhirsch wrote: post #842
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people knew how crappy, insecure, and unreliable nuclear computer systems were, there'd be a lot more existential dread about cyber security

I built control computers for nuclear reactors. Those machines are not connected to a network and are guarded by multiple stages of men with automatic machine guns. It was designed to flawlessly run 3x boards each with triple-modular-redundant processors in FPGA fabric all nine processors instruction-synced with ECC down to the Registers (including cycling the three areas of programmable fabric on the FPGAs). They cy…

Well, the news says that doge randos are potentially exfiltrating the details of systems like that as well as financial details of many Americans, including those who hold machine guns and probably suffer from substandard pay and bad economic prospects/job security as much as anyone else does.

Perhaps the safest assumption is that system reliability ultimately depends on quite a lot of factors that are not purely about careful engineering.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#847

Post by Dylan16807 »

lr1970 wrote: post #767
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…

bringing islands together requires one to synchronize both -- frequency and phase. It is super difficult for large generators and transmission lines. transient heat dissipation can be a real bummer.

How hard is getting each island within .1Hz of correct? The full grid doesn't have much trouble, but I don't know how much cutting things down impacts that.

And then phase will align itself a couple times a minute so what's difficult about that part?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#848

Post by WalterBright »

fsckboy wrote: post #843
WalterBright wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw some ancient footage of an Me-109 fighter engine being started. A tech jumped on the wing and inserted a hand crank into a slot on the side. He threw all his might into turning it, and then after a delay the propeller started turning and coughed into life. I realized the tech must have been winding up a flywheel, and then the pilot engaged a clutch to dump the flywheel's inertia into the engine. The engineer in…

> Me-109 fighter point of trivia: Messerschmitt, yes, but Bf-109, produced by Bayerische Flugzeugwerke. you don't want to get your flugzeug works confused

You are correct, the official moniker is Bf-109, but the Allies referred to it as the Me-109.

BTW, since we are Birds of a Feather, I bet you'd like the movie "The Blue Max". It's really hard to find on bluray, but worth it! The flying sequences are first rate, and no cgi.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#849

Post by Dylan16807 »

martinald wrote: post #638
genewitch wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid tied solar won't put power into the grid when the grid is down. It's the one reason I didn't grid tie. Non tied solar won't affect the grid at all. So this is a non-issue. Grid tie requires the grid to tie to, otherwise it can't synchronize. So it stays disconnected.

Youre missing my point. I know that; I mean if you are restarting the grid and say you have a segment you think has 5MW of load that will come online, but you connect it and a minute or two later suddenly 2MW of grid tied solar detects the grid and starts exporting and you now have 3MW of load it is going to make it much more tricky to balance the restart. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is in reality but it…

> I mean if you are restarting the grid and say you have a segment you think has 5MW of load that will come online, but you connect it and a minute or two later suddenly 2MW of grid tied solar detects the grid and starts exporting and you now have 3MW of load it is going to make it much more tricky to balance the restart.

I really thought that sentence was going to end with "it makes it a lot easier to handle that segment".

Yeah you have some big problems if it's a complete surprise, but your status quo monitoring would have to be very strangely broken for it to be a complete surprise. Instead it should be a mild complicating factor while also being something that reduces your load a lot and lets you get things running quicker.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#850

Post by Dylan16807 »

worldsayshi wrote: post #772
somat wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Satifactory, The larger powerplants need a lot of energy for their infrastructure to run and an overload will trip breakers and shut the whole grid down, a naively designed grid death spirals very easy. My factory was needing increasingly complicated black start systems so I started putting the powerplant infrastructure on a self contained islands. something a factory overload would not trip, it was somethi…

Thinking about this makes me wonder how all real world power plants aren't designed to survive a grid outage? Why would you ever need to black start a real power plant? Like, can't you design it so that it disengages from the grid rather than shutting down in a catastrophic outage like this? Or make it only take on a fraction of the load or something?

It's hard to design a plant that can handle a drastic load reduction without shutting down entirely.
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