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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#891

Post by ncruces »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #885
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…

Black Start achieved! Not at 100% yet. Apparently we have [at least] 2 blackstart stations in Portugal, both were used.

I expect those two (one CCNG, one hydro) are the protocol for a black start, but other hydros should have the capability should those fail.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#892

Post by chippiewill »

addandsubtract wrote: post #353
chippiewill wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a connected grid across most of continental europe. If Portugal's grid blacked out unexpectedly then Spain's grid could have been made unstable too, which then continue onwards to South of France and Italy. Just a typical cascade failure because it means everything's now running with lower tolerances.

So, how do you stop this from cascading further? Did France have to cut them off the grid somehow?

There aren't as many interconnects between Spain and France proportional to generation as there are between Spain and Portugal.

Also France has a massive Nuclear base load and is usually an electricity exporter so their grid will be a bit more resilient (the spinning mass of massive turbines in Nuclear plants provides inertia to the grid itself) than the Spanish/Portuguese grid that would have had a decent renewable mix.

At the same time, electricity grids will have various measures to prevent instability spreading. Whether that's load shedding (dropping parts of the grid), removing production, or what France likely did, dropping the interconnects. This is usually fully automated.

If there were more connections to France it _maybe_ could have spread further. Nuclear power plants can be twitchy if things go south so if it had spread enough to knock 2-3 french plants offline then that could potentially have toppled France which then as a big exporter could have swept across much of the rest of mainland Europe (and maybe even the UK which might struggle to adapt to the loss from France through its HVDC interconnects if all three were maxed out)

That said, this is all very unlikely.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#893

Post by ncruces »

mike_hearn wrote: post #634
gwbas1c wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spain is part of the largest interconnected grid in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?

Spain is but Portugal is only connected to Spain and they are currently doing a full black start. For Spain the external power and synchronization can come from France rather than generators which will help, but the process and complexities are still mostly the same. Call it a dark start, perhaps.

Even then, the interconnect capacity with France is currently 2800 MW (was 1400 MW in 2015) with just 3 links, all on the NE.

If Portugal (on the West) had to wait for that, it would probably have taken even longer.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#894

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

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…

As the press release you linked points out, the black start plan Spain trains on uses nuclear energy supplied from France to re-energize the power plants.

"Luckily", France is at an historically high level of production capacity at the moment and the connection between the two countries was reestablished fast.

According to RTE (French network manager), the interconnection was maxed yesterday at around 3GW of power.

Sadly, while Spain is part of CESA, it's not very well connected. I wouldn't be surprised if one the takeaway from the whole incident is that more interconnections are needed.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#895

Post by dxuh »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #775
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…

I wonder if someone could build a realistic scenario into a game -- let's say some sort of smaller scale black start for, say, a space station. And throw in a unknown computer architecture for the in-game computers so that players need to RTFM to figure out how it works.

I tried to make something like this (not power specifically) for a game jam once: https://pfirsich.itch.io/arbitrary-complexity

I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI

The game is bad and nothing of what we planned on doing actually made it into the game. The video is long and boring too. But maybe someone finds this cool and is inspired by this and makes a game like this.

The first 15 minutes of the game were actually about getting the ship moving, first by reading the manuals of half a dozen different ship systems and then following some procedure outlined in those manuals (parts of which were simply incorrect), maybe having to do some things in sync with your other players and stuff like that. I think it would have been cool to add multiple reactors and start them up in sync and stuff. The different ship systems were actually Lua programs that interacted via a message bus. So kind of a unknown computer architecture?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#896

Post by nunobrito »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #622
nerder92 wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick Google seems to point into another direction: https://crypto.news/moneros-50-price-pump-likely-tied-to-330...

yes (of course) .. It's fascinating how always people love to jump to conspiration theories .. If it were a cyberattack (and so far it isn't proven at all), it would be nothing less than a state sponsored cyber attack to be able to get down the electrical grid from 2 EU countries - and obviously no "reward" such as crypto would be involved behind the scene

Please refrain to call it a conspiracy when it is a valid hypothesis with valid facts.

It is common to use Monero as reward for specific groups performing cyberattacks. Please inform yourself on the topics and reflect afterwards on what was written.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#897

Post by nunobrito »

pantalaimon wrote: post #535
nunobrito wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related talk in Berlin 5 months ago detailing how to shutdown energy grids using only radio waves: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-blinkencity-radio-controlling-st...

Not really relevant, but the talk was in Hamburg

Thank you for the correction.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#898

Post by nunobrito »

Eduard wrote: post #687
pantalaimon wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really relevant, but the talk was in Hamburg

yes really relevant/related, as that talk also mentions that a sub-1 Hz variation of the nominal 50 Hz is already enough to cause blackouts - which is also the case for the current blackout: https://x.com/Nexuist/status/191687508022891747 the talk discusses further aspects of the European energy grid which are relevant for the current situation.

Precisely, the similarity is awfully coincident.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#899

Post by nunobrito »

nerder92 wrote: post #554
nunobrito wrote: post #487

To remember: in the early hours of this morning there was a huge purchase/transfer of monero that increased the price +30% (highly unusual) and a few hours later before lunch time we see Iberia disconnected from the grid. Monero is the favorite payment coin when ordering real cyber attacks.

A quick Google seems to point into another direction: https://crypto.news/moneros-50-price-pump-likely-tied-to-330...

Please read carefully what you linked. It claims theft without a victim being identified. There is no victim and there is zero evidence of being stolen coins.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#900

Post by balazstorok »

red_admiral wrote: post #253

I'm going with: never attribute to malice what can be explained by ... an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid. I would want very strong evidence before I believe this is an attack. There is precedent for major power outages, a huge majority of which are not malicious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages I remember the day when the Swiss railway power networ…

I think James Burke's classic talking about the fragility of our complex interdependent systems starting the episode from the 1965 Northeast blackout is still relevant and an interesting watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
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