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All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

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Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#91

Post by pif »

rafaelm wrote: post #51

We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days. After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood c…

> At least it made for some nice neighborhood cookouts were everyone cooked and shared their food in the street.

It's always nice to rediscover human warmth within such tragedies.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#92

Post by sunkensheep »

ethbro wrote: post #50
amaterasu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trivialising the problem, but whichever station energises the grid first becomes the reference. An operating grid has what may as well be infinite inertia (it isn't infinite of course), so new stations coming online must match it (or try and change the phase of the grid to match theirs). I visited a power station in Melbourne many years ago, and they have the shattered remains of a turbine and generator that was…

In the event that there's a phase mismatch, I assume that gets physically transmitted back to the generating device? (Mode subject to type of device) Or am I over-trivializing it? E.g., will an out of phase turbine have a physical resistance against it, as a consequence of the rest of the grid?

If the phase is not quite matched, you get power swing and mechanical oscillation. If you get it very wrong expect pole slip http://supachaisabua.blogspot.com/2013/09/2.html?m=1

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#93

Post by jacobush »

ics wrote: post #48
MisterTea wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat job. I've always wanted to poke my head into ConEd's system and see the whole thing from behind the scenes. Years back I remember ConEd was replacing two or three very large transformers down the street of a large venu I was working an event. Turns out we worked the same event the next year and amazing the same day ConEd again had the second transformer scheduled to moved into place. What an operation. Huge trai…

Heh, our most recent replacement a few weeks ago came in at almost 900,000lbs with oil. Depending on the speed of the replacement you can't always move the transformer dry because you need a certain amount of time between filling it and putting it in service.

Air bubbles need to rise first?

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#94

Post by nnq »

hfkajshfaks wrote: post #8
kasperni wrote: post #3

Argentina is world’s eighth largest country. I find it mind blowing that you can have a power outage that covers the whole country (+ some more).

It isn't really though. A cascading failure can knock out an entire grid. The Northeast blackout is an example. A line goes out. while (there some lines are still live): The current redistributes itself among neighboring lines. Neighboring lines trip end BlackStart() BlackStart() is fun. Having your plants and grid down is like having a dead battery (plants use ~30% of the electricity they gen on themselves) and no o…

    > Neighboring lines trip
    > As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants
...don't get it: why would you turn off your nuclear power plants, even if the grid failed?!

Won't it make more sense to keep it running as usual maybe just using the power to generate steam that you throw into the atmosphere? ...mainly because stopping and restarting a nuclear power plant is expensive af.?

(It still boggles my mind why are electric grids so focused on efficiency at the cost of resiliency... with abundant nuclear + hydro you could easily over-produce a bit, I'm 99% sure that making electricity dirt cheap for consumers by gov controlled over-production would help fight climate change even if it appears wasteful: there will be huge incentive to replace petrol burning trucks, buses, cars etc. when electricity it dirt cheap... and then prices can be gradually ramped up after everyone made the conversion.)

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#95

Post by [deleted] »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #83
mromanuk wrote: post #2

I was going to post this. Thanks. Looks like Uruguay, Paraguay, south of Brazil, Bolivia are also affected. Several million people. It’s raining, no internet, this will be a long Sunday. Also today is father’s day, will be a celebration with candles like in XIX :)

It isn't Father's Day in Uruguay, Brazil, or Bolivia. Not every country in the world celebrates holidays on the same day that US Congress designates them.

[deleted]

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#96

Post by martinvol »

rafaelm wrote: post #51

We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days. After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood c…

The situation in Argentina was completely different. This was a one time thing that was sorted out in 6 hours and it's very unlikely that will happen again.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#97

Post by soyyo »

rafaelm wrote: post #51

We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days. After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood c…

It's very sad that while you are going through all this, in other parts of the world where the situation is far better, the only interest in Venezuela seems to be how they can use it to support their political claims.

For instance in Spain, leftist people refuse to acknowledge how bad the situation is because they link Chavez and Maduro with their ideas and somehow think that it would show weakness in their ideology, specially for some politicians that openly praised Chavez.

On the other side, right wing people want the situation to be as bad as possible so they can use it as a proof of how harmful the left is for a country.

So Venezuela will pop up again and again in political discussions, but the important issue seems to be "my ideology is betters than yours", not helping the people.

I really hope it gets better for you.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#98

Post by vageli »

ics wrote: post #39
lugg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA isn't in much of a better position. Large scale transformer blowouts are a nightmare scenario due to how long they take to replace / repair.

I work on one of the densest power grids in the world (NYC) on the team which does emergency transformer replacements and can possibly answer questions about this. From failure to in service for a single transformer in Manhattan is down to 2-3 weeks. That includes design and engineering (my part), permitting, and construction. For fast transformer replacements we rely on two paths, either system spares (identical uni…

> I work on one of the densest power grids in the world (NYC) on the team which does emergency transformer replacements and can possibly answer questions about this. From failure to in service for a single transformer in Manhattan is down to 2-3 weeks. That includes design and engineering (my part), permitting, and construction.

Interesting. I had always wondered how utilities interact with local permitting. I had assumed they would work something out to have standardized permits for common work which they could leverage during incidents but that seems that's not the case.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#99

Post by pjc50 »

nnq wrote: post #94
hfkajshfaks wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't really though. A cascading failure can knock out an entire grid. The Northeast blackout is an example. A line goes out. while (there some lines are still live): The current redistributes itself among neighboring lines. Neighboring lines trip end BlackStart() BlackStart() is fun. Having your plants and grid down is like having a dead battery (plants use ~30% of the electricity they gen on themselves) and no o…

> Neighboring lines trip > As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants ...don't get it: why would you turn off your nuclear power plants, even if the grid failed?! Won't it make more sense to keep it running as usual maybe just using the power to generate steam that you throw into the atmosphere? ...mainly because stopping and restarting a nuclear power plant is expensive af.? (It still boggles my mind why are ele…

I'm not an expert, but there's an interesting discussion on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Can-an-American-nuclear-power-plant-bl...

The key factors seem to be:

1) the plant must be capable of running as an island. It seems not all of them are; I suspect the problem is the plant consuming a variable amount of self-power e.g. 1MW being connected to a 100MW generator results in a very unstable system.

2) whatever safety event causes the problem must not trip at the generators themselves but disconnect the plant cleanly from the grid. Since these events are by definition exceptional, this may be very hard to avoid.

> with abundant nuclear + hydro you could easily over-produce a bit

Both of these are exorbitantly expensive to build, and hydro requires specific geology.

Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

#100

Post by wickerman »

da_chicken wrote: post #47
throwaway5752 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had massive physical damage from a powerful hurricane, their grid didn't just fail. Transmission lines and substations had to be repaired. That is ignoring issues like Whitefish Energy among other things. Very different situation. edit: yes, we know that nothing anywhere near comparable to hurricane Maria hit them.

Do we know that there's been no grid damage in Argentina? It is the middle of winter.

Most of the country has a very warm winter (yesterday I spoke to my mam and she said it was 16 C).

There's been grid problems since I have memory. Doesn't surprise me that the whole thing eventually went down.

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