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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#911

Post by sapiogram »

petertodd wrote: post #665
genewitch wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? Why will the US allow this, eventually?

> And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd. In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...

I don't think anyone is going to starve to death because they can only spend 1000EUR...

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#912

Post by casey2 »

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…

Every single retrospective I've seen on major power outages is full of miscommunication and people who would be fired if they worked in fast food. As well as blaming the tech boogeyman ("Our systems were on the fritz this morning")

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#913

Post by pta2002 »

EasyMark wrote: post #813
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…

no one has emergency fm radios there? I thought that was pretty much ubiquitous. that's the first I'd go to check what was going on I think, other than my phone

From my personal experience, mostly just in the car. Here in Portugal there was a rather well-timed rail strike today, so a lot of people who would've taken the train drove instead and had a way to get back and listen to the radio. From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too, which is the national broadcaster's main radio station, who stopped all normal programming and did an all-day massive report on this situation to keep people informed. From what I could tell they didn't even run any ads during that period, just all-day reporting continuously repeating key information for people who'd just tuned in.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#914

Post by casey2 »

guerrilla wrote: post #553
dark-star wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't be ready for everything and anything shrug

We can be significantly better prepared for most things.

We are prepared, just have the people in the suburbs breed some more and ship them over to the decimated cities. You can think of people in the cities as the rat-wheel of production. No culture is better than any other culture, therefore all culture is expendable.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#915

Post by brutusborn »

Helmut10001 wrote: post #857
tux3 wrote: post #261

You can see the crash on the ENTSO-E live data: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio... Three quarter of the production disconnects from the grid between 12:30 and 13:00, with only a bit of solar and onshore wind sticking around.

Interesting - when you realize that nuclear energy is not as reliable as solar (nuclear disappears completely around 1 pm, while solar keeps a stable input share).

Looks like they're using French nuclear to help black start the grid [1]. Solar and wind systems could have caused the instability issues that led to the Spanish Nuclear requiring isolation. It will be interesting to see the final investigation, but my bet is that "induced atmospheric vibration" is a PR deflection from a badly designed and operated system [2].

[1] https://transparency.entsoe.eu/transmission-domain/physicalF... [2] I'm not necessarily blaming the engineers, but the politicians who force those engineers to put square pegs in round holes. For example, I can imagine politicians making a short term decision to skimp on energy storage while increasing renewable penetration. Surely renewable systems must be less reliable without storage given the lack of rotational inertia?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#917

Post by zmibes »

My experience of it in Lisbon was undramatic. I was able to buy medication from the pharmacy. Life continued as usual more or less apart from some inconveniences, people playing cards in the street and a sense of everyone stepping away from the tech. Eyes were rolled as the reflexive suggestions of "putin" were inevitably voiced, more to make conversation than anything else. I met neighbours that I'd never talked to before, and reconnected with some I hadn't talked to for years. People played guitar on their balconies rather than spotify bluetooth speaker pop. The neighbourhood cheered as it came back online but part of me, selfishly, would have liked a few more hours of blackout.

Would have been a very different story if it were a week rather than a day, but I was left with a sense that this complex community of locals and foreigners is stronger than I previously suspected.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#918

Post by throwaway984393 »

jventura wrote: post #910
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…

Experience from Portugal, near Lisbon: fake news and made-up stories traveled fast! My wife called me (before phones went out) saying someone heard on the radio that Portugal was on red alert, it was WW3 (world war 3) and I think she even mentioned "missiles"! Also someone said it was a cyberattack and all Europe was off. Lots of panic reactions, many people buying toilet paper, water, candles, sausages and other can…

[dead]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#919

Post by soci »

diggan wrote: post #904
soci wrote: post #902

I'm from Spain, electricity is almost fully restored in my area. But my fiber network is still down, same with the buildin elevators. People do not realise that when the backup supplies (batteries, diesel, whatever...) get drained, a cold start of non electric infrastructure could also be needed because syncornizing a mesh of unstable IT systems is tricky by itself, in some cases needing physical access. EDIT:: typos

What network are you on? I'm outside Mataro and with Vodafone, got internet connection and power restored some time early morning/late night (after 02:00, before 09:00)

MasMovil / Orange. Yesterday connection went on and off while the router powered by and UPS. But since last night, the fiber does not sync with the GPON anymore.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#920

Post by gregwebs »

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…

There’s an explanation that earth’s magnetic field is now so weak that a normal solar wind ended up breaking through a vulnerable spot.

Very poorly explained right now by Space Weather News. I am waiting for an updated explanation.

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