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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#931
post #904
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)

I'm with O2 (Movistar) in BCN and the internet came back at the same time as the power at around 18:00.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#932
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thanks to telcos being legally obligated to give a shit about reliability. Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the…

Meanwhile (some) politicians in my country (Poland) and EU say that we should limit cash handling or eradicate it at all

Who? Please provide names.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#933
post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I'm with O2 (Movistar) in BCN and the internet came back at the same time as the power at around 18:00.

Thats right around when we got phone service again, but no electricity until early this morning. Guess our internet/cellphone coverage comes from BCN which would make sense.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#935

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 wild how much modern life depends on these insanely delicate chains of events going perfectly

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#936
post #59

Apparently a local grid overload near France and a cascading failure down the Spanish network, but radio and newspapers don’t agree on root cause. Of course there is a lot of noise. For instance, one reporter asked one of the government flunkies whether it could be a cyberattack and they turned his noncommittal “maybe, we don’t know” into “government says cyberattack may be ongoing”. Be careful of idiot reporters out…

It's a good reminder how much noise and misreporting flies around during live incidents

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#937

One guy simulated Australia's electrical grid for 3 years to show that the entire grid could run off of >98% renewable energy using the installed renewables with just a small amount of storage (e.g. 5 hours of average demand, ~10% of demand over the entire period). To me this indicates that in many energy markets where renewables are sufficiently built out, the only factor for why we aren't using them more is the sto…

Yeah, this matches what I've been thinking too - we're way closer to a high-renewables grid than people realize, but the bottleneck isn't generation anymore, it's storage and infrastructure

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#938
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?

The problem is that it's still steam pushing spinning rust. You can't instantly scale up or down, let alone do so in an organized fashion. If you were happily generating 1000MW out of 1500MW max, there's very little you can do if a power line goes offline and you're suddenly connected to 2000MW of load - or only 250MW. At best it's going to take tens of seconds to adjust, which in practice means you're forced to dump the entire load because in the meantime your output has deviated so much that you're causing serious damage to downstream equipment - or your own. And load shedding isn't really an option because you're now operating as an island, which means you have to instantly figure out how the grid is now connected, what the current supply/demand is, which neighborhoods should be turned off to best match the pre-incident demand, and what the impact on the local grid is - there are way too many variables there to be able to respond in a fraction of a second.

Starting back up from zero is significantly easier, as you are completely isolated and have zero load. You turn the power plant on, and start slowly adding local load to ramp up. Synchronize with neighboring plants where possible to build the grid back up. The only issue is that a power plant needs a significant amount of power to operate, so you need something to provide power before you can generate power. In most cases you can just piggyback off the grid, but in an isolated black start it means you need a beefy local independent generator setup. That costs money and it's rarely needed, so only a few designated black start plants have them, paid for by the grid as a whole.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#939

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.

What are the non-expensive non-Chinese alternatives?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#940

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...

I remember the talk and thought about it when I saw the news. No conspiracy or whatever, just thinking about the complex system which is also vulnerable for some parts.

> The used radio protocols Versacom and Semagyr, which carry time and control signals, are partially proprietary but completely unencrypted and unauthenticated, leaving the door open for abuse.

You don't think the omission of encryption and lack of authentication imply a criminal absence of due diligence.

I guess some huge contracts are in the offing fix those necessary features which should have been built-n in the first instance.

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