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Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

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Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#941

Post by VagabundoP »

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…

During a bad storm here many people used their electric cars to power their house. There were still places to charge it and then come back to the house to power it until the house was re-connected.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#942

Post by Helmut10001 »

brutusborn wrote: post #915
Helmut10001 wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ph…

According to [1], 3/4 came from renewables during the re-startup. Most of today's inverters are black-start ready. That is, they don't require external energy to startup, unlike nuclear, which is heavy, costly, and slow. German readers may find fefe interesting here [2]. He debunks many of these myths.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/stromversorgung-in-spani...

[2]: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=96ee73ea

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#943

Post by crote »

k7sune wrote: post #526
wongarsu wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A synchronous interconnect provides not just a source of truth but also stabilizes your grid frequency. If you have an isolated grid you have to match generation to demand to keep the grid frequency stable. If you have a 1GW interconnect that means you can mismatch generation and demand by up to a gigawatt and still be fine. I imagine that makes for a much faster startup procedure

If the isolated grids all each synced to a source of truth first (GPS?), would it be possible for them to immediately connect afterwards?

Yes, but that actually makes it harder to start up.

To synchronize the isolated grids, they all need to operate with an exact match of supply and demand. Any grid with an oversupply will run fast, any grid with an undersupply will run slow. When it comes to connecting, the technical source-of-truth doesn't matter: you just need to ensure that there will be a near-zero flow the moment the two are connected - which means both sides must individually be balanced.

And remember: if you are operating a tiny subgrid you have very little control over the load (even a single factory starting up can have a significant impact), and your control over the supply is extremely sluggish. Matching them up can take days, during which each individual subgrid has very little redundancy.

On the other hand, the interconnect essentially acts as a huge buffer. Compared to the small grid being connected, it essentially has infinite source and sink capacity. For practical purposes, it is operating at a fixed speed - any change is averaged out over the entire grid. This makes it way easier to connect an individual power plant (it just has to operate at near-zero load itself, move to meet a fixed frequency target [which is easy because there is no load to resist this change], and after connection take on load as desired) and to reconnect additional load (compared to the whole grid, a city being connected is a rounding error).

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#944

Post by ExoticPearTree »

slightwinder wrote: post #516
alickz wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>an incredibly complex system that can fall over even if no-one's being stupid I only have a layman's understanding of power grids, but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this? I also wouldn't blame malice without corroborating evidence

> but I thought they were incredibly hardened, with backups and contingencies in depth Some are harder than others, and some have random flaws which nobody can really predict. Spain seems in the transition to renewables, so it's possible that they have some flaws because they are still in the process, or because it's something which never happened before and is unknown territory. Also, Spain had some economic problem…

> the loss of cellular phone-connections for calling helpers.

All the mobile phone installations that I saw had power for at least 24-72hrs depending on how far from civilization they were. The carriers have backups and everything.

The problem in these kind of situations is the saturation of the mobile network, not its availability.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#945

Post by chasd00 »

tpmoney wrote: post #716
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…

> 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…

I did a lot of work for a major airline earlier in my career and came away with same impression. I just couldn’t see how they kept planes in the air based on my experiences through out the organization. I think in a big enough org the sheer momentum keeps things moving despite all the fires happening constantly.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#946

Post by ExoticPearTree »

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…

I have to ask: what's with "many people buying toilet paper" when there's the smallest probability of a disaster? Why? Why? Why?

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#947

Post by seanc »

MisterTea wrote: post #618
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…

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…

Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#948

Post by ExoticPearTree »

Matthyze wrote: post #470
rich_sasha wrote: post #374

Grids are tricky, because the electric socket is kind of a leaky abstraction for heavy plant machinery in turbines of thermal plants, load balancing, synchronisation, and a gazillion other things I really don't understand. Is a grid built on renewables and batteries somehow more resilient? Solid state things tend to be less fiddly, hence my question. I remember reading at one point in the past that renewables were ac…

I'll give a somewhat simpler answer than Filligree has. The problem with renewable energy sources is that they are typically both highly variable and not dispatchable (i.e., controllable). The former leads to supply peaks that can exceed transmission capacity or supply lows that require compensating generation elsewhere. The latter means that energy generation can easily be increased or decreased as required, which i…

The "problem" with renewables is that they are not dispatch-able, meaning you will never be 100% sure that tomorrow or a week for now there will be sun or wind in a specific region. On the other hand, a nuclear or a coal powered plant, know months in advance if they will be available for peak load or not.

Yes, if it is sunny or windy, they can be scaled in minutes, but only if conditions are met. The inverse is true for nuclear/coal - they cannot be scaled up & down in minutes.

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#949

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal

#950

Post by feirlane »

VagabundoP wrote: post #907

On a slight side note if anyone has any good references to read on grid stability and resilience please reply. Ex Electronic Engineer interest.

Practical Engineering on youtube has some good videos on the electrical grid. This one in particular is a good explanation on what they had to go through to get power back on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
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