All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
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Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#2I 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 :)
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#3Argentina 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).
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#4Reminds me of the outage that hit the Northeast U.S. in the early 2000s.
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#5I 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 :)
> south of Brazil
That sounded strange to me, since Brazil imports power from Uruguay and Argentina through somewhat small DC links, and if only them failing is enough to cause a blackout in Brazil, something was probably not configured correctly. So I went looking, and according to https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2019/06/16/apagao-deixa-m... "deixou sem energia toda a Argentina, Uruguai, Paraguai e sul do Brasil", so Paraguay was also affected. Paraguay shares the huge Itaipu dam with Brazil, and a large amount of power in Brazil comes from the Itaipu dam, so if Paraguay was affected, Brazil (mostly the south and southwest) will probably also be affected.
edit: the realtime graphs at http://www.ons.org.br/pt/paginas/energia-agora/carga-e-gerac... show a loss of around 1.3 GW of hydroelectric generation in the south region starting around 7:00 and ending around 10:00, matching the timing of the blackout.
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#6Does it have something to do with the Copa America that's currently going on right now? Maybe more people inside watching the games and using up power.
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#7Argentina 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).
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.
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#8Argentina 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()
Usually the hydroelectric plants are started first. Arg. is lucky, they have a lot of those. Otherwise you need to fire up diesel generators (which hopefully have been maintained).
You give power to the grid first so you can start another plant.
Then you feed hospitals and continue firing the thermal plants.
Throughout all of this you have to keep phase stability (no grid, no phase reference). I'd assume this would limit renewable's use-fullness for re-start (a thousand 5Mw turbines out of phase are best left idling)
As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants (Arg. has a few). These are last because of nuclear poisons that accumulate from decaying wastes that weren't burned while the reactor was off.
It's a bloody hard problem.
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#9Does it have something to do with the Copa America that's currently going on right now? Maybe more people inside watching the games and using up power.
It's winter in Argentina now, so they don't have AC loads. TVs are small by comparison (Although it's fascinating to see how load changes during large games: you can spot commercials, for example!)
Re: All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage
#10CAMMESA administers the Argentinian electricity market, and they have data on demand [1] and grid flows. Compare the graph of flows on the 500 kV lines from 2019-06-16T07:00 local [2] to one hour later at 08:00 local [3]. For reference, see the prior day too, at 2019-06-15T08:00 local [4].
[1] http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx [2] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2... [3] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2... [4] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2...