MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t
Watching with interest as I'm meant to be picking my girlfriend up from a flight from Portugal later this evening. Phone reception appears to be down as well.
Chances of her making it back tonight - I'm going for slim.
Going to be an interesting test case of the reliance on digital money, the internet etc. If they don't get the power back on in hours it's going to cause a lot of chaos. I'm even reading stuff about martial law although think that's the usual twitter troll alarmism.
Should be an interesting one. I predict people enjoying a day off.
I predict that… absolutely nothing of significant consequence will come from this.
Hospitals run off backup generators and everyone else will just have a day off work, the rich will make a bit less money today due to reduced business output and otherwise life will go on.
Depends on how long it takes to recover. UK plans for recovery of similar run to several days - called a blackstart. It's quite complicated as you have to restore in sections to prevent blowing up transformers, interconnectors etc.
I think the largest issue is how can two countries be taken out so easily, regardless of the cause.
Talk about a house of cards...
Risk management fail!
Going to be an interesting test case of the reliance on digital money
Most tills need electricity to pay with cash too.
Telegraph already blaming Solar, obviously
Cock up, conspiracy, cyber-attack, China are actually investing heavily in Spanish infrastructure (which is upsetting Trump) Russia love causing mischief, but Spains economy & infrastructure has been growing faster than almost anywhere else
I guess people will be more affected depending on where they live..
Near me supermarkets have closed doors but the bars and Cafés will be doing OK as a lot of it is cash and/or on tab anyway... And most of the kitchens run off great big gas bottles as there's no mains gas in a lot of places.
That said... No fridges or freezers will be working so that will get bad, fast
Hospitals run off backup generators
Essential services within the hospital run on back up Genny's.
You'll find they won't be running at capacity nor starting any non essential operations /care without the grid aspect - IE still very disruptive to the wider populus
I think it's rather dismissive to suggest that power outages are no issue for hospitals.
Most tills need electricity to pay with cash too.
Worked a new year with a power cut on the bar once. Candles , float and a calculator were deployed along with regular cash up to the safe.
Depends on how long it takes to recover. UK plans for recovery of similar run to several days - called a blackstart.
It's not a blackstart.
A blackstart is starting from absolutely nothing and involves things like using a bike track pump to charge the instrument air system on your gas turbine compressor so that it can then supply instrument air to the rest of your power station. In most cases the grid and the generators are designed to not need that as they are connected to the rest of the grid before they start up.
Depending on what exactly went wrong the generators might (and probably are) all still be up and running (or ready at the press of a button) it's just a case of re-connecting areas sequentially so as not to overload things all at once.
Ironically renewables like solar and wind aren't generally capable of a black start as they need the grid to synchronize their inverters.
Most tills need electricity to pay with cash too.
Yea, it's a bit pointless being able to say "cash still works in a power cut" when 24h later there's no bread and milk in the shops anyway. So in the first 5 minutes you can be smug and have some fresh food from whichever outlet will serve you. 3 days later when the government collapses into anarchy and fiat money loses it's backing and follows it then we're all doomed 😂
Depends on how long it takes to recover. UK plans for recovery of similar run to several days - called a blackstart.
It's not a blackstart.
A blackstart is starting from absolutely nothing and involves things like using a bike track pump to charge the instrument air system on your gas turbine compressor so that it can then supply instrument air to the rest of your power station. In most cases the grid and the generators are designed to not need that as they are connected to the rest of the grid before they start up. It's just a slow process as everything needs to be brought back online in sequence.
Ta for the correction! I've sat through too many calls with NESO people trying to scare me.
Not just food that needs to be kept chilled, a lot of medicines require refrigeration or freezing
Not just food that needs to be kept chilled, a lot of medicines require refrigeration or freezing
Yeah not just hospitals but local pharmacies are gonna be in trouble too..
Excellent interview on 5Live with an expat management consultant who had had to stop work, deal with the fact that her coffee machine wasn't working, and worry about the ham and cheese in the fridge.
After 5 minutes of this gritty tale of survival against the odds, she remembered her husband relies on a machine to help him breathe overnight...
Yea, blackstart is almost as much a mechanical issue as it is an electrical one. It's getting that first big generator spinning at 50Hz so it can power the other powerstations and get them running again. There's then a long series of steps to connect everything together.
The process is the same / similar if the generators haven't actually tripped, you're just starting from a point hours / days further down the sequence. The reason it's important to have plans in place to carry out a black start is you obviously can't entirely predict what's gone wrong and where in that sequence you are.
After 5 minutes of this gritty tale of survival against the odds, she remembered her husband relies on a machine to help him breathe overnight...
There was a good quote about someone driving around between petrol stations looking for one that was open as their pumps weren't woking.
I guess now they have even less petrol.
There was a good quote about someone driving around between petrol stations looking for one that was open as their pumps weren't woking.
Similar was happening when tanker drivers went on strike, people driving for hours to find a garage with fuel.
There was a great story about someone who saw a tanker on the road and, assuming it was full of fuel on its way to a delivery, followed it for bloody miles until eventually it arrived at a dairy farm. 🤣
I don't think many people realise just how flaky a lot of infrastructure actually is, how close we're sailing to a "back to the stone age" catastrophe. Made much worse of course by how reliant everything is these days on an internet connection and some kind of power source.
I just saw a post on an expat group with someone asking if the petrol stations were operational...
Really...? I mean they might have manual ways of pumping fuel but I imagine that would be limited to emergency services etc.
Surely going to be tough for many people, it's the end of the month a lot of people would have been expecting wages etc to be paid electronically. Is that going to happen now?
I work for a company that makes backup generators (including the big ones that back up hospitals, datacentres, critical infrastructure etc). There will be a lot of Cummins generators roaring away in Europe right now !
Also - as mentioned above, starting up a power grid is hard, as the majority of grid scale generators rely on having both available power to get them started and need the stable 50Hz to synchronise to, and then balance the load across the grid whilst only part of the grid is operational and also the usual supply & demand balance has been distrupted. Hence the complex, very long time duration country-wide procedures that @beej referred to.
As part of the lessons learned from this it will be interesting to see what additional pieces of infrastructure are deemed to be "critical" over and above what already has backup power in place.
Then there’s all those owners of EV’s, e-bikes, scooters, etc…
Here in Madeira power is fine but internet being disrupted. No card machines working where we have been this afternoon.
Then there’s all those owners of EV’s, e-bikes, scooters, etc…
A good advert for EVs - with bi-directional charging or simply a V2L (i.e. the car can deliver 230V) capability like an increasing number of cars can then a typical home-owner would be set up for potentially several days worth of self-sufficient power.
The process is the same / similar if the generators haven't actually tripped, you're just starting from a point hours / days further down the sequence.
The generators trip if there's a massive power outage like that. Because there's no grid to synchronise to and nowhere to send the power. The power station operators really need to hope their DC backup batteries and protective systems were working properly or there could be some seriously knackered turbines and generators to repair.
This sounds exactly like a black start scenario to me.
Hospitals run off backup generators
Essential services within the hospital run on back up Genny's.
You'll find they won't be running at capacity nor starting any non essential operations
They're probably also set up to run for a few hours, not a week, so will need fuel deliveries. Hopefully the fuel company has a generator to run the pumps.
My partners at her mums in Vinuela just outside Malaga, when she phoned me earlier she thought it was just them (they live in a rural finca) and were pretty freaked out when I said it was the entire Iberian Peninsular! she's meant to be flying home Weds to work on the local elections Thursday which is looking a bit ropey! I think they've got the cards out tonight.
Spanish PM has made an address... basically saying what you'd expect... Don't panic, but we don't know whats going on.
Some flights cancelled, looks like my girlfriend isn't getting home today. But no phone reception so I've no idea what her plan is.
Power's back on in most of Spain now. TBH personally speaking it was great: half day at work, took the dog for a long walk on company time, fired up the bbq for dinner... but clearly not ideal if you had an operation booked for today, or a small business reliant on electricity (i.e. most of them), etc etc.
Most unfortunately, the telephones are still down in my mother-in-law's village. Such a shame 😂
Hold on. When Heathrow had a power cut angry Brits said this can only happen in the UK as every other country would have back up plans for their airports.
20 per cent of power restored in Spain
The Spanish government has said that 20 per cent of Spain’s power grid has been restored as the country declared a state of emergency.
Red Electrica is working to restore power across the Iberian peninsula."
Hopefully sounds like things are getting fixed fast... but the bigger question is how the chuff can it have happened... it will certianly be an interesting post-incident review with lots of 'lessons learned'.
One sub-station v most of the Iberian peninsula. Yes that’s almost exactly not the same at all.
A very worrying situation and not something to trivialise. If it really was ‘atmospheric conditions’ then that’s clearly a massive issue in today’s climate change world and if it wasn’t…….well that’s even more scary.
Power is not back on ‘in most of Spain’ according to BBC - 35% of power needs are being met….and that’s 10hrs after the event. This is huge.
Hold on. When Heathrow had a power cut angry Brits said this can only happen in the UK as every other country would have back up plans for their airports.
That was 'only' a local issue though... this thing is national, multinational, actually... I suspect there's a lot to come out of the woodwork over what happened today.
Indeed it was but there were tales of the generators being taken away. So, were Spain’s taken away too or was it all just a load of angry Brits ranting?
Power is back on at home up in the mountains 🙂
Definitely makes me want rooftop solar and a battery more than I already did
Also enjoying the internet knowing what it is. It's a cyber attack! It's Russia! It's Trump! It's the fault of EU regulations! No, it's solar! No, it's nuclear! No, it's net zero! No, it's underinvestment! No, it's electricity imports! No, it's communism, no, it's capitalism.
(I bet 10p it's capitalism)
does anyone have any insight into the 'it was atmospheric conditions' reason? It sounds like bollocks...
If its too windy where your main generating wind farms are so they can’t run, which I believe is 48mph, and your solar can’t keep up with that extra load then I suppose that could be classed as atmospheric. That’s why they still need gas or nuclear power stations to take up that slack but if you don’t or can’t ramp them up in time then big spinning metal things that creates the 50hz frequency slow down and everything stops working. Saw a graph that showed when it happened the frequency dropped by only 0.15hz and took a while to get back up
This Twitter user claims that the frequency dropped by 0.15 Hz and that was enough to trip all the systems to shut down.
https://twitter.com/Nexuist/status/1916875080228917471
I think they were talking about large temperature differences in the region, which can cause issues with expansion/contraction of metals in transmission lines. Combined with wind, might trigger oscillations.
So not about wind farms - although there was probably a number of issues that coincided resulting in the outage.
The right wing press is running very hard with "it's net zero's fault innit". Something to do with renewables not being able to respond to shocks because of low physical inertia in the system.
The experts they have found are not actually saying this the cause but what made it so serious - but you don't exactly get that from the headlines.in the Telegraph or Mail
Unfortunately, no matter wether heavy use of solar/wind was a genuine factor or not, the whole situation will become a stick the right uses to beat the green agenda with for years.
Hopefully there will be some considered analysis reported once the causes are identified and understood
Isn't more inertia in the system only useful if you have some action you can take in the extra time it gives you to avoid the trip?
In this scenario, might not of made much difference.
The right wing press is running very hard with "it's net zero's fault innit". Something to do with renewables not being able to respond to shocks because of low physical inertia in the system.
.........
Hopefully there will be some considered analysis reported once the causes are identified and understood
I suspect that the considered analysis will not feature in the right wing headlines in quite the same way though.
'Isn't more inertia in the system only useful if you have some action you can take in the extra time it gives you to avoid the trip?
Intertia in this case is the ability of the grid to maintain its 50% frequency. Maintaining that is critical as a seemingly very small mismatch can cause some very significant damage, (one of the reasons why generators usually take themselves off line if a mismatch is detected). Traditional generators involving spinning alternators are good for this. A lot of the newer renewables though have no inertia as such, so as more renewables are added the grid tends to be a bit less stable.
This is quite different to having some excess flexible capacity to absorb peaks and troughs. That can be provided by smaller, more responsive generators, battery backup, hydro etc.
The irony of the right-wing press blaming this on renewables is spectacular, when the cause is likely down to decades of under-investment in the infrastructure across Europe as a whole. Pretty much every inverter/battery storage system has the capability to respond to instructions from grid management software and almost instantly sink or supply reactive power into the network.
It's implemented and proven in Australia. Why isn't it in the UK or Europe? Because we handed the smart meter contracts to the company which offered the largest bribes instead of doing it properly. No smart meter on the market today has the necessary RS485 connection to instruct the inverter how to behave as the grid is approaching its lower or upper frequency limit, so all of this extra capacity to manage the issue is wasted.
Definitely makes me want rooftop solar and a battery more than I already did
Also enjoying the internet knowing what it is. It's a cyber attack! It's Russia! It's Trump! It's the fault of EU regulations! No, it's solar! No, it's nuclear! No, it's net zero! No, it's underinvestment! No, it's electricity imports! No, it's communism, no, it's capitalism.
(I bet 10p it's capitalism)
You'll need a system that can run off-grid (islanded) that's not a normal setup, certainly for the UK. Most UK setups shut down generation when the grid is off.
the thing about the amospheric conditions is that usually if engineers are making a thing that can be done in by such natural causes, they build in a big olde safety factor. If it does end up failing, its usually really obvious why - there's a hurriance or a drought or a heatwave or whatever.
The generators trip if there's a massive power outage like that. Because there's no grid to synchronise to and nowhere to send the power. The power station operators really need to hope their DC backup batteries and protective systems were working properly or there could be some seriously knackered turbines and generators to repair.
This sounds exactly like a black start scenario to me.
This why I said the term "black start" is confusing.
To me (working on the process side) "Blackstart" implies you have nothing. The plant has gone cold, you've got no compressed / instrument air, the control systems are switched off.
There's electrical side issues in bringing them back online, but on the steam side (whether it's coal, gas, oil or nuclear boiling the water) you've got a whole other set of blackstart issues for example. Your control valves need air pressure to operate (the stem is pushed up and down pneumatically by a diaphragm), you can't get instrument air without the instrument air compressor (might be electric or steam driven), your compressor isn't running because you have neither steam nor electricity, you can't get steam or electricity because the valves are closed, so you end up in a circular problem of nothing in the plant can be started because it's all interdependent.
AIUI the generators should have 'tripped' by isolating themselves from the grid, furnaces etc will have turned themselves down, but the system keeps warm and self sustaining until it's time to re-connect it.
'Isn't more inertia in the system only useful if you have some action you can take in the extra time it gives you to avoid the trip?
In this case it at least in part literally means the flywheel effect of big generators spinning at 50hz.
If I flick my kettle* on the generator feels that load as a braking force, and the flywheel slows, the steam turbine on the other side then reacts to maintain that speed.
If one generator is somehow out of phase with another (i.e. it's been disconnected) then you get a difference in voltage between them (just visualize the sine waves shifted left/right slightly) and that balances out as one acts as a drag on the other. That generates both huge spikes in current and a great big bang as the alternators synchronize. So the aim is to connect them after they've been synchronized. There's a spinning dial on the control panel** that shows how out of phase you are, if it's spinning then you're fast /or slow, if it's stopped it shows you're at the right speed, and the pointer is how far out of phase you are. The aim is to stop it spinning at 12 o'clock. Then with the grid already balanced and your alternator spinning at no load you can connect the two. If you then open the steam valve to the turbine it will try and speed up the alternator, but because it and every other alternator on the grid are now connected it's trying to accelerate every one together which it will find hard to do as applying more torque, pushes your alternator slightly out of phase, the current*** goes up, someone else's goes down and is now acting as a break on your system. That's the inertia.
If for example the sun suddenly came out then the load on all those alternators drops and they speed up, and the steam valve has to be closed a bit and the boiler turned down, that's the issue with a lack of inertia.
Solar and wind have none of that, their inverter just generates a sine wave to match the grid.
*it would need to be a massive kettle obviously to have a measurable impact.
**more likely a digital gauge these days I guess.
*** I'm saying current for simplicity, AC electrics are complicated as you have voltage, current and frequency,
Its interesting being sat in the middle of Die Hard 4.0 thou.
It could have been a nuclear attack or aliens invading as once you have no phone signal you're unaware.
That did stay on for a while then all dropped out
The only way you can find out is using the car radio to see whats up.
We've been having new substations installed so was expecting it to be that :-).
I'll probably invest in a battery or possibly a wind up radio and some more gas for the jetboil and make sure the pot noodle stack is properly maintained, I only found out last week that the big pot noodles have bigger noodles!!!.
You'll need a system that can run off-grid (islanded) that's not a normal setup, certainly for the UK. Most UK setups shut down generation when the grid is off.
it's my understanding that all solar panels would shut off completely during a power cut (except in the case that you are totally off-grid in which case the power cut is irrelevant!) but batteries could be configured to isolate themselves from the grid & continue to supply power, but that is not standard (which sounds like it would be an extra cost to consider!)
Ah, got you about that level of blackstart TINAS. Would take a while for our place to get that flat and cold, (Connah's Quay Gas CCGT in North Wales) and frankly if Unit 5, (the kettle in the control room mess) is not working, well we may as well just close doors as we leave. 😁 You're referring to coal plants by the sound of it, I guess you're not at a site now?
Good explanation of Synchronous Compensation to maintain grid frequency. There are a few units around the UK now that have no electrical generation capacity, their only function is to provide that Hz stabilisation effect through an enormous spinning mass.
We can rule out a cyber attack.
I know James and would consider him an authority in such matters.
I know James and would consider him an authority in such matters.
his logic seems sound, but he’s only 90% sure… and by their very nature rogue states are unpredictable and not necessarily going to claim success for any particular test attack (to see what’s possible, understand how people/states react)…
that said I think there are more likely explanations including a simple major component fault or an “IT” upgrade where someone hit the wrong button!
of course it always struck me that the people who profit most from cyber threats (or even the media discussing if this might be a cyber attack) are consultants offering their expertise in protecting from those threats!
There's a line in... I think Star Trek First Contact, where Picard tells Data he'll take his best guess over someone else's certainty.
He (James) Went on to say:
Annoyingly the Tesla Powerwall has the domestic grid forming capability desired.
I think you need the second generation gateway IIRC.
Mine works very nicely.
As with Heathrow lots of nonsense being talked out there.
Sounds similar to the event in the UK (2009?) that was contained by LFD.
With that, and possibly this, the problem was not fossil generation or renewable generation but protection settings based on an assumption of a higher proportion of fossil while there was actually more renewable in reality. And a couple of decent common or garden faults and you get cascade tripping.
The UK have addressed the issue going forwards not by going back to fossil generation but by tweaking a couple of protection settings (albeit on lots of generators).
But that was the UK. Texas was completely different and this might have been something completely different again.
I know a few of the folk the press / TV / radio are contacting as experts, and the ones who really are experts are saying “don’t know yet”.
For the above.
Google “grid forming inverter”
You can make DC sources (fully converted wind, solar, batteries) assist with or even control voltage and frequency, but until recently they tended not to (cost and control in a spinning synchronous rotor based system).
Going forwards they may have to.
This looks a reasonable explanation (at least I haven’t spotted the errors yet).
https://energycentral.com/c/iu/grid-forming-vs-grid-following
The weirdies are blaming net zero.
Or there's the Occam's razor approach which is that it was a cascading failure
That's how the Iranians were got IIRC, a single USB stick put into a non-airgapped PC, so if it was hackers they could have got something apparently insignificant that cascaded massively. But a 10% chance of that feels fair.
The weirdies are blaming net zero.
They are probably slightly right and completely wrong at the same time.
It’s not about renewables or fossil, it’s about how you manage your power system / energy system, and understanding that you do it slightly differently for different mixes of generation.
But as for what actually caused this - wait and see. It’s not like we’ve never had a widespread cascade failure on a system with traditional generation.
Profit isn't necessarily financial, and none of the potential motives map here:
- no financial benefit - not even a bank robbery under cover of power outage
- no military benefit, no invasion alongside or any other form of attack alongside
- no political benefit on a nation-state level, if it was nation-state they've just pushed the big red button for zero reward
- if it were hacktivism of some kind, I would expect a statement to have been blasted out by now
Now, there is an argument it could be skiddies, opportunists, or idiots, but then we've got to ask about capabilities. If the European grid was that vulnerable, then we'd be seeing attacks daily.
Ultimately, this is probably correct, as you say, seems most likely.
All the same, 'who benefits' is a datapoint not an analysis. Im reminded of MH-17, much the same logic came out - "Nobody benefits from this, especially not the russians, can't be them". The problem with 'cui bono' is that it doesnt allow for incompetence, in the case of MH17, some idiots got lent a weapon they shouldn't have had. It's not inconceivable something similar could happen with a cyber weapon.
Just finished listening to a trashy audio book called The Disruption Trilogy by RE McDermott. A solar flare kills most of the transformers in the northern hemisphere and the lights go out. The US government prioritises hording of resources and power and leaves the people to fend for themselves. Within days it is full-on rape and pillage, gangs, prison breakouts and a survivalist's wet dream. I guess the ready availability of guns might make that sort of scenario more likely but I was glad to hear that Spain and Portugal managed to hold civilisation together for a few hours.
On the home solar/battery side, ours is grid-linked and when the mains power goes off so does ours, much to the confusion and anger of my family.
Does anyone know how easy it would be to MacGuyver a working system in the event of a semi-apocalypse....just in case...
On the home solar/battery side, ours is grid-linked and when the mains power goes off so does ours, much to the confusion and anger of my family.
Does anyone know how easy it would be to MacGuyver a working system in the event of a semi-apocalypse....just in case...
Hard to enough I wouldn’t bother.
Could you turn off the main circuit breaker in your house so that your house is disconnected from the grid, then get a cheap petrol generator, start it up and plug it into a wall socket, and as long as the generator can supply enough watts, your house should be back in action again.
Obviously if you don't isolate your house from the grid, when the grid comes back on then there could be a big bang.
Can anyone poke holes in my plan?
Can anyone poke holes in my plan?
Reckon your plan might poke holes in the generator, partition walls, people stood nearby etc. 🤣
Dave managed it in the USA...at huge expense.
Dave made a lot of money (I assume) working for Microsoft.
A transfer switch is the key.
Can anyone poke holes in my plan?
My dad used to do exactly that. One of the first things I did after he died was decommission his extension cord with a male plug at each end. Handing in his hoard of cyanide poison was first on the list. His shed should have been preserved as a museum of extremely unsafe workplace practices.
Can anyone poke holes in my plan?
Apart from trying to push 80A through a circuit designed for lower amperage, the wrong side of safety devices and that probably won't power any other circuit (??), no
Obviously if you don't isolate your house from the grid, when the grid comes back on then there could be a big bang.
Strangely, domestic feed-in could have been one hole in the Swiss cheese that caused the Iberian outage, along with too much reliance on solar and wind, too few international interconnects and too few local power stations
You're referring to coal plants by the sound of it, I guess you're not at a site now?
No, I work on the design of oil/gas/petrochemical plants, I've done one waste to energy plant as well, they all generally have on-site generation using either steam turbines or CCGT's with some level of import or export from the grid (or not, it might be incredibly remote). So there's usually some thought put into how to start up the plant with no external power.
There are a few units around the UK now that have no electrical generation capacity, their only function is to provide that Hz stabilisation effect through an enormous spinning mass.
That I didn't know!
Were they built like that or are we just keeping old alternators spinning?
Can anyone poke holes in my plan?
A colleague did that with a solar system. The lead to it was referred to as the death plug because it looked like a standard UK 13A plug, except if you pull it out the pins are live 😬
Swapping the plug / socket around doesn't help either because then the live pins are just live the other 99% of the time.
Various people poking holes in my plan
But in the event of the zombie apocalypse it would work right? OK, it'll have its limitations and risks, and isn't going to pass any safety inspections and is definitely not compliant with any regs, but it'll keep the lights on. Just don't try and run any heavy loads like the oven, or car charger.
NB: For the avoidance of doubt and for those who take things literally I'm not really going to do this, it's just a thought experiment,bit of fun.
Were they built like that or are we just keeping old alternators spinning?
I'm not really up on the details of the design, but the one we own was a repurposed CCGT using the gas turbine as motive power. Think it was a new flywheel rather than just de-bladed ST and disconnected generator.
If anyone wants to have a go at pretending to be a grid eningeer, this is a frustratingly geeky game 🤓
https://www.neso.energy/energy-101/balancing-grid-interactive-game
If anyone’s interested check out the actual electrical content channel on YouTube for a basic theory dumbed down on what happened, there is swearing and an East Midlands accent to contend with though.
Could you turn off the main circuit breaker in your house so that your house is disconnected from the grid, then get a cheap petrol generator, start it up and plug it into a wall socket, and as long as the generator can supply enough watts, your house should be back in action again.
I have a petrol generator and 90A changeover switch, which is the safe way to do it. My question is whether if I switch to the generator, will my solar panels sync to it, so that when the sun shines I can get more amps than the generator itself provides? My research so far suggests that generator output may be too noisy and rough for the inverter to cope with.