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.
