Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.
NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:
Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have- nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to all the world’s ’have-nots."
Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!
Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.
I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.
The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.
edit: and europe has almmost always atleast half a year of whole country supply of natural gas in caverns and other storage.
None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.
That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.
It might be faster to instead black start several independent power islands in parallel, and connect them together as a final step. At least in my country (Brazil), that's how it's done for large-scale blackouts, even when some of the country still has power; it was done that way for the partial blackout in 2023, and there's a written procedure on how to do it (which is available on the operator website, if you know where to look). In 2023, some areas failed to black start for one reason or another, and had to wait for power from the outside; other areas managed to black start as expected, and were then synchronized with other areas until everything came back together.
But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around
Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to
It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.
However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.
And while there are ways to maintain inertia https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/grid-inertia-why-... I don't see why a solar farm can't do it through smart syncing of inverters (or maybe they do some measure of it)
As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.
Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
North America is organized in regional grids:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...
Texas, on the other hand, which is easily the size of a country...
It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.
Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.
CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.
A few more interconnects with the rest of the country and it wouldn't have even made the news.
this is after decades of Texans bragging about their independent power supply. Many Texans still believe outright lies about the blackout, like it being "caused" by green energy sources, which was false.
It was caused by free market participants not spending capital to harden their network. Solar panels and Wind Turbines work great in the cold climate of Canada.
The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm. The grid companies all should have foreseen this with even minimal investment in planning. They didn't, because that's less profitable, and the "regulator" in Texas has no ability to punish them for pinching pennies on reliability and resilience.
Free Market at work baby!
This is incorrect. That storm set multiple records, most notably the longest freezing streak the state has ever experienced [1]
Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Waco hit 30 year lows while Dallas set 80 year lows.
It also hit the entire state at the same time.
Maybe there's validity to some of the rest of your post, but that storm was absolutely not a regular occurance.
1. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/streaks/mapping/...
As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
I had a long blackout as a kid during a hurricane in 1985. Once it was safe it was repaired rather quickly.
The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
If your city has an extended power outage, the cell nets could easily be down as well.
And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.
Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.
Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.
It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"
Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
Credit cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that.
The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
That's not the case. There are individual laws in each country that govern this.
https://fullfact.org/online/UK-not-only-europe-country-legal...
Either way, there should be no reason grocery stores don't accept cash imo.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/cash_strategy/faqs/html/index...
Only in a handful of cities and states. There is no federal law requiring businesses to accept cash for goods and services.
But in this case, an emergency, I would assume someone would still know how to take a manual payment receipt!
No need for imaginary scenarios.
and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.
same applies for luxury high rises in europe, almost all if not all of 20+ story buildings built last 30 years have them on roofs.
Why? Every gas station stores that capacity.
also depends on data center, some datacenters are directly in middle of european city. in most dense part of city and dense in europe or asia is something else then dense in america.
> and so being located in middle of city you do not want ten of thousands of liters of diesel in tanks there.
This is based on FUD. This is the case all over the US and they don’t cause problems.
It’s interesting that Europe has taken such a brittle approach to infrastructure.
(Samurai wallet is defunct, but the principle holds up)
Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
Transacting bitcoin private keys without going to the network and trusting the other party to not scam you defeats the whole purpose.
When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
It’s not like you can (could?) keep a block „just in case” and thus many shopkeepers wouldn’t even bother in case of outages.
Depending where you live a good old trust can be a currency. Humans are great when it comes to adaptation, I bet I could just write on paper name, CC number and leave it on a paper for shopkeeper and everything would resolve just fine..
Most retail workers are GenZ and struggle to understand what this would even look like because they’ve never conducted any transaction without POS computers (for looking up prices, for tallying them, for figuring tax and total, and computing change), so even if a dusty manual in the stockroom technically spells out a method of ringing sales using nothing but pen and paper and maybe a solar calculator, I would be surprised if any of the clerks working any given day would have the initiative to initiate an offline protocol. Most likely the store manager would usher customers out, lock up the store, keep the staff for 30 minutes to see if it came back on, and then go home.
I've only seen a few but I believe they have springs on the inside and roll on little wheels similar to how desk draws roll. Most can be opened with a key to trigger that event.
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/neue-rege... https://www.lexware.de/wissen/buchhaltung-finanzen/kassenbon...
Many other EU countries have similar regulations, and in some cases had them for a long time.
Receipts or invoices are the basis for a firm's whole economic activity, including the underpinning of their financial reporting, their tax burdens etc. And businesses failing to provide receipts erodes not only the tax base, but also any rights a consumer may have.
Also, fuel station can probably successfully run it's own backup power;)
Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).