https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
I saw a video the other day of some human running and jumping on a transformer after hopping a fence, dancing on the transformer in a distribution site.
It ended as you'd expect, a bright light, a lot of curse words from the camera operator who was probably blinded temporarily.
Electricity does not care.
Nor does Darwin
I can't believe and I'm horrified someone actually published such a video.
Trying to stay on the facts, this incident is likely accidental but some people even the very workers at energy companies could send a message for, I don't know. A pay raise?
Yes, you can try to hold the country hostage for your salary by going on strike, but that's the sort of thing that results in very energetic union-busting.
Actually sabotaging the infrastructure would result in terrorism charges, or at the very least the JSO treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_County_substation_attack
Unsolved to this day.
Not that type of hospital.
The low-wage workers can get triple-time and take weeks off "later in the year" for covering the stop-loss, so they also benefit.
I don't call fire fighters, because they are emergency responders. Please note i said what i do, not what i think other people should do. The people i tell this to are free to do with that information what they want, i don't demand it or anything.
Consider this a contextual error on my part. It's more of an "inside baseball" snippet of conversation than anything that requires judgement.
A tree falling can be addressed by vegetation management and trimming. A power line sagging because of excess heat is operator error.
These are not remotely the same.
I hate this term, and look forward to using it all the time.
As you have identified A wider right of way costs more.
Usually for lines above some voltage, perhaps 200kV, the cost of an outage due to a tree strike outweighs the cost of additional vegetation management so they will clear the right of way wide enough that no tree can fall and hit the power line.
Around here for 130kV the right of way is still as narrow as it can be and we annually take down the riskiest trees as this is the best for our budget, which is not unlimited.
They go through and remove damaged trees near the easements of the highway lines, as well as branches that could break into lines.
As an aside we lived on the same section of grid as the sheriff, and our power was rock solid for a few years, then he left office and now our power is better than average (at least better than our neighbors who's power line cones from the other direction).
Residential distribution voltage varies by utility but it’s usually in the medium voltage range, 5kV to 35kV, with 13.8kV being common.
In Texas, the electric providers cut staff and maintenance to maximize shareholder value. They will not have redundant systems and redundant plants out of the goodness of their hearts. The Texas marketplace actually allowed them in the odd event of an outage to charge astronomical spot prices thinking this will incentivize them to have redundant systems. This was a foolish fantasy.
Now in Texas, discussion of how to cost share redundancy have taken place. But no one wants to pay for it. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/01/texas-power-market-p...
If you want a no fail grid you need to incentivise a no fail grid.
So frequent it even has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_accidents_an...
Solar PV/thermal + wind: ~78%
Nuclear: 11.5%
Co-generation: 5%
Gas-fired: ~3% (less than 1GW)
This is (a) incredibly impressive to achieve and (b) definitely the point at which the battery infrastructure needs to catch up in order to reduce the risk of such incidents.
This non-existent technology will surely catch up very soon, I wonder what takes them so long.
The only battery available at this scale is hydro and it doesn't do very well in Spain because of droughts.
Makes the case for favouring flywheels over batteries.
http://claverton-energy.com/active-power-article-flywheel-en... as a smaller scale example. $330/kW but at that price it only has 15 seconds of carry-over, basically just enough to get the diesel generator fired up.
Spinning reserve in the grid is equipment that capable of long-term generation very quickly. In the case of hydroelectric dams, they will often cut off the water supply to some of the turbines and use air pressure to push the water out of the way; the generator attached to the turning essentially turns into a motor and keeps the turbine spinning. If you need to bring it online, you open the water valve and let the air out.
Similar situation with natural gas-fired simple cycle turbines. They’re sitting there running at low output. Need more? Just add fuel. For combined cycle it might take a bit for the boiler to warm up for full output but having the first stage running full tilt will get it warmed up fast.
In a solar grid you probably have milliseconds instead of seconds, this could be the reason why the automation failed in this case.
https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1057463/...
That's insane, imagine if it let go.
Or if you consider the Irish grid (average consumption around 5 GW) that's enough energy to power the grid for about 0.8 seconds (obviously it's not going to have enough instantaneous power output to do that, but again for a sense of scale).
If Ireland had 10 of them, that'd be 8 grid-seconds worth of energy. Although, of course, actual disturbances aren't going to be that large. A few percent imbalance perhaps?
So if the whole grid had an instantaneous 10% imbalance, one of those units could carry it for 8 seconds.
(EDIT: changed energy numbers to fit the appropriate power grid)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_harp
Edit: might be a completely different kind of oscillation than I was thinking of. https://news.sky.com/story/spain-portugal-power-outage-lates...
So I would also like to understand how this works :)
They already became a laughing stock once for promising the "strongest possible response" for the Nord Stream 2 sabotage [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/eu-sees-sabotage-nor...
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
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 problems in the last decade, maybe someone build to cheap or was even cheating somewhere.
> Are the grids at this scale really this brittle? Would there be a death toll from this?
Hospitals should have backup-systems. Traffic should be able to stop in time. I guess the most problematic parts are people stuck in elevators and other spaces which only open electrical, as also 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.
In reality this means you might lose, say, 1GW due to a transmission line failing, have a big frequency dip as a result, and then have 14GW drop offline like dominoes because they sense a grid frequency outside of safe operating parameters; disconnect as they go into safety mode; cause the frequency dip to worsen; and pull even more plants offline with them. If you're not careful, a small outage can quickly cascade into an entire grid going offline.
I think we should prepare for the worst though. It's wrong to assume it's not an attack too, and until we can conclude it's not an attack we should be prepared to deal with the possible consequences and act accordingly.
Very poorly explained right now by Space Weather News. I am waiting for an updated explanation.
We're a remote business so it seemed like I'd just rudely dropped off the call, but as everything was down I couldn't let people know what'd happened.
Apparently it was caused by botched maintenance work affecting 30,000 houses, but the timing was so perfect I can't help thinking it was because our AGI overlords really didn't want me to deliver that talk for some reason.