A full grid black start is orders of magnitude more complex. You’re not just reviving one machine — you’re trying to bring back entire islands of infrastructure, synchronize them perfectly, and pray nothing trips out along the way. Watching a rig wake up is impressive. Restarting a whole country’s grid is heroic.
The words "it's a miracle it works at all" routinely popped up in those conversations, which is... something you don't want to hear about any sort of power generation - especially not nuclear - but it's true. It's a system basically built to produce "common accidents". It's amazing that it doesn't on a regular basis.
Funny thing is, those are the exact words I use when talking to people about networking. And realistically anytime I dig deep into the underlying details of any big enough system I walk away with that impression. At scale, I think any system is less “controlled and planned precision” and more “harnessed chaos with a lot of resiliency to the unpredictability of that chaos”
Components aren’t reliable. The whole thing might be duct tape and popsicle sticks. But the trick for SRE work is to create stability from unreliable components by isolating and routing around failures.
It’s part of what made chaos engineering so effective. From randomly slowing down disk/network speed to unplugging server racks to making entire datacenters go dark - you intentionally introduce all sorts of crazy failure modes to intentionally break things and make sure the system remains metastable.
Seek only to understand it well enough to harness the chaos for more subtle useful purpose, for from chaos comes all the beauty and life in the universe.
The syncronasation of a power grid ... Wow.
Tell me more about this paradise.
Or the U.S. financial system. Or civilization in general.
The reason people work together is fundamentally the same reason you go to work - self interest. You're rarely there because you genuinely believe in the mission or product - mostly you just want to get paid and then go do your own thing. And that's basically the gears of society in a nutshell. But you need the intelligence to understand the bigger picture of things.
For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps. They even wage war over them and in efforts to expand them or control their territory. This [1] war was something that revolutionized our understanding of primates behaviors, which had been excessively idealized beforehand. But they lack the intelligence to understand how to bring their little societies up in scale.
They understand full well how to kill the other tribe and "integrate" their females, but they never think to e.g. enslave the males, let alone higher order forms of expansion with vassalage, negotiated treaties, and so on. All of which over time trend towards where we are today, where it turns out giving somebody a little slice of your pie and letting him otherwise roam free is way more effective than just trying to dominate him.
Citation needed on that one.
> Consider that Sparta and Athens were separated by only 130 miles, yet couldn't possibly have been further apart!
They spoke the same language, shared the same literature, practiced the same religion, had a long history of diplomatic ties. When the Persians razed Athens, they took refuge with the Spartans.
> For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps.
Again, I don't think this claim stands to evidence. The so called chimp war you mention is about a group of about a dozen and a huge fight that broke out among them. That doesn't support the idea that they are capable of 200-strong 'intricate' groupings.
"They spoke the same language" ... not exactly, the Spartans spoke Doric, while the Athenians Attic. (Interestingly, there is a few Doric speakers left [0].) While those languages were related, their mutual intelligibility was limited. Instead of "Greek" as a single language, you need to treat it as a family of languages, like "Slavic".
"shared the same literature" ... famously, the Spartans weren't much into culture and art, and they left barely any written records of their own. Even the contemporaries commented on just how boring Sparta was in all regards.
If we delve deeper into ideas about how a good citizen looked like, or how law worked, the differences between Sparta and Athens are significant, if not outright massive.
While those two cities weren't entirely alien to each other, had some ties, same gods, and occassionally fought on the same side in a big war, there was indeed a huge political and cultural distance between them. I would compare it to Poland vs. Russia.
Not "entirely alien, had some ties" is not it. They were part of the same cultural cluster, participated in the same games, traveled to the same sanctuaries, had mutual proxenies. The very fact that we know the opinions of several Athenians about Spartans is telling. We don't know what they thought of inhabitants of Celtic population centers, or Assyrian cities, or Egyptian ones. But we know what they thought of individual Spartans that they mention by name, biographical detail and genealogy.
Yeah, we have a lot of opinions of one another, yes we understand basic vocabulary of our cousins, though details in fine speech are another matter, yes, we are technically Christian, but still the political and societal difference between, say, Czechs and Russians is quite big.
As was the difference between the Spartans and the Athenians. Constitutionally, the poleis were all over the map, from outright tyrannies, through oligarchies and theocracies, to somewhat democratic states.
That's called circular reasoning.
Put another way, you're arguing against an example and not a fundamental premise. Proving the example is correct doesn't really get us anywhere since presumably you disagree with the fundamental premise.
That sounds very much like "Just believe me." or even more "The rules were that you guys weren’t gonna fact-check"
> I have no idea what you're trying to argue.
Presumably you know what you are trying to argue. That is what the questions were about.
> Proving the example is correct doesn't really get us anywhere
You would have solid foundations to build your premise from. That is what it would get us.
First we check the bricks (the individual facts), then we check if they were correctly built into a wall (do the arguments add up? are the conclusions supported by the reasoning and the facts?). And then we marvel at the beautiful edifice you have built from it (the premise). Going the other way around is ass-backwards.
> you're not really formulating any argument or contrary view yourself.
I don't know what viewpoint namaria has. I know that "Sparta and Athens [..] couldn't possibly have been further apart" is ahistorical. They were very similar in many regards. If you think they were that different you have watched too many modern retellings, instead of reading actual history books. That's my contrary view.
> For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps.
Here the question is what do we believe to be "societies". The researchers indeed documented hundreds of chimps visiting the same human made feeding station. Is that a society now? I don't think so, but maybe you think otherwise. What makes the Chimps' behaviour a society as opposed to just a bunch of chimps at the same place?
I'd much rather focus on "prepping" by building social resiliency, instead. The local community I'm plugged into is much stronger together than anything I could possibly build individually.
I am an ex-scientist and an engineer and had a look at the books of my son who studies finance in the best finance school in the world (I am saying this to highlight that he will be one of the perpetrators, possibly with influence, of this mess)
The things in there are crazy. There are whole blocks that are obvious but made to sound complicated. I spent some time on a graph just to realize that they ultimately talk about solving a set of two linear equations (midfle school level).
Some pieces were not comprehensible because they did not make sense.
And then bam! A random differential equation and explanation as it was the answer to the universe. With an incorrect interpretation.
And then there are statistics that would make "sociology science" blush. Yes, they are so bad that even the, ahem, experts who do stats in sociology would be ashamed (no hate for sociology, everyone needs to eat, it is just that I was several times reviewer of thesises there and I have trauma afterwards).
The fact that finance works is because we have some kind of magical "local minimum of finance energy" from which the Trumps of this world somehow did not maybe to break from (fingers crossed) by disrupting the world too much.
Computer networking is not the same. Our networks will not explode. I will grant you that they can be shite if not designed properly but they end up running slowly or not at all, but it will not combust nor explode.
If you get the basics right for ethernet then it works rather well as a massive network. You could describe it as an internetwork.
Basically, keep your layer 1 to around 200 odd maximum devices per VLAN - that works fine for IPv4. You might have to tune MAC tables for IPv6 for obvious reasons.
Your fancier switches will have some funky memory for tables of one address to other address translation eg MAC to IP n VLAN and that. That memory will be shared with other databases too, perhaps iSCSI, so you have to decide how to manage that lot.
EVPN uses BGP to advertise MAC addresses in VXLAN networks which solves looping without magic packets, scales better and is easier to introspect.
And we didn't even get into the provider side which has been using MPLS for decades.
A problem with high bandwidth networking over fiber is that since light refracts within the fiber some light will take a longer path than other, if the widow is too short and you have too much scattering you will drop packets.
So hopefully someone doesn't bend your 100G fiber too much, if that isn't finicky idk what is, DAC cables with twinax solve it short-range for cheaper however.
What’s your source?
Perhaps the safest assumption is that system reliability ultimately depends on quite a lot of factors that are not purely about careful engineering.
Most operating systems are based on ambient authority, which is just a disaster waiting to happen.
I wonder however how being part of the "continental Europe synchronous grid" affects this, and how it isolates to Portugal and Spain like this.
But yeah there are a lot of capacitors that want juice on startup that happily kills any attempt to restore power. My father had "a lot" of PA speakers at home and when we tripped the 3680w breaker (16A 220v) we had to kill some gear to get it back up again. I'm also very sure we had 230v because I lived close to the company I worked for and we ran small scale DC operations so I could monitor input voltage and frequency on SNMP so through work I had "perfect amateur" monitoring of our local grid. Just for fun I got notifications if the frequency dropped more than .1 and it happened, but rarely. Hardly ever above though since that's calibrated over time like Google handle NTP leap seconds.
I love infrastructure
I realized the tech must have been winding up a flywheel, and then the pilot engaged a clutch to dump the flywheel's inertia into the engine.
The engineer in me loves the simplicity and low tech approach - a ground cart isn't needed nor is a battery charger (and batteries don't work in the cold). Perfect for a battlefield airplane.
---
I saw an exhibit of an Me-262 jet fighter engine. Looking closely at the nacelle, which was cut away a bit, I noticed it enclosed a tiny piston engine. I inferred that engine was used to start the jet engine turning. It even had a pull-start handle on it! Again, no ground cart needed.
---
I was reading about the MiG-15. American fighters used a pump to supply pressurized oxygen to the pilot. The MiG-15 just used a pressurized tank of air. It provided only for a limited time at altitude, but since the MiG-15 drank fuel like a drunkard, that was enough time anyway. Of course, if the ground crew forgot to pressurize it, the pilot was in trouble.
Again, simple and effective.
point of trivia: Messerschmitt, yes, but Bf-109, produced by Bayerische Flugzeugwerke.
you don't want to get your flugzeug works confused
BTW, since we are Birds of a Feather, I bet you'd like the movie "The Blue Max". It's really hard to find on bluray, but worth it! The flying sequences are first rate, and no cgi.
And, despite the news reports, this is not a true blackstart. Some power survived.
Similarly, the US Navy maintains banks of pressurized air flasks to air-start emergency diesels. Total Capacity being some multiple of the required single-start capacity
Random fact: Those starters are a plot point in the 1965 film The Flight of the Phoenix, where the protagonists are trying to start a plane that’s stranded in the Sahara, but only have a small supply of starter cartridges left.
Is that what Dr. Sattler is doing in this scene from Jurassic Park?
Nice attention to detail by the filmmakers.
There will be costs/losses by the various power companies which weren’t generating during all this of course, but also fixing this is by definition outside of their control (the grid operators are the ones responsible).
I’m sure public backlash will cause some changes of course. But the same situation in Texas didn’t result in the meaningful changes one would expect.
That’s because there is no effective regulation of the state’s power industry. Since they’re (mostly) isolated from the national grid, they aren’t required to listen to FERC, who told them repeatedly that they should winterize their power plants. And a state-level, the regulators are all chosen by the Governor, who receives huge contributions from the energy industry, so he’s in no rush to force them to pay for improvements.
The real irony was the following summer during a heatwave, when they also experienced blackouts. Texas energy: not designed for extreme cold, not designed for extreme heat. Genius!
I miss the food in Texas, but that’s about it.
Rather, it's the typical Republican approach--reduce costs, never mind the safety systems.
Small diesels could be an option but they're harder to pull start for a given size.
I once needed to jump-start a small marine diesel, many miles from land...
There was a small lever that cuts compression. You have to get it spinning really fast before restoring compression! It's definitely a lot of work!
EDIT - Here is a cheap modern small marine diesel [1]. The operation manual suggests that you don't have to do anything to get it spinning quickly, you just have to crank it 10 times, put away the crank handle, and then flip the compression switch. That's progress!
[1] https://www.yanmar.com/marine/product/engines/1gm10-marine-d...
Cranks and decompression levers are gone for at least 30-40 years now tho.
They're my kryptonite, but I accept it's mostly my ignorance.
Air compressors have more valves and gaskets that are vulnerable to oxidation, especially in salty environments, so I'd have thought the upkeep between the two, the two stroke would be easier.
Look at how the military builds surface-based missiles these days: it's in a factory-sealed box. Molten salt batteries so they last for decades. (You don't see molten salt in most purposes because once it's been triggered it's lifespan is in minutes or even less. They're used in applications that only need to deliver power once.)
Having good, fresh fuel on an oil rig. They need an engine that can run on crude.
It’s not the type of thing that using directly is economically feasible, even for emergency situations.
Maybe there are other concerns for an oil rig.
The hand-pumped air compressor is the tool of last resort. You can try an engine start if there's someone there who's able to pump it. You don't have to worry about how much charge is left in your batteries or whether or not the gasoline for the 2-stroke pump engine has gone stale. It's the tool that you use as an alternative to "well, the batteries are dead too, guess we're not going to start the engine tonight... let's call the helicopters and abandon ship"
Could the batteries be dead and the generators not start? I guess but it's very unlikely. I get that on an oil rig it might be a matter of life and death and you need some kind of manual way to bootstrap but there's not much that's more reliable than a 12V lead-acid battery and a diesel engine in good condition.
I think I'd take Lithium Ion batteries over lead acid for almost every conceivable use-case. They are superior in almost every way. Lighter, less likely to leak acid everywhere, better long term storage (due to a low self-discharge) and better cold weather discharge performance. The only drawback would be a slightly increased risk of fire with Lithium.
Most vessels will experience a blackout periodically and the emergency generator start fine, normally on electric or stored air start, and then the main generators will come up fine. It's really not delicate, complex or tricky - some vessels have black outs happen very often, and those that don't will test it periodically. There will also be a procedure to do it manually should automation fail.
There are air starters on some emergency generators that need handling pumping. These will also get tested periodically.
The most complex situation during black out restoration would be manual synchronisation of generators but this is nothing compared to a black start.
In a real black start, the guys might very well grab a portable generator and just use that instead. But having the option to hand crank something rather than rely on batteries that might run flat is good.
And then phase will align itself a couple times a minute so what's difficult about that part?
That tends to be for very large engines, where the extra plumbing isn’t a problem.
A rare but sobering opportunity to reflect on something we usually take for granted: electricity.
We live in societies where everything depends on the grid — from logistics and healthcare to communications and financial systems. And yet, public awareness of the infrastructure behind it is shockingly low. We tend to notice the power grid only when it breaks.
We’ve neglected it for decades. In many regions, burying power lines is dismissed as “too expensive.” But compare that cost to the consequences of grid collapse in extreme weather, cyberattacks, or even solar storms — the stakes are existential. High-impact, low-frequency events are easy to ignore until they’re not.
That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.
Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.
Lest also forget the Crowdstrike drama where many supermarkets simply went dark, in some instances for nearly 24 hours, despite working communication links. But I digress.
Literally true. However:
- If it takes them 10 minutes to fire up the generator, then 5 minutes to restart the network and registers, that is no big issue (in a many-hour outage)
- At least in my part of the USA, many supermarkets do have generators - because storm damage causes local outages relatively often, and they'd lose a lot of money if they couldn't keep their freezers and refrigerators powered. Since the power requirements of the lighting and registers are just (compared to the cooling equipment) a rounding error, those are also on generators.
Seen it done in USA, for a Target next to a Kroger grocer. Kroger lost everything that needed cold after reserve either ran out or wouldn't start, but Target had a contingencies contract and lost no product.
But both major supermarkets nearby worked on diesel generators and payment by card worked flawlessly. I guess they had satellite connection.
It might have been more complicated in small villages but people living in rural areas ually still use a lot of cash.
However I assume this can work offline with the data being uploaded later though, as basically all the small supermarkets and shops were still open here (_incredibly_ chaotic though), and on the big supermarkets card payments were working (TBF, even the free wifi was working there, I guess they probably have some satellite connection).
So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike.
When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve.
As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back.
You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1].
Looting only ever happens when areas hve started being evacuated and most shop owners + law enforcement are elsewhere.
I often wonder if we should leave energy/telecommunications in a state where they can and do fail with some degree of frequency that reminds us to have a back up plan that works.
I had thought that the (relatively) recent lockdowns had taught us how fragile our systems are, and that people need a local cache of shelf stable foods, currency, and community (who else discovered that they had neighbours during that time!)
For something like this, a local electricity generation system (solar panels, wind/water turbines, or even a ICE generator) would go a long way to ensuring people continued to have electricity for important things (freezers)
If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.
0:49 and light came back, and woke us for a moment.
So yeah, you need local first POS applications.
And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this?
Why will the US allow this, eventually?
In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd.
In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
I didn't mean literally zero cash, but once the bulk of your transactions are by card, you don't need to constantly go to the ATM and replenish your cash reserves
Of course I get that carrying coins and notes is cumbersome, but if we've managed to live all through the 80's and 90's with it, I think we can manage to keep doing it. 100% digital money is giving up on a huge level of self-determination and privacy that I wouldn't feel comfortable with, but I guess as newer generations grow up already pre-adoctrinated and not being able to compare the before-and-after, in the end society will end giving up.
I don't think it's just a generational divide.
I do understand the privacy and self-determination problems of a cashless society but I have to admit I'm just to weak-minded to care about that in practice; the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
Not sure I understand how that's different than today? You set a time and place, then you meet there, are people doing more than that today? Seems the youngsters understand this concept as well as older people, at least from the people I tend to meet like that.
> the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
Interestingly enough, no matter if you had cash or card yesterday you couldn't get a coffee anywhere, as none of the coffee machines had power and even in the fancier places where they could have made the coffee without power, they didn't have electricity for the grinder itself, so no coffee even for them.
no, today people are continuously updating you about their whereabouts and assume you can just change time, place continuously and if you don't have the phone people get lost and panic. Ok I'm exaggerating of course, but there is a grain of truth in this
I once used an aggregator app to summon a handyman to my place. My request was simple: move two pieces of furniture around my very small apartment.
So I find a reputable service within the app, I schedule it, and they send a guy. He shows up to my door breathless, with some kind of sob story about a vehicle breakdown. I dismiss that out of hand and he gets to work. He did a fine job and it didn't take very long.
Then we get to the point of settling up, so I announce I'm going to pay in the app. He looks really disappointed and says he usually takes cash. I realized at this point that he was ready to shake me down, and also he would incidentally be discovering where I stashed my cash, when I reached for it with him there in the room. So disappointed. So I send the money out in the app and I show the confirmation screen to the guy. And I felt so bad that I followed up with a tip in the same fashion.
But at the end of the day he was just a garden-variety cash-in-hand scammer and I had no reason to feel guilty, because I had unwittingly outwitted him by trusting the app. And the company had no qualms about it.
Another time, I had a very short cab ride to the laundry. And it did not take long for the driver to spin a gigantic tale about his auntie addicted to gambling used up all their savings and they was really hurting for money. I was shifting uncomfortably wondering why I was hearing this. So the cabbie parks the car and his POS machine shuts off. He's like "oh it's out of order" so here he is, shaking me down and expecting me to go fetch cash to put in his grubby hands.
I stared him up and down, started taking photos, and got out of there. I discussed with dispatch. They said if he's not accepting cards and I intended to pay by card, I owe him nothing.
So again a cash-in-hand sob-story scammer was foiled. The cab service was crazy enough to assign him to pick me up additional times. This is why I ride Waymo, folks!!!
The laborer was simply trying to actually get paid vs. deal with the overhead of the app. Somewhat shady perhaps - since it routes around the company taking their cut for finding him the work, and likely avoids taxes. I've paid these sorts of guys cash every single time I've used such a service and exactly zero of them have "shook me down" or cared where I stored the money. They make so little already I'm happy to help them out with a smile.
Cabbies simply want cash for pretty much the same reason. They get charged an astronomical "service fee" by the cab company, and likely are avoiding taxes as well. I agree that such a situation is more shady in general, but I've actually had (NYC) cops side with cabbies on this topic and force me to go get cash at the ATM or get arrested. I also use car services now over cabs whenever possible due to this reason - mostly for convenience, never out of fear of being robbed though.
The chances of you getting mugged/stolen from for using cash are just the same as the chances of you getting mugged for no apparent reason walking home. Perhaps the collective dis-use of cash has reduced these odds, but you specifically is utterly irrelevant.
Yes, well, I choose not to participate in shady shit like that. Is that OK that I prefer to make transactions as laid out by their employer and not every random guy?
> happy to help them out with a smile
So you choose to be knowingly complicit in tax-avoidance schemes. That's fine; you do you, but some of us steer clear of shady shit, just on principle, you know? Perhaps the company deserves their cut as well -- they get paid so little already, amirite?
Also if there was nothing unusual about their choice of payment, then why must they regale me with these shitty sob stories? Am I supposed to be moved to tears at their hardship and heroism at making it to my door, that I must promptly cover their expenses? They are not panhandlers, they are service providers.
No, I ordered a service and I pay for the value of the service, according to the Company's rates. The cab company was clear about it: either I pay how I want to or I don't owe them. Nobody's arresting me for refusing to fork over cash. That's a scam.
That's not the only time I was cash-scammed by a cab driver. They will pull every trick in the book, and surely they compare and trade notes on their marks.
It gets even worse: my simple insistence on transacting with the cab company earned me fake receipts. Yes, they faked every receipt that they sent me in email. The totals were all fudged down to be much smaller than what I paid, including a $0 tip. It was very very obvious, especially when the rides booked in the app were generating duplicates showing different calculations. I reported it twice to their backend developers and they said that there were some coding errors in device drivers; please stand by for a fix. LOL!
That's a scam to ensure that taxpayers can't get reimbursed for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Most/all cab companies provide NEMT services as well, and they can't stand when people go outside of insurance companies. So they falsified my receipts.
And again, that's why I trust Waymo.
You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.
That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
Nahhh - some banks have some parts of the infrastructure in COBOL. Specifically larger retail banks often have their ledgers in COBOL. Most of them want rid and are actively getting rid. Most places have had programs to root COBOL out since before 2000, but there are residual implementations remain. The ledgers are the hardest place to deal with because of the business case as well as the awkwardness. Basically there's not much of an advantage (or at least hasn't been) in modernizing so keeping the thing going has been the option. Now people want to have more flexible core systems so that they can offer more products, although not so sure that customers want this or can consume it. Still - it supports the idea of modernisation so not many people are keen to challenge.
The most common big implementations I come across are in Java.
Anyway point remains, electronic transactions with no internet or electricity is a solved problem, and banks don't want to solve it or they can't due to incompetency or maliciousness.
Currency transactions worth their weight in gold, it is of utmost importance for transactions to always be published to a central authority right away. If they don't have to be published, they should not exist at all. Imagine people buying stuff without anyone knowing right away! That should never, ever exist, for any reason.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cob...
I can imagine it and it happens all the time. Your version sounds very dystopian.
Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.
The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.
This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.
Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.
What's even more annoying that we have solutions for a lot of those problems - in case of electric grids we have hydroelectric buffers, we have types of powerplants that are easier to shutdown and startup than coal, gas or wind/solar(which cannot be used for cold start at all).
The problem is that building any of this takes longer than one political term.
Of course not, they're optimising shareholder profit.
How do you make those systems antifragile rather than simply highly resilient?
I postulate the grid as a whole is antifragile, but not enough for the renewable era. We still don’t know what was the root cause of the Spanish blackout almost 24h after it happened.
> This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.
What kind of comment is this? Toyota has been using and refining it for decades. It wasn’t invented yesterday by some “teenagers”. Such a state of HN’s comment section.
JIT is definitely not perfect as exposed during the Covid period, but it isn’t without merits and its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”.
Then we have JIT in computing, such as JVM.
Sure it is. That's exactly how it achieves the higher profitability. Safety margin costs money. Otherwise known as inefficiency.
Slack in the system is a good thing, not a bad thing. Operating at 95% capacity 24x7 is a horrible idea for society in general. It means you can't "burst mode" for a short period of time during a true emergency.
It's basically ignoring long tail risk to chase near-term profits. It's a whole lot of otherwise smart people optimizing for local maxima while ignoring the big picture. Certainly understandable given our economic and social systems, but still catastrophic in the end one day.
I would expect a paid professional in management discipline to be aware of such nuance but alas proven wrong again.
That should have been enough to scrub anyway, but there was clearly political pressure to launch.
I do agree that they need to specifically design anti-fragile.
We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.
The chips shortage has been difficult, but it's also been little more than an inconvenience when you look at it in terms of goods being available to consumers or whatever.
I fell into the other poster's trap, talking about something emotionally charged that isn't really responsive to what I said initially.
Sad whomp whomp horn: the economy is going to be negatively affected by covid disability and death on an ongoing basis and a new pandemic will still cause so much fear the economy will shut down.
I do agree on Covid disability. Early on we saw some pretty dire predictions, but since then it's mostly been an exercise in muddying the waters. Lots of wheel-spinning about what constitutes long Covid when they should have simply been collecting data on the various symptoms. Better to not see the problem than have to deal with it.
Look at how we were handling AIDS before we discovered it was HIV destroying the immune system. Long Covid is still at that stage--we are seeing a slew of highly varied effects rather than the mechanism.
And a lot of people thinking it was an overreaction proves nothing. People don't get a vote on reality.
But I wonder from a reliability (or lack of cascading failures) point of view whether synchronous islands interconnected with DC interconnects is more robust than a large synchronous network?
I feel like to many technologists, the internet is still "the place you go to to play games and chat with friends", just like it was 20 years ago. Even if our brains know it isn't true, our hearts still feel that way.
I sometimes feel like the countries cutting off internet access during high school final exams have a point. If you know the internet will be off and on a few days a year, your systems will be designed accordingly, and if anything breaks, you'll notice quickly and during a low-stakes situation.
Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.
This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.
I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.
Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.
The South Australia System Black in 2016 would count - SA already had high wind and rooftop solar penetration back then. There's a detailed report here if you're interested:
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...
Non tied solar won't affect the grid at all. So this is a non-issue.
Grid tie requires the grid to tie to, otherwise it can't synchronize. So it stays disconnected.
Why would that prevent you from being grid-tie? I have 53 panels (~21kw) grid tied and pushing to the grid, but in the event of grid failure my panels will still operate and push into my 42kwh battery array which will power the entire house. ( The batteries take over as the 'virtual grid source). I can then augment the batteries with generator and run fully off grid for an extended amount of time ( weeks in my case ).
> 42kwh battery array
these are mutually exclusive. What you have is a hybrid system, which is something i explicitly did not mention. A grid-tie system is not generating an AC waveform when the grid is down, at all. it cannot, by definition, and by design, as the AC waveform requires the grid to synchronize to.
Hope this clears this up.
I really thought that sentence was going to end with "it makes it a lot easier to handle that segment".
Yeah you have some big problems if it's a complete surprise, but your status quo monitoring would have to be very strangely broken for it to be a complete surprise. Instead it should be a mild complicating factor while also being something that reduces your load a lot and lets you get things running quicker.
You need to calculate for it but I don't think this would be a problem
Does this really qualify as "black start" when they can rely on the bigger EU grid?
It really depends on the region though because almost all large hydroelectric dams are designed to be primary black-start sources to restore interconnects and get other power plants back up quickly in phase with the dam. i.e. in the US 40% of the country has them so it’s relatively easy to do. The hardest part is usually the messy human coordination bit because none of this stuff is automated (or possible even automatable).
* the load spike from everyone’s motors and compressors booting up at the same time
The power plants with direct connections have hard lines and black-start procedures that get power out to the most important customers like telecom infrastructure, which provides the rest of the comms. In a real world full restart it’s going to mean organizing workers at many substations to babysit old infrastructure so cellular is pretty much mandatory.
Instead, there are literally hundreds of smaller wind/solar installations. Some of which depend on rapidly fading cellular communication to restart. And some might need an actual site visit to throw on the physical breakers.
For Spain the external power and synchronization can come from France rather than generators which will help, but the process and complexities are still mostly the same. Call it a dark start, perhaps.
If Portugal (on the West) had to wait for that, it would probably have taken even longer.
As far as containing the issue, this was a disaster. On the flip side, this was as good an opportunity to test a black start as any, it went reasonably well, and the network operator was already in the process of contracting two further dams for the ability.
> A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant, to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.[1]
Only the first power plant in a black-start (like a hydroelectric dam or gas plant started by a backup generator) is truly "black started." The rest don't fit that definition because they depend on an external power source to spin up and synchronize frequency before burning fuel and supplying any energy to the grid. If they didn't, the second they'd turn on they'd experience catastrophic unscheduled disassembly of the (very big) turbines.
Only the first power plant can come online without the external transmission network.
In fact, if you’re not sure which will start first, you might go that way. They’re all disconnected from the grid at that time anyway.
Then again they might be less prepared precise because of the euro grid is available
It's far more problematic for the UK because all the interconnects are DC.
That sounds like someone explaining why the solution is so bad, before describing what the solution is.
Electricity markets and electricity networks are designed by the regulator.
Incentives are planned by the regulator so that individual stations or companies have the correct incentives to have capabilities that the network grid needs.
One example is financial incentives to provide black start capabilities. Another example is incentives to provide power during peak loading (peaker plants). There are many more examples of incentives designed so that the needs of the whole network are met.
If an operator is incentivised to act selfishly in such a way that the grid will fail, then that is a failure of the regulator (not the individual operator).
Blaming individual people or companies for systemic faults is generally a bad thinking habit to form. There are too many examples where I see individuals get blamed. Fixing our systems is hard but casting blame in the wrong places is not helpful. It's difficult to find a good balance between an individual's responsibilities and society's responsibilities.
Not quite. They are _influenced_ by the regulators.
And Europe has been incentivizing trash-tier low-quality solar and wind power, by making it easy to sell energy (purely on a per-Joule basis) on the pan-European market.
Meanwhile, there is no centralized capacity market or centralized incentives for black start and grid forming functionality.
There absolutely is. Look up terms like "Frequency Containment Reserve" and "automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve". The European energy market takes transport capacity in account, and there is separate day-ahead trading to supply inertia and spare generating capacity. Basically, power plants are being paid to standby, just in case another plant or a transmission line unexpectedly goes offline.
Similarly, grid operators offer contracts for local black start capacity. The technical requirements are fixed, and any party capable of meeting those can bid on it.
It's quite a lucrative market, actually. If during the summer a gas plant is priced out of the market by cheap solar, it can still make quite a bit of money simply by being ready to go at a moment's notice - and they'll make a huge profit if that capacity is actually needed.
Spain and Portugal are not members, btw.
And the same applies to capacity markets. I believe, there is a plan to come up with a plan for it by 2027.
> Similarly, grid operators offer contracts for local black start capacity. The technical requirements are fixed, and any party capable of meeting those can bid on it.
And I don't believe there are ANY solar/wind plants that have black start capacity in Europe. The current incentives structure makes that a near certainty.
There certainly is in New Zealand, although the dollar amounts are quite small. If your countries regulator doesn't incentivise the capability, I believe that is a fault of your regulator.
Transpower (NZ) says:
We may enter into black start contracts with parties who can offer the black start service compliant with our technical requirements and the Code. Black start is procured on a firm quantity procurement basis (via a monthly availability fee and/or a single event fee for specified stations). Black start costs are allocated to Transpower as the Grid Owner (see clause 8.56 in the Code for details)
The UK keeping its own time just makes things easier for it IMO.
I imagine you can get close enough by syncing to a shared time source like GPS or the DCF77 signal, as long as you communicate how the phase is supposed to match up to the time source. Or at least you could get close enough that you can then quickly sync the islands the traditional way.
The question is if it's worth the effort and risk. Cold starting a power grid is a once in a lifetime event (at least in Europe, I imagine some grids are less stable) and Spain seems to plan to have everything back up again in 10 hours. Maybe if the entire European grid went down we would attempt something like that by having each country start up on their own, then synchronize and reconnect the European grid over the following week.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_states_synchronization_...
The harder part is this: To pump power into the grid you lead the cycle ever so slightly, as if you were trying to push the cycle to go faster. If instead you lag the phase the grid would be pumping power into you.
That lead is very very small, and probably difficult to measure and synchronize on. I would imagine that when the two grids connect everything jumps just a little as power level equalize, it probably generates a lot of torque and some heat, I would assume it's hard on the generator.
From a physics point of view, by leading the cycle you introduce a tiny voltage difference (squared), divided by the tiny resistance of the entire grid. And that's how many watts (power) you are putting into the grid.
To synchronize the isolated grids, they all need to operate with an exact match of supply and demand. Any grid with an oversupply will run fast, any grid with an undersupply will run slow. When it comes to connecting, the technical source-of-truth doesn't matter: you just need to ensure that there will be a near-zero flow the moment the two are connected - which means both sides must individually be balanced.
And remember: if you are operating a tiny subgrid you have very little control over the load (even a single factory starting up can have a significant impact), and your control over the supply is extremely sluggish. Matching them up can take days, during which each individual subgrid has very little redundancy.
On the other hand, the interconnect essentially acts as a huge buffer. Compared to the small grid being connected, it essentially has infinite source and sink capacity. For practical purposes, it is operating at a fixed speed - any change is averaged out over the entire grid. This makes it way easier to connect an individual power plant (it just has to operate at near-zero load itself, move to meet a fixed frequency target [which is easy because there is no load to resist this change], and after connection take on load as desired) and to reconnect additional load (compared to the whole grid, a city being connected is a rounding error).
If your Factory uses too much power, theres not enough energy to run the power plants generation, which decreases your power production. Death spiraling until theres no power.
You have to disconnect the factory, and independently power your power plants back up until you have enough energy production to connect your factory up again.
Another "trick" is those burner inserters are black start capable. They can pick up fuel and feed themselves to keep running without an electrical network.
I also tend to put Schmitt triggers in low priority areas. They've got a battery on the main grid next to them and if the battery drops below 50% power they remain off until it goes back above 75% power.
As for 50%/75% triggers--the game doesn't model start/stop problems, only fancy circuit setups would give a hoot about being fed by flickering power. (But as a human....I was out adding to a big accumulator bank at twilight. Far away the bugs had a base close enough to my laser turrets that they kept attacking. The sun was powering my base but didn't have enough for the turrets. The whole bank would flicker for every bug. Usually the electrical indicator on the accumulators is a good thing.)
> The burner inserter is the most basic and slowest type of inserters. It is powered by burning fuel, compared to the more advanced inserters which are powered by electricity. It will add fuel to its own supply if it picks any up, which makes it useful for filling boilers with coal. This has the advantage that it will continue working even if the power fails, as opposed to electrically-powered inserters which will be unable to function.
In particular, when power demand drops below the supply everything starts running slower, which in turn means that the electrical inserters used to feed coal into the boilers run slower which drops the rate of electrical production. Burner inserters don't have that problem.
---
Schmitt triggers are really easy with stock multi combinators now. It isn't so much a "things have issue with flickering power" but rather "turn off the coal feed to the steel furnaces that would go to the electrical station instead" and "make sure that the coal unloading station doesn't brown out" and "turn off power to the electrical furnaces and labs to make sure that the coal mines don't dip in production rate when power dims".
The Schmitt trigger also makes for more reasonable "where is there excess oil that I should produce solid fuel from?" There's the optimal, but sometimes in the processing you can't crack any more crude to gas because the heavy oil is backed up, so turn on the appropriate cracking station when {conditions} and turn it off when {conditions}.
I'm just saying what's the need for a gap between on and off? How does the bounce harm anything in the game? Simply put the non-critical stuff behind combinators that will switch off at x% of power. Real world machinery wouldn't like that but the game factories don't care. Nor do the refineries--in your oil case, plonk down a tank of heavy oil, turn on the crackers when it's above a certain level.
https://wiki.factorio.com/index.php?title=Burner_inserter&ol... (edit from 2016)
> Since v0.10.0, any Fuel items picked up by a burner inserter will also be used to power the inserter. This makes it useful for:
> Automatically loading Gun turrets from a Transport belt, where one side of the belt is filled with magazines and the other with Coal.
> Filling Boilers with Coal. This has the advantage that they will continue working even if the power fails. This is not the case for electrically powered inserters.
https://wiki.factorio.com/Version_history/0.10.0#0.10.0
> Burner inserter will use item with fuel value for itself when it has empty inventory.
0.10.0 was released 2014.
---
The flickering isn't a problem (though a high frequency flicker can caused the power chart to be difficult to read).
A consistent drain on power that is causing capacitor levels to drop below some threshold suggests that certain things should be turned off before the problem becomes cascading when capacitor supply drops to 0.
And apparently I misunderstood the mod, it leeches from things it could pick up but doesn't. It was probably written before it became stock and thus contained some out of date text.
Man I need to go play some more.
Starting back up from zero is significantly easier, as you are completely isolated and have zero load. You turn the power plant on, and start slowly adding local load to ramp up. Synchronize with neighboring plants where possible to build the grid back up. The only issue is that a power plant needs a significant amount of power to operate, so you need something to provide power before you can generate power. In most cases you can just piggyback off the grid, but in an isolated black start it means you need a beefy local independent generator setup. That costs money and it's rarely needed, so only a few designated black start plants have them, paid for by the grid as a whole.
And you're assuming that there is a throttle setting that lets the plant produce so little power that it only runs itself. Think of the Falcon 9--the landing is hairy because it's impossible for it to produce less thrust than it weighs. The engine will go out if you try to throttle it too much.
- Cause of event not known yet.
- They noticed power oscillations from the Spanish grid that tripped safety mechanisms in the Portuguese grid. At the time, due to the cheaper prices, the Portuguese grid was in a state of importing electricity from Spain.
- They are bringing up multiple power systems and the Portuguese grid is able to supply 100% of needs if required. It was not configured in such a state at the moment of event.
- They had to restart the black start more than once, since while starting, noticed instabilities in some sectors that forced them to restart the process.
- Time for full recovery unknown at this time, but it will take at least 24 hours.
Would this suggest the grid hasn't snapped apart, or is it just not possible to tell from the data?
Coal, pumped hydro, and nuclear generation all went to 0 around the same time, but presumably that's those sources being disconnected from the grid to balance demand? https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
https://x.com/RedElectricaREE/status/1916818043235164267
We are beginning to recover power in the north and south of the peninsula, which is key to gradually addressing the electricity supply. This process involves the gradual energization of the transmission grid as the generating units are connected.
I see load dropping to zero on that graph, or rather, load data disappears an hour ago.
If the grid frequency goes too far out of range then power stations trip automatically, it's not an explicit decision anyone takes and it doesn't balance load, quite the opposite. A station tripping makes the problem worse as the frequency drops even further as the load gets shared between the remaining stations, which is why grids experience cascading failure. The disconnection into islands is a defense mechanism designed to stop equipment being too badly damaged and to isolate the outage.
Last actual load value for Spain at 12:15: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
Last actual load value for France at 12:00: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/load-domain/r2/totalLoadR2/sh...
https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGeneratio...
Everything dropped to zero except wind and solar, which took huge hits but not to zero. I expect those have been disconnected too, as they cannot transmit to the grid without enough thermal plant capacity being online, but if the measurement at some plants of how much they're generating doesn't take into account whether or not they were disconnected upstream they may still be reporting themselves as generating. You can't easily turn off a solar plant after all, just unplug it.
Either that, or they're measuring generation and load that's not on the grid at all.
Rooftop solar for example just shows as a reduction in demand, not 'generation' per se.
None of this gear is suited to a black start. If you had total grid loss for a month you could doubtless rewire it to power the farm when it's windy despite no grid, maybe even run some battery storage for must-have services like a few lights so they keep working on still days but you could not start the grid from here.
It's not just about the power. System components cannot be brought to operating temperatures, speeds and pressures faster than mechanical tolerances allow. If a thermal plant is cold & dark, it can take days to ramp it to full production.
In some cases yes. Modern combined cycle plants can take as little as 30 minutes to ramp to full output. Older designs can take upward of 4-6 hours.
If you have steam as an indirection, that's when things take a really long time. Natural gas turbines are a more direct cycle.
1. The grid has to fully collapse with no possibility of being rescued by interconnection
2. As a result, a generation asset has to be started without external power or a grid frequency to synch to
3. An asset capable of this is usually a small one connected to a lower voltage network that has to then backfeed the higher voltage one
4. Due to the difficulty of balancing supply/demand during the process, the frequency can fluctuate violently with a high risk of tripping the system offline again
None of this applies in yesterday's case:
The rest of the European synchronous grid is working just fine.
News reports stated Spain restored power by reconnecting to France and Morocco.
By reestablishing the HV network first, they can directly restart the largest generation asset with normal procedures.
As they bring more and more load or generation online, there's little risk of big frequency fluctuations because the wider grid can absorb that.
I can only imagine the difficulty of bringing large parts of the grid back online, that rush current must be immense.
Or look at Apollo 13. The astronauts had turned off everything possible because they had lost their generator and only had their batteries. And it took a lot of furious planning by the guys on the ground to come up with a sequence of turning things back on that didn't cause the peak draw to go too high. Can't go too fast or it trips. Can't start too early because the power is limited, but can't start too late because the systems have to be up when they hit the atmosphere.
More than cash it was important yesterday to have the following in case it would have lasted longer:
- a battery powered am/fm radio with spare new batteries
- some candles and matches
- food reserves for a few days that don't need refrigeration: bread, anything in can, pasta, rice...
- some kind of gaz or alcohol stove, dry wood or bbq charcoal: you can always make a fire in the middle of the street where there is no risk of burning things around.
- water reserve (I always have like 24L of drinking water) and since I hate waste I regularly fill jerrycans when waiting for hot water in the shower that I use for manual washes (kitchenware or gears).
But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?
My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.
Currently the main driver of battery deployments is not so much energy price time arbitrage as "fast frequency fresponse": you can get paid for providing battery stabilization to the grid.
(for the UK not Spain: https://www.axle.energy/blog/frequency )
So if you have a smarter solar panel, or a smart battery, you can stabilize the grid. I’m assuming that all of the traditional software complexity things in distributed systems apply here: you want something a little bit smart, to gain efficiency benefits, but not too smart, to gain robustness benefits.
My intuition is that bringing the market into it at small timescales probably greatly increases the efficiency significantly but at the cost of robustness (California learned this “the hard way” with Enron)
> Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat
If the electronic controller is “ahead of” (leading) the grid, then that heat would come from the solar plant; if it is “behind” (following) then that heat comes from the grid. Is that right? And likely, solar plants opted for the simplest thing, which is to always follow, that way they never need to worry about managing the heat or stability or any of it.
I wonder if the simplest thing would be for large solar plants to just have a gigantic flywheel on site that could be brought up via diesel generators at night…
If you mean how does solar detect phase and synchronize to the grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop
If you mean how does solar act to reinforce the grid: search for terms like "grid forming inverter vs. grid following inverter" though not all generators are the same in terms of how much resilience they add to the grid, esp. w.r.t. the inertia they do or do not add. See e.g. https://www.greentechmedia.com/squared/dispatches-from-the-g...
Low Grid frequency & voltage can cause an increase in current & heating of transmission lines and conductors and can damage the expensive things, this is why these systems trip out automatically at low frequency or low voltage, and why load shedding is necessary
I'm not saying you're wrong, but this isn't obviously correct to me.
Since solar going to a grid is completely dependent upon electronic DC->AC conversion, I would expect that it could follow a lot greater frequency deviation for a lot longer than a mechanical system that will literally rip itself apart on desync.
The real reason that small scale solar PV is grid following (i.e. it depends on an external voltage and frequency reference) is that this ensures power line safety during a power outage. That's it.
An inverter can be programmed to start in the absence of an external reference and it can operate at a wide range of frequencies.
However, DC-AC converters don't have an inherent inertia. They can follow almost any frequency and phase within reason. Certainly a DC-AC converter should be able to respond way faster than any frequency/phase changes that a mechanical system can generate.
In theory, they should be able to set themselves to be ever so slightly closer to ideal so that the amount of power they have to sink is limited but are still exerting a very slight force to bring the grid back into compliance rather than continuing to add load which propagates the collapse.
The main difficulty is that the software of grid-following inverters tend to make them trip out very suddenly if the grid parameters get too far out of spec (they will only follow the grid so far), but once the grid is good they basically instantly synchronise.
But all large solar farms are likely to be mandated to switch from grid following to grid forming inverters eventually which will make them beneficial for grid security because they will help provide 'virtual intertia' that looks exactly the same to the rest of the grid as spinning mass does.
"Luckily", France is at an historically high level of production capacity at the moment and the connection between the two countries was reestablished fast.
According to RTE (French network manager), the interconnection was maxed yesterday at around 3GW of power.
Sadly, while Spain is part of CESA, it's not very well connected. I wouldn't be surprised if one the takeaway from the whole incident is that more interconnections are needed.
Here's why generators were running here despite the grid being available. A generator has a very short lifetime and in order to prolong it, some owners learned to run those in the very optimal schedule. Which sometimes requires a minimum amount of time to run in a single cycle. Thus if you started it you are committed to run for X hours.
I know. What's interesting re: Ukraine is because there are so many generators there are more options to getting power sufficiently restored for normal life than just rushing to restore the entire grid.
> Thus if you started it you are committed to run for X hours.
I'm skeptical this is the main reason. While fast starting a diesel generator is hard on it, there are other, slower, ways to start big diesel generators with minimal impact on lifespan. The blackouts in Ukraine are almost all on a schedule, so big buildings with dedicated staff and expensive generators can and do startup their generators in advance (I've personally heard this happen on occasion - big generators spooling up multiple minutes in advance of the scheduled blackout).
Also, it makes sense to turn on generators in advance anyway: gives you a chance to diagnose any issues.
Perhaps not the main reason, but heavy devices do indeed require minimum amount of time running. I think small devices as well but not as long. Honestly I don't remember what we did back then: so many things were going at the same time, longevity of generators was not very well know at the time )
Ukraine went through many black starts in the first winter of Russian strikes against energy. I guess they built a skill of recovering it quickly enough that it started happening faster and easier every next time.
I took down the servers though, so you probably can't easily try it. I don't know if I added a way to configure the lobby server. I should have! It's open source though. And there is a video about that thing on my YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TPgfa7LbiI
The game is bad and nothing of what we planned on doing actually made it into the game. The video is long and boring too. But maybe someone finds this cool and is inspired by this and makes a game like this.
The first 15 minutes of the game were actually about getting the ship moving, first by reading the manuals of half a dozen different ship systems and then following some procedure outlined in those manuals (parts of which were simply incorrect), maybe having to do some things in sync with your other players and stuff like that. I think it would have been cool to add multiple reactors and start them up in sync and stuff. The different ship systems were actually Lua programs that interacted via a message bus. So kind of a unknown computer architecture?
> have some cash at home
For maybe the first 24 hours at a grocery store, and then not so sure. Would your neighbors sell you supplies and food? Maybe not? And so many places now depend on cashless transactions and doubtful they have pen, paper, lockbox, and safe as a contingency plan.
The entire EU runs on one synchronised grid so from that perspective a single 'province' went offline, not the grid.
The complex process of configuring the transmission network to bring grid power to each power plant in succession is the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous...
That said, lots of people hit the cafés and had to resource to cash payments. There was also lots of people buying bottled water at the shops.
So basically, you could divide people in two groups. Those that took it like an extra Sunday, and those that took it like the beginning of a war or something :-D
Most places are so dependent upon electricity that they can't even take cash during a blackout. And they don't even have the mechanical machines to take a credit card imprint anymore.
If you try to connect another generator to the grid, it needs to be at the same point (phase) in the sine-wave cycle, so that its power contribution is added, not subtracted.
If it's not in sync, huge currents can flow, causing damage. Sort of like connecting jumper cables backwards.