LittleInch
Petroleum
- Mar 27, 2013
- 22,596
Widely reported, the Spanish and Portuguese electricity supply collapsed 28th April after it lost 15GW of supply (about half of its consumption) in 5 seconds. Not surprisingly the interconnected to France the European grid tripped and the grid collapsed.
This M is nearly un heard of and lights just how much we all rely on Grid power. Basically nothing worked. No mobile coverage, precious little Internet, no ATM or even if you had cash the tills didn't work. Trains stuck in tunnels or out in the middle of no where and traffic gridlock.
Some standby power, but limited and also limited in duration for hospitals, airports etc.
If there are some grid sparkies out there, please do some digging and see why this happened? No one so far as I can see can say why supposed high vibrations or fluctuations in the HVgrid caused such a dramatic loss of supply.
Seems to be slowly recovering today, but I can imagine bringing an entire country back on line is not straightforward.
This what the head of the Spamish Grid said. Anyone able to interpret this?
" Sánchez said that the power cut originated at 12.33pm, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.
“That’s something that has never happened before,” he added. “What prompted this sudden disappearance of the supply is something that the experts still haven’t been able to determine. But they will … All potential causes are being analysed and no hypothesis or possibility is being ruled out.”
Sánchez thanked France and Morocco for sending additional electricity to Spain, and said the current shortfall would be eased using gas and hydroelectric power.
The Portuguese operator, REN, said the outage was caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, with extreme temperature variations in Spain causing “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines.
REN said the phenomenon, known as “induced atmospheric vibration”, caused “synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network”. "
This M is nearly un heard of and lights just how much we all rely on Grid power. Basically nothing worked. No mobile coverage, precious little Internet, no ATM or even if you had cash the tills didn't work. Trains stuck in tunnels or out in the middle of no where and traffic gridlock.
Some standby power, but limited and also limited in duration for hospitals, airports etc.
If there are some grid sparkies out there, please do some digging and see why this happened? No one so far as I can see can say why supposed high vibrations or fluctuations in the HVgrid caused such a dramatic loss of supply.
Seems to be slowly recovering today, but I can imagine bringing an entire country back on line is not straightforward.
This what the head of the Spamish Grid said. Anyone able to interpret this?
" Sánchez said that the power cut originated at 12.33pm, when, for five seconds, 15 gigawatts of the energy that was being produced – equivalent to 60% of all the energy that was being used – suddenly disappeared.
“That’s something that has never happened before,” he added. “What prompted this sudden disappearance of the supply is something that the experts still haven’t been able to determine. But they will … All potential causes are being analysed and no hypothesis or possibility is being ruled out.”
Sánchez thanked France and Morocco for sending additional electricity to Spain, and said the current shortfall would be eased using gas and hydroelectric power.
The Portuguese operator, REN, said the outage was caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, with extreme temperature variations in Spain causing “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines.
REN said the phenomenon, known as “induced atmospheric vibration”, caused “synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network”. "
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