This article starts by saying "we dont know what actually happened here, or why" and then goes on to make various insinuations and suppositions, and then proposes policy based on that.
We haven't yet seen the sequence of breaker trip events.
We haven't yet seen the graphs of power flows at tie points, and of frequency and voltage error.
The closest thing to a useful fact visible from Google seems to be: "The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss." That's not a cause. Losing 15GW all at once, more power than any one plant generates, indicates some previous event had caused breaker trips somewhere. No indication of the previous event.
We do know this wasn't a supply shortage. There was plenty of generating capacity online.
Here's an analysis of the US Northeast blackout of 2003.[1] Until we start to see that level of detail, it's just blithering.
Unless someone diverted all that power for some purpose.
Classic scifi might be a time traveller trying to get home, or someone opening an interdimensional gateway, or maybe an AI becoming conscious and needing the power to ascend.
This unusual situation points to a perfect storm of poor grid management and inadequate connections of solar facilities to the grid, as well as other unknown faults. In my opinion, there is a good chance ..."
We don't really know, I don't really know, but I'm going to write a long post about it.
It makes me realize how ignorant about power grid I am. It is kinda unfathomable to me, that 2 countries completely black out for 10 hours, then somewhat "magically" go up again, and a week later nobody knows what went wrong and how it got fixed. Or maybe someone knows but doesn't want to say? Anyway, it makes an impression that the whole power grid is this magical black box that somehow works on its own, breaks, fixes itself, and humans can only pray gods to let them have good harvest and uninterrupted electricity next summer. Maybe it's time to renew sacrifices at the temple of Jupiter or somebody else.
I don't agree. You do not need a thorough root cause analysis to acknowledge the fact that a) some invariants in the system were violated, b) some of the people accountable are already making claims that fly in the face of reason.
Also, Spain has a regrettable track record of covering up the responsibilities of state institutions in major disasters.
Animats|10 months ago
We haven't yet seen the sequence of breaker trip events. We haven't yet seen the graphs of power flows at tie points, and of frequency and voltage error.
The closest thing to a useful fact visible from Google seems to be: "The network lost 15 gigawatts of electricity generation in five seconds at around 1033 GMT, the Energy Ministry said on Monday evening, without explaining the reason for the loss." That's not a cause. Losing 15GW all at once, more power than any one plant generates, indicates some previous event had caused breaker trips somewhere. No indication of the previous event.
We do know this wasn't a supply shortage. There was plenty of generating capacity online.
Here's an analysis of the US Northeast blackout of 2003.[1] Until we start to see that level of detail, it's just blithering.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
b112|10 months ago
Classic scifi might be a time traveller trying to get home, or someone opening an interdimensional gateway, or maybe an AI becoming conscious and needing the power to ascend.
readthenotes1|10 months ago
This unusual situation points to a perfect storm of poor grid management and inadequate connections of solar facilities to the grid, as well as other unknown faults. In my opinion, there is a good chance ..."
We don't really know, I don't really know, but I'm going to write a long post about it.
krick|10 months ago
PorterBHall|10 months ago
motorest|10 months ago
I don't agree. You do not need a thorough root cause analysis to acknowledge the fact that a) some invariants in the system were violated, b) some of the people accountable are already making claims that fly in the face of reason.
Also, Spain has a regrettable track record of covering up the responsibilities of state institutions in major disasters.