Electrical failure cuts power to all of Argentina and Uruguay, supplier says
bbc.com
bbc.com
We are being told by authorities that there is no better system design than this.
That is, Uruguayan network is interconnected to Argentina, what gives us more robustness. If something small/medium fails here, Argentina compensates, and viceversa. This has improved our system for many years.
However, it seems to have this very improbable issue. If something big happens in Argentina (which is much bigger than us), there is no way Uruguay can supply the energy they need to keep running.
Is there any other way to interconnect two electric networks (having more robustness for the normal cases) but avoiding this kind of high-impact issues?
From a computer network point of view, this doesn’t make much sense, but there are physical limits here I guess...
Why can’t we just have some kind of limit condition to switch the connection off, instead of trying to rescue the other network?
Thanks for your explanation.
Given the timing, it feels like some state flexing.
Maybe they were trying something new on a development environment, or testing something that should have worked in production. That would be funny.
If this was caused by state actors, in part or whole, then I would expect most hearings and reports about it to be less public, and occur behind closed doors.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
According to this: https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-ca...
... there are only a couple Gubernatorial elections, so likely unrelated.
With all the talk of the USA ramping up efforts to disrupt Russia's power grid, could it be that some out-in-the-wild exploit hit an unintended target? I couldn't find any info on who provided Argentina with their equipment.
Seriously though, I'd think it would be trivial to figure out if this was failure or malice.