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Comment by zimpenfish | Hacker News Reader

Given the frequent reports we get about the insecurity and fragility of the US power grid, is the UK grid as bad and is this going to be just a business-as-usual oopsie or something more sinister?

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(Not an expert)

The UK grid is actually pretty well maintained and resilient - and controlled power outages can actually be a positive thing in this sense. It looks like a couple of generators failed within a short period, causing a sudden loss of about a gigawatt. When the frequency drops as a result, automated systems start tripping to prevent a more widespread collapse - it’s much easier to restore power to customers who have been isolated than to recover after a more widespread collapse, like the US northeast blackout in 2003.

Yeah, apparently these power outages only lasted a little under an hour for the folks affected. The big disruption came from it taking out heavily-used sections of the train network during the evening commute and the operators seemingly not having an easy way to bring those back into operation.

The problem seems to be that individual trains have faulted and apparently cannot be restarted without a visit from an engineer. With multiple faulty trains blocking lines, nothing can move.

>The UK grid is actually pretty well maintained and resilient

Also prefixed by not an expert here; but know a few in the industry and somewhat keep up with it.

The push away from coal to other sources of power (combined with the closure of gigawatts of nuclear power) has put the network under more stress than it's been in the past few decades [1]. I'd expect more of this in the future in cases of multi generator failures; there just isn't that much in the way of generation to take up the slack.

Luckily we're in summer where demand is much lower, if this was to happen in winter the outcomes could have been much worse.

//edit - Just to be clear though, this does seem to be totally benign and could have happened to any other well equipped grid. A gigawatt of power dropping out in such a short space is going to result in some kind of load shedding. Denorwig spins up fast; but not that fast.

1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33527967

Outages of this scale are pretty much unheard of in the UK

Wait until the dover-calais power grid interconnector goes down on nov 1st.

I assume you're referring to Brexit. Any indication that this would actually affect the power grid?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-energy/no-deal-br...

“UK-issued Renewable Guarantees of Origin and Guarantees of Origin for combined heat and power will no longer be recognised in the EU. If an existing contract with an EU countries’ electricity supplier or trader requires an EU-recognised Guarantee of Origin, it is possible that the contract could be compromised”

... yet mysteriously, the trains are often this bad

There have been similar reports about the UK grid for as long as I can remember (multiple decades).

The squeaky wheels get the grease.

As for the UK today, certainly anywhere along the South Coast was untroubled by this (including the RJ Mitchell windtunnel[0], which was quite literally a blast).

[0] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/windtunnels/index.page

The US power network is on 110v, this is reason enough to call it fragile opposed to the 230v in the UK

Nominal voltage in the US is 120 volts. It hasn't been 110 volts since the 1970s.

And it's still creeping upward. The average voltage at my house over the last year was 121.9 volts. https://i.imgur.com/6RMZnXd.png

Only the last bit to your house or apartment is 110v. That doesn't make it more or less fragile, it just means you need more amps and correspondingly more wire in the final hop to the customer.

The difference in voltage results a real difference is in the distribution and how the phases are delivered - due to the lower voltage limiting how far it's economical to distribute the last mile, the US has many smaller transformers (those big cans on poles that catch fire sometimes), whereas Europe has fewer bigger transformer stations.

Although this has the opposite effect - the 120V system is less fragile, since the points of failure are more distributed (a blown transformer will affect fewer customers).

See: https://electrical-engineering-portal.com/north-american-ver...

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