Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, one of the most stunning proofs of how successful the European Union is happened with the grid. On 8 January 2021, the synchronous area of Continental Europe split into two, the system separation resulted in a deficit of power (approx. -6.3 GW) in the North-West Area and a surplus of power (approx. +6.3 GW) in the South-East Area,

The reaction speed was something to behold. The event happened at 14:05 CET, at 14:09 CET the Transmission System Operators (TSOs) were in teleconference but by then some 1.7GW capacity in France and Italy was dropped and 420 MW and 60 MW was activated in the Nordic and Great Britain. Customers barely felt it: only 70 MW in the North-West Area and 163 MW in the South-East Area were disconnected. By 15:08 the event concluded.

Yes, there was a mistake in the processes which led to the event in special circumstances but , I believe , the respected readers of HN know this all too well , the big question is what happens when an emergency hits. And those processes held up spectacularly.

The EU itself is a thing to behold. Just managing to prevent wars between their members for so many decades is a remarkable accomplishment, unheard of in the continent's troubled history.

Not perfect, and certainly not invulnerable to bad actors, but still a beautiful accomplishment of will and politics.

Almost all of us in Europe have never known anything but this peace so it almost feels a given. (I doubt a lot of readers are above eighty years old.) Yet a lot of kvetching about regulations happen and so it's good to remind people they have their own use.

Surely you mean this peace that ended when Russia started a full-scale invasion in Ukraine.

I've come to think that the so-called "most peaceful era in human history" as the post-Cold War era has been often called is more aptly "most peaceful era in western history".

Plenty of strife and conflict can be and are found where most western eyes generally don't look.

This peace, by and large, is about the lack of entries with other Western European countries on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Germany

By that measure, you'd consider the peace ended in 1956 when Russia -- then called the Soviet Union -- re-invaded Hungary after very briefly withdrawing. (As an aside, when the National Bank of Ukraine last year opened two donation accounts, I sent 1956 EUR to both. I am not subtle with my messaging.)

I don't know what 1956 felt like in western Europe but the current situation definitely doesn't feel like peace even though the war is not fought in western Europe. The war is at the EU border with stray missiles and overreaching Russian attacks already having hit EU territory.

> Russian attacks already having hit EU territory.

On 15 November 2022, a missile struck the territory of Poland at the village of Przewodów near the border with Ukraine, killing two people.[1][2][3] ... It was the first incident of a missile (vis-a-vis prior UAV incursions) fired from Ukrainian army[6] landing and exploding within NATO territory ... Initially Ukraine accused Russia of striking Poland,[9] while United States claimed that the missile was likely to have been an air defence missile fired by Ukrainian forces at an incoming Russian missile.[10][11][12] This was later confirmed in September 2023 by the Polish Prosecutor's Office, which stated that the explosion was caused by an out of control air-defence missile S-300.[6][13]

Right, that falls under the "stray missiles" category.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine are members of the EU.

>> Almost all of us in Europe have never known anything but this peace

> Neither Russia nor Ukraine are members of the EU.

Europe != EU

Also, explosives from the Russian invasion in Ukraine have hit the territories of two EU countries: Poland and Romania.

Seems like the trick really is to deeply intertwine economies.

It kind of feels similar to how monarchs tried to form lasting peace further back: inter-marry so that everyone is someone’s cousin they grew up with. Of course that didn’t exactly work perfectly.

>Seems like the trick really is to deeply intertwine economies.

Did not work terribly well for the former Soviet republics :(

> Seems like the trick really is to deeply intertwine economies.

On one hand, I read experts say that. On the other, I read experts point out that it failed to prevent WWI.

I wonder what the consensus is, if there is one, and what the evidence is.

Yeah my thoughts too. My feeling is that there won’t be some perfect solution that stops all wars. But that it was a very rational idea that may have stopped some.

Indeed it would be interesting to see experts attempt to enumerate situations that were avoided through this approach. Though I’m not sure if that’s even possible given it requires a form of alternate reality synthesis which is all but pure bias.

A statistical approach may find there’s still too little data?

> My feeling is that there won’t be some perfect solution that stops all wars. But that it was a very rational idea that may have stopped some.

Yes, absolutely. Also, it generally makes us wealthier.

To say nothing about living longer and not being blown up. It's definitely a plus.

But the economies were not so intertwined. The British, French, etc. were massively profiting from exploiting their colonial holdings while the Germans and Austro-Hungarians were being left in the dust, slave labour abolished some decades or centuries ago.

no mention of the gold hoards of Spain ? it rocked the continent at the time

That was the thesis of "The Great Illusion", published in 1911. Basically, nation states would rationally avoid war, as it is pure downside, economically. Obviously it's at least insufficient.

I think it's a totally naive view. Even if we limit ourselves to only thinking about rational actors, we must always ask about economic costs for whom. Nation states do not operate as a unit as a rational economic actor -- we must look at the competing actors within. One group could somewhat win, and another substantially lose, and that may net out to a negative -- it happens regularly. Many are clamoring for it right now -- a new Cold War against China.

Intertwined economies are part of it but I think people underestimate the importance of norms. EU leaders and ministers are regularly in meetings together. When there is a crisis now the reaction of all EU leaders is to hold a conference for them to hash out how to deal with the situation. This establishment of the norm of talking whenever there's an issue is very powerful.

This. A billion times this!

The principle that member nations have alignment and act (mostly) in unison.

I found this article from bloomberg on the event!

> Europe’s grid, which is usually connected from Lisbon to Istanbul, split into two as the northwest and southeast regions struggled to keep the same frequency. The problem originated in Croatia and led to the equivalent of 200,000 households losing power across Europe. Supply to industrial sites was cut in France and Italy.

> Transmission grids need to stay at a frequency of 50 hertz to operate smoothly and any deviations can damage equipment that’s connected. Had the frequency swings not been reduced within minutes, it could have caused damage across the entire European high voltage network, potentially causing blackouts for millions.

> A fault at a substation that caused overloading on other parts of Croatia’s grid has been identified as the cause of the issue, network operators concluded Tuesday.

> “The problem isn’t posed by growing green electricity directly but by shrinking conventional capacity,” said Eglantine Kuenle, chief electricity systems modeler at the EWI Institute of Energy Economics at Cologne University. “The upshot is a gap in secure power generation and grid balancing that must be fixed.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20230621192146/https://www.bloom...

----

Personal thoughts. I knew we had an interconnected grid, but I had no idea it span from Portugal to Türkiye, nor that the rest of Scandinavia wasn't connected. For a system as critical, and as complex, it seems like a feat of engineering on all sides involved.

Apologise to pick nits, but if it is not Turkey it is Türkiye. The former is perfectly fine in English.

Oh, sorry, my bad!

> if it is not Turkey it is Türkiye. The former is perfectly fine in English.

Not according to the Turkish government.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/03/turkey-changes...

Fortunately they are not in charge of English. Not even the English government is. At most they are in charge of their respective versions and advocacy of it.

Alphabets and certainly diacritics are used differently in different languages, so insisting on a certain way of writing can only lead to inconsistent pronunciation.

I just hope they don't go back to Arabic alphabet, it would be a pain to write. Btw when will China start demanding we refer to it as Zhōngguó, or better yet 中國 /s

I think this illustrates the point well: if they were to write it in another script completely, English would adopt some transliteration of the name, i.e. an exonym.

You don't need that, the official report is good https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2021/07/15/final-report-on-the-se...

Official reports can be self-serving, both intentionally and unintentionally (it represents only one perspective). Journalists talk to many sources with many perspectives.

Journalists might but the publication which did the supermicro spy chip story without retracting it does not deserve that moniker. (Small footnote: I was a columnist, later editor, even later part of the editorial board of the largest computer monthly in Hungary in what now feels like a different life a quarter century ago.)

> the publication which did the supermicro spy chip story

How is that related to what we're talking about?

> does not deserve that moniker

That's pretty extreme. One story you didn't like, and that's it? I don't think anything, certainly not press releases, will meet your standard.

And the work to speed up Moldova & Ukraine's connection to the sychronous grid, just after Russia invaded in 2021, was impressive too.

At the time, it was said this plan was the immediate reason for the invasion: letting the sync finish would have crossed some measure of western integration for the Kremlins tastes.

The Kremlin is so easily offended.

You meant 2022, right? I'm linking an article describing how Ukraine connected to EU grid

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-ukraine-unplu...

Oh yes, 2022.

To be a little nit-picky the grid includes Scandinavia through HVDC connections with the rest of Europe, see [1] for the entire ENTSO-E grid. If you mean the synchronous grid, Denmark is part of Scandinavia and its continental part is synchronised with the rest of Europe.

[1]: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/downloads

> I knew we had an interconnected grid, but I had no idea it span from

WP articles about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid

https://www.netzfrequenz.info/allgemein/aufteilung-des-synch...

>As an aside, one of the most stunning proofs of how successful the European Union is happened with the grid. On 8 January 2021, the synchronous area of Continental Europe split into two

The European grid has nothing to do with the EU. The grid includes non-EU countries like Switzerland and Norway. The UK did not leave the grid after Brexit; its interconnections with Ireland and the continent still exist.

The US and Canada's grids are interconnected without the two nations being integrated as closely as the EU member states are.

ENTSOE-E exists because of the 2009/72/EC directive. It's an EU entity. As with many such, they also allow / work with entities outside of the EU but that doesn't change the fact this is an association existing under and because of the EU legal framework.

US and Canada grids are split east-west, and then there is a third grid restricted entirely to the geographic region of Texas

Texas is connected to Mexico and some other exceptions. The fed though would rather frozen dead Texans than deregulate and allow ERCOT to connect as they do to Mexico. Fed basically holding some of the poorer rural Texans hostage to influence some rich ERCOT bureaucrats to change their regulations -- pretty fucked up IMO.

say what

Texas has made a conscious decision since 1935 when FDR signed the Federal Power Act to stay away because they didn't want the feds to mess with their grid. The feds have no power here because the Texas grid does not cross state lines. When West Texas Utilities did connect through state lines in 1976 (called the Midnight Connection) both HL&P and Texas Electric Service Company immediately disconnected from them to avoid falling under federal regulation. It was not the feds. https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/connecting-past-and-...

Yes the federal regulations make demands in order to connect. The feds can release their hostages and drop the federal regulation demands and deregulate and Texas would surely connect to these interstate grids as they did to Mexico.

seeing is believing, until then no one can say that with any certainty

But all of those are connected via HVDC, so aren't they the same grid? Or are you limiting your definition to synchronous grids?

Indeed a sync'd grid is what is typically being called a single grid. HVDC only got the required fast breaker a decade ago so it is nowhere near as widely deployed as the AC system (it's hard to make a HVDC breaker because even if an AC breaker arcs it'll self extinguish in an extremely short period of time as the voltage crosses zero, HVDC never does this so you need something to force the current to zero). Maybe the definition will change over time, it is, after all, completely arbitrary.

The US isn't even integrated with itself.

And sure, other countries can integrate too, and in fact do. Nobody said only EU members are allowed to do it. It is however the largest grid on earth, and therefore a technical and political feat.

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