State of emergency declared after blackout plunges most of Chile into darkness

Thanks to you, the operators, and the linemen out there keeping it all going. When it works correctly no one notices.

Fundamentally electromagnetism is a unified force.

A changing electric field induces a magnetic field: the electricity creates a magnetic field inside the motor-generator causing the rotor's electromagnet or permanent magnet to spin to align with that field. For a DC motor halfway through the rotation the polarity switches causing the rotor to keep spinning to align with the new magnetic field (AC doesn't need this because it is varying on its own). The motor-generator is operating in "motor" mode here because the magnetic field changes first and the rotor is trying to catch up to it ultimately consuming energy.

Now spin a motor's shaft putting energy into the system. The rotor has a magnetic field either because its an electromagnet or a permanent magnet. You are spinning the rotor shaft so by definition the magnetic field coming off the rotor also spins. Thus the stator sees a continuously varying magnetic field which - you guessed it - induces an electric field in the stator windings.

In reality this is a continuously varying effect based on whether the rotor's motion is leading or lagging the magnetic field (really it is trying to lead or lag but never gets far otherwise it would burn up).

The short version is a generator at "idle" but synchronized is a motor. The grid is providing the power to spin that motor (or the attached engine/steam turbine is providing just enough rotation of the shaft to keep the generator synchronized but no more).

As the generator begins to "provide" power more torque is put into the shaft's rotation. This causes the magnetic field to want to lead the electric field, transferring energy into the electric field. The entire grid strongly resists the shaft actually spinning faster though. The mechanical energy that wants to make the rotor go faster is siphoned off by the magnetic flux and electric fields. Electric field steals energy from the magnetic flux. Reduced magnetic flux steals energy from the rotor's angular momentum to replenish itself (if it couldn't the rotor would slow down). The rotor gets angular momentum from the connected source of torque like a steam turbine. The Cycle of Life ... or something.

If you suddenly cut the transmission lines and took no action all that torque would overspeed the generator very quickly though because no electric current could flow so the electric field just builds up (stealing energy from the rotor) then gives the energy right back as more magnetic flux (speeding up the rotor). This would let the rotor just go faster and faster while also heating everything up.

My grid tie solar system does exactly what you say. It monitors the frequency of grid power and matches it dynamically. There are defined parameters for how out of spec it can get and for how long. I don't recall the exact numbers but imagine 0.2Hz for 100ms, 0.5Hz for 1ms, 1Hz for 500ns. Same thing for voltage though that allows a much wider range.

In CA all grid tie solar also requires communication with the utility (through the manufacturer) with a backup connection source (Internet and LTE in my case). This is so if the grid is nearing capacity or going unstable the utility can command the inverters to allow a wider band of voltage and frequency. The last thing the grid needs in an unstable scenario is everyone's solar panels tripping off at the same time.

Technically the utility can also command the panels to stop production if there is an excess supply but they are limited in how long and how often they can do that.

Fun fact: The interconnect operators used to keep track of the average frequency over time and would run the grid slightly fast or slow to ensure the grid averaged 60Hz over time. This allowed clocks and such to maintain time by relying on the grid. That is no longer the case though. I think they still roughly aim for a 60Hz average but if they're behind by 0.01Hz over the past week they no longer run the grid at 60.05Hz for a while to "catch up".

Fun fact number 2 I just learned recently: Southern California used to be on 50Hz! That's right, the USA had split cycle just like Japan. Most of the country on 60Hz, SoCal on 50Hz. Right after WW2 they made the switch apparently. I guess a lot of stuff was dual frequency capable at the time but the utility provided assistance where required.

Fun fact number 3: Ever wonder why we have 110/220 or 115/230 or 120/240? Because every local utility picked their own standard: 110 (from Edison's DC system carried over into AC world), 115, or 120. It was not until relatively recently that we really standardized on 120/240 (+/- 5% which is 114 - 126 but with brief excursions allowed). That's why some old appliances might say 110 or 115 on them.

Fun fact number 4: 120/240 is a backwards compatibility hack. It was too late to change to 240 and 120 is (for physical reasons) better for electric lighting applications (thicker less fragile filament for same light output). How to solve this? Change your MV-LV transformers to 240 but center tap them. Instead of Line-Neutral you provide customers Line 1 - Neutral - Line 2. Connections across L1/L2 give you 240 volts, connections across L1-N or L2-N give you 120 volts! Everyone's happy! There is a NEMA plug standard for low-amp 240V. It has both blades horizontal (looks like the unimpressed smiley face). I wish it were more popular in kitchens for boiling water and such.

* A power company failed to trim trees from its power lines properly. Four of their major transmission lines failed in one afternoon due to shorting out via tree.

* The software bug you mentioned caused a failure to alarm the power company of two of their line failures. The first and fourth failures were alarmed in real time.

* A separate issue rendered the regional grid operator's software modeling real-time grid instability inoperable for most of the afternoon. Crucially, if this had been running, the operator would have realized that the failure of one more line would have created grid instability requiring immediate action.

* The final line trip set off a cascade of overloads trips until Sammis-Star overloads and trips. This takes about 15 minutes, and analysis suggests that the Sammis-Star trip is when the blackout became inevitable.

* Sammis-Star triggers lines to fail one-by-one from east to west, until it severed every line in Ohio and Michigan. This causes a large power surge to go from Michigan through southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario, back into Michigan and then into the final demand of Cleveland.

* Essentially every link along this spiral fails in the course of a few seconds, creating several grid islands. Whether these grid islands black out is dependent on the local mismatch between generation and consumption.

(Full story from https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.c...).

A bit of decentralization goes a long way.

Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups.

Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.

vs

EV => $8000 - $40000

Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000

PV => $5000 - $15000

Heat pump => $5000 - $10000

That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.

Also keeping people out of the damn fridge. But that can be modified through other means.

Where do you live?

> You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro

A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.

Yep.

> If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.

Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.

I think plug types are not a great risk as users will usually not want that. But in my head the risk is that we import 500k of something that technically works, but is off spec by 10V or 10hz, or the tolerance specs are too wide or too small. It's obvious how too small of a tolerance can cause issues, but too wide isn't ideal either, as there's tradeoffs, you end up importing swiss knife products. Which makes sense for big expensive electronics, but stuff like phone chargers? Subterranean or aerial cabling?

The task of verifying the quality of something is distinct from the task of verifying that it conforms to the local standards. And I wouldn't put it past the cargo culting governments to figure that if it's good enough for the US it's good enough for us.

Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense.

If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.

Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.

Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?

Because that genuinely is dangerous?

Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?

There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?

>"Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.

This makes no sense.. Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.

Chile has a history of looting after natural disasters. It also has a history of massive protests that often cause damage and sometimes turn violent. (The current president certainly knows, as he was a big student leader during one wave of student protests.) In a country like that, a one-night curfew is a reasonable precaution after a country-wide blackout.

Then travel there during the day? Why do you then need to go outside at night?