I don't know the first thing about electric infrastructure, but for there to be a single point of failure like this just seems bonkers. I suppose the country's shape is partially to blame. I wonder what could have caused this.
In this case, there is room for improvement, at some cost to be determined from a post mortem.
A bit of decentralization goes a long way.
https://www.gambit-energystorage.com/
https://www.angleton.tx.us/DocumentCenter/View/3793/Gambit-E...
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/01/12/Tesla%20BESS%20G...
They've been pushing the envelope on battery tech for some time now, and finding very useful, if at times novel, uses for it.
Hot take: Bring back JB Straubel (Former Tesla CTO). That’s who is the equivalent of BYD’s CEO. A driven, yet low key engineering leader. Culture comes from the top.
HN Search: BYD (sorted by date) - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Where's the value add in buying a Tesla battery instead of just getting one from one of their suppliers?
With that said, BYD has a strong offering and recently landed a large contract (12.5 GWh) in Saudi Arabia.
https://www.energy-storage.news/tesla-starts-production-at-s...
https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidd...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/02/17/byd-to-supply-12-5-gw...
With the switch to 21700 and 4680 batteries, they make their own (in China and I think some other US-based gigafactory)
The Chinese are far ahead of Tesla, specifically BYD
Tesla are not doomed (hyper inflated share price might be) but they have been over taken on all fronts
Elon still has the best rockets....
https://www.nrel.gov/grid/grid-forming-inverter-controls.htm...
It’s very weird, indeed
In fact that’s how individual sections of the grid set power flow limits, by ensuring they stop leading when they reach their max capacity. fascinating really
For example, you can't just turn on all the power plants. Ignoring the phase issue, power plants require some power to operate (which is where the flywheels and batteries come into play). This means you need to isolate them, and bring them up one-at-a-time (and you probably want to isolate consumers until the whole process is complete). How do you coordinate this in the absence of power/internet? Radios, but now you have to worry about the logistics surrounding that. Do you have a stockpile of petroleum that can be tapped without power, because your people aren't getting on-site in a reasonable time without a car. How familiar are people with the process, having never practiced it?
Black-start-region and join-regions should be enough to get a whole grid going?
Electric grid get more reliable with scale, not less (that's why parts of North Africa is interconnected with Europe, which itself is interconnected all the way to Russia).
Small grids (like islands) are always a nightmare to manage for that reason.
Had you read the Wikipedia page you posted, you'd have realized that they planned to use dedicated HVDC lines under the Mediterranean to carry the power, and not the Spain-Moroco interconnection.
But you need mountains and water. Chile has a lot of those
One piece of infrastructure trips offline, causing an abnormal situation at another, which then trips etc.
That pipeline/powerline is your single point of failure.
It is still a single network, but you need multiple failures to manifest into a cascading issue like this.
What you're probably thinking of is more akin to distributed system which fails when any one component fails, i.e. modern microservice architectures, aka distributed monoliths. But that's not the case here, because you constantly have minor issues on the grid. They're just continuously being handled. What becomes the issue is the cascade, with each failure increasing the likelihood of a following failure etc.
In web developer terms, this is as if a production k8s cluster fails because a node went offline, which rebalanced too many containers to another node which ran out of memory, causing it to crash and starting the cascade, ultimately ending with adjacent clusters starting to crash because of the error quotas etc
It starts with a small thing at 12:15 p.m. and takes a while for other things to happen. But then bam 4:05:57 p.m. to 4:13 p.m. results in:
End of cascading failure. 256 power plants are off-line, 85% of which went offline after the grid separations occurred, most due to the action of automatic protective controls.It was nice to see the stars though.
* 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...).
On the other side you will see frequency drops, which will do the same.
I do not know what Chiles power production looks like, but it would be a huge challenge for any power network to deal with one of the main lines suddenly dropping out.
Many modern countries have experienced rolling black- and brown-outs in the past ~25 years. It's not an easy thing to sidestep without a lot of spare capacity and that takes money that nobody has the appetite to spend.