Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.

Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!

Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.

> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.

I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.

The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.

most generators in european cities are connected to gas utility so it has essentially unlimited capacity without land traffic.

edit: and europe has almmost always atleast half a year of whole country supply of natural gas in caverns and other storage.

> our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency,

None of that changes the difficulty of a black start. If there is a full outage, it will take a while to get going.

> None of that changes the difficulty of a black start.

That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.

The difficulty is still the same: for each piece of the puzzle (substations, high voltage power lines, transformers, generators, loads), they have to wait until enough power is available at the connection point, and carefully manage the power balance so it's neither too much nor too little (and if they get it wrong, things trip offline and they have to start all over), while the grid is in a degraded state (often meaning no alternative paths, so a single fault can set them back several steps). The only difference being that the black start "generators" are these still working international links (which could be very far from the important parts of the national grid).

It might be faster to instead black start several independent power islands in parallel, and connect them together as a final step. At least in my country (Brazil), that's how it's done for large-scale blackouts, even when some of the country still has power; it was done that way for the partial blackout in 2023, and there's a written procedure on how to do it (which is available on the operator website, if you know where to look). In 2023, some areas failed to black start for one reason or another, and had to wait for power from the outside; other areas managed to black start as expected, and were then synchronized with other areas until everything came back together.

Yes

But honestly dark starts are the kind of boomer self-made problems that'll just have to work around

Whoever built a solar grid inverter without the capacity for dark start needs a stern talking to

The grid is not just an aggregation of individual sources and sinks; it takes active effort to keep them all working together in a useful way without just collapsing again into another cascading failure. For that reason, your solar inverter doesn't come on until the grid operator wants the solar inverters to come on in your section of the grid.

It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.

However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.

I knew some of this, but thanks for explaining it well

And while there are ways to maintain inertia https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/grid-inertia-why-... I don't see why a solar farm can't do it through smart syncing of inverters (or maybe they do some measure of it)

Solar inverters could simulate inertia by not running at 100% most of the time, but you do want the free energy machines to run at 100% as much as they physically can, because it's free energy, which means there's no buffer for simulating inertia. It's been commented many times that batteries can be used to simulate inertia. You can also literally just add inertia, in heavy spinning lumps of metal that don't do anything.

As in the German government and most of the political class...

Germany has dozens of links to its neighbours. We don't need much in terms of "black start" capacity, that's just pointless fearmongering by fossil fuel and/or prepper propaganda sites.

As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.

As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!

> As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!

Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

North America is organized in regional grids:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss...

US nationwide would be the whole of Europe category, which, I don't believe had ever happened.

Texas, on the other hand, which is easily the size of a country...

Just verified: Texas is larger than Spain and Portugal combined!

Indeed, and that’s the main problem: you can’t remember or know anything.

It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.

Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.

The US has three “independent” grids so losing them all would be hard. But I believe at times Texas has gotten close, and East went pretty dark at some point recently.

CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.

2021 was pretty bad in Texas, IIRC

2021 would have been a non-event if people in Texas weren't propagandized about some nonsensical "Independence" bullshit.

A few more interconnects with the rest of the country and it wouldn't have even made the news.

this is after decades of Texans bragging about their independent power supply. Many Texans still believe outright lies about the blackout, like it being "caused" by green energy sources, which was false.

It was caused by free market participants not spending capital to harden their network. Solar panels and Wind Turbines work great in the cold climate of Canada.

The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm. The grid companies all should have foreseen this with even minimal investment in planning. They didn't, because that's less profitable, and the "regulator" in Texas has no ability to punish them for pinching pennies on reliability and resilience.

Free Market at work baby!

>> The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm.

This is incorrect. That storm set multiple records, most notably the longest freezing streak the state has ever experienced [1]

Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Waco hit 30 year lows while Dallas set 80 year lows.

It also hit the entire state at the same time.

Maybe there's validity to some of the rest of your post, but that storm was absolutely not a regular occurance.

1. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/streaks/mapping/...

There's five different grids in North America (Eastern, Western, Texas, Alaska, Quebec) so something would have to go very wrong for a nationwide blackout.

Except this is Spain and Portugal which combined have 1/3 of the area of Texas, which had a state wide outage recently.

There was a very famous one in 2003.

As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.

It was about 7 hours long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003. Where I lived it was restored very quickly.

I had a long blackout as a kid during a hurricane in 1985. Once it was safe it was repaired rather quickly.

US, no, Texas and California are .. not doing so well.

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