General blackout in the Iberian peninsula
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36 replies
Today's episode of "Malfunction or Moscow?"
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Speculation is fun, but ... :)
Thanks! Yeah it's important to stick to the evidence. Otherwise it'll seem like cyber attacks are much more prevalent than they actually are which helps Putin. But it's hard not to have that initial reaction when hearing about fires and blackouts in Europe lately.
What really scared me is the internet service and mobile networks went down a few minutes (like, 2-3 minutes) after the main power.
Comms switch centers and cell towers are supposed to have batteries to keep them running for a while. But they went black almost immediately.
During the day we got some short moments of connectivity. Short and sparse.
There are things that I’d like to have some explanation for.
That's not what happened in the entirety of Spain. I'm from one of the least affected areas (basque country) where the blackout only lasted ~2h. My cellphone had 4g connection the entire time.
Good to know, and somehow good news.
Aux power is probably not suited to deal with an outage of this scale. They probably reserved whatever they had at their disposal for emergency calls. Unless those didn't work either in which case damn.
At this very moment, the tower my cellphone hooks to is not providing 5G connectivity. But when I went out to have breakfast and walked just one block I got a good one. So maybe some equipment was damaged by whatever happened (and has still not been repaired, which is understandable).
Yes that's quite likely too
I wouldn't rule out Beijing either. They always got a folding chair somewhere.
Both Spanish and Portugese officals have been talking about the possibility of a cyber attack. The fact that hours later we do not know what happened makes that unforunatly a possibility.
The entire peninsula has no power at all? How on earth does that happen?
I hope everyone's safe.
Electricity network requires that production and consumption are always equal. If there is too little production, the frequency (Hz) goes down and if too little consumption, the frequency goes up. If frequency goes too far every electric device pretty much breaks.
This is why there is automation in the network that tries to balance the network (reserve production and consumption). BUT if shit hits the fan, and frequency goes too bad, it automatically takes load off or production off the network. This often causes domino effect, you take load off, which causes over production, and again you take production off and loop is ready. In minutes the whole network falls like domino blocks, one by one.
There was lots of luck (and probably skill and preparation) that they were able to stop it. Main land Europe from Portugal to Turkey is one big network.
Cold starting whole Europe would have taken week. You need to start small islands, and connect them together slowly. Balancing load and production.
Source: I work in electricity production and distribution.
There are always some bottle necks on the network, but the frequency is same on all mainland Europe. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous_Area
It is possible that this bottle neck saved the whole European grid coming down.
We are. But thank you for the concern.
Europe has a highly interconnected grid. Usually that works in everyone's favor by providing much better stability than smaller grids. It appears there are ways to take down the entire grid too though.
Extreme weather phenomenon. Something about a wave reveberation.
Whatever the cause, this doesn’t look good. About 60 million people without power.
At least in Valencia there’s cell service, as I was able to WhatsApp some family there to check on them.
Some cell towers have battery backups.
According to what I heard, most don't.
@zaphod @Leavingoldhabits
I am in southern Spain right now. Power came back about 30 minutes ago.
It is interesting how quiet a city can be.
Without cars cities are pretty quiet
Right, and quite pretty!
@driving_crooner @Saleh
Some data carriers with difficultues and broadcasting stations worked but on the street level trains, metros and traffic lights are still off in many places after 10 hours.
The Spanish and Portuguese presidents are saying that they don’t dismiss any hypothesis, but the only info beoadcasted through the news were that there was an overload in some point of the grid that created a domino effect and left all the system without voltage
I don't think Spain has a president. It is a kingdom
Edit: I stand corrected. They call the leaders of goverments presidents.
You are right, of course. But the Spanish PM is called ‘President of the government’, and informally, ‘President’.
Spain is a parliamentary monarchy, the King is the head of the Estate and a symbolic figure but doesn’t have power over the Parliament. In Spain we don’t use the title “prime minister” we have a President of the government and a president for each of the 16 autonomic regions (similar to federated estates).
Damn squirrels
I laughed...
Power cut chaos in Spain and Portugal caused by 'rare' atmospheric phenomenon, says operator
A cyberattack? We will know, in time. For now, this is an ongoing issue and a Carrington event is equally possible. Or, just a human error. Look for past outages, it could happen: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages
I think it would be more widespread if it was a true Carrington event. Might still be a mini one. Actually kind of rooting for this to be the case because then the only bad actors are the politicians and power company administrators that have ignored the warnings. Might lead to reforms worldwide.
Thanks!!!!!
Canada would be more susceptible to that than Spain. Also, there were no large CMEs in the last few days.
There has been no space weather event remotely close to a Carrington one
I'm just visiting the Algarve.
Luckily I found some store that had a free open wifi network (they had a server room so still had power). There were people lining up to use payphones (interestingly they still have them here).
Otherwise, no wifi, no data, no phone network, so no information on the whole situation. Can't pay by card. Had a bag of chips for dinner because I can't cook. Couldn't book accommodation or a bus. Shops used pen, paper and calculator but took only cash. People barely have cash at hand and ATMs were out too.
I don't know what I could've done without money if this would have lasted even longer.