Spain is about to face the challenge of a “black start” - Ars Technica
Spain is about to face the challenge of a “black start” - Ars Technica
arstechnica.com
Spain is about to face the challenge of a “black start”
17 comments
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Major power facilities require power to operate, and there's lots of unmet demand.
Since the Iberian Peninsula lost power in a massive blackout, grid operators are in the process of trying to restore power to millions of customers and businesses. As you might imagine, the process—termed a "black start"—is quite a bit more challenging than flicking on a switch. However, the challenge is made considerably more difficult because nearly everything about the system—from the management hardware that remotely controls the performance of the grid to the power plants themselves—needs power to operate.
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You'd assume the critical "energy grid management systems" to have battery backups at a minimum, but also solar or some other independent power supply.
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Grid management is currently my business specialisation. I can assure you that maintaining a grid operational is a lot more complex than keeping backup generators at a few key facilities. For example, the smart meters collect data all the time. Even with a power and communication loss, they will continue to collect for a while, storing the data internally. When communication is restored, they will send all their stored data at once. Now multiply that by millions of meters and days of data. The servers are not going to be able to ingest that torrent information. Now, what if the outage was extra long like this one, and the meters ran out of internal storage or charge? How are you going to manage the data gaps?
That's only meter data. There's a ton of other systems in play. Very few people realize how delicate and complex power grids are. I can't speak for Spain, but the US grid is held up by spit, duct tape, brute force and prayers to the old gods. May Cthulhu have mercy on us.
EDIT: Typos
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You are telling me that smart meters, of all things, don't have API circuit breakers to prevent them from crashing the entire system? Talk about irony.
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Don't worry. If the transmission fails, the meter will try again, and again, and again, and again...
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"what the fuck is exponential backoff" - someone writing software for these meters ten years ago
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Why not just ignore the meters
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I don't understand what you mean.
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like why not just send the data the meters are sending into a black hole until after systems are up for a while so that meters dont have a backlog of data that overloads the system
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Power company regulations allow for some estimation on a handful of meters, but not that much.
Consumers (retail and commercial) are also entitled to contest their bills so if there is no data then there is no proof.
There are also severe penalties to providers for not uploading their data to the market. For example, a small customer (power company) is penalized $250k per hour for data missing.
How will the power company know how much power they need to purchase from the market if they do not know what their demand is or how it is tracking.
Etc. etc. etc.
EDIT: By "regulations" I meant government regulations.
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Did the US run out of chewing gum already???
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Solar, in Spain? Nah, get outta here.
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17 comments