Power goes out on entire island of Cuba, leaving 10 million people without electricity
Power goes out on entire island of Cuba, leaving 10 million people without electricity
The article doesn't specify, but it appears to be a long term fuel issue. They have been trying to cut back for a while now, including with blackouts for various areas, but they finally ran out and/or the demand while it was on just crashed the system.
Restarting an entire grid is not easy either, it usually takes many hours even if you have fuel available.
More like decrepit oil-fired power plants, many decades old. Cuba is also having economic problems.
I don't get it. How does the failure of one single power plant cripple an island that large?
Here's Practical Engineering explaining how it almost happened in Texas. he also goes into why starting from a black start is so hard
Article doesn't say, but one plausible scenario:
A big power plant goes down and other plants have to pick up the load. Load exceeds capacity of remaining plants and they shut down (or breakers blow, etc). Repeat.
Power plants also need energy to start up (black start), and if there's no grid energy to power those ancillary systems, or if the power plant doesn't have on-site auxiliary generators to provide black start capability, they're down until they can get power again from elsewhere.
Base load plants (coal, nuclear) don't throttle up and down quickly for changing loads. For quick response, we use peaker plants which are typically natural gas powered turbines and can respond quicker (grid batteries are, thankfully, replacing these in some cases).
That's grossly over-simplified but it's more or less the gist of it.
Power plants also need energy to start up (black start), and if there’s no grid energy to power those ancillary systems, or if the power plant doesn’t have on-site auxiliary generators to provide black start capability, they’re down until they can get power again from elsewhere.
This is huge, we have massive drills to make sure we can do this, and idle black start plants for just this purpose alongside almost an entire secondary grid for bootstrapping.
Electricity is expensive and hard as hell.
so it's exactly like coal generators in Satisfactory
For a historical analogue check out what happened in Italy on 28. September 2003. One international line in Switzerland sparked to a tree, and got shut down, that caused a cascade where the other lines to France were overheating and getting shut down a few minutes after, and Italy didn't manage to shed enough load in time to keep up their frequency internally, then everything shut off when it drooped low enough. Took them 18 hours afterwards to get the whole grid back online.
Electric grids are really tough to get back online from what I've read. Rolling blackouts help keep things online, but if the whole thing goes down at once it's tricky to get all the generators on the same timing for their 60/50 Hz transmission lines.
If you keep proactive with rolling blackouts you have a chance, but if you are slacking even a bit all the spinning plates fall at once.
If demand exceeds supply, the whole grid will fail as the voltage/frequency drop trips all sorts of safety systems meant to protect the grid and the devices connected to them. Normally the supply and demand are continually balanced to avoid this.
If a major plant goes offline and you don't shut down equal demand at the same time (usually by disabling entire neighborhoods) then this is the result.
That's how power works, you miss your requirements by even a little and you can get cascading failures if you haven't engineered things well and your guys aren't sharp.
Power engineering is not something casual, it's brutal and if you aren't on your toes then your toes will leave black sooty marks where they were.
We spend insane amounts of money keeping things going, Cuba probably cut corners and couldn't do upgrades due to sanctions/embargoes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of much of the Northeast regional electricity distribution system.
Not a plant but another example of something that should have been small causing massive outages. From what I know talking to people who've worked for the province's grid operator, it's a massive job to keep everything going.
They should trade China all the cigars and rum they want for enough cheap solar and batteries to power the island.
average lemmy user: "but communism is still waaaay better than capitalism"
What an absolutely braindead comment.
Yep, if communism is to blame then maybe the US should lift the embargoes/sanctions and let communism fail on its own strengths or weaknesses. But they won't do that. I wonder why.
It's like the joke about Americans saying that communism is doomed to fail as if they haven't spent billions and billions of dollars trying to make sure it fails.
This just begs the question
Why do we allow a major embargo of an entire island nation and allow an entire people to live without the proper necessities and resources in order to maintain their nation?
President Obama began to ease the embargo restrictions in 2016, allowing for travel and investments. It was Trump, in 2017, who reinstated the embargo in full. Probably just because Obama relaxed it.
Then Biden got into office and uh,
https://press.un.org/en/2023/ga12552.doc.htm
UN discussion on how damaging the embargo is
Because the people there didn’t allow US capitalists to exploit them and their resources; because the people started to organize themselves and their resources around public interest; because they were voting in leaders who didn’t allow US elite to exploit them.
And so they must be punished.
Longest embargo in US history!
... probably done as a deterrent against other near by nations looking to station nuclear arms in close proximity.
Stops places like Mexico, Canada, or Panama from making an offer to China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia to station Nuclear their silos/launch bases for them.
Canada is probably still thinking about it though.
You can control a nation's ability to import and receive nuclear weapons, especially if you are trying to control the supply of arms ...... it doesn't mean you get to starve and decimate an entire country just because you don't like their politics or they don't happen to support you.
The US has an embargo, but Mexico and Canada don't. Cuba can and does buy goods from them. Cuba's real problem is paying for them. The US does not embargo food or medicine goods to Cuba, yet the country has problems feeding their people. Poor economic management of a communist country with no real resources.
Cuba can't pay because Cuba can't conduct normal finances with the rest of world because of the US embargo
It's like having having someone handcuff you, cuff you feet and pin you to the ground and rest their knee on your neck and ask you why you can't get up on your own.
Technically, but the US has sanctioned companies in other countries who do business in Cuba scaring off a ton of possible choices. The companies have to choose between the richest company on earth and Cuba. Not much of a choice.
Plus IIRC boats that go to Cuba can't go to the US after for some period of time. Which considering location makes it hugely inconvenient for shipping companies.
Plus since the US and US based companies control a huge portion of the world's financial systems Cuba is locked out of all of them