Any thoughts/information on what happened? Was it a lack of spinning reserve?
Was it " The Portuguese operator, REN, said the outage was caused by a “rare atmospheric phenomenon”, with extreme temperature variations in Spain causing “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines."
as is written in the Guardian?
The Italien blackout from a few years ago had a definate cause in the tripping of interconnetors from Switzerland during a storm.
I could be talking about the forum closure, which I definitely did miss, but I am talking about the loss of electricity supply to Spain and Portugal. I was caught in the centre of Madrid when the power went off. There was absolute chaos. I was with my wife and whilst we are both reasonably fit, there was no way we would have been able to walk to our hotel on the outskirts of the city. I thought it was going to be a night on a park bench. Luckily a friend was able to organise a lift around mid-night.
It might be taken for granted but electricity is badly missed when gone!
It will be interesting to find out what caused the departure!
Mike:
You didn't mention if you have a medical kit?
I spent most of this morning water proofing my wooden hurricane window boards so they are ready to put up.
I also have annual "flood" insurance, which causes most major structural problems.
Peter
we are indeed reasonably well prepared, not for hurricanes, but for common accidents ;-) When I bought the house I made sure we are about 40-50m above the flood line ;-)
Mike.
Are you and Andy (who also responded) going to create a 72 hour home protection Kit?
Well all the comms is already on a small UPS - might not go for 72 hours but should easily see us through the usual 1-2 hour power cuts that seems typical here and probably for a few hours of a national blackout should the worse happen. The only time it was off for longer in my experience was when a cable in the street went bang and we were off for the best part of a week (apart from a short spell when the DNO installed a temporary generator, but that seemed to run out of fuel after 24 hours). There's a rechargable work light that and a log burner for space and domestic hot water heating (which will function adequately enough without electric for pumps), an amount of tinned food on the shelves, and during most of the year some additional fresh from the garden. I can store about 2000l of rainwater (but that's looking rather depleted at the moment after about 2 months without rainfall).
- Andy.
Hello Mike:
Being situated relatively high up doesn't guarantee you are flood free, as the people in Boone North Carolina found out last year during hurricane season. I assume your house is built on clay soils. I live on Sandy soil which mops up the rain water very quickly.
Peter
Hello Andy:
Here in Florida one is advised not to store "standing water " around the house because of mosquitoes.
We do not have roof gutters on our house as they are usually overwhelmed by our high rainfall rates. We have stones located on the ground at the drip lines.
Peter
We are well off topic but where I am its topsoil of half a metre or less, and then a gravel sand mix down tens of metres to the water table and then more of the same but wet. The landscape is really the glacial outwash of the last ice age ( the one that ended about 12,000 years ago, so about twice as far back as the first Egyptian pyramids, for some sense of scale. ), all sorts of junk was dropped when the ice melted, so the south of England soil structure is very variable over even a few km.
In terms of wildlife water butts are covered, and excess goes to soakaway, though the thing folk get in garden ponds is frogs, not so much mosquitoes.
Mike.
My rainwater barrels are indeed covered - even the vent holes have a fly mesh screen (intended to keep leaves and other detritus out rather than insects,but it should have the same effect). Not that we have much of an issue with mosquitoes here, not for the moment at least.
- Andy.
Hello Mike:
I have been waiting for the past few days for someone in this discussion thread, to mention the news that Chinese Solar equipment (actually the inverters) had been found to contain remote controlled kill switch, which if activated could cause instability in national grids.
I think the Times newspaper had something about this a day or so ago.
Peter Brooks
The best news report I could see was Reuters, and it's contents suggested to me that someone is being overzealous with the fear mongering (but then it is Chinese..).
Sounds like some kit used a communications module that implicitly had multiple capabilities, of which only one or two were being used in the application - happens a lot in modern electronics - and that the worry mongers (it's there job) have done the usual briefing to ham up the problem. It's no worse that Intel including its own OS and browser inside its own CPUs so they can phone home etc. (other chip makers are available).
It's all a bit of a merry go round.
Hello Philip:
The original news report appears to be published by Reuters based on US government research.
This isn't the first time major Chinese made equipment has been found to be capable of sending data back home.
Similar things happened with Chinese made container cargo cranes installed at US Ports a couple of years ago.
This might be an updated version of the "Trojan horse" story!
Peter Brooks
Hello Philip:
The original news report appears to be published by Reuters based on US government research.
This isn't the first time major Chinese made equipment has been found to be capable of sending data back home.
Similar things happened with Chinese made container cargo cranes installed at US Ports a couple of years ago.
This might be an updated version of the "Trojan horse" story!
Peter Brooks
We're about to take you to the IET registration website. Don't worry though, you'll be sent straight back to the community after completing the registration.
Continue to the IET registration site
