Re: Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

On 5/8/2025 5:43 AM, Martin Brown wrote:

On 08/05/2025 12:49, Don Y wrote:

But where can exchange traffic go?  See what I mean?  Anyone that
you want to contact (and everyone along the way) must be "up".

>
That was the original point of ARPANET then EPSS and later the internet. Packet switching means that any route to the destination at all will do.

>
But that assumes there *is* a series of hops that can get you "there"...
wherever "there" happens to be.  In a nationwide outage, what chance
that everything EXCEPT some critical bit of comms gear is affected?

 Nationwide outages should be exceptionally rare. Never had one in the UK but the way they are going one winter's day it will happen.

Yes, but they *do* happen.  As well as events that take out large
geographical areas (e.g., 9/11).
One can't protect against (e.g.) 10 sigma occurrences as it's not economical.
But, people still have to potentially deal with them.

Most powercuts tend to be fairly local round here - a regional powercut or a national one requires something truly catastrophic to happen.
>
I can only recall one UK powercut in that league in the past half century (August 9 2019). Of course it directly affected the densely populated affluent regions London and the South East. Therefore it was much more newsworthy than if it had affected the remote Scottish Highlands where weather induced powercuts are quite common.

>
I don't think I've ever (regardless of where I've lived) experienced
a deliberate power cut.  A drunk may take out a telephone pole or
a branch may fall on some high tension wires but no one has ever
said "sorry, we're turning the lights out" (for whatever reason)

 They do that routinely where I live once a year for trimming trees that might otherwise short out live supply lines or worse fall onto them.

I don't recall it in any of the places that I've lived with overhead
services.  Here, things are below grade.
In the former case, outages were frequent enough (one place they occurred
monthly) that any sort of PM would be lost in the noise.  In the latter,
it's decades between *clusters* of failures.

I wouldn't describe that 2019 powercut as deliberate either it was a huge MFU caused by a single lightning strike to an insignificant power plant that lead to a cascade network failure.
 We typically lose power a couple of times a year due to very high winds toppling poles and/or the sort of snow that sticks onto trees and makes them break. The mains poles here are now antique. Installed ~1950's and the bases are rotten. Unsafe for linesmen to climb and marked as such.

I don't know how our "area" is fed as it has to be overhead *somewhere*.
But. most of the high tension lines are on metal support towers or
metal "poles" (18-24" diameter at base)
The other side of town has overhead service and frequently is down
for a day or so as high winds play dominoes with the poles.

The recent big one at Heathrow didn't affect all that many people although it did take down the whole airport which shows remarkably bad contingency planning - it should have had supply redundancy and the ability to switchover to it before the diesel generators ran out of fuel. Heads should roll over them having to shut down completely.

>
Fukishima?

 Genuine natural disaster beyond what the designers had considered. They almost

Like grid failures the designers hadn't considered?  :>

got away with it but didn't. Tsunami are absolutely terrifying. Another one when I was in Japan in the hours of darkness was reported as >2m (which was when the gauge stopped transmitting). The next morning there was seaweed hanging off supergrid pylon wires.
 

I'm considering replacing the UPS at my router. Some UPS "destroy" the battery too fast.

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Yes.  Rather than spend time investigating it, I've taken the approach
of just rescuing batteries to replace those that have been "cooked".

>
That is a feature of UPS design that specsmanship to get the longest run time for the sales datasheet means that they cook their batteries. I have seen them swell to the point of bursting inside a UPS. Thick rubber gloves needed to remove the remains. Support metalwork was a real corroded rusty mess but electronics above it remained OK.

>
Yup.  They have a rationalization, though -- they are trying to provide the
highest availability.  Else, how much availability do you sacrifice to
maximize battery life?  Do you then start specifying battery life as a
primary selection criteria?

 I think they probably could back off the fast recharge a bit. I'm always nervous of going back on again too soon after power is restored (even though my systems are reasonably fault tolerant). Sometimes the mains restoration goes on and off several times a few seconds apart if there are still other transient leak to ground faults on the lines.

Our outages tend to be clean on/off/on events as they are simple equipment
failures.  One cable segment replacement was followed by a *second*
when the line was reenergized but that was unusual.  And, the second
failure was almost immediate.
I have every machine (save the 24/7/365 "services" box) set to stay
off in the event of power failure.  I don't need to have them all
spin up of their own accord if unattended.

Of course.  But, they are in the PRIMARY business of selling batteries,
not UPSs!

 A bit like printers then.

There are depressingly many "toilet paper" products (products where
the main business is selling toilet paper, NOT the "free dispensers").
One firm sells distilled water in tiny vials.  The vials are *chipped*
to ensure you don't substitute some other distilled water for THEIR
distilled water.  <rolls eyes>
[Yes, of course there are likely standards of purity ionvolved
but I'm sure the real issue is continued revenue stream]
Some years ago, I designed a box; lots of pressure to get the
costs down (about $300 DM+DL).  The boxes were "sold" for $6000.
But, all were given away -- to sell chemical reagents!
An acquaintance makes his living buying drug stores (pharmacies).
All of the content is treated as crap and resold for pennies
on the dollar.  What he's after is the prescriptions that the
store handles.  So, when you laugh at the outrageous prices
that they charge for common items (that you can easily buy
elsewhere), know that those aren't the real profit drivers!

With the exception of multi-user servers, individual workstations
usually have auto-backup provisions *in* the key applications.
And, in the event of an outage (even if the machine stays up),
the user is usually distracted by the rest of the house/office
going black; is ~15 minutes of uptime going to be enough if the
user isn't AT the machine when power fails?
>
No one has yet to address the market where TCO is the driving
criteria.

 To some extent it is an insurance policy to not lose what I'm working on if the power does go down suddenly. Despite having theoretical lightning protect as well I also shutdown when there are thunderstorms about.

That hasn't been a problem, here.  Whichever machines happen to be powered
up will just go in and out of "sleep" based on how long I've been "away"
from them.  Booting is costly (add-in cards with legacy BIOS that
have to come up sequentially -- usually probing external busses in the
process).  So, I'd rather just let them idle at a lower power.

I saw what a big lightning strike to our works building did to the switchboard and mainframe. The surge protection devices on a big chunky copper bus bar saved themselves by allowing transients to fry all of the terminal driver boards. The phone lines were just a sooty shadow on the wall and it blew the clip on covers off the cable way.

I took some steps to protect the comms wiring for my automation system
from "deliberate acts of sabotage" (e.g., holding a tesla coil to the
8P8c's).  But, unless you are building from scratch, I don't think
it is possible to address this issue (how do you know which wires
travel alongside each other)

About once a decade we get lightning to tree strikes within 100m. It usually fries bedside clocks and modems (although mine survived OK last time). This was despite a 1" calorific spark jumping off it.

Our home was struck many years ago.  (CRT) TV ended up "magnetized"
(color distortion).  Solid state phones were all toasted (leaving the
house looking to be "off hook").  My other half (home at the time;
I was at work) in a panic cuz "the phones don't work" -- it's one
thing to lose power, yet another to lose POTS!