Spain France Portugal power outage

[Beachwaves127]

Looks bad! I haven’t seen much on hospitals / emergency services but I’ve more seen comments on travel - roads trains planes. Hope they can fix it and wonder what caused it.

Well.........the ATC backup at Heathrow worked as it should have done.

On the ground side- don't know...if the back up
plan was supposed to allow the airport to keep operating at 100% obviously that is a fail.

If the planning for such circumstances was to allow the operation to stop in a controlled safe manner you could argue it did work.

My moneys is on aliens 👽. That would be interesting.

Not qualified, but my first question is what's so unusual that it hasn't happened before.

Loads of villages and rural areas near me (in Ireland) lost all power after Storm Eowyn in January, our village was out for several days but the local small supermarket operated with cash and torches. No petrol station though, and the Tesco was closed, and no phone signal/internet because the masts weren't working.

Our internet was back within three days and our phone signal within about two. Scary to be completely cut off from the internet/phone while it lasted. (We are off-grid so we had full electricity at our house throughout, most people only got their electricity back after many days, some weeks. We had plenty of gas bottles for heating. A lot of people who had scoffed at our off-grid lifestyle had to eat their words!).

Anything related to climate change could easily be unprecedented

Bum. We're flying to our place in the Algarve tomorrow! Trying to check if Faro is badly affected! Mind you, Ryanair would fly through a nuclear war rather than risk refunding anyone!!

An airport's electrical backup plan needs to run long enough to allow those planes that are too close to divert, to land safely. Heathrow is basically a town of 80,000 people and you can't "just have a spare generator" for that.

Airports shut all the time for all kinds of reasons (remember Gatwick and the drones?), so keeping them running 100.000% 24/7/365 isn't part of the planning.

Oporto is on the same latitude as New York city.

According to BBC Portugal blaming fault with Spanish grid.

Also electricity grids may be more interconnected than ever before, both within and between countries.

I’m not very high up, I just want to point that out lol I did training sessions for stores but it was localised
so you’d have local emergencies such as flooding, fires, terrorist attacks.
in this case it’s very much helping the community who needed it at the time. We would never expect people to come to us in these events. We’d come to the community and give things out such as water, tea, basic food. It would be free at the consumers point but we’d need to account for the stock on our system as we work on a just in time schedule so sell 1, replace 1.
For store events, it’s as above. Everyone has to be checked out by 20 minutes and there is someone with a timer.
customers are not allowed to carry on shopping, they MUST come to a till at the first sign of a power cut, if they don’t want to they must leave. If we dont manage to get everyone out by 20 minutes then we go to the negotiation stage but I have only ever had to do that for 1 customer in 20 years! If power is still off then all colleagues then start the frozen/fresh procedures to keep everything cold whilst we wait for further info. We have a few hours after that before the next stage is implemented.
again I have only had to do this once where we got a chilled wagon delivered to our store yard as a priority so we then store everything in there to prevent waste.
We then open again when power is restored for ambient only until fridges have reached temp and then restocked.
for a national emergency, it obviously only a theory as we have never had to implement but covid tested some of the procedures. We would never expect colleagues to work so some of it is a moot point but it’s basically along the lines once we realise we’re not going to be opening in the foreseeable future then all essentials are bought to the front… eggs, milk, baby food, nappies, bread… anything we think people will need or fresh foods
to be honest, if it was such an emergency that were doing this then I think whatever staff are still there would just try and make sure people got their fair share rather than expect payment.
Luckily we’ve never had to test it yet but the way things are going who knows

That does sound plausible. There's a similarity with the power outage in 2003 in parts of Canada and northern USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Causes

It's also worth noting that complex systems can take a long time to come back up as certain bits have to be working correctly before other bits can come back on stream. That can take hours.

If nothing else this will winkle out the companies who think business continuity is something other people do.

I can guarantee there will be a rush to purchase replacement UPS batteries (because they were never regularly checked).

We'll also get to see whose disaster recovery was up to snuff.

Electricity grids are pretty resilient, because individual components fail all the time. Something taking place across many place in a wide area at once is the most likely cause.

However, I have my bingo card ready and expect to be able to cross off the WEF/George Soros/Bill Gates/5G/vaccines/Trump/Putin/Brexit as definite causes according to the Bloke In The Pub corner of social media. Personally I've got a tenner on it being Penelope Keith.

I'm sure someone whose 'DH Knows About These Things But I Can't Say Why As It Would Be Outing' will be along shortly to explain everything to us.

I remember that outage. it was very much a “where were you when…” situation. I had to walk ten flights up to my apartment, had cold bread, defrosted from the freezer, for dinner.
I remember a general feeling of “we’re all in this together”, with people directing traffic etc. I hope everyone is ok during this outage.

solar flare. knocked out power to much of Canada a couple of decades ago

Edit: sorry should have RTFT!

Mrs Cox I presume?
😂

Or an update in technology.

This is the event I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1989_geomagnetic_storm

Presumably this is why we've been advised to have 72 hours supply of everything, including water. Just in case.

Indeed.

But what is the exact issue? I took a quick glance at various regions of Spain's weather, and there wasn't anything that jumped out as being unusual.

So the extreme temperature variation, was it variation across regions, or one area that shot up/down suddenly?

It's a vague enough statement while sounding scientific at first glance, to just wonder why if that causes issues, it hasn't happened before - I would have thought Spain/Portugal in April wouldn't have had more severe weather extremes than other places do normally?
Did it cause chaotic motion, in which case there might have been similar variations before that didn't cause an issue. Or it could be that there was something else that added into the situation that just tipped it.

It's also worth noting that complex systems can take a long time to come back up as certain bits have to be working correctly before other bits can come back on stream. That can take hours.

Very few complex systems are capable of being bought up without some intervention.

A lost of servers can be configured to reboot when power is (re)applied. However even before that, you want to be sure the power is going to stay up before you proceed. I've had to work through a power outage where the power dropped about 2 minutes after it appeared to come back. Which then managed to bork a server as it died in the middle of a reboot which itself was a reboot after a drop-dea power cut.

If that server is your DHCP and/or DNS server then you aren't talking to anyone.

These are the sort of events that can lead to a midnight call and a police escort to the data centre if your system is that important

(When I worked for British Gas, they had to helicopter some staff into the control room in Marble Arch in 1987 as the snow was impassable where they lived.)

No one knows yet the source of the massive power outage in Spain and Portugal. Sanchez, the Spanish Prime Minister has called for a National Security meeting, and said they are still investigating what's happened. No one knows right now, and international press reports stating what the problem is should be taken with a grain of salt. It's impossible to know for certain this early on the source of the problem.

The reason given is very vague, well to the ordinary person who is not a meteorologist that is. So I'm thinking, aha that's a holding reason, but might not be the full story yet....

Anyway, I'm sure you are all aware that it is the CHEMTRAILS, yes them chemtrails, they are responsible for Covid, disaster, plague, and everything under the sun, so I suppose it's a reasonable assumption. 😊