To ask if anyone else is caught in the huge power outage?

[MissB83]

What a nightmare!

All well in my part of the Scottish Highlands. Well ........I’m out of wine but still have power.

@FaFoutis he’s planning on the 0615 too but doesn’t get in to Edinburgh til around 1045 and then still has to trek out east! Ach well. I can hear trains on the mainline from the house (our local station is on the east coast mainline although they don’t stop at us) so I’m fairly confident they will get everyone shifted quite early! 🤞🏻

@Supersimpkin a pp mentioned it was an issue with low frequency. If that's the case then all of the equipment on the electricity network has "protection" built into it to monitor frequency, current levels etc and to trip if it sees a certain value. Like you have a fuse in appliances at home. Because all of the network is connected all of the equipment sees the change in frequency and reacts as it's been designed to - some of the equipment will have tripped in response to the drop in frequency

QuckTheDuck

That shows what the demand on the national grid is and how its been met, usually a combination of sources. CCGT are Gas powered stations Coal is as described not a lot of it is use these days in fact under normal loads its now negliable.Wind is self explanitory expect a decent wind input for the next day or Two but if its gets too breezy the wind generators feather their blades so they don't overspeed and damage thermselves. On the small dials such as Solar, not much at night of course the others are Biomass, straw and wood burning. OIl very rarely used and only in emergencies they can take some time to warm up coal plants in particular . The others are interconnectors between the UK and other countries etc.

Click on the French version and you can see how France with its Nuke and Hydro powers quite a bit of europe a lot of the time!.

Thanks @Justaboy ! So it is demand only, not output as such? As on the daily ones I expected to see a dip when the grids went down?

Milwall up to their old tricks.

Ok in east Devon.

@qucktheduck it's generation on the grid rather than demand.

Just for interest (using that term loosely!) If you look at the daily hydro/pumped/bio table and zoom in around the period 16.00 to 20.00 you'll see a little blue line which shows pumped storage coming onto the system. This will be dinorwig coming on to help bring the frequency back up. Worth a Google if you aren't familiar with dinorwig 🙂

Hmm....not sure the official story stacks up. I speculate there may be some cyber angle to this. I don’t get why the effects are widespread but completely miss other regional networks.

They didnt go down for long, what they need to do is "balance" the grid that is match what they can generate to the demand. They don't have much storage on the grid except for a place called Dinorwig its a massive lake in wales they can get that up and running very quickly its very usefull for what they call demand uptake. Imagine how many kettles get switched on after Corrie is on 't telly that needs to be ment and quickly . Its very important that the demand balance is kept in narrow limmits you can see this by looking at the frequency its a bit low at the moment. Some years ago a station called Longannet in scotland when off and caused a simler trip shutdown.

You can see where the overall demand is being met from each source as the number of Gigawatts (Gigawatt a thousand million watts!) and its expressed also as percentage.

There is a bit on the national grid site that can show short duration breaks but its tucked away and awkward to find but overall Gridwatch is very usefull in its own right.

Oh yes Dinorwig or the Electric Mountain as its known, you can visit that if your in North Wales the idea is you have a large lake and open the valves to the genorators and a lot of power for a while when its quite in the middle of the night you pump the water back!.

www.electricmountain.co.uk/
www.electricmountain.co.uk/

@Al2O3 Yeah I must admit that was my first thought, "Who would want to mess with us in a cyber capacity...? oh. Yep."
I could be wrong of course but... that's what I am leaning towards.

Doubt it was them naughty ruskies these things can happen by themselves very easily. It is usually much worse in the winter months when supply is low and demand is high there are times in the winter when they ask some customers, usually large steelworks and Alumimium smelters and the like to cut their demand, load shedding its called.

Sometimes its a very narrow margin;(

Yes, I can remember these things happening very easily before. ?

All the traffic lights in my area were off around 5.00pm, was total chaos trying to get in & out the supermarket car park.

I’m in mid cornwall and our power has only just been restored. The problem areas seem very random.

They might seem random, but the system is designed to disconnect certain areas of demand in response to the drop in frequency. If it didn't do that then the whole network would go down and it would take a long time to reconnect everyone.

How strange the Cambridge English Dictionary doesn't identify it as such.

Perhaps try expanding your research...

power ˌoutage noun [countable] American English

a period of time when there is no electricity supply SYN power failure, power cut British English

Source...

www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/power-outage

Our village was one of the last in the UK to be connected to the national grid. We have frequent power cuts but none today which is odd.

That's what an outage is BBC4 on the 7pm news called it a "power outrage".

They might seem random, but the system is designed to disconnect certain areas of demand in response to the drop in frequency. If it didn't do that then the whole network would go down and it would take a long time to reconnect everyone.

It wasn't a planned outage in response to some serious disaster, it was just an outage because some stuff failed, no pseudo overarching understanding is needed.

Northwest England too. How weird.

My part of the NW has been fine. (Would have been ironic if we'd had a cut in the middle of watching The Current War.)

Yep, h is stuck 90 mins from home because the trains are down, localised flooding has diverted coaches and no cabs for love nor money. He's travelling for business so at least they pick up the tab for a hotel if he can find one. I actually feel sorry for him (rare these days) but I'm not at home so I really can't rescue him

No, it wasn't a planned outage... but it was the result of a designed response to this kind of event

Our bits of London (Lambeth, Battersea) went down. All the house alarms of the rich were triggered (apparently that's what cutting the power does) and all us peons in rush hour traffic cursed bec the trafficclights were down. For about 20 minutes!