How on earth does the power supply to an entire Country fail?
In: Engineering
There is a problem with turning the power back on again that makes it difficult to do it:
Many appliances in a normal home are consuming a lot more electricity for a while when you start them up. Fridge? Needs more electricity. Freezer? Needs more electricity. Some tv start up, realise that they are not supposed to do anything and hibernate again. And so on.
Not to mention that a fridge that has been turned off for a day will have a pretty rough time cooling down the food in it again. It will consume a lot more electricity in the upcoming day than it usually does during a day, just because it has to catch up.
Now, imagine that a whole bloody country does this at the same time. It’ll demand so much from the producers that you literally can’t turn it all on at the same time. You have to turn on a section at a time. And pay attention to the load you get, and then carefully pick a section to turn on after an hour or two. And still pay close attention to the load.
And at the same time you run into other problems. When you turn on power, it’s a really large circuit breaker that has to be moved. I’m gonna bet you that if you open 20 really large circuit breakers that haven’t moved in a decade, then one or two of them will probably fail. Or at least be bit cranky.
And some of the large breakers are fully manual. How…how do you manage to get personell out to that breaker, when gas stations can’t sell gas to the company vans and cellphone towers are knocked out for lack of electricity?
There is a lot of practical problems that…are not necessarily solved in advance. Not all the line workers have satellite phones. Not all the depots got their own fuel depots with a hand-cranked pump for emergency refuelling. And…
Well. Yeah. Once it’s blacked out, you face a lot of practical problems with the restarting procedure, if you wait for too long before you get started.
As for the question on how things fail… that is a good question. But it literally only takes that a very, very, very large power line gets disconnected before there is a fault on it. Or that a large producer has a failure. I haven’t read up on what the problem actually is, but it’s usually one of those two. There is a problem with production or there is a problem with transmission.
EDIT: I browsed a news article or two about it.
The problem appears to be that the consumption is so large that the producers can’t meet demand. Producers can’t maintain the goal frequency on the production. Voltage goes down. Voltage goes up and down violently when the producers try to meet demand and can’t.
Eventually, lots of equipment will start to disconnect, because when the voltage does that, it’s…an obvious problem. In a perfect world, it means that the production units will have a less rough time keeping up. In a real world, it can mean that the producers loose *too much* consumption, and force them to do an emergency shut down because of that instead. And once a large producer shuts down, it’ll give too much load to all the others. And the vicious circle continues.
It’s all a matter of failed load balancing. Production can’t meet demands. And whoever it is that has balancing as their job failed at it. Or reacted a hint too slow. And now they have to start up slowly. From scratch. One consumer area at a time. one production unit at a time. Probably for days.
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