Minimal News_

    "Real electrical systems have to deal with issues of reactance and other exciting math-heavy constructs designed to drive you into some other field of study."

They had me at this

"With inverter-based power storage, generation, and transmission, the grid can now react incredibly quickly. This is good when they do the right thing, but can be very bad when they do the wrong thing."

I'm wondering if this will be like the 2016 South Australian blackout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

"AEMO identified software settings in the wind farms that prevented repeated restarts once voltage or frequency events occurred too often. "

Grid operators are currently mostly against renewable and so they impose "blunt" disconnect rules on inverters behind renewable sources, and this comes to bite the grid when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

May be in the end this will be a good thing and grid operators will start to treat inverters and renewable as a strength and modify grid regulations as needed.

This news cycle was pretty hilarious (and just as sad) to hunt through.

From what I deciphered, the actual suggested cause was "aeolian vibrations" [0], which is one of the three forms of wind-induced conductor vibrations according to this [1] IEEE article. Also known as "flutter" according to Wikipedia [2]. (I'm not in EE so can't confirm nor debunk.)

Connected to this, another seemingly made-up term that made the news cycle was "Ging-induced vibrations" (in Portuguese media). Now, I don't speak Portuguese, but all my efforts hunting down this mysterious Ging tremendously failed. However, when I plopped ging into translation models, I couldn't help but notice that "ginga" in Portuguese means "swing", as in cable swing. So I'm giving it pretty reasonable chances that "ging" (no capitalization) might be what "flutter" is in English, i.e. the industry slang for "aeolian vibrations" there. And then the rest was just a typical journo move, much in the way of "the hacker known as 4chan".

In any case, it would have been cool if anyone actually linked to where said company made their statement, so that people could independently verify what was actually being said. From what I read, they have since explicitly debunked that they were inventing any new niche atmospheric effects. It's incredibly disheartening that such basic bits of information can become this seriously distorted before going viral, even (especially?) in this day and age. Makes you wonder how trustworthy are the regular news, even biases nonwithstanding, that aren't so readily obvious to be bollocks.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-VzxRfPHjU

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4773888

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockbridge_damper#Wind-induce...

My state, Wisconsin, has had a long political and legal battle over the construction of high voltage lines from the Madison area to Dubuque, Iowa. Opposition ranges from aesthetics to wildlife conservation to it just being a waste of money.

One line of arguments I found intriguing is that the lines should be buried instead of on towers, for a multitude of reasons. The company building it would extract profit and then long term maintenance would fall on the state. If the lines were buried, there'd be less maintenance caused by weather events, less transmission losses, and overall more efficient and resilient operation.

Obviously burying such lines has much higher up front costs and the companies looking to profit don't want to pay it.

"Diagnosis and Mitigation of Observed Oscillations in IBR-Dominant Power Systems - A PRACTICAL GUIDE" - https://www.esig.energy/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/esig-rpt-...

Why were all the answers provided by new contributors? Don't see that very often.

Can this be mitigated by putting the cables under ground? Just curious, since it’s a huge debate here at times because of the massive cost of doing so.

Germany needs a connection from the coast into the south and most of it as of now will be build under ground.

I think they might have been referring to conductor gallop, power line sag, and subsequent fault. I read synchronisation failure as downed cable. With extreme temperature variations come extreme winds. Not sure if this was the case.

Accepted answer posits that this may be due to a mistranslation from Spanish, or someone's misunderstanding of an explanation, or both.

In other words, the phenomenon is another "vegetative electron microscopy".

Interestingly, the recent deadly floods were also blamed on a rare atmospheric event. Sadly, it seems official information during such events is just as rare.

No power is unusual, but happens, but no mobile phones, no internet, no emergency broadcasts, SMS or otherwise, just complete silence for hours... and then you hear it might be multi-country wide. Pretty scary. You assume the worst, right?

What was also scary to see was how little cash people have. The cash machines went down, queues formed, banks closed, POS terminals failed, and suddenly the smart-world we are building was looking very dumb.

Imagine not being able to buy basic essentials like medicines, food and water. Hopefully more people will reject cards / digital money as a result of this crisis.

But I also wonder what contribution the massive new solar farms and wind farms had on this crisis. That supply must be quite variable, and subject to rare atmospheric events such as clouds...

Sorry to rant, it was a pretty upsetting experience.

Spanish grid operator (Red) preliminary Engineering Report seems to be blaming renewable generation (solar) for the initial drop followed by second drop 1.5 seconds later.

April 1 already?

Excellent accessible explanation.

It's a fake term, used by the government to hide the real cause - deteriorating magnetic field, that will flip in 15-25 years, but we will start seeing a lot of issues similar to that event more often.