Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

It is a promise, they can not backout on it. Else, it will leak, and speculation will be worse.

They take it on stride. I don't live there, nor have visited. I think that the island that stayed for a month on solar/wind doesn't have heavy industries, not by far.

The storage, and the generating capacity, will have been sized with this in mind.

It means installing more than the bare minimum in wind turbines and solar panels, but that's cheaper than shipping in loads of diesel fuel, and building tanks big enough to hold enough diesel to tide you over a bad couple of days.

When John Larkin says he is estimating, he means that he is guessing.

If you estimate something, you put a number on it, with tolerances and if you claim to have made an estimate you should post that estimate,

It's obviously possible, but if you haven't designed your grid to let you do that, it's a strictly theoretical possibility.

There's nothing at all crazy about importing power when you need it. There's something slightly crazy about not having enough grid storage to soak up excess power from intermittent sources like solar cells and windmills, but you have to buy that grid storage, which makes it the kind of capital investment that the US tends to skip if it can.

Well, they had their diesel generators on standby. They did not have to be confident, they simply were not needed for many days.

You can read it with an automated translator.

The island is small.

Well, the diesel generator exists since for ever basically :-)

The storage facility and the wind farms are recent.

I'm thinking that it doesn't snow there very much. A few days without power won't kill many people.

Wind and solar, with 100% diesel backup, probably makes sense for them. Diesel is expensive.

It will in the UK if all the 'phones need mains power (either at the subscribers' premises or at the masts). Nobody will be able to call out the emergency services. How many deaths per day will that be if nobody can contact the police, fire brigade or ambulance service?

Even politicians can be relied on to be less stupid than that. Admittedly they were stupid enough to moth-ball the natural gas storage set-up which let you store enough natural gas to keep the fast-start gas-turbine generators running for a couple of days, just before Russian gas got cut off.

In the renewable future that storage will probably be repurposed to store electrolytic hydrogen - you only get back about 25% of the energy you used to make the hydrogen, but emergency back-up don't have to be all the cheap - they don't get used all that often.

There is no evidence to support your claim at the moment.

I know people who will die if their phones go offline for a full day.

It doesn't ever snow, look at the map.

The diesel has been there since ever, it is not the backup. It is the main system, but they are very glad to avoid using it now, thanks to wind and solar.

That's a good point that many countries have ignored. And there are no phone booths either. Nor that they would be any good in that sense, with a fibre network.

I heard that Switzerland is investigating how to mandate that phone towers must have their own power to survive for... I don't remember the time, days?

Back in the days of analog telephones over copper wires, the US telephone system central offices had lead-acid battery power sufficient for 48 hours full operation, plus a diesel backup generator. This allowed the diesel to be brought online only as needed, and slowly if repair is needed.

The objective was 0.99999 operational availability, which was usually achieved in practice.

Cell phone systems are happy to achieve 0.90000; maybe we can get them to 0.99.

Joe

I know. I worked with the 5. :-)

My cell phone works at least 99% of the time. Unless it's doing a software update.

There is negative evidence - there haven't been enough deaths that anyone can ascribe to political stupidity.

Covid-19 might be seen as a counter-example - Donald Trump managed to get a bigger fraction Americans killed by Covid-19 than Boris Johnson did for Britons in the UK - but the sort of ignorance that you envisage is a whole lot more thorough-going than anything those two clowns exhibited.

The conversion to mains-dependency is nowhere near completion yet and the change has been so rapid that there haven't been any major power cuts during that time.

It will happen.

Rural phone masts last about 24 hours without power before they go dark. IDK if it is the same in cities. More of a problem is that the removal of POTS copper circuits in favour of FTTC VDSL or fibre means that without electricity even a fixed line phone is dead in the water. DECT ones obviously don't work at all and neither does care on call.

Mobile phones need to be put into airplane mode to avoid them doing ET phone home until their battery runs out when there is no mobile signal.

POTS phones on direct copper continued to work using power from emergency batteries and/or generators at the exchange. That is no longer true for modern telecoms kit which requires mains power for FTTC box.

Amazingly fibre to premises can still work OK in a power cut since that is actually powered off the reserve supply back at the main exchange. Advantages of having a UPS at home.

Not that many if our region is characteristic.

We were off power for 48 hours in storm Arwen. Places nearby were off grid for one or two weeks. They had "saved" money by cutting back on preventative maintenance so that when a pole failed in the wind it went over with enough force to make its equally feeble neighbours fall like dominoes. Took a lot of hard work to re-establish supply.

It was very a serious MFU. But it happened in the north so that's OK.