Grand Apagon - Electricity (not) in Spain

Ahh. I did wonder. All the big telcos of that day did roughly the same thing, largely dictated by the technology of the day.

Joe

I couldn't test, my own UPS failed too soon.

Well, the power outage was "total". :-D

Liz Tuddenham, prophet.

Back-up power isn't actually a political question. It gets written into specifications for particular jobs - nothing I've been directly involved with, but there is a lively business in providing it.

Anything that can go wrong - will. Anything that can't go wrong - will eventually. Anything that doesn't go wrong eventually hasn't been tested long enough.

If the fibre goes direct to the exchange, they had backup power. However, if the distance is great and they have to reconstruct the signal with some kind of optical amplifier, then I don't know. The distance is about 2.5 Km.

My mobile phone worked all the day, I could send and receive whatsapp messages.

I have a small computer doing server things, and it tried to email me as soon as the UPS said it was running on battery. That email did not reach me till the power came back; this could be that the fibre went OOS, or that the UPS at my router went down instantly. I do not know.

I'm considering replacing the UPS at my router. Some UPS "destroy" the battery too fast.

GPON typically has a range of about 20km without any repeaters.

John

That does not look true. Reasonably sized generator have a lot of inertia, so large changes on few cycle basis would mean huge forces and are likely impossible by changing steam flow. Even smaller, but fast changes would mean extra mechanical stress, so probably would be worth to fix (to get expected equpement life).

If the story about computer crashes is true, there are more likely reasons. Our physicits got a building that was previously used by communist party. They had trouble with electricity supply. On osciloscopes they could see really awful waveforms. A little investigation showed that the building had common connection with rectifiers for trams (our trams use DC). Advantage of this was that power for trams was switched off only after everthing else in the city, so this was most reliable power nearby. But waveform caused trouble for computers and scientific equipement.

That's what the uninterruptible power supply business exists to deal with.

But redundancy can make it very unlikely that they'll all go wrong at the same time.

Perfectly true, but since the human life-time is finite, it may not be all that relevant.

That was the original point of ARPANET then EPSS and later the internet. Packet switching means that any route to the destination at all will do.

I'm told that my fibre feed is passive optical connectors and splices all the way back the regional exchange about 12 miles away. My local exchange was about 5 miles away and a so-called exchange only direct line (which meant that ADSL 2+ was the limit for me prior to FTTP).

Mobile phone masts here typically have a lifetime of about 8-40 hours after power failure depending on how heavily they are being used. Backhaul presumably is optical or microwave.

Most powercuts tend to be fairly local round here - a regional powercut or a national one requires something truly catastrophic to happen.

I can only recall one UK powercut in that league in the past half century (August 9 2019). Of course it directly affected the densely populated affluent regions London and the South East. Therefore it was much more newsworthy than if it had affected the remote Scottish Highlands where weather induced powercuts are quite common.

The recent big one at Heathrow didn't affect all that many people although it did take down the whole airport which shows remarkably bad contingency planning - it should have had supply redundancy and the ability to switchover to it before the diesel generators ran out of fuel. Heads should roll over them having to shut down completely.

I only log external power failures. Kitchen appliance clocks all reset when we lose power for more than a couple of seconds.

That is a feature of UPS design that specsmanship to get the longest run time for the sales datasheet means that they cook their batteries. I have seen them swell to the point of bursting inside a UPS. Thick rubber gloves needed to remove the remains. Support metalwork was a real corroded rusty mess but electronics above it remained OK.

Which taken to extremes is very bad for battery life.

They really think I'm going to buy their vastly overpriced replacements?

As a side note, the Apagón made all my DCF-77 clocks synchronize inmediately. Usually Madrid has reception problems, taking even weeks to synchronize, but looks like it is more an interference issue than the distance to Mainflingen.

Nationwide outages should be exceptionally rare. Never had one in the UK but the way they are going one winter's day it will happen.

That is usually a given since the regional and further up the chain concentrators all have UPS and diesel generators or fuel cell supply.

But the central nodes usually have better battery backup and/or generators than the local nodes. Local nodes die first according to how much traffic they have to handle.

They do that routinely where I live once a year for trimming trees that might otherwise short out live supply lines or worse fall onto them.

I wouldn't describe that 2019 powercut as deliberate either it was a huge MFU caused by a single lightning strike to an insignificant power plant that lead to a cascade network failure.

We typically lose power a couple of times a year due to very high winds toppling poles and/or the sort of snow that sticks onto trees and makes them break. The mains poles here are now antique. Installed ~1950's and the bases are rotten. Unsafe for linesmen to climb and marked as such.

Genuine natural disaster beyond what the designers had considered. They almost got away with it but didn't. Tsunami are absolutely terrifying. Another one when I was in Japan in the hours of darkness was reported as >2m (which was when the gauge stopped transmitting). The next morning there was seaweed hanging off supergrid pylon wires.

I think they probably could back off the fast recharge a bit. I'm always nervous of going back on again too soon after power is restored (even though my systems are reasonably fault tolerant). Sometimes the mains restoration goes on and off several times a few seconds apart if there are still other transient leak to ground faults on the lines.

A bit like printers then.

To some extent it is an insurance policy to not lose what I'm working on if the power does go down suddenly. Despite having theoretical lightning protect as well I also shutdown when there are thunderstorms about.

I saw what a big lightning strike to our works building did to the switchboard and mainframe. The surge protection devices on a big chunky copper bus bar saved themselves by allowing transients to fry all of the terminal driver boards. The phone lines were just a sooty shadow on the wall and it blew the clip on covers off the cable way.

About once a decade we get lightning to tree strikes within 100m. It usually fries bedside clocks and modems (although mine survived OK last time). This was despite a 1" calorific spark jumping off it.

That was exactly what happened in the UK in the early 1970s; we had a rota of power cuts lasting 4 hours each. I made up an automatic lighting unit based on a car battery for my parents. It used relays to switch on when the mains went, then recharge at a fast rate until the battery voltage rose high enough, then trickle charge.

I worked in animal research at the time. The technicians brought in portable paraffin heaters from thier own homes to keep the animals warm. We worked by the light of paraffin lamps and adapted a pressure stove with a bunsen burner gauze to act as a radiant heater. One of my jobs was to monitor the voltage of the telephone exchange batteries and warn the exchange if they started to run down.

Whatsapp worked, Google (search) did not. Browsing a news site was very slow.

No. I don't know if they have centralized server or distributed.

The one on the server did, yes, but the one on the router doesn't have that facility.

I don't think any of mine can report power usage.

And trickle charge continuously.

Indeed.

I saw in an Eaton model they mentioned two strategies - translated from Spanish:

UPS Topology: Standby (Offline) or Standby (Offline)

Eaton Ellipse ECO 650 IEC SAI Offline 650VA 400W Eaton P/N: EL650IEC

I still have not investigated.

Barajas and probably all main airports remained working here, but the problem was getting to them. The Metro to Barajas was OOS, so it meant bus or taxi; and there were terrible traffic jams because signalling was OOS. Even the air crews had trouble arriving at the airports.

That level of "not working" has not happened to me. Maybe because some power failure makes me find out that the battery is dead.

I don't.

But last battery I replaced was not even two years old, rather 5 months short. I replaced it just in time to serve during the Gran Apagón.

...

Not the same, but past Monday someone stole the signalling cable in the high speed railway to Andalussia, leaving the entire line OOS. I heard that trains were authorized to run at 40 Km/h, so that they could see the other train in time and tail it. Not sure it worked.

The authorities talked of sabotage. The price of the cable when new is not even a thousand euros, but the damage to thousands of people is huge.

...

Ugh.

And having disgruntled customers.

You need software monitoring to hibernate or power off the machine.

...

{Phrase translated by DeepL, so inconsistent: Topología UPS: En espera (Fuera de línea) o Standby (Offline)}

I have investigated. There are two models, IEC and DIN. It refers to the connectors.

Specs:

Manual:

I do not see a reference to that "topology" except at the vendor. But it says that the expected battery life is 4 years.

Wow! :-D

I did not notice that one, but instead I noticed that my DAB+ radio got reception in Cartagena. The transmitter is probably in Murcia, at the mountains. Still, the reception was choppy, once every few seconds. Today is even more choppy, and doesn't work downstairs at all.

That was during the various coal miners strikes which were at their peak then. Local newspapers had rotas for planned supply cuts.

ISTR there was still the odd planned power cut even in the late 1970's but they became increasingly rare after that.