yeah who cares about traffic lights, the more pressing matter the news shoud've covered was hospitals loosing power and emergency backup not working as intended, gotta feel for those poor patients on life support i just hope all are ok and that the power loss dosent happen any time soon again
Major Power Outage
- Thread starter ron3003
- Start date
yeah who cares about traffic lights, the more pressing matter the news shoud've covered was hospitals loosing power and emergency backup not working as intended, gotta feel for those poor patients on life support i just hope all are ok and that the power loss dosent happen any time soon again
Soldato
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Cyber attack knocking power sources off the grid and being hushed up?
Just saying.
Just saying.
Nothing here in Stamford. Which is actually kinda annoying as I just bought a second UPS
Soldato
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Why attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I mean can two stations be simultaneously stupid whilst being coincidental? I guess so, but that's hard to believe.
Soldato
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Money on each failed for some entirely preventable reason. Not lightning strike or some act of God but some bit of missed maintenance. Such failures will happen hundreds of time a year across the industry, just chance two happen so close together. Happened in about 2009 lost the East coast because Logannet and Sizewell went down within an hour of each other.
If true it will come out in the official report. They not going to say that while the power is still off.
I suspect they were referring to the way that street lighting including traffic lights can be on a different circuit to the housing/buildings, so you can have power to the shops and houses but the street lights might be out.
There are also some instances (I think London has it) where Traffic lights might have the option to be controlled centrally (useful in cities), and so failure of power away from the lights can affect their functions so they may not operate as smoothly as normal.
When our town had issues with the power at peak time (who knew massively increasing the size of the town without increasing the links to the grid could affect reliability), it was interesting to note how and where things went down when there was a power cut.
For example street/traffic lights might be the only things working in a street that was dark, or half the highstreet would lose power along with a load of street lights in surrounding streets (but the houses might still have power).
Oddly enough traffic flowed better without the traffic lights
I suspect they were referring to the way that street lighting including traffic lights can be on a different circuit to the housing/buildings, so you can have power to the shops and houses but the street lights might be out.
There are also some instances (I think London has it) where Traffic lights might have the option to be controlled centrally (useful in cities), and so failure of power away from the lights can affect their functions so they may not operate as smoothly as normal.
When our town had issues with the power at peak time (who knew massively increasing the size of the town without increasing the links to the grid could affect reliability), it was interesting to note how and where things went down when there was a power cut.
For example street/traffic lights might be the only things working in a street that was dark, or half the highstreet would lose power along with a load of street lights in surrounding streets (but the houses might still have power).
Oddly enough traffic flowed better without the traffic lights
We had a power cut a few years ago down my street, only my house and 6 others went off. I assume it was something to do with 3 phase power. Although the whole street had to be cut off while they where repairing the cable in the road.
I suggest the easy option first
Possibly, but probably not. Even if it did happen, it would only be one factor. The more important factor is the current lack of resilience in the UK's electricity generation and the main factor in that is over-reliance on renewables. They're not controllable and not reliable. The bigger the percentage of renewables in the system, the more fragile the system becomes. We can expect more of this sort of thing.
This happened because 1 controllable and reliable power station went down. That's it. Just 1. A recently partially completed wind farm went down afterwards, but that's not much yet and shouldn't have mattered at all. It does supply the grid, but only a small part of it is currently finished and working so it doesn't supply much.
Even if that 1 power station was taken offline by a cyber attack, that's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that our generating system isn't robust enough to deal with 1 power station suddenly going offline.
[..] Oddly enough traffic flowed better without the traffic lights
There have been some experiments with not having traffic lights. Part of Amsterdam does it. They found that it worked. It seems like a stupid and dangerous idea, but it seems that (at least in some circumstances) it results in road users paying more attention and in the roads being used more efficiently without being more dangerous.
did a quick restart of the router and hey presto 49mb download dont need to call bt after all
I get this logic as a car driver, it's what inspires banked roundabouts and large fences/mounts/plantings at such junctions.
People do slow down when "nervous" about not seeing.
As a biker I have to call it out as what it is ludicrously increasing the danger in the hope people recognise the danger.
As a biker I am not a threat to a car and I get treated as such the moment I cant be seen or I do not have "right of way" I can guarantee you a car will be violating my right of way in a potentially fatal manor.
Yes I've rode bikes in Holland for relevance too.
Think that’s so it doesn’t turn itself back on when there’s been a power cut....say you forgot to switch it off and ended up steaming at 5am, for example
Council in the town I just moved from have installed over 100 traffic lights in the last couple of years, they seem to have a thing about changing all road management to traffic lights from previous roundabouts and so on - now complaining they are out of money... wonder how long before maintenance starts to slip.
One stretch of road has 105 traffic lights alone within 500m - 73 of them installed since 2016. That is just an average size market town - not some city.
A lot more traffic lights round here too. They only install LED lights when they put brand new sets in, they don't replace the old sets for LED hence all the blown bulbs. Plus with all the council cuts these days they only come out to replace blown bulbs when there is more than one blown on a set.
So looks like the reason for the outage was a lightning strike on a distribution network, which correctly tripped the safety system, this combined with two power generators going offline/ reducing output at the same time caused a 5% loss on the grid.
Talk about 1 in a million chance...
I’m sure labour will use this as a reason to push nationalisation of the grid.
Talk about 1 in a million chance...
I’m sure labour will use this as a reason to push nationalisation of the grid.