Power blackouts in Portugal and Spain

Hagar said:
That is an easy problem to solve. The shopkeeper has a cash float from which he supplies change. God's sake, for how many centuries have we been doing this kind of stuff?

We usually keep a few hundred stuffed in a sock.
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Give a cashier nowadays the extra change to make your money give back, to say a pound, and it confused the hell out of them and they say it's ok the till is telling me how much change to give for the initial round pound you gave them .
 
GGizmo said:
Why do you find it laughable that the government, who is promoting a cashless society and knowing there is opposition to it, wouldn't want to keep multiple day power outages on a need to know basis?

It's well known that the newspaper media acts as a filter for certain stories. It came to my attention on the build up to the race riots in Oldham. Every day there were racially motivated attacks being reported in the local newspaper, The Oldham Chronicle. But if you didn't live in Oldham or read the local newspaper you wouldn't see it anywhere else.

The then editor was on record of trying to suppress the stories because they said it would aid the BNP.
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Because its basically CT level 10 to say there is a cover up.

Shock horror as local news is local.
Its why, you know for example the BBC and ITV have regional news programs.

I bet they are covering up the A14 constantly having crashes in your news as well right?
I mean its almost a daily newsworthy story where I live...
 
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b0rn2sk8 said:
If you are referring to the blackout the UK had in 2019, that’s not the case.

The cause was two large generators disconnecting simultaneously and the loss was too great for the remaining generators on the grid to react to and ‘catch’.

We didn’t even have much if any grid scale battery storage to rely on at that time anyway, it was 6 years ago. I don’t think the first grid scale battery started operating until 2021 in the U.K.

The irony is if there was plenty of large scale battery storage on the grid at that time they may have prevented the blackout because they can go from zero to 100% in sub 1ms and would have given enough time for the remaining generators and emergency generators to spin up and take over before the batteries depletes.
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IIRC that's the reason they built one of the experimental battery systems near where I grew up, the incoming supply was unreliable (who knew that massive house building without increasing the incoming feed from the grid would be an issue), so they built the battery farm on the site of the main substation/transformer station that kept shutting down as it had hit the point where several times a night in the winter you'd notice lights dimming for a fraction of a second, and multiple actual power cuts.

Apparently the local grid supplied by that battery farm is now very stable and stays up when neighbouring areas go dark (I think there was a cut that affected a fairly large area and the only places still with power were those fed from the battery farm as it had been built specifically to stay up when the incoming feeds tripped).
 
b0rn2sk8 said:
Almost all electronic cash registers have a key to open the cash drawer.

I imagine most of the issue is they can’t scan the products through the system and most will not have a clue what the price actually is without going to look at the shelf for each item.
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Yup

One of the big problems with the way most places now rely purely on shelf edge labels linked to the barcode* is that without the electronic cash register being up (and linked to the store servers etc) the staff in anything but the smallest stores have zero way to know the price of an item, especially as a lot of stores change prices on a regular basis and have tens of thousands of items in stock - it's exactly why barcode readers took over so quickly from price labels for running things through the tills even back when they still did put a price label on the item.
I can see a way you could provide the resiliency for it, basically a few handheld terminals that can query an internal simplified DB (just pricing and recording the sale of the item so it can update the store's stock control later), I suspect pretty much any PDA/Phone/Stock control terminal that can operate in a standalone mode could run an app for this (Mr Tesco if you're reading this I want royalties if you do this:p), but it would be extremely niche and I suspect most big stores would rather shut than have customers on the premises with either no power, or the power provided by the backup generators especially if they don't know how long the outage will be. A lot of supermarkets used to have backup generators but only really to keep chilled and frozen food from spoiling and emergency/very limited lighting for staff.


*One of my many pet hates is stores that do that, but like B&M move stock around the store and you end up with a lot of items with no shelf price label near them.
 
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All off our offices in Spain and Portugal stayed up no issue, the computer rooms have UPS + Generators. But the main office and factory space isn't covered so while I didn't see any alerts we obviously told people not to come in.

In terms of Banking, all datacentres have backup supply. The problem is remote in, in the olden days the devices at home / shops were powered by telecom hubs. But once we moved to Fibre then its no longer powered so its down the house, shop, factory, office to provide the power.

4G/5G masts are supposed to have at least 30 mins BBU but not mandated. There was some study about making it 4 hours but its still in the study phase. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.p...f-adding-power-backup-to-uk-mobile-sites.html

Obviously this is a problem for people with emergency pendant type devices, they are supposed to have 2 to 8 hour battery backup on their home routers which connect to generator backed data centre (the fibre hubs in the street I believe are passive and don't need power) for FTTP. If you are HFC, tough luck.

Also BT and I think VM offer a SIM based emergency box but obviously reliant on your local mast still working.

Of course if you really want to maintain internet then you can get starlink. They do a mobile battery power version these days.
 
No one posted this yet? Very fishy.
"Britain’s electricity grid operator is investigating unexplained power plant failures that hit the UK’s system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into blackouts..."

Extremely rare weather phenomenon ? Give over. All the people in the know saying it's lack of inertia in the grid that Solar doesn't provide. That or the coincidence with the UK Grid wobble means it's Russia upto tricks.
 
Nutty667 said:
No one posted this yet? Very fishy.
"Britain’s electricity grid operator is investigating unexplained power plant failures that hit the UK’s system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into blackouts..."

Extremely rare weather phenomenon ? Give over. All the people in the know saying it's lack of inertia in the grid that Solar doesn't provide. That or the coincidence with the UK Grid wobble means it's Russia upto tricks.
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I was just about to post this to ask what it means from our resident grid sparkies

 
Nutty667 said:
No one posted this yet? Very fishy.
"Britain’s electricity grid operator is investigating unexplained power plant failures that hit the UK’s system hours before Spain and Portugal were plunged into blackouts..."

Extremely rare weather phenomenon ? Give over. All the people in the know saying it's lack of inertia in the grid that Solar doesn't provide. That or the coincidence with the UK Grid wobble means it's Russia upto tricks.
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Been a lot of weird, likely state sponsored, hacking related activity going on lately. A lot of it seems kind of headless stuff where vulnerabilities are activated to try and join hardware to botnets or carry out generic attacks rather than directed cyber attacks. Quite a lot of these "technical" issues which companies have been having lately are due to things like older WiFi APs suddenly restarting in a compromised state and trying to attack the firewall to create a tunnel to the internet and/or carry out generic scripted attacks designed for a specific organisation (in the hope that at least some of these devices are within the right organisation), etc. a lot of this probably originates back to Russia and North Korea though some I think is probably Israeli stuff with the intended targets of like Hezbollah, Iran, etc.
 
Nothing at the moment, don’t be so quick to believe random posts on twitter, investigate and verify.

I just had a look at my solar inverter, I spotted 2 single readings which are a little out of the ordinary:

03:05:55 49.77hz
22:08:39 50.22hz

But outside of those two specific readings everything else is in the normal range.

Yes before anyone says, I know my data isn’t particularly high resolution and the equipment isn’t the most accurate but it’s still polling the grid every few seconds. If there is something massively out of whack, I would see it.
 
StriderX said:
They'll never admit it if it was a Russian cyber attack as there's simply no denying it's an act of war to harm millions of civilians, so they'll keep that schtum for as long as they can.
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Absolutely, European countries are too scared of Putin to say anything which is why he can get away with it

In the meantime European tax payers will continue to bare the burden of increasing Russian attacks
 
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Grim5 said:
Absolutely, European countries are too scared of Putin to say anything which is why he can get away with it

In the meantime European tax payers will continue to bare the burden of increasing Russian attacks
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I don't think so, we have supplied plenty of missiles and other tech to Ukraine, killing more than a few Russians in the process.

Russia may be actively hacking Europe but whether that becomes universally known is doubtful. Personally I can't think of a better use for my tax dollar than defeating putin.
 
Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
Because its basically CT level 10 to say there is a cover up.
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There is an opposite of CT were people think everyone is nice in the world and nothing sinister is happening.

Many stories don't get coverage for all kinds of reasons, some because they don't want to acknowledge them (grooming gangs, long covid etc).

Mercenary Keyboard Warrior said:
Shock horror as local news is local.
Its why, you know for example the BBC and ITV have regional news programs.
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I think it comes down to what you think is local, regional or national.

All national news was local and/or regional news at one time.

I think half of Oldham being without power for 2 days, stopping all cashless trade is a worthy news story outside of Oldham.

When I read the story it made me think is this happening in other parts of the country? But because I don't live locally I wouldn't know.

IF areas are having over 24 hour power outages, and it's a regular occurrence then we, the public, need to know.
 
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