Potential power outages this winter

Buckster said:
Depending on how large an area what happens to mobile phone masts do they have generator backups or would one be within signal range but outside of your area.
Click to expand...
given the size of them I'm going to guess they are on the normal grid, they aren't much wider than a normal lamppost
 
There are a few previous posts on it - gist of it only single digit percentage of masts have backup power and most of those are just to cover short outages. For FTTP, etc. you'd have to rely on battery backup on the ONT, etc. (or other UPS setup for digital voice) at your end and everything else in the loop having power for telephone functions.
 
Last edited:
The modern World is less resilient than the old World. Time was that copper land lines kept working because they were on their own supplies and the phone was powered by incoming cable. I think in the 40's and 50's pre-CEGB the GPO had it's own powerstations for this function. Now everything is reliant on everything else working. In the 90's power stations still had radio's in the control room as well as dedicated direct landlines to the National Grid in case they had to restart from a black out with no normal communications. Now there will be a mobile phone in a charger cradle. Efficiency has reduced resilience, success has bred complacency.
 
Thanks for your replies - I'd sort of discounted FTTP as although my house has battery backup for the ONT I'd assumed the local cabinet would be out of power.

So if you've no landline telephone (our whole estate is FTTP) and the local mobile masts don't have power how do you make an emergency call ?

I guess many people these days are picking broadband only packages and not taking up landlines even in non FTTP areas also so would be reliant on mobile for emergencies also therefore you'd hope providing a mobile signal in the event of a power outage had been considered
 
Last edited:
Buckster said:
Thanks for your replies - I'd sort of discounted FTTP as although my house has battery backup for the ONT I'd assumed the local cabinet would be out of power.

So if you've no landline telephone (our whole estate is FTTP) and the local mobile masts don't have power how do you make an emergency call ?

I guess many people these days are picking broadband only packages and not taking up landlines even in non FTTP areas also so would be reliant on mobile for emergencies also therefore you'd hope providing a mobile signal in the event of a power outage had been considered
Click to expand...
You can't make a conventional emergency call if the power is off to the local cell phone repeaters. You'd need a charged up satellite phone I guess.
 
BUDFORCE said:
But we all need to.

I'm quite comfortable with a hoodie on in about 12c inside out of the wind.

I appreciate there are some more vulnerable.

But most of us don't need to be sitting 20c houses.

Turn lights off, only put just enough water in the kettle etc. If we all start making changes it'll add up
Click to expand...
I agree, but there doesnt seem to be the drive to do a campaign sadly.
 
Massive and a lot are very subjective terms. 196MWh is the equivalent of 30 tonnes of coal. A big coal station burns 16,000 tonnes a day at full load. The recent peak earlier this week was 45,000 MW so you'd need 225 of those to supply 1 hours electricity. You'd need 125 just to replace Tuesday's gas generation for an hour. As a means to do second my second stabilisation of the grid they are excellent however.

We will see a lot of distributed battery storage but I'm still sceptical it is going to scale to Grid level capacity.

I'd love to know how much those MegaPacks cost because it is key to understanding the deploy-ability of the technology.

edit: a quick google suggests £300 per kWh at present. Which means that site cost £59m-ish. I acknowledge there may be a huge margin of error in either direction on that number.
 
Last edited:
PlacidCasual said:
Massive and a lot are very subjective terms. 196MWh is the equivalent of 30 tonnes of coal. A big coal station burns 16,000 tonnes a day at full load. The recent peak earlier this week was 45,000 MW so you'd need 225 of those to supply 1 hours electricity. You'd need 125 just to replace Tuesday's gas generation for an hour. As a means to do second my second stabilisation of the grid they are excellent however.

We will see a lot of distributed battery storage but I'm still sceptical it is going to scale to Grid level capacity.

I'd love to know how much those MegaPacks cost because it is key to understanding the deploy-ability of the technology.

edit: a quick google suggests £300 per kWh at present. Which means that site cost £59m-ish. I acknowledge there may be a huge margin of error in either direction on that number.
Click to expand...
A close friend of mine who works in the industry said that many countries are going to build several GWh of capacity over the coming years. It’s necessary to be able to switch off gas completely by 2050

Edit. Here’s some forecasts https://www.takomabattery.com/top10-grid-scale-energy-storage-countries-in-europe-in-2022/
 
Last edited:
teenwolf said:
had a leaflet today today saying power cut call 105, looks like its happening.
Click to expand...

To be honest that's just general good advice. I had a power cut in my whole area today, cell sites and FTTP cabinets were all knocked out too so I had no way of finding out how to contact SSE since the internet was down...

The 105 number is relatively new I think.
 
If we do have conditions bad enough to have rolling blackouts a good chance you won't be able to call 105 either - which wouldn't need reporting as they'd be scheduled anyhow. But more significantly some people might have trouble calling 999 or 101, etc.
 
Rroff said:
If we do have conditions bad enough to have rolling blackouts a good chance you won't be able to call 105 either - which wouldn't need reporting as they'd be scheduled anyhow. But more significantly some people might have trouble calling 999 or 101, etc.
Click to expand...

do the old people still have a chain to pull for emergency response, with no electric how is that going t work unless i am wrong.
 
Today's going to test the system. next to no wind, colder, and everyone putting the kettle on at half time.
 
Am I the only one thinking that if we go straight from everyone been able to do what they want to rolling backouts then something is amiss?

There should be steps in between such as telling industry to shutdown and advising home users to do things to save power.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom