this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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[–] Renohren@lemmy.today 22 points 1 day ago (19 children)

I live very close to the border but on the French side, we had a tiny outage of about 1/3 of a second (but long enough to reset routers)... That's probably why.

[–] ms_lane@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (16 children)

That's all it takes some times if conditions are bad inside a grid.

This is one of the unfortunate downsides to moving form 'large spinny things' in coal generation to tiny integrated circuits generating the rotational momentum needed in an AC system. We had a similar issue in South Australia in 2016, complete black system after a number of events but of the two biggest preventable causes, one was simply the loss of rotational momentum in the system, in 1995 is used in be close to 10s, in 2016 it was less than .6s

We need to start rethinking the grid for the future, we can't keep coal/gas but we also can't keep a grid completely reliant on momentum for short term ride through.

[–] Torben@feddit.nl 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Good point. In the Netherlands there are tests being done with ultra fast batteries to take over the grid forming properties of 'large spinny things'. See: https://www.rwe.com/en/press/rwe-generation/2024-09-09-rwe-builds-ultra-fast-innovative-battery-storage-system-in-the-netherlands/

But saying that this power outage is caused by it is speculation at this point.

[–] ms_lane@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

We've got some large scale batteries in SA (funnily enough one of our first was built by Elon, with his '$100mil for 100MW in 100 days' promise, which largely held- this was pre mask-off though) and it's now a lot better than in was in 2016.

We've also got more power generating here, so less variable dependence on interstate links (which go back to Brown Coal powered Victoria, yuck)

I'm not implying there is a problem with their grid though, just stating a small problem can cascade very quickly in an AC grid, it doesn't take a lot especially when a lot of us in the western world have been belt tightening for the last 10-15 years (less available backup capacity)

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