All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/massive-power-outage-hits-argentina-uruguay-power-companies-2054203

by TanakaTarou • 7 years ago

292 141 7 years ago

mromanuk• 7 years ago

I was going to post this. Thanks. Looks like Uruguay, Paraguay, south of Brazil, Bolivia are also affected. Several million people. It’s raining, no internet, this will be a long Sunday. Also today is father’s day, will be a celebration with candles like in XIX :)

cesarb4• 7 years ago

south of Brazil

That sounded strange to me, since Brazil imports power from Uruguay and Argentina through somewhat small DC links, and if only them failing is enough to cause a blackout in Brazil, something was probably not configured correctly. So I went looking, and according to https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2019/06/16/apagao-deixa-m... "deixou sem energia toda a Argentina, Uruguai, Paraguai e sul do Brasil", so Paraguay was also affected. Paraguay shares the huge Itaipu dam with Brazil, and a large amount of power in Brazil comes from the Itaipu dam, so if Paraguay was affected, Brazil (mostly the south and southwest) will probably also be affected.

edit: the realtime graphs at http://www.ons.org.br/pt/paginas/energia-agora/carga-e-gerac... show a loss of around 1.3 GW of hydroelectric generation in the south region starting around 7:00 and ending around 10:00, matching the timing of the blackout.

paulvs2• 7 years ago

According to Paraguayan news [1] (Spanish), the failure was on the Argentina side of the Yacyretá hydroelectric (which is shared by Argentina and Paraguay), not at the plant itself. Only a few Paraguayan towns close to the hydroelectric itself were affected, while Argentina and countries it resells electricity to were out of power.

jahitr• 7 years ago

I was on the Internet (In Argentina) the whole day. :)

freddie_mercury• 7 years ago

It isn't Father's Day in Uruguay, Brazil, or Bolivia.

Not every country in the world celebrates holidays on the same day that US Congress designates them.

kasperni• 7 years ago

Argentina is world’s eighth largest country. I find it mind blowing that you can have a power outage that covers the whole country (+ some more).

lugg• 7 years ago

USA isn't in much of a better position.

Large scale transformer blowouts are a nightmare scenario due to how long they take to replace / repair.

cronix• 7 years ago

Even worse when a generator goes out (or is destroyed). It can take months to get a new one. Hope we don't have multiple generators go out at once. They're not just sitting on a shelf somewhere waiting to be picked up.

ics5• 7 years ago

I work on one of the densest power grids in the world (NYC) on the team which does emergency transformer replacements and can possibly answer questions about this. From failure to in service for a single transformer in Manhattan is down to 2-3 weeks. That includes design and engineering (my part), permitting, and construction.

For fast transformer replacements we rely on two paths, either system spares (identical units, sometimes refurbished or like in kind replacements) and more recently mobile resiliency transformers. Resiliency transformers are trucked in on semis and can operate at 69, 138, or 345KV in our case. (There's some lightweight reading on them here: https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/siemens-introd...)

hfkajshfaks8• 7 years ago

It isn't really though. A cascading failure can knock out an entire grid. The Northeast blackout is an example.

  A line goes out. 
  while (there some lines are still live):
    The current redistributes itself among neighboring lines.
    Neighboring lines trip
  end
  BlackStart()

BlackStart() is fun. Having your plants and grid down is like having a dead battery (plants use ~30% of the electricity they gen on themselves) and no one to give you a jump.

Usually the hydroelectric plants are started first. Arg. is lucky, they have a lot of those. Otherwise you need to fire up diesel generators (which hopefully have been maintained).

You give power to the grid first so you can start another plant.

Then you feed hospitals and continue firing the thermal plants.

Throughout all of this you have to keep phase stability (no grid, no phase reference). I'd assume this would limit renewable's use-fullness for re-start (a thousand 5Mw turbines out of phase are best left idling)

As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants (Arg. has a few). These are last because of nuclear poisons that accumulate from decaying wastes that weren't burned while the reactor was off.

It's a bloody hard problem.

mjevans• 7 years ago

The renewables depends on how they're connected to the grid. If they're DC charging a battery bank then presumably said bank can be treated as a single source so they'd be useful. Though it might be more efficient if they were also able to synchronize and direct-connect to the grid as AC.

lostlogin• 7 years ago

How is grid phase synchronised?

apthnz• 7 years ago

What do you do for a living, and how can I learn more about it? This stuff fascinates me and you've explained it really well.

6thaccount26• 7 years ago

Technically there is a last step you didn't mention. At some point after your island is ready, you'll want to reconnect with other islands. I've never done it in real life, but have done so in many simulations.

I forget the exact calculations involved (it's been years and I'm no longer involved with that area of operations), but you want to make sure your frequency matches the grid you're connecting with to within a certain amount. I think the stations which connect neighboring areas usually have extra monitoring equipment for a variety of energy accounting reasons, but also to measure the frequency on each side to see if it's a go or no go. I believe they use synchroscopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchroscope) to do this.

Edit: it looks like y'all started talking about this below and I missed it, but the information is good, so I'm leaving it up.

mulmen• 7 years ago

Thanks for this, it is very informative and not something I had considered before.

I'm curious about the statement about renewables though because it seems that with wind or solar the production is very irregular even in normal operation. Doesn't that mean there has to be some technology to balance individual generator differences which would make re-starting those installations easier?

Re: Nuclear, how much energy is required to start up a nuke plant? If decaying toxins are a risk shouldn't those be prioritized? I might misunderstand what you mean by toxins, does that reduce production for some time?

nnq2• 7 years ago

    > Neighboring lines trip
    > As a last step you turn on your nuclear plants

...don't get it: why would you turn off your nuclear power plants, even if the grid failed?!

Won't it make more sense to keep it running as usual maybe just using the power to generate steam that you throw into the atmosphere? ...mainly because stopping and restarting a nuclear power plant is expensive af.?

(It still boggles my mind why are electric grids so focused on efficiency at the cost of resiliency... with abundant nuclear + hydro you could easily over-produce a bit, I'm 99% sure that making electricity dirt cheap for consumers by gov controlled over-production would help fight climate change even if it appears wasteful: there will be huge incentive to replace petrol burning trucks, buses, cars etc. when electricity it dirt cheap... and then prices can be gradually ramped up after everyone made the conversion.)

snowwindwaves4• 7 years ago

What type of power plant has 30% of nameplate rating on station service loads?

I've been to about 30 stations under 50 MW and the biggest station load might have been 300 kW if they had all the heaters, fans, pumps, crane, welders, air compressors, and gates operating at the same time.

segfaultbuserr2• 7 years ago

BlackStart()

I love how the people coming from different fields invented their own word for "the process of starting a system through external intervention because it cannot support itself at this point".

Kickstart. Jumpstart. Bootstrap. And now I learned a new one: blackstart.

sergiomattei2• 7 years ago

Puerto Rico was without power for months after Hurricane Maria.

throwaway5752• 7 years ago

They had massive physical damage from a powerful hurricane, their grid didn't just fail. Transmission lines and substations had to be repaired.

That is ignoring issues like Whitefish Energy among other things. Very different situation.

edit: yes, we know that nothing anywhere near comparable to hurricane Maria hit them.

pryelluw• 7 years ago

Not that the PR grid was a an example of reliability before the hurricane. I had to endure hours and sometimes days with no power rather consistently.

Maria wasnt the only hurricane that left us in the dark. George and Hortense were a 2 month ordeal with no power (aside from small gasoline generators) in the town I grew up.

imjustsaying2• 7 years ago

parts, not the whole island. correct me if im wrong

cwperkins• 7 years ago

Reminds me of the outage that hit the Northeast U.S. in the early 2000s.

thekingofh• 7 years ago

Does it have something to do with the Copa America that's currently going on right now? Maybe more people inside watching the games and using up power.

hfkajshfaks8• 7 years ago

It's winter in Argentina now, so they don't have AC loads. TVs are small by comparison (Although it's fascinating to see how load changes during large games: you can spot commercials, for example!)

floatrock• 7 years ago

In the UK, this phenomenon is called the TV Pickup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

Basically a commercial break comes on, everyone turns on their tea kettle and flushes their toilets, and bam: 200-400 MW spike in demand.

There's some blogs out there charting this during big world cup games.

niftich3• 7 years ago

CAMMESA administers the Argentinian electricity market, and they have data on demand [1] and grid flows. Compare the graph of flows on the 500 kV lines from 2019-06-16T07:00 local [2] to one hour later at 08:00 local [3]. For reference, see the prior day too, at 2019-06-15T08:00 local [4].

[1] http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx [2] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2... [3] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2... [4] http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2...

hfkajshfaks8• 7 years ago

I don't understand why BsAs temperature would drop just because the e got knocked off, or why it ceases to be an analog function after the cut :S

cesarb4• 7 years ago

My guess would be that it's an average of several temperature sensors, and that a sensor going offline registers as zero. So when the sensors come back online, there's a sudden jump in the calculated average temperature.

alins• 7 years ago

[2] and [3] refer to June 15; [4] refers to June 16. Is your text correct? What can be learned from the numbers on the 500 kV lines?

codemac• 7 years ago

If you change the links to june 16th, you'll what they were trying to say:

http://www.cammesa.com/uflujpot.nsf/FlujoW?OpenAgent&Flujo%2...

alganet• 7 years ago

There was a coronal hole open these days, any chance this is related to sun activity?

olivermarks• 7 years ago

seems unlikely given the very low sun spot activity in our current minimum

lgats• 7 years ago

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/communities/electric-power-communi...

Scoundreller2• 7 years ago

How resilient has the cellular phone network been in this outage?

How resilient is the municipal water system in an outage like this?

Do most people in Argentina and Uruguay cook with (piped/tank) gas or electric ranges?

fbellag• 7 years ago

At least in Buenos Aires metro area where I live, cell, water and gas are working ok. Water may be an issue if this continues as the pipe pressure is not enough to fill up the buildings tanks, so you'll need to go to ground level with buckets or similar.

In all of the countries affected the standard way to cook is natural gas, so we should be good in that front until power is up again.

I'm getting reports from friends and family that different zones of the metro area are getting powered as I write.

Me, still no luck... Hopefully in the next hour!

techas• 7 years ago

My family at the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires run out of water during Sunday. Cell phones where working intermittently.

kragen5• 7 years ago

I haven't tracked the cellphone network status continuously, but here in Buenos Aires, I had a VoIP call from 8:30 to 9:00 which worked fine. Until it didn't, at about 9:00, but that's par for the course with fucking Movistar. I was using cellphone data because the power was out in the house. I didn't realize it was out in the entire country.

Here in Argentina, municipal water is totally reliable (I've never heard of a water service loss due to a power outage), but the pressure in the pipes is so low that every individual house has a pump to raise the water into a rooftop tank. These pumps are invariably electric and powered from either the grid or, on the frequent occasions that doesn't work, a generator. Municipal water typically has service losses a few times a year, but not due to blackouts.

Gas stoves are far more common in Argentina than electric stoves, although my apartment has an electric stove, which has a short which electrifies the stainless-steel surface of the stove when it's turned on. Most people in and near the capital run their gas stoves and on-demand hot-water heaters from public-utility natural gas, supplied by local monopolies (state-owned in some cases). Propane cylinders are common in less-populated areas and in houses where the gas piping has been disconnected from the public utility, usually due to billing disputes or safety concerns.

Over the last few years, the utilities have been sandbagging gas reconnections after disconnections due to safety concerns, often allowing them to leave unprofitable customers disconnected for years at a time once someone has called in a gas leak, while they wait for the government price controls (which have fallen far behind our absurd levels of inflation) to be loosened, making those customers' business profitable again. This has been a significant reason for new installations of electrical cooking and hot-water-heating appliances. A court recently ruled against this practice, and so gas reconnections have been sped up lately.

Uruguay has much less use of natural gas, for regulatory reasons: gas appliances can only be installed indoors if the room in which they are installed has a window to the outside that cannot be closed, thus removing the risk of explosions in the case of a gas leak. Consequently in Uruguay gas stoves are almost unheard of, and nearly all cooking is electric. Many hot-water heaters in Uruguay are still the gas-powered tankless type that is nearly universal in Argentina, though. They're just installed outdoors.

(Actually, I'm not sure if the above information about Uruguay applies outside of Montevideo.)

I hope this information is interesting to you!

L_Rahman• 7 years ago

Not OP, but deeply interesting to me and especially so as I travel around South America.

I am completely fascinated by the home infrastructure choices in different parts of the world. I'm currently in Sao Paulo and the hot water setup is a little scary. There's no hot water reserve or hot water plumbing at all.

The only hot water source is in the shower. It's heated electrically in real time by a 5000W appliance that sits just above the shower head. The only way to change water temperature is by turning a knob on the appliance. In homes with bad grounding, this results in shocks often enough that my hosts have shown me Brazilian memes about it.

el_isma• 7 years ago

Uruguay has much less use of natural gas, for regulatory reasons: gas appliances can only be installed indoors if the room in which they are installed has a window to the outside that cannot be closed, thus removing the risk of explosions in the case of a gas leak. Consequently in Uruguay gas stoves are almost unheard of, and nearly all cooking is electric. Many hot-water heaters in Uruguay are still the gas-powered tankless type that is nearly universal in Argentina, though. They're just installed outdoors.

Uruguayan from Montevideo here, and I disagree with this. I've seen very very few electric kitchens. Almost all the stoves I've seen are gas powered. Most use gas tanks, and some have piped gas into their homes. Hot water heaters are usually electric, and installed indoors. You'd only have a gas heater if you have piped gas.

mrleinad• 7 years ago

Tandil, Buenos Aires province: No cellular phone service for Claro (one of the cell phone companies here). Water service out for the entire day. Luckily I have a rooftop tank, but I got worried about running out of water if this outage went on for days.

rafaelm3• 7 years ago

We just went through a couple of outages in Venezuela. The first one was 5 days, the second one 3 days.

After day 2 you start getting worried because everything failed, including the water service (they've been badly maintained and they don't generate their own power) and cell phone service. Lots of already scarce food was lost because people had no way to refrigerate it. At least it made for some nice neighborhood cookouts were everyone cooked and shared their food in the street.

Getting in touch with my parents in another city was like sending messages in a bottle. I sent an SMS, once a day they moved to one of the few places where there was still cell phone service and replied.

Since the main issue that caused the huge outages hasn't been resolved yet, we still get daily power rationing. I'm sitting here in the dark typing, 4 hours so far without power.

Hope the situation in Argentina gets resolved quickly!

mensetmanusman2• 7 years ago

That is scary. Our distant family in Venezuela have fled to Chile. Those left behind have died.

rafaelm3• 7 years ago

Yeah, it's a scary situation. A couple of days into the outage you start to hear about people looting and you can understand how a situation like that can get out of hand really fast.

As a curious note, my sister fled to Bs. Aires a few months ago (along with a the thousands of others that have been leaving), now she's going through this blackout over there.

pif• 7 years ago

At least it made for some nice neighborhood cookouts were everyone cooked and shared their food in the street.

It's always nice to rediscover human warmth within such tragedies.

martinvol• 7 years ago

The situation in Argentina was completely different. This was a one time thing that was sorted out in 6 hours and it's very unlikely that will happen again.

soyyo• 7 years ago

It's very sad that while you are going through all this, in other parts of the world where the situation is far better, the only interest in Venezuela seems to be how they can use it to support their political claims.

For instance in Spain, leftist people refuse to acknowledge how bad the situation is because they link Chavez and Maduro with their ideas and somehow think that it would show weakness in their ideology, specially for some politicians that openly praised Chavez.

On the other side, right wing people want the situation to be as bad as possible so they can use it as a proof of how harmful the left is for a country.

So Venezuela will pop up again and again in political discussions, but the important issue seems to be "my ideology is betters than yours", not helping the people.

I really hope it gets better for you.

rafaelm3• 7 years ago

Yeah, the situation right now is a political tug of war between the left and the right. The people get stuck in the middle. It really sucks.

Thanks for your thoughts.

ralusek2• 7 years ago

In the United States it's the same, but the left don't even take it as an example of socialist failures. Instead they attribute the state of Venezuela to having been the consequence of American interventionism. It's actually a tragedy, because the lessons to be learned from the failure of socialism come at the cost of countless lives, the least we could do is come away with something of utility.

pauljurczak• 7 years ago

Power grid hacking exercise?

stebann• 7 years ago

Maybe. Maybe not. Forensics are on it now.

EGreg3• 7 years ago

I really take no pleasure in saying this

THE PROBLEM IS CENTRALIZATION!!!!

In this case, of the electric grids. In USA there are a few huge transformers that can be knocked out with an EMP, carrington event or otherwise, and plunge the USA into a similar situation.

We need to decentralize:

Electric grids (solar, etc.)

Cellphone towers and ISPs (mesh networks)

Social software and collaboration (open source software platforms to replace Facebook and Google)

I am a big believer in this, and I have led Qbix to reinvest nearly a million dollars of our company’s revenues to build towards this future:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzMm7-j7yIY

https://qbix.com/blog

Happy to answer any questions / comments / threats :)

DuskStar• 7 years ago

Are you sure that the problem is centralization and not interconnectedness? I think if Argentina had just one generating plant they would have found it a lot easier to get things back up and running - no coordination problems - and if they had a few dozen independent grids then only a handful of them would have been affected (just one, or even none). The grid, as it exists today, is rather distributed - hundreds of generating plants in both US East and US West, and I imagine the situation is similar in South America.

ahje• 7 years ago

Considering the current advances in solar technology, I think we'll soon hit the point where a local power grid powered by solar panels and batteries will be more efficient for people living a bit remote, and I do believe that we will see a larger amount of people living "off-grid" in the rural areas of the future.

Communications networks are the big problem, but sattellite-based solutions like Starlink might help in that regard.

Problem is that none of it will help if the Sun decides to throw a bunch of star stuff our way; local grids will be just as fried as the big ones, and it's better to make sure people are able to survive on their own without electricity for at least a few days.

cryptonector3• 7 years ago

Decentralizing would mean more frequent local power outages as you cannot meet demand with local generation.

Decentralizing would force lower efficiency on power generation.

dredmorbius3• 7 years ago

An incidence/severity trade-off.

EGreg3• 7 years ago

Decentralization doesn't mean you can't have a market for energy, and interconnections.

dredmorbius3• 7 years ago

David E Nye's When the Lights Went Out traces the history and impacts of blackouts within the U.S.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/when-the-lights-went-out-a-hi...

bestCauliflower• 7 years ago

Might it have something to do with this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20190025

I just find the timing amusing to be honest. If both Russia and the US are vulnerable to cyber attacks on the power grid, there is no doubt in my mind that Argentina is much more vulnerable.

All Of Argentina, Uruguay Without Electricity After Massive Outage

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