Argentinian power cuts

[ARW]

So the failure of just one hydro electric station caused it?

[Harry Bloomfield]

ARW has brought this to us :

Maybe a domino effect, one fails and overload the rest of the generators.

[Ian Jackson]

In message <qe8tkh$9s0$ [e-mail], Harry Bloomfield [e-mail]> writes

In the early sixties, didn't a domino effect power failure in the north of the USA and southern Canada lead to a sudden increase of births nine months layer?

[Nick Odell]

Could be.

Apart from the hydroelectric station possibility there's another one involving water: much of the country has been experiencing heavy rainfall for several days - the sort of stuff that makes Lincolnshire look like April showers. Commonly heavy rainfall used to get into the underground systems and disable power distribution on a block-by-block basis or if very unlucky a whole barrio might go down but there has been massive investment in the electricity infrastructure over the past few years - paid for by removing the subsidies on customer bills - and that's resulted in far fewer events of that type. My guess is that the huge amount of rainfall and subterranean flooding has picked out a hitherto undiscovered weakness. We should know the answer in a week or two.

I'm going back there for a while in July: I could give you live updates if you liked.

Oh well: please yourselves :)

Nick

[Robin]

I'd certainly be very interested in live reports of the absence of electricity where you are :)

[Dave Liquorice]

Only 3.1 GW.

Maybe but as there are 20 x 155 MW turbines one dropping off line only adds 8 MW (5%) to all the others. Not a great overload per turbine.

Much more likely is a domino effect in the distribution. For some reason the Yacyreta hydro station drops off the grid. The in balance of generation and demand causes the frequency to fall and the automatics start tripping things off to load shed. But get a bit carried away...

Something similar happened in Ontario and the NE & Mid Western US in

2003.

And closer to home in 2008 when the grid lost 1.5 GW when Longannet and Sizewell B went off line within minutes of each other. Quite large areas of the country lost power.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Ian Jackson submitted this idea :

Well they had to keep warm somehow.

[harry]

Most ofargentina/Brasil/Paraguay electricity comes from here:-

here:- Plus another I can't remember the name of.

Probably some issue here. ISTR there is the world's longest DC power links to them. Might be something to do with it

[Nick Odell]

Heheheh: (most) hospitals have back-up emergency systems and I think the internet went down, not because the ISPs couldn't P the I S but because the powered bits near the customers lost power. I know first hand that the 3G and wired telephone systems still kept going. The railway system, street lighting and signaling, all domestic and industrial supplies went down.

More worrying perhaps are those people who live at home despite being seriously ill and who are electrically dependent on life-sustaining machinery. The electricity supply company keep mini-generators for them and whilst they have sufficient in the case that a block or a barrio is knocked out, there are nowhere near enough for the whole capital city, let alone the rest of the country. Fortunately, as of last night, only one or two districts within the capital were still without power and most places got their electricity restored within six to seven hours. I've not (yet) heard of any fatalities resulting from the outage.

Nick

[Brian Gaff]

This sort of catastrophic failure happened in the US some years ago when a lot of the Eastern Seaboard was load shed as sub station after substation got overloaded due to not very smart software in control. I'm sure this problem can happen anywhere there is a grid. Brian

[tim...]

What I found more surprising is how small the population of such a large county is

At a density of 14.5 that lower than nearly every European country

tim

[Nick Odell]

It is an enormous country: our popular mapping systems don't really do that justice and when the country became established its founders realised it was going to be very hard to defend it (mainly from the indigenous people who lived there before the Spanish came, and later, the neighbours in Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay) The notorious presidency of General Roca at the end of the nineteenth century is testament to that. So they encouraged immigration from Europe to boost the population to make the country more resilient. The Germans mainly went west, the Welsh to the mid-south and a surprising number of English and Scottish to the deep south. Spanish and particularly Italians landed in Buenos Aires in huge numbers and either settled there or radiated outwards. Apart from a few oddities and historical accidents such as the town called Villa General Belgrano which is almost entirely populated by decedents of the crew of the Graf Spee, that's the way it is. And, underpopulated as it is, without immigration the whole place would probably be called Chile today.

Nick

[The Other Mike]

Loss of generation might be blamed but that should always be a credible fault, you might selectively shed load but the system should always stay intact.

As ever the fault will be in the protection settings or the assumptions that were used to calculate them.

National Grid (UK) were involved in a joint venture with the Argentine System Operator Transener in the 1990's for development of their HV grid on a 95 year concession. Argentina defaulted on payments around 2002, NG withdrew and it eventually went to international arbitration. Argentina lost.

--

[Dave Liquorice]

You're just used to living on very small and crowded island. B-)

14.5 what?

[Tim Streater]

Presumably peeps/sq. mile.

[Robin]

Most of the world is metric so if I had to guess I'd guess per 24.7 square furlongs

[Tim Streater]

22.595 square furlongs, Shirley?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Willing to bet there are bits of it more densely populated than the UK. ;-)

[Robin]

I'll show you mine if you show me yours?

1 km = 1 093.613 yards 1 sq km = 1 195 990 sq yds 1 sq fyrlong= 48 400 sq yds whence 1 sq km = 24.710 sq furlongs

[Nick Odell]

....and you would win your bet

....but it's not all like that .....some of it is actually "dead quiet." And sometimes there are considerably fewer than 14.5 people per square km. Or even per 100square km Nick