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I'm seeing some reports saying that a significant frequency oscillation happened, which triggered automatic shut-downs, which cascaded. Could an event like this have that effect?
I suppose it makes sense that it was an automatic shutdown rather than infrastructure failing on such a wide area. And then once it's shut down, a black-start is a logistical challenge as other comments have explained.
I'm also seeing some reports about it being more likely that something happened on the east side, somewhere like the Ebro valley or north across the Pyrenees. Catalonia seems to have been particularly affected, and it's on the path of important lines coming from France. High heat at noon could have caused a line to fail and short against a tree, which would be similar to the 2003 nation-wide outage in Italy.
The grid is supposed to tolerate any single failure, even under full load. Of course sometimes the first failure is a fire or equipment malfunction and the second failure is a planning failure or someone pressing the wrong button.
Cascade failures are common. The weakest link fails, load gets re-distributed evenly, the second-weakest link fails and so on.
In theory [a flawed one] you've had enough spare capacity to survive N failures and N+1 failures are statistically unlikely because p^(N+1) is close to zero.
On practice [or with a better theory] you can't multiply probabilities in a grid system because random variables aren't independent. 30% spare capacity can go to -100% in a second.
Grey failures are harder for large systems to handle. If a chunk goes hard down that's usually easy. Something like voltage oscillations that trigger cascading failures in a sequence can lead to negative feedback loops that bring it all down.
From Le Monde live feed, RTE (French electricity network manager) declared the issue unrelated to this fire.
"Le gestionnaire français souligne par ailleurs que cette panne n’est pas due à un incendie dans le sud de la France, entre Narbonne et Perpignan, contrairement à des informations qui circulent."
The 2003 US Northeast blackout was caused by the failure of only a few lines that shorted into trees. These line failures created grid instability that resulted, ~5 minutes later, in most of the Northeast losing power in a cascading failure.
Redundant systems have failures in one path quite often that you never know anything about. We get headlines when the failures correlate in the same timeslot.
Few years ago nearly entire day European network was sitting on N-0 due to multiple issues in Poland, caused by a heat wave and deeper root causes. There are many power plants and power lines where any further issue would cause Europe-wide blackout.
you are right, but the emphasis could use a tune-up. In California, home of world-leading tech.. there are sensors and information networks, extensive electrical power lines, heavy equipment and budgets, a lot of dry and dead tress, a history of fire. So you see that California in a way is a world-quality testing lab. and the way the information travels, and the way the information is applied, could also be world-quality .. or, world-theater for government imbecility..
Sahil anticipates AI will significantly commoditize software. Especially following DeepSeek's impact. He has promoted Devin via twitter and likely aims to position Gumroad as the leading creator-focused alternative to traditional Open Source e-commerce platforms.
