Generators must synchronize with the grid. Huge spinning rotor masses that will experience tremendous forces to coerce them into matching an RPM that corresponds to the grid's frequency.
Frequency is also impacted by load: the greater the load on the generator the more torque required at its input shaft to maintain the same RPM. If the generator's input engine is already at max torque then RPM must decrease all else equal. That in turn requires that every other generator on the grid also slow down to match.
When a huge chunk of generating capacity disappears there isn't enough power feeding the remaining generator input shafts (all else equal) to maintain RPM so the grid frequency must drop. That tends to destroy customer equipment among other problems.
Generators are motors and motors are generators. If the capacity disappears too quickly the grid _drives the generator as a motor_ potentially with megawatts of capacity all trying to instantly make that 100 ton rotor change from 3600 RPM to 2800 RPM or whatever. Inertia puts its $0.02 and the net result is a disintegrating rotor slinging molten metal and chunks of itself out while the bearings turn into dust.
Protective equipment sees this happening and trips the generator offline to protect it. Usually the coordinating grid entity keeps spare capacity available at all times to respond to loss of other capacity or demand changes. This is also the point of "load shedding": if spare capacity drops below a set level loads are turned off.
If spare capacity is not maintained or transmission line choke points present problems then capacity trip outs can cause progressive collapse as each generator sees excessive load, trips, and in turn pushes excess load to the next generator. If your grid control systems are well designed they can detect this from a central location and command parts of the grid to "island" into balanced chunks of load/capacity so the entire grid does not fully collapse.
Of course when you want to reconnect the islands it takes careful shifting of frequency to get them aligned before you can do that.
If all generators collapse you end up in a black start situation that requires careful staging lest more load than you expected jumps on the grid (maybe due to control devices being unpowered or stuck somewhere), triggering a secondary collapse.
Caveat: not a grid engineer so I may have gotten some of this wrong but hopefully it helps anyone who wonders why load shedding exists or how a grid can "collapse" and what the consequences are if you don't do those things and just let it ride.
Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.
My professor did that for Bonneville Power Administration. I worked on a tiny piece of his modelling software. A short writeup of it https://ciex-software.com/fmcmx.html
Oh yeah. These posts are the limit of my knowledge. Real-world power plants, switchgear, and grid management is way way more complex! And if you want to talk about "hard real time requirements".... it doesn't get much harder or real time than keeping the grid going :)
Thanks to you, the operators, and the linemen out there keeping it all going. When it works correctly no one notices.
An interesting side effect of that is one can use the grid frequency to coordinate emergency power response - individual nodes (batteries, peaker plants, etc.) can react directly to the frequency measurement with generation or load, thus stabilizing the grid. Too much energy is equally an issue. Usually it's called fast frequency response these days.
Good point... oversupply lightens the load on the generator meaning not as much angular momentum is converted to magnetic flux then to an electric field. Unopposed the torque is able to increase the rotor's speed which directly determines grid frequency.
My grid tie solar system does exactly what you say. It monitors the frequency of grid power and matches it dynamically. There are defined parameters for how out of spec it can get and for how long. I don't recall the exact numbers but imagine 0.2Hz for 100ms, 0.5Hz for 1ms, 1Hz for 500ns. Same thing for voltage though that allows a much wider range.
In CA all grid tie solar also requires communication with the utility (through the manufacturer) with a backup connection source (Internet and LTE in my case). This is so if the grid is nearing capacity or going unstable the utility can command the inverters to allow a wider band of voltage and frequency. The last thing the grid needs in an unstable scenario is everyone's solar panels tripping off at the same time.
Technically the utility can also command the panels to stop production if there is an excess supply but they are limited in how long and how often they can do that.
Fun fact: The interconnect operators used to keep track of the average frequency over time and would run the grid slightly fast or slow to ensure the grid averaged 60Hz over time. This allowed clocks and such to maintain time by relying on the grid. That is no longer the case though. I think they still roughly aim for a 60Hz average but if they're behind by 0.01Hz over the past week they no longer run the grid at 60.05Hz for a while to "catch up".
Fun fact number 2 I just learned recently: Southern California used to be on 50Hz! That's right, the USA had split cycle just like Japan. Most of the country on 60Hz, SoCal on 50Hz. Right after WW2 they made the switch apparently. I guess a lot of stuff was dual frequency capable at the time but the utility provided assistance where required.
Fun fact number 3: Ever wonder why we have 110/220 or 115/230 or 120/240? Because every local utility picked their own standard: 110 (from Edison's DC system carried over into AC world), 115, or 120. It was not until relatively recently that we really standardized on 120/240 (+/- 5% which is 114 - 126 but with brief excursions allowed). That's why some old appliances might say 110 or 115 on them.
Fun fact number 4: 120/240 is a backwards compatibility hack. It was too late to change to 240 and 120 is (for physical reasons) better for electric lighting applications (thicker less fragile filament for same light output). How to solve this? Change your MV-LV transformers to 240 but center tap them. Instead of Line-Neutral you provide customers Line 1 - Neutral - Line 2. Connections across L1/L2 give you 240 volts, connections across L1-N or L2-N give you 120 volts! Everyone's happy! There is a NEMA plug standard for low-amp 240V. It has both blades horizontal (looks like the unimpressed smiley face). I wish it were more popular in kitchens for boiling water and such.
If you have two AC generators connected to a load and one of them shifts is phase any amount ahead of the other one, the second one becomes a motor. Power flows in proportion to the difference in phase angle.
Take a little hobby DC motor and hook it to a battery. It will spin. Now hook it to a small LED and turn the shaft. The LED will light up. In fact hook both up. The battery will spin the motor and light the LED based on its voltage/charge state. But if you start spinning the shaft you will begin taking over from the battery. Spin even faster and the battery will start charging. Stop trying to spin the shaft and watch the LED dim and the motor slow down as the battery takes over again.
Fundamentally electromagnetism is a unified force.
A changing electric field induces a magnetic field: the electricity creates a magnetic field inside the motor-generator causing the rotor's electromagnet or permanent magnet to spin to align with that field. For a DC motor halfway through the rotation the polarity switches causing the rotor to keep spinning to align with the new magnetic field (AC doesn't need this because it is varying on its own). The motor-generator is operating in "motor" mode here because the magnetic field changes first and the rotor is trying to catch up to it ultimately consuming energy.
Now spin a motor's shaft putting energy into the system. The rotor has a magnetic field either because its an electromagnet or a permanent magnet. You are spinning the rotor shaft so by definition the magnetic field coming off the rotor also spins. Thus the stator sees a continuously varying magnetic field which - you guessed it - induces an electric field in the stator windings.
In reality this is a continuously varying effect based on whether the rotor's motion is leading or lagging the magnetic field (really it is trying to lead or lag but never gets far otherwise it would burn up).
The short version is a generator at "idle" but synchronized is a motor. The grid is providing the power to spin that motor (or the attached engine/steam turbine is providing just enough rotation of the shaft to keep the generator synchronized but no more).
As the generator begins to "provide" power more torque is put into the shaft's rotation. This causes the magnetic field to want to lead the electric field, transferring energy into the electric field. The entire grid strongly resists the shaft actually spinning faster though. The mechanical energy that wants to make the rotor go faster is siphoned off by the magnetic flux and electric fields. Electric field steals energy from the magnetic flux. Reduced magnetic flux steals energy from the rotor's angular momentum to replenish itself (if it couldn't the rotor would slow down). The rotor gets angular momentum from the connected source of torque like a steam turbine. The Cycle of Life ... or something.
If you suddenly cut the transmission lines and took no action all that torque would overspeed the generator very quickly though because no electric current could flow so the electric field just builds up (stealing energy from the rotor) then gives the energy right back as more magnetic flux (speeding up the rotor). This would let the rotor just go faster and faster while also heating everything up.
I don't know the first thing about electric infrastructure, but for there to be a single point of failure like this just seems bonkers. I suppose the country's shape is partially to blame. I wonder what could have caused this.
Broadly speaking, electrical grids are the largest machines in the world and are held together by systems to keep everything in harmony at a target frequency (enormous spinning mass that slows when load is added, and has to spin back up, failsafes that have to decouple parts of the grid when maintaining voltage and frequency becomes impossible with committed capacity, etc). It’s actually wild it works flawlessly most of the time and is a testament to robust systems keeping them operational. There’s always room for improvement between here and some nebulous point of diminishing returns. That cost/resiliency discovery process is constant.
In this case, there is room for improvement, at some cost to be determined from a post mortem.
Batteries are taking over this role. Tesla has one near Houston, TX that can have an isolated electrical path established from it to geographically close thermal generators to provide blackstart capabilities (like jumpstarting a car). “Gambit Energy” is the project. To your point, distribution and grid segmentation solves for this, but it takes time and money to deploy batteries throughout a service territory, configure orchestration and transmission grade disconnects to rapidly isolate system components, etc. I see a large order of battery storage from BYD in Chile’s future.
Complete blackstarts are scary stuff. We have all this infrastructure to assist with pulling one off, but it's not the kind of thing you can test. As they saying goes "your backups are only as good as the last time you tried to restore them."
For example, you can't just turn on all the power plants. Ignoring the phase issue, power plants require some power to operate (which is where the flywheels and batteries come into play). This means you need to isolate them, and bring them up one-at-a-time (and you probably want to isolate consumers until the whole process is complete). How do you coordinate this in the absence of power/internet? Radios, but now you have to worry about the logistics surrounding that. Do you have a stockpile of petroleum that can be tapped without power, because your people aren't getting on-site in a reasonable time without a car. How familiar are people with the process, having never practiced it?
Couldn't you test it by either isolating an existing region and try to blackstart that particular region, intentionally out of phase with the main grid, and then try to synchronize and connect.
Black-start-region and join-regions should be enough to get a whole grid going?
If you can handle the consumer load in the region without local plants, maybe? That would still only be a 90% test because you can't completely blackout a region for testing purposes, consumers would get angry.
At times I wonder if Tesla, as far as the business goes, would be better off pivoting to being a battery company that happens to make cars than a car company that happens to make batteries.
They've been pushing the envelope on battery tech for some time now, and finding very useful, if at times novel, uses for it.
Developers want a solution, not cells. It’s why Tesla’s Megapack solution is so popular, and they have a years long pipeline even at 80GWh/year of manufacturing capacity (split equally between California and China). Autobidder is also state of the art for orchestrating the assets for developers.
With that said, BYD has a strong offering and recently landed a large contract (12.5 GWh) in Saudi Arabia.
AFAIK Tesla is already an energy tech company, some of their energy solutions happen to have wheels and some autonomy. We still think of Tesla as a car company because that is how they make money and also how most people experience Tesla given that they see them on the road. This is similar to Alphabet and Google Search situationship.
Perhaps if they have a CEO that focuses on the business such that BYD's CEO does. Without effective leadership, it's just an unattended machine that will not grow as fast as competitors will, although it'll continue to spit out cars and battery packs on existing lines as long as workers doing that work are happy enough to stay and quality stays "Tesla good enough” that consumers will continue to procure their products.
Hot take: Bring back JB Straubel (Former Tesla CTO). That’s who is the equivalent of BYD’s CEO. A driven, yet low key engineering leader. Culture comes from the top.
Well, currently the CEO is not only not doing his job at Testla, but actually doing his best to drive away Tesla's customers. And it's working, at least in Europe: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd9v3r69qo
Musk fanboys are always impressed by how much he does, but it's becoming clear he can't have time to be the CEO of Tesla, owner of X, CEO of the Boring Company, CEO of SpaceX, CEO of SpaceX, CEO of xAI, owner of Neuralink, Reichsleiter of the DOGE, and top-20 Diablo IV player.
Great time to recall that Musk was unaware of the battery storage program at Tesla until someone pointed out the test installs they'd done of units in the car park to him. He immediately called for it to be shut down.
The battery storage part of the company is growing quickly with a new factory in China just coming online. That part of Tesla is growing faster than cars and Elon says it could be a bigger business in the long term.
Huh! Today I learned that inverter technology is advanced enough that batteries can also provide inertia and powergrid frequency control that flywheels were used for!
All (grid tied) inverters technically provide that function. An inverter doesn’t just generate 50/60 Hz sine, it supplies power by attempting to slightly “push” the frequency higher, i.e lead, to provide power.
if there’s no more power to provide, it “pushes less”.
AC voltage must stay within spec, and the grid has voltage control in place, but that’s not what determines the direction of power flow. Like, what makes the inverter output power rather than draw it?
In fact that’s how individual sections of the grid set power flow limits, by ensuring they stop leading when they reach their max capacity. fascinating really
Electric grid get more reliable with scale, not less (that's why parts of North Africa is interconnected with Europe, which itself is interconnected all the way to Russia).
Small grids (like islands) are always a nightmare to manage for that reason.
North Africa is interconnected to Europe because Europe thought that it would be a good idea to build huge solar plants there.
The project ultimately failed because long distance energy transportation is difficult and expensive, among other issues like general instability of the region.
No, this is independent: first of all the Spain-Morocco interconnection predates the Desertec project by half a decade, and survived after its demise, but it has never been designed to be able to carry that much electricity (it's barely capable of carrying 1.4GW): it cannot be used for significant export and is there for grid stability alone.
Had you read the Wikipedia page you posted, you'd have realized that they planned to use dedicated HVDC lines under the Mediterranean to carry the power, and not the Spain-Moroco interconnection.
In finance, these are called systemic risks. Some nodes in the overall network of financial institutions that can trigger cascading failures, hence affecting the whole system.
No, a single point of failure means that everything depends on a single thing. I.e. if you've got 10 gas engines all being fed by a single pipeline. Or a single powerline providing all electricity to the full grid.
That pipeline/powerline is your single point of failure.
It is still a single network, but you need multiple failures to manifest into a cascading issue like this.
What you're probably thinking of is more akin to distributed system which fails when any one component fails, i.e. modern microservice architectures, aka distributed monoliths. But that's not the case here, because you constantly have minor issues on the grid. They're just continuously being handled. What becomes the issue is the cascade, with each failure increasing the likelihood of a following failure etc.
In web developer terms, this is as if a production k8s cluster fails because a node went offline, which rebalanced too many containers to another node which ran out of memory, causing it to crash and starting the cascade, ultimately ending with adjacent clusters starting to crash because of the error quotas etc
It starts with a small thing at 12:15 p.m. and takes a while for other things to happen. But then bam 4:05:57 p.m. to 4:13 p.m. results in:
End of cascading failure. 256 power plants are off-line, 85% of which went offline after the grid separations occurred, most due to the action of automatic protective controls.
Are you old enough to remember the great northeast blackout of 2003? A single software bug brought the whole grid down for 55 million people and we didn't have power fully restored here in southern Ontario until 3 days later.
It wasn't a single software bug. Broadly, what happened was this:
* A power company failed to trim trees from its power lines properly. Four of their major transmission lines failed in one afternoon due to shorting out via tree.
* The software bug you mentioned caused a failure to alarm the power company of two of their line failures. The first and fourth failures were alarmed in real time.
* A separate issue rendered the regional grid operator's software modeling real-time grid instability inoperable for most of the afternoon. Crucially, if this had been running, the operator would have realized that the failure of one more line would have created grid instability requiring immediate action.
* The final line trip set off a cascade of overloads trips until Sammis-Star overloads and trips. This takes about 15 minutes, and analysis suggests that the Sammis-Star trip is when the blackout became inevitable.
* Sammis-Star triggers lines to fail one-by-one from east to west, until it severed every line in Ohio and Michigan. This causes a large power surge to go from Michigan through southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario, back into Michigan and then into the final demand of Cleveland.
* Essentially every link along this spiral fails in the course of a few seconds, creating several grid islands. Whether these grid islands black out is dependent on the local mismatch between generation and consumption.
nope nothing like that at all, like so far away from what i'm thinking. i'm writing what i'm calling "the walking book" about a guy and his dog walking everyday over a lifetime, where the tension of the plot is about all the things that happen throughout all of the different walks
Electricity infrastructure is incredibly expensive. If a main transmission line goes down you will have issues both sides of it, one side experiencing sudden increased supply which will raise the frequency which will cause power plants to trip offline.
On the other side you will see frequency drops, which will do the same.
I do not know what Chiles power production looks like, but it would be a huge challenge for any power network to deal with one of the main lines suddenly dropping out.
It's likely not a single fault, but a fault and a subsequently failed protection mechanism. Elements of a grid usually work together, tied through frequency synchronisation with protection breakers to separate them if a part gets overloaded or fails. If a required generator or transmissions like did go down, and it and its users remained connected to the national grid, that load can very easily pull the rest down.
Many modern countries have experienced rolling black- and brown-outs in the past ~25 years. It's not an easy thing to sidestep without a lot of spare capacity and that takes money that nobody has the appetite to spend.
Getting fuel for your generator might be a challenge. Petrol stations tend to require electricity to operate their pumps.
A less reactive and better long term plan would be investing in tech that simultaneously reduces your monthly electricity bills and makes you more resilient against grid failures: solar + battery. It's not a solution in the middle of a black out. But a great one for dealing with the next one.
I have no idea how reliable the grid in Chile is. But even the southern tip is at -52 degrees latitude, which means their winters are about as dark as at +52 latitude, like Berlin, Germany where I live where solar power is very popular Anything in between (most of the US, except Alaska) gets enough sun hours to make solar panels a very useful fallback (with seasonal limitations obviously); and you can also keep your batteries topped up with grid power too using e.g. cheap off-peak power.
A cheaper alternative could be to pick up a few portable batteries and solar panels from Amazon. You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro. Running the AC off such a setup is not going to be a thing. But you could run a small fridge for a half a day or so, keep phones laptops charged, and keep the lights on. Some people buy generators just so they can top up their batteries when solar falls short and run completely off-grid otherwise.
Note that just having solar doesn't necessarily protect you in a blackout. A lot of systems won't work without having power on the main line to sync to.
Most utilities require solar or any other generator isolate itself from the grid in the event of a blackout. This is to prevent line workers from being harmed. But you are right, before you accept the system from your electrician test isolating from the grid and running loads locally, then re-establishing a connection to the grid.
Batteries are great if you can use them all of the time - eg V2G, grid load shifting, or if your utility won't buy generated solar power. Otherwise the capital cost is too high to have significant storage batteries sitting around idle waiting for an emergency.
> You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro
A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.
You can of course use your batteries on a regular basis even without solar, and even offset your expenses by filling them up during lower-cost times if your utility provides that.
Additionally, a good tri-fuel generator is often less than $1000 so you have power even if you can't get petrol.
Yes, that exception was the main dynamic I gave. But the cost of setting up a large enough system to have those options is at least one and half orders of magnitude more than the generator.
I stayed away from discussing propane because it's adding another variable. I too thought that was the way to go, until I realized it doesn't work so well in the winter because the self-evaporation rate is too low. It my experience it takes 3x 20lb tanks teed together to run my small 2500 watt inverter generator, and the baseline load isn't even that much.
A good hedge against not being to access petrol is a multi-fuel generator, that can use residential natural gas or propane tanks in addition to liquid fuel.
This seems pretty wasteful. Going without electricity for a day really isn't such a burden and a freezer can last pretty long or if it doesn't there's rarely much of a problem with waste if you just eat the food in order.
Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
There is no additional infrastructure for plugging a vehicle like Hyundai that supports V2L into a generator socket. Except a 20$ adaptor. You only get 15A from it but that’s enough to run key functions for 5 days silently and exhaust free.
You can run your fridge and freezer, you can run your (gas) furnace, and your lights. That’s most people’s core requirements, and a typical car battery can do this for 5 days. I’ve also heard of people watching tv on it.
Yep, ran my refrigerator, my router and my modem with an inverter on my Chevrolet Bolt EV after blackouts from a large windstorm in California knocked power out for a few days.
The trick with Bolt EVs is that one must have the car on, because the high voltage battery will not engage when the car is off for safety reasons. Also, the car shuts off every hour of unless the seatbelt is fastened. This is not a big deal.
Since the comparison was between a generator, I left out the generator inlet you need. But that’s like <1k$ install. The car replaces the generator but the inlet is needed to breaker box either way.
Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups.
Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
We had a nearly week long power outage due to a windstorm. Tesla has a power gateway, only usable by Cybertruck for now. that detects grid failures and automatically fails over the entire house to vehicle power. My Cybertruck (123 kWh) kept my house powered (15 kWh/day - natural gas took care of hot water, heating, and cooking) for almost all of that, with a one-time top-up at a friend's house.
That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end
This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
I have two Tesla Powerwalls in my garage, and they (among other things) do just this.
I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles.
I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home.
The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
Cheap way to power the home directly is to get a generator inlet put in ($500-1000) and connect the vehicle to that. You can then use either a vehicle or a gas generator, which is useful during extended outages when you need to top up the car.
Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+.
I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
4 bedroom house in Austin, TX. A hot summer is around 100 kWh and my Rivian battery is 135 kWh. Which means I can roughly get a one full summer day out of my car's battery (assuming I still need to drive the car and usually leave it at 70% max).
So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
On the other hand here in Washington a little west of Seattle with a 3 bedroom all electric house I use about 40 kWh a day in the coldest month of winter and 8-10 kWh a day in summer.
You could get something like a Span electrical panel and only enable critical loads during a blackout and set the AC a little higher than normal. Even a large house can go down to 20-30 kWh a day.
That's on the higher end of household usage. On the lower end, during a cold windstorm in the PNW I was able to get it down to 600W (15 kWh/day) because I have mostly natural gas appliances. My Cybertruck kept us going for nearly a week with just one top-up (because I don't like to go above 80% or below 20%). We deferred using the dryer and dishwasher, and relied on the fireplace for warmth instead of the HVAC.
On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc
Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
Remember that having PV isn't enough, you also need to have the circuitry to disconnect your house from the grid, because your personal panels probably don't have the capacity to power the entire grid on their own (plus it wouldn't be safe for line workers to have random pockets of energy in a grid that's supposed to be down).
The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode?
If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
> The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode?
Yep.
> If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.
When my family had a windstorm take out our lines for an entire week and we had to toss food, we opted to go for a battery-operated cooler/freezer that charges off 100W solar. Bonus is that we can take it camping too.
A 2200W inverter generator + 2000WH battery can carry most households for a week before you need to do any serious maintenance on the unit. About 3 gallons of fuel per day and a mid-week oil change is all you need during operation. You can often run off the battery alone while everyone sleeps at night.
The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use.
I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.
meh - "By Wednesday, the government said that 90% of homes and businesses affected by the blackout had had their electricity restored, according to the Chilean National Electric Coordinator."
I was in Santiago when this happened. While working in the basement of my hostel, all the power went out, and it was pitch black. I didn't really think much of it at the time because there had been several minutes-long outages before in various places in Santiago/Chile. When I got upstairs, I noticed that I had no cellular coverage, nor did anyone else, which is when I realized that this one was different. Took about 7hrs to get the power back on in my part of town.
It's very interesting when there is ZERO internet or any other form of external communication. In hind-sight I'd say it was an interesting short simulation for the zombie apocalypse.
Honestly I don't see much of a problem if this is applied to imports of single items by an end user. I used to be that I had trouble importing some device partly because the power supply was not certified by the local regulatory entities. Most of what people import in single quantities are electronics with switch mode power supplies that work from 100-240v and at 50/60hz. I doubt many people are importing a hairdryer or a toaster. Personally if a power supply is approved by the FCC or some other important entity I consider it good enough for my personal use, even if it has a foreign plug.
It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.
As I understand it, the most frequent type of importation by item is wholesale, we can be talking about the import of 500k phone chargers.
I think plug types are not a great risk as users will usually not want that. But in my head the risk is that we import 500k of something that technically works, but is off spec by 10V or 10hz, or the tolerance specs are too wide or too small. It's obvious how too small of a tolerance can cause issues, but too wide isn't ideal either, as there's tradeoffs, you end up importing swiss knife products. Which makes sense for big expensive electronics, but stuff like phone chargers? Subterranean or aerial cabling?
The task of verifying the quality of something is distinct from the task of verifying that it conforms to the local standards. And I wouldn't put it past the cargo culting governments to figure that if it's good enough for the US it's good enough for us.
The transmission company that triggered this claims a safety mechanism misfired, taking down the main and backup lines. After this 200km section shut down it triggered cascading failures. I heard on the radio that one substation exploded, but didn't find news about it[^1].
Power was partially restored within 44 minutes, but it was more like 2-6hrs before it was back and stable depending on the area.
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I'm not too mad at the initial outage, this kind of thing happens, but I'm ashamed of how many emergency contingencies didn't work great. In Chile we kind of expect a natural disaster to take down power or communications in a large area without much warning due to earthquakes.
For instance power is meant to go down locally after a ~7 M_{W} earthquake as a safety feature, so it's going to go down even if it's no one's fault, but the protocols and safety nets didn't work great. Traffic was a mess in cities, particularly Santiago which heavily relies on the subway to get people around, some critical infrastructure had no backup power (Mobile antennas, few Hospitals).
Some people reacted poorly IMO, many went to fill up their gas tanks when it made absolutely no sense to me. I guess we really need solar to spread more so people don't even think about using their cars to charge their phones.
I'm also annoyed that most modern cellphones have no AM/FM receivers. Mobile coverage and networks are good, but they stands no chance if everyone suddenly tries to use them.
[^1]: I guess a mix of a power surge together with high temperatures triggered this. I've seen a small transformer explode as it got shorted and light up the cooling oil.
FYI - The 3rd worlds power grid, mostly near the equator isn't as resilient to solar storms as the U.S. and other nations in the Northern Hemisphere who've had to harden there grids against such things due to repeated solar incidents. Often because they have no redundancy when a line surges.
Chile is further south than you think and more developed than you think. Unlike most of Latin America, the tap water in Chile is generally safe to drink, so their electric grid might also be better than you expect.
A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?
Chilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night.
Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones.
It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
Most telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most).
For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
The infra is generally great, although lately new operators have pushed quality down as they push aggressive pricing and cost savings through dubious lobbying and corner cutting on reliability.
Nowadays some antennas go down right after a power outage because they don't have backup batteries. People also realised that they are quite pricey, so people melting copper lines moved to stealing batteries after the shift to optic fiber. To me this activity is straight out terrorism as it takes down critical infrastructure, I'm generally leftist, but ready to shoot these people on the spot if I actually had a gun.
On a scale from 0 to Augusto Pinochet bringing American "Freedom" to the people or his next door neighbor, Videla, throwing dissidents out of airplanes, the current government declaring a curfew during darkness is about a 0.
Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
I have a very close friend who's Chilean but grew up in Brasil after his family immigrated to escape Pinochet. Overall, Chile is exceptionally safe by South American standards, especially outside Santiago (which has all the perks and challenges of any large city).
It is very hot in Paraguay so I am waiting a while before I visit. Today I'm in Lima and eventually plan on visiting Salvador in Brazil. Asuncion has become one of the top destinations for digital nomads and I am curious what it is about this land locked country other than the very favorable tax laws that is attracting people.
I’ve been to Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires. Highly recommend Argentina, in my opinion generally safer and much better food (pastas, pizza) Italian influence.
I won't quibble with your characterization of South America today (even tho i disagree) but I do disagree with your suggestion of its causation. Certainly the lack of beasts of burden were an issue in pre-Spanish times, but the progression of North America and South America are remarkably similar after the British/French and Spanish starting settling. The primary differences really seem to come from a cultural difference between the people of the two continents and the failure of South America to reject communism.
George Washington and Simon Bolivar both lived at roughly the same time and fought similar revolutions.
South America's woes really began in the early 20th century when, despite avoiding the devestation of the world wars, they succumbed to socialist revolutions which ravaged their economies and destroyed their future prospects.
Just looking at the history of Chile in particular, it's a little hard to make this particular story work! Or just, I would be extremely curious here to hear the precise theory/timeline here for you. Similar theories I have heard always seem to fall back on a kind of kettle logic: communism is cultural invetiability, active external cause, symptom, and then the continual generator of ongoing woes post-mortem; was it the "revolution" itself or the fact they "needed" one? It just usually lacks the kind of rigor and nuance we should expect from historical analysis. But I would hope your idea here isn't so simple?
Or, when they succumbed to socialist revolutions which drew the attention of capitalist interventionists. The devastating impacts we've had can't be downplayed.
It's notable that the worst countries to live in are the ones where the socialists won (e.g. Venezuela). The excuse then becomes that these societies are dysfunctional because they have been impoverished by American embargoes, which is plainly not the case because you don't see these crime rates in countries with even higher rates of poverty like Nepal. It's also just obviously not true if you know anything about how incompetent the Venezuelan regime is and how its pork barrel politics operate.
Countries colonized by Iberians are simply mired by the problems introduced by the Iberian attitude to wealth and work (namely that one ought to violently seize the former to avoid the latter). In Colombia alone there are something like 35 murders a day, and quite a few of those are for 3 year old iPhones worth less than the assailant's motorcycle.
The preference for seizing wealth translates into the political sphere in these countries and had a lot to do with why the revolutions there took on a distinctly socialist character. On the one hand you had large landowners refusing to make any kind of concessions to the laborers they were exploiting, and this gives you the guerrillas who financed their operations via the drug trade (the right-wing paramilitaries later start doing the same thing as they lose institutional support).
Both parties distrust each other. Keep in mind that this isn't like the American culture war. Most of these countries were dealing with full-scale civil wars in the last century.
Consider Colombia again: 3 years ago, they elected a former socialist guerrilla as president. One of the first things he did was decriminalize the possession of narcotics. He compared cocaine with whiskey a few weeks ago. This variety of civic incompetence is quite typical in South America, and is the source of most of its problems.
If the issue at the end of day is "attitude" than why even bring up socialism at all? Wouldn't socialism in this rendering just be an expression of something already there to begin with? Idk, it just sounds like you both want it to about bad guys but also be fatalistic and say there was something inevitable here anyway. I don't really understand logically how you can keep both things true here.
Also cocaine is not comparable whiskey? Why is that?
>If the issue at the end of day is "attitude" than why even bring up socialism at all?
It is the result of the Iberian approach to politics which is not cooperative but based on clientelism. They inherited it from the Romans. The general dynamic is that socialist revolutions emerge as a result of landowners seeing other people as peons to be exploited. The socialism itself is downstream from seeing the state as a seat of power to be seized for personal enrichment rather than a public office.
>Cocaine is not comparable to whiskey
Cocaine is far more addictive than alcohol. Neither substance is socially desirable.
Got it. So you are just affirming the same kind of exogenous force your socialist interlocutors would, except its the colonial Spanish/Portuguese, not the United States? And when you spoke of attitude and preference above, you meant specifically those of these colonizers?
And hopefully not to be pendantic about it but you did in your reply precisely show how and why one might compare cocaine to alcohol. I am still confused about your point there, but it doesn't really seem important to your conceits anyway.
> Got it. So you are just affirming the same kind of exogenous force your socialist interlocutors would, except its the colonial Spanish/Portuguese, not the United States? And when you spoke of attitude and preference above, you meant specifically those of these colonizers?
No, you've misunderstood me. There is no exogenous force. South America is itself a product of Iberian colonialism. You could, I suppose, say that South America did not have problems with ineffective governance prior to the arrival of the Iberians. This is somewhat dubious, though, because those governance structures look nothing like our own. The Aztecs were probably effective governors during the time that they ruled, but would anyone really prefer to live in a world where they had won?
People who live in impoverished countries create these narratives to avoid acknowledging their collective failures. There are plenty of examples of countries that have been colonized which are today completely peaceable, as well as countries that have never been colonized which are nonetheless comparatively unstable.
South Americans are particularly susceptible to these narratives. It is usually associated with leftist ideas surrounding decolonialism, but this is by no means exclusive - plenty of conservatives will blame the gringo for problems that are squarely within the realm of their control (at least insofar as anything can be "within our control," but the premise that such a culpability exists is already accepted by anyone arguing that "It's all the Americans' fault.").
> you did in your reply precisely show how and why one might compare cocaine to alcohol.
Petro's exact words were: "La cocaína es ilegal porque la hacen en América Latina, no porque sea más mala que el whisky." This is manifestly not the case. The sort of blase attitude he takes towards a substance that has done so much to destroy his country is emblematic of the civic incompetence I alluded to.
It's s deterrent. Very common in Latin America. Most crime is opportunistic and thieves can be in and out well before police or private security arrive. Justice can be hard to come by and police could even look the other way if they are in in it with bribes or in bed with organized crime.
It is shocking at first to see razor wire, electric fences, perimeter sensors, shards of glass embedded at the top of concrete block walls.
In the US you don't know if that house you are targeting has someone inside waiting with a gun. That is shocking to many outside cultures too.
Chile has pretty lax gun laws (by South American standards).
In South America, plenty of people have guns - they just don’t have permits or licenses for them. Chile is relatively orderly on that front, but most places aren’t.
So unlike the US, it’s a lot less likely someone is going to call the cops if someone gets shot.
> Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday.
Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside.
I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
The 2019 outage affected a small fraction of people. It mostly hit rural areas and small towns or subdivisions in hills. It affected only a few hundred thousand accounts in a region of 8 million people.
Yeah, no. Pretty much all of Sonoma and Marin lost power for days. Most of the rest of the cuts were in more rural areas but UC Berkeley and East San Jose got hit. The only county spared entirely was San Francisco.
PG&E has restored power to 228,000, or 31%, of customers in parts of the San Francisco
Bay Area after high winds died down and inspections and repairs were complete, Vice
President Sumeet Singh said during a press briefing. More than 100,000 had already
regained service earlier Thursday. About 510,000 were still without power.
Over eight hundred thousand is a bit more than a few hundred thousand.
800,000 was the entire state. For example, they turned off the entire city of Red bluff. Red bluff is not in the Bay area. The number of customers that got turned off in the Bay area was much less than 5% of the population. I am sure you can see that that is very different from a nationwide blackout.
Rolling portions of the Bay Area (but by no means all, or even most) had well communicated power outages due to weather conditions during that time.
Aka there was plenty of time for people to know what is going on, no one was really surprised, agencies had time to prepare and roll out contingencies, etc.
In this case, no one seems to really know what caused it, let alone have had any warning. And Santiago is the national capital.
For all they know, someone intentionally crashed the grid in order to take the country.
What would you expect the US gov’t to do if Washington DC suddenly and unexpectedly completely lost power? I guarantee it would be pretty much the same thing.
Caltrans and PG&E had to be shamed into providing power for the Caldecott tunnel. The contingency was basically just shut everything down including tunnels and whatnot.
PG&E didn't share their list of folks who required electricity for medical equipment with counties, didn't actually contact everyone effected, and didn't communicate specifically when the power was going to be on/off to most of them. PG&E (still) doesn't do "well communicated".
I wouldn't say that's any more right or wrong. Localities have to deal with things according to their context, which will have to account for lots of variables.
I don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it).
In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it.
In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward.
I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
Yes, backup generators are required by the NEC for hospitals and certain other facilities (I’m at lunch and don’t have my copy of the NEC handy).
Generators are extremely common at hospitals, emergency dispatch centers, cell phone towers, nursing homes, natural gas and water pump stations, police and fire stations, data centers, etc.
This is common standard procedure during region-wide emergencies. Everyone sees it as reasonable as far as I know due to crime being common during emergencies. We are at an all time high perception of crime. I myself have been victim of two car hijacks this year, and know plenty of victims in my already small social circle. If my only loss of freedom is going out during the night (you still can do it for short trips by filling a form), I think it’s worth it.
Even ignoring crime, a curfew probably helps the health care and firefighting sectors significantly. I can easily imagine my friend group using a blackout as an excuse for a drunken bonfire.
So long as there is enough space to safely have a bonfire (no burning down the neighbor's house or starting a forest fire), and nobody gets so drunk they need medical care there is nothing wrong with a drunken bonfire. Or you can put away the alcohol and have a kid friendly bonfire - they are just as much fun.
Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
Yes, with proper planning drunken bonfires are fine, I've enjoyed several.
One hastily put together without the benefits of electricity is less likely to be properly planned. Hundreds if not thousands of groups doing the same thing ensures a certain number are going to cause problems. And with emergency services already stressed, banning risky behavior seems fair.
All bonfires have risks, so banning them during a complete blackout really doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you do have an accident, don’t expect an ambulance to come.
Why wouldn't an ambulance come? My experience (this is US) is I expect the local emergency phone numbers to work and the ambulance to come.
A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
My local experience with blackouts is cell towers become unusable after 4-6 hours; if the outage started in the middle of the night, sometimes things work a little longer, until everyone wakes up. Emergency calls have priority and can attach to any network, so maybe they would work, but not if all the cell towers are totally offline.
Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter.
Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
As long as someone never ever needs to be inconvinented even in a situation were it could make sense to just not do anything which is not necessary for a day or two...
If we had a system, were you could register yourself and the society would be allowed to not help you, that would be great. But no we have a medical code (which funny enough is not enough to let woman die when they have a difficult/livethreatening pregnancy...)
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO,
As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
That is true but it seems like most authoritarians invent a vague emergency to justify grabbing specific powers (e.g. Trump declaring a "border emergency"), whereas a specific emergency for a specific event has a time limit.
In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing[...] does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to [Chileans]?
This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity.
Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid?
Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
I am surprised you do not realize that cities have different civic requirements than countryside. A rolling blackout is generally done during the day with specific targets. Industrial power is shutdown, residences lose power etc..but hospitals, and civic services generally are subject to the rolling blackouts.
There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
>"Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
This makes no sense.. Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
> I am surprised you do not realize that cities have different civic requirements than countryside.
Why do you think that? Stating a difference in civic requirements does not change any of the arguments put forward. I can move around a city without electricity. And so can you.
> There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
This may not be a popular view in the U.S. government right now, but there are good reasons to distrust governments. In fact, most societies have embedded this distrust into the government itself through interlocking powers, constitutions, rule of law, etc.. The desire for good government decisions is not unique to the people of Chile.
> Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
Note how vague you seem to remain about the actual benefits of a curfew. It's a pattern we see in many of the replies on this thread. I think this vagueness is probably an indicator that some commenters don't really know a good reason, but feel the need to argue in favour of a curfew.
... although I do not really understand this motivation. It's a policy decision like countless others, and I have no strong feelings one way or the other - but maybe I'm missing the emotional part.
Let me the clear.. with a countrywide blackout with no specific eta on restoration, it creates potential for crime of opportunity. We should fix the root cause, but we should also take efforts to reduce the potential by higher police presence (symptoms) and reduce the potential for the opportunity (preventive measures) by reducing the traffic to necessity. It is not an indefinite curfew, but only till the root cause is resolved.
A short-term curfew is a minor inconvenience. Something unexpected happened, and now you have to adjust your routines for a day or two. Being able to deal with such inconveniences without making them a bigger issue than they are is an essential skill for those who live in a society.
Chile has a history of looting after natural disasters. It also has a history of massive protests that often cause damage and sometimes turn violent. (The current president certainly knows, as he was a big student leader during one wave of student protests.) In a country like that, a one-night curfew is a reasonable precaution after a country-wide blackout.
>My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc
Then travel there during the day? Why do you then need to go outside at night?
> Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid?
Because that genuinely is dangerous?
Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
> Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted.
In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response.
Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests.
I was there for a couple of weeks visiting friends back then and we even used a ridiculous, ad-laden app to look up "our" blackout times. It is also a strong case study for large-scale consumer-led solar expansion, perhaps together with Pakistan. ( https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/pakistan-solar-power... )
On the African continent alone, it is estimated that some 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still have no access to reliable electricity. (Src.: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/0f028d5f-26b1-47ca-... ) Reliable and non-discriminatory (at least not prohibitively expensive) access to electricity remains a serious human development issue.
Curfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world.
It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.
The bad thing is the sudden change in a resource that the people are dependent on. There's absolutely nothing bad about imposing a curfew during this emergency.
Generators must synchronize with the grid. Huge spinning rotor masses that will experience tremendous forces to coerce them into matching an RPM that corresponds to the grid's frequency.
Frequency is also impacted by load: the greater the load on the generator the more torque required at its input shaft to maintain the same RPM. If the generator's input engine is already at max torque then RPM must decrease all else equal. That in turn requires that every other generator on the grid also slow down to match.
When a huge chunk of generating capacity disappears there isn't enough power feeding the remaining generator input shafts (all else equal) to maintain RPM so the grid frequency must drop. That tends to destroy customer equipment among other problems.
Generators are motors and motors are generators. If the capacity disappears too quickly the grid _drives the generator as a motor_ potentially with megawatts of capacity all trying to instantly make that 100 ton rotor change from 3600 RPM to 2800 RPM or whatever. Inertia puts its $0.02 and the net result is a disintegrating rotor slinging molten metal and chunks of itself out while the bearings turn into dust.
Protective equipment sees this happening and trips the generator offline to protect it. Usually the coordinating grid entity keeps spare capacity available at all times to respond to loss of other capacity or demand changes. This is also the point of "load shedding": if spare capacity drops below a set level loads are turned off.
If spare capacity is not maintained or transmission line choke points present problems then capacity trip outs can cause progressive collapse as each generator sees excessive load, trips, and in turn pushes excess load to the next generator. If your grid control systems are well designed they can detect this from a central location and command parts of the grid to "island" into balanced chunks of load/capacity so the entire grid does not fully collapse.
Of course when you want to reconnect the islands it takes careful shifting of frequency to get them aligned before you can do that.
If all generators collapse you end up in a black start situation that requires careful staging lest more load than you expected jumps on the grid (maybe due to control devices being unpowered or stuck somewhere), triggering a secondary collapse.
Caveat: not a grid engineer so I may have gotten some of this wrong but hopefully it helps anyone who wonders why load shedding exists or how a grid can "collapse" and what the consequences are if you don't do those things and just let it ride.
Am grid engineer. You nailed it. It can get incredibly complex modelling this stuff, and reading all the armchair observers banging on about 'single points of failure' is amusing.
My professor did that for Bonneville Power Administration. I worked on a tiny piece of his modelling software. A short writeup of it https://ciex-software.com/fmcmx.html
Oh yeah. These posts are the limit of my knowledge. Real-world power plants, switchgear, and grid management is way way more complex! And if you want to talk about "hard real time requirements".... it doesn't get much harder or real time than keeping the grid going :)
Thanks to you, the operators, and the linemen out there keeping it all going. When it works correctly no one notices.
An interesting side effect of that is one can use the grid frequency to coordinate emergency power response - individual nodes (batteries, peaker plants, etc.) can react directly to the frequency measurement with generation or load, thus stabilizing the grid. Too much energy is equally an issue. Usually it's called fast frequency response these days.
Good point... oversupply lightens the load on the generator meaning not as much angular momentum is converted to magnetic flux then to an electric field. Unopposed the torque is able to increase the rotor's speed which directly determines grid frequency.
My grid tie solar system does exactly what you say. It monitors the frequency of grid power and matches it dynamically. There are defined parameters for how out of spec it can get and for how long. I don't recall the exact numbers but imagine 0.2Hz for 100ms, 0.5Hz for 1ms, 1Hz for 500ns. Same thing for voltage though that allows a much wider range.
In CA all grid tie solar also requires communication with the utility (through the manufacturer) with a backup connection source (Internet and LTE in my case). This is so if the grid is nearing capacity or going unstable the utility can command the inverters to allow a wider band of voltage and frequency. The last thing the grid needs in an unstable scenario is everyone's solar panels tripping off at the same time.
Technically the utility can also command the panels to stop production if there is an excess supply but they are limited in how long and how often they can do that.
Fun fact: The interconnect operators used to keep track of the average frequency over time and would run the grid slightly fast or slow to ensure the grid averaged 60Hz over time. This allowed clocks and such to maintain time by relying on the grid. That is no longer the case though. I think they still roughly aim for a 60Hz average but if they're behind by 0.01Hz over the past week they no longer run the grid at 60.05Hz for a while to "catch up".
Fun fact number 2 I just learned recently: Southern California used to be on 50Hz! That's right, the USA had split cycle just like Japan. Most of the country on 60Hz, SoCal on 50Hz. Right after WW2 they made the switch apparently. I guess a lot of stuff was dual frequency capable at the time but the utility provided assistance where required.
Fun fact number 3: Ever wonder why we have 110/220 or 115/230 or 120/240? Because every local utility picked their own standard: 110 (from Edison's DC system carried over into AC world), 115, or 120. It was not until relatively recently that we really standardized on 120/240 (+/- 5% which is 114 - 126 but with brief excursions allowed). That's why some old appliances might say 110 or 115 on them.
Fun fact number 4: 120/240 is a backwards compatibility hack. It was too late to change to 240 and 120 is (for physical reasons) better for electric lighting applications (thicker less fragile filament for same light output). How to solve this? Change your MV-LV transformers to 240 but center tap them. Instead of Line-Neutral you provide customers Line 1 - Neutral - Line 2. Connections across L1/L2 give you 240 volts, connections across L1-N or L2-N give you 120 volts! Everyone's happy! There is a NEMA plug standard for low-amp 240V. It has both blades horizontal (looks like the unimpressed smiley face). I wish it were more popular in kitchens for boiling water and such.
> the grid _drives the generator as a motor_
Can you expand on this/link a relevant article? I'm a layman and this sounds really interesting!
If you have two AC generators connected to a load and one of them shifts is phase any amount ahead of the other one, the second one becomes a motor. Power flows in proportion to the difference in phase angle.
Take a little hobby DC motor and hook it to a battery. It will spin. Now hook it to a small LED and turn the shaft. The LED will light up. In fact hook both up. The battery will spin the motor and light the LED based on its voltage/charge state. But if you start spinning the shaft you will begin taking over from the battery. Spin even faster and the battery will start charging. Stop trying to spin the shaft and watch the LED dim and the motor slow down as the battery takes over again.
Fundamentally electromagnetism is a unified force.
A changing electric field induces a magnetic field: the electricity creates a magnetic field inside the motor-generator causing the rotor's electromagnet or permanent magnet to spin to align with that field. For a DC motor halfway through the rotation the polarity switches causing the rotor to keep spinning to align with the new magnetic field (AC doesn't need this because it is varying on its own). The motor-generator is operating in "motor" mode here because the magnetic field changes first and the rotor is trying to catch up to it ultimately consuming energy.
Now spin a motor's shaft putting energy into the system. The rotor has a magnetic field either because its an electromagnet or a permanent magnet. You are spinning the rotor shaft so by definition the magnetic field coming off the rotor also spins. Thus the stator sees a continuously varying magnetic field which - you guessed it - induces an electric field in the stator windings.
In reality this is a continuously varying effect based on whether the rotor's motion is leading or lagging the magnetic field (really it is trying to lead or lag but never gets far otherwise it would burn up).
The short version is a generator at "idle" but synchronized is a motor. The grid is providing the power to spin that motor (or the attached engine/steam turbine is providing just enough rotation of the shaft to keep the generator synchronized but no more).
As the generator begins to "provide" power more torque is put into the shaft's rotation. This causes the magnetic field to want to lead the electric field, transferring energy into the electric field. The entire grid strongly resists the shaft actually spinning faster though. The mechanical energy that wants to make the rotor go faster is siphoned off by the magnetic flux and electric fields. Electric field steals energy from the magnetic flux. Reduced magnetic flux steals energy from the rotor's angular momentum to replenish itself (if it couldn't the rotor would slow down). The rotor gets angular momentum from the connected source of torque like a steam turbine. The Cycle of Life ... or something.
If you suddenly cut the transmission lines and took no action all that torque would overspeed the generator very quickly though because no electric current could flow so the electric field just builds up (stealing energy from the rotor) then gives the energy right back as more magnetic flux (speeding up the rotor). This would let the rotor just go faster and faster while also heating everything up.
>If the capacity disappears too quickly the grid _drives the generator as a motor_
Essentially braking, right?
I don't know the first thing about electric infrastructure, but for there to be a single point of failure like this just seems bonkers. I suppose the country's shape is partially to blame. I wonder what could have caused this.
Broadly speaking, electrical grids are the largest machines in the world and are held together by systems to keep everything in harmony at a target frequency (enormous spinning mass that slows when load is added, and has to spin back up, failsafes that have to decouple parts of the grid when maintaining voltage and frequency becomes impossible with committed capacity, etc). It’s actually wild it works flawlessly most of the time and is a testament to robust systems keeping them operational. There’s always room for improvement between here and some nebulous point of diminishing returns. That cost/resiliency discovery process is constant.
In this case, there is room for improvement, at some cost to be determined from a post mortem.
Giant flywheels exist, in some systems, which can easily start or restart backup diesel generators on the fly, though probably not for whole grids.
A bit of decentralization goes a long way.
Batteries are taking over this role. Tesla has one near Houston, TX that can have an isolated electrical path established from it to geographically close thermal generators to provide blackstart capabilities (like jumpstarting a car). “Gambit Energy” is the project. To your point, distribution and grid segmentation solves for this, but it takes time and money to deploy batteries throughout a service territory, configure orchestration and transmission grade disconnects to rapidly isolate system components, etc. I see a large order of battery storage from BYD in Chile’s future.
https://www.gambit-energystorage.com/
https://www.angleton.tx.us/DocumentCenter/View/3793/Gambit-E...
https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2024/01/12/Tesla%20BESS%20G...
https://www.nrel.gov/grid/black-start.html
Complete blackstarts are scary stuff. We have all this infrastructure to assist with pulling one off, but it's not the kind of thing you can test. As they saying goes "your backups are only as good as the last time you tried to restore them."
For example, you can't just turn on all the power plants. Ignoring the phase issue, power plants require some power to operate (which is where the flywheels and batteries come into play). This means you need to isolate them, and bring them up one-at-a-time (and you probably want to isolate consumers until the whole process is complete). How do you coordinate this in the absence of power/internet? Radios, but now you have to worry about the logistics surrounding that. Do you have a stockpile of petroleum that can be tapped without power, because your people aren't getting on-site in a reasonable time without a car. How familiar are people with the process, having never practiced it?
Couldn't you test it by either isolating an existing region and try to blackstart that particular region, intentionally out of phase with the main grid, and then try to synchronize and connect.
Black-start-region and join-regions should be enough to get a whole grid going?
If you can handle the consumer load in the region without local plants, maybe? That would still only be a 90% test because you can't completely blackout a region for testing purposes, consumers would get angry.
as long as you have too much load it's easy. You just cull load until you get to something manageable
At times I wonder if Tesla, as far as the business goes, would be better off pivoting to being a battery company that happens to make cars than a car company that happens to make batteries.
They've been pushing the envelope on battery tech for some time now, and finding very useful, if at times novel, uses for it.
Don't they get their batteries from Panasonic et al?
Where's the value add in buying a Tesla battery instead of just getting one from one of their suppliers?
Developers want a solution, not cells. It’s why Tesla’s Megapack solution is so popular, and they have a years long pipeline even at 80GWh/year of manufacturing capacity (split equally between California and China). Autobidder is also state of the art for orchestrating the assets for developers.
With that said, BYD has a strong offering and recently landed a large contract (12.5 GWh) in Saudi Arabia.
https://www.energy-storage.news/tesla-starts-production-at-s...
https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/tesla-software/autobidd...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/02/17/byd-to-supply-12-5-gw...
They used to, maybe 5-6 years back when they were still using the most common 18650 format.
With the switch to 21700 and 4680 batteries, they make their own (in China and I think some other US-based gigafactory)
AFAIK Tesla is already an energy tech company, some of their energy solutions happen to have wheels and some autonomy. We still think of Tesla as a car company because that is how they make money and also how most people experience Tesla given that they see them on the road. This is similar to Alphabet and Google Search situationship.
Perhaps if they have a CEO that focuses on the business such that BYD's CEO does. Without effective leadership, it's just an unattended machine that will not grow as fast as competitors will, although it'll continue to spit out cars and battery packs on existing lines as long as workers doing that work are happy enough to stay and quality stays "Tesla good enough” that consumers will continue to procure their products.
Hot take: Bring back JB Straubel (Former Tesla CTO). That’s who is the equivalent of BYD’s CEO. A driven, yet low key engineering leader. Culture comes from the top.
HN Search: BYD (sorted by date) - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Well, currently the CEO is not only not doing his job at Testla, but actually doing his best to drive away Tesla's customers. And it's working, at least in Europe: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd9v3r69qo
Musk fanboys are always impressed by how much he does, but it's becoming clear he can't have time to be the CEO of Tesla, owner of X, CEO of the Boring Company, CEO of SpaceX, CEO of SpaceX, CEO of xAI, owner of Neuralink, Reichsleiter of the DOGE, and top-20 Diablo IV player.
The forgot the shitload of tweets he's posting every day.
And a father of 13!
Great time to recall that Musk was unaware of the battery storage program at Tesla until someone pointed out the test installs they'd done of units in the car park to him. He immediately called for it to be shut down.
> I wonder if Tesla, as far as the business goes, would be better off pivoting to being a battery company
The Chinese are far ahead of Tesla, specifically BYD
Tesla are not doomed (hyper inflated share price might be) but they have been over taken on all fronts
Elon still has the best rockets....
The battery storage part of the company is growing quickly with a new factory in China just coming online. That part of Tesla is growing faster than cars and Elon says it could be a bigger business in the long term.
Batteries are destined to be a commodity, if they aren't already. Doesn't seem like an obviously great long term plan.
That's one reason that trying to value TSLA by comparing it to Ford et al doesn't work.
Huh! Today I learned that inverter technology is advanced enough that batteries can also provide inertia and powergrid frequency control that flywheels were used for!
Utility scale solar inverters can as well! Renewables and batteries have graduated from grid following to driving grid health. Exciting times.
https://www.nrel.gov/grid/grid-forming-inverter-controls.htm...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-inverter
All (grid tied) inverters technically provide that function. An inverter doesn’t just generate 50/60 Hz sine, it supplies power by attempting to slightly “push” the frequency higher, i.e lead, to provide power. if there’s no more power to provide, it “pushes less”.
It’s very weird, indeed
Really? Isn't it trying to raise the voltage over the sine? (Note, a question. I have no clue).
AC voltage must stay within spec, and the grid has voltage control in place, but that’s not what determines the direction of power flow. Like, what makes the inverter output power rather than draw it?
In fact that’s how individual sections of the grid set power flow limits, by ensuring they stop leading when they reach their max capacity. fascinating really
Gambit is one of the most profitable batteries in ercot, due to the congestion and volatility in the Houston zone.
> A bit of decentralization goes a long way.
Electric grid get more reliable with scale, not less (that's why parts of North Africa is interconnected with Europe, which itself is interconnected all the way to Russia).
Small grids (like islands) are always a nightmare to manage for that reason.
North Africa is interconnected to Europe because Europe thought that it would be a good idea to build huge solar plants there. The project ultimately failed because long distance energy transportation is difficult and expensive, among other issues like general instability of the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec
No, this is independent: first of all the Spain-Morocco interconnection predates the Desertec project by half a decade, and survived after its demise, but it has never been designed to be able to carry that much electricity (it's barely capable of carrying 1.4GW): it cannot be used for significant export and is there for grid stability alone.
Had you read the Wikipedia page you posted, you'd have realized that they planned to use dedicated HVDC lines under the Mediterranean to carry the power, and not the Spain-Moroco interconnection.
But the best and biggest batteries are natural high water dams. You pump it up and let it flow down.
But you need mountains and water. Chile has a lot of those
In general failures like this aren't so much because of a single point of failure but because they trigger cascading failures across the network.
One piece of infrastructure trips offline, causing an abnormal situation at another, which then trips etc.
In finance, these are called systemic risks. Some nodes in the overall network of financial institutions that can trigger cascading failures, hence affecting the whole system.
Isn’t this the same as a single point of failure, just “spread out”?
No, a single point of failure means that everything depends on a single thing. I.e. if you've got 10 gas engines all being fed by a single pipeline. Or a single powerline providing all electricity to the full grid.
That pipeline/powerline is your single point of failure.
It is still a single network, but you need multiple failures to manifest into a cascading issue like this.
What you're probably thinking of is more akin to distributed system which fails when any one component fails, i.e. modern microservice architectures, aka distributed monoliths. But that's not the case here, because you constantly have minor issues on the grid. They're just continuously being handled. What becomes the issue is the cascade, with each failure increasing the likelihood of a following failure etc.
In web developer terms, this is as if a production k8s cluster fails because a node went offline, which rebalanced too many containers to another node which ran out of memory, causing it to crash and starting the cascade, ultimately ending with adjacent clusters starting to crash because of the error quotas etc
You are right, I was thinking of a distributed system, it’s not the same. But it’s still risky and brittle.
You'll want to read timelines of blackouts, e.g. this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Tim...
It starts with a small thing at 12:15 p.m. and takes a while for other things to happen. But then bam 4:05:57 p.m. to 4:13 p.m. results in:
Are you old enough to remember the great northeast blackout of 2003? A single software bug brought the whole grid down for 55 million people and we didn't have power fully restored here in southern Ontario until 3 days later.
It was nice to see the stars though.
It wasn't a single software bug. Broadly, what happened was this:
* A power company failed to trim trees from its power lines properly. Four of their major transmission lines failed in one afternoon due to shorting out via tree.
* The software bug you mentioned caused a failure to alarm the power company of two of their line failures. The first and fourth failures were alarmed in real time.
* A separate issue rendered the regional grid operator's software modeling real-time grid instability inoperable for most of the afternoon. Crucially, if this had been running, the operator would have realized that the failure of one more line would have created grid instability requiring immediate action.
* The final line trip set off a cascade of overloads trips until Sammis-Star overloads and trips. This takes about 15 minutes, and analysis suggests that the Sammis-Star trip is when the blackout became inevitable.
* Sammis-Star triggers lines to fail one-by-one from east to west, until it severed every line in Ohio and Michigan. This causes a large power surge to go from Michigan through southern Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Ontario, back into Michigan and then into the final demand of Cleveland.
* Essentially every link along this spiral fails in the course of a few seconds, creating several grid islands. Whether these grid islands black out is dependent on the local mismatch between generation and consumption.
(Full story from https://web.archive.org/web/20120318081212/http://www.nerc.c...).
just gave me a good ambiance idea for a fiction, ty
https://www.amazon.com/Blackout-heart-stopping-techno-thrill...
nope nothing like that at all, like so far away from what i'm thinking. i'm writing what i'm calling "the walking book" about a guy and his dog walking everyday over a lifetime, where the tension of the plot is about all the things that happen throughout all of the different walks
Electricity infrastructure is incredibly expensive. If a main transmission line goes down you will have issues both sides of it, one side experiencing sudden increased supply which will raise the frequency which will cause power plants to trip offline.
On the other side you will see frequency drops, which will do the same.
I do not know what Chiles power production looks like, but it would be a huge challenge for any power network to deal with one of the main lines suddenly dropping out.
It's likely not a single fault, but a fault and a subsequently failed protection mechanism. Elements of a grid usually work together, tied through frequency synchronisation with protection breakers to separate them if a part gets overloaded or fails. If a required generator or transmissions like did go down, and it and its users remained connected to the national grid, that load can very easily pull the rest down.
Many modern countries have experienced rolling black- and brown-outs in the past ~25 years. It's not an easy thing to sidestep without a lot of spare capacity and that takes money that nobody has the appetite to spend.
Consider this your reminder to swing by the home improvement store and buy that backup generator you've been thinking about getting for a while.
Gonna be a lot of discarded food in Chile over the next few days...
Getting fuel for your generator might be a challenge. Petrol stations tend to require electricity to operate their pumps.
A less reactive and better long term plan would be investing in tech that simultaneously reduces your monthly electricity bills and makes you more resilient against grid failures: solar + battery. It's not a solution in the middle of a black out. But a great one for dealing with the next one.
I have no idea how reliable the grid in Chile is. But even the southern tip is at -52 degrees latitude, which means their winters are about as dark as at +52 latitude, like Berlin, Germany where I live where solar power is very popular Anything in between (most of the US, except Alaska) gets enough sun hours to make solar panels a very useful fallback (with seasonal limitations obviously); and you can also keep your batteries topped up with grid power too using e.g. cheap off-peak power.
A cheaper alternative could be to pick up a few portable batteries and solar panels from Amazon. You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro. Running the AC off such a setup is not going to be a thing. But you could run a small fridge for a half a day or so, keep phones laptops charged, and keep the lights on. Some people buy generators just so they can top up their batteries when solar falls short and run completely off-grid otherwise.
Note that just having solar doesn't necessarily protect you in a blackout. A lot of systems won't work without having power on the main line to sync to.
Most utilities require solar or any other generator isolate itself from the grid in the event of a blackout. This is to prevent line workers from being harmed. But you are right, before you accept the system from your electrician test isolating from the grid and running loads locally, then re-establishing a connection to the grid.
Batteries are great if you can use them all of the time - eg V2G, grid load shifting, or if your utility won't buy generated solar power. Otherwise the capital cost is too high to have significant storage batteries sitting around idle waiting for an emergency.
> You can get a nice plug and play setup that will power some essential things for a while for a few thousand dollar/euro
A petrol generator that will do this can be had for like $400.
You can of course use your batteries on a regular basis even without solar, and even offset your expenses by filling them up during lower-cost times if your utility provides that.
Additionally, a good tri-fuel generator is often less than $1000 so you have power even if you can't get petrol.
Yes, that exception was the main dynamic I gave. But the cost of setting up a large enough system to have those options is at least one and half orders of magnitude more than the generator.
I stayed away from discussing propane because it's adding another variable. I too thought that was the way to go, until I realized it doesn't work so well in the winter because the self-evaporation rate is too low. It my experience it takes 3x 20lb tanks teed together to run my small 2500 watt inverter generator, and the baseline load isn't even that much.
A good hedge against not being to access petrol is a multi-fuel generator, that can use residential natural gas or propane tanks in addition to liquid fuel.
there's fuel stabilizer you can buy to store fuel for a year+, just calendar a reminder to use/replace once a year (good idea for other reasons).
This seems pretty wasteful. Going without electricity for a day really isn't such a burden and a freezer can last pretty long or if it doesn't there's rarely much of a problem with waste if you just eat the food in order.
The problem isn't going without electricity for a day, it's that you don't know if you will only have to do a day.
Also keeping people out of the damn fridge. But that can be modified through other means.
Risk management isn't a waste
Too much is. How much to spend on it is the tricky part.
A backup generator is wasteful?
Where do you live?
Or a lot of impromptu parties...
By candle light.
Get an EV instead. Use it for bi-directional charging, buy PV to reduce your dependency and energy bill and a heat pump to be independent of oil/gas companies.
Hardware store backup generator => $500 - $2000
vs
EV => $8000 - $40000
Bidirectional charging infra => $2000 - $5000
PV => $5000 - $15000
Heat pump => $5000 - $10000
That's an awful lot of money that you're proposing people spend in order to cover a rare occurrence. Of course there's day-to-day value in having all of that which a backup generator cannot provide, but in a power outage, you'd probably rather just have the cheap gas generator, and maybe a $1000-ish "solar generator" (i.e. battery pack with inverter) that you can use to load-shift the generator. Run the genny during the day to charge the battery; run the fridge, lights, and phone charger from the battery overnight.
There is no additional infrastructure for plugging a vehicle like Hyundai that supports V2L into a generator socket. Except a 20$ adaptor. You only get 15A from it but that’s enough to run key functions for 5 days silently and exhaust free.
V2L is very different from V2H, but sure, you could charge your laptop and phone or whatever.
You can run your fridge and freezer, you can run your (gas) furnace, and your lights. That’s most people’s core requirements, and a typical car battery can do this for 5 days. I’ve also heard of people watching tv on it.
Yep, ran my refrigerator, my router and my modem with an inverter on my Chevrolet Bolt EV after blackouts from a large windstorm in California knocked power out for a few days.
The trick with Bolt EVs is that one must have the car on, because the high voltage battery will not engage when the car is off for safety reasons. Also, the car shuts off every hour of unless the seatbelt is fastened. This is not a big deal.
With a forest of extension cables? Or are you talking about powerizing the existing sockets (V2H)?
Since the comparison was between a generator, I left out the generator inlet you need. But that’s like <1k$ install. The car replaces the generator but the inlet is needed to breaker box either way.
Here’s video summary https://youtu.be/ZmmhOXsIRjw?si=eZh_MCWJjhrwNpm9
Cool!
and TV these days often means laptop anyway.
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Get an EV instead
Be choosy about the EV, not all of them have this feature (Tesla, for instance, doesn’t last I checked). That said, after we got our Hyundai (and the vehicle-to-load adapter), I sold our generator to a neighbor. Less than a year later, we both got to test our electrical backups.
Hopefully you were going to buy an EV anyway, because a nice generator is about $1000. A Hyundai Ioniq 5 is considerably more than that.
We had a nearly week long power outage due to a windstorm. Tesla has a power gateway, only usable by Cybertruck for now. that detects grid failures and automatically fails over the entire house to vehicle power. My Cybertruck (123 kWh) kept my house powered (15 kWh/day - natural gas took care of hot water, heating, and cooking) for almost all of that, with a one-time top-up at a friend's house.
In the US, almost no vehicles support bidirectional / V2H. It's only the F150 Lightning, I think. (Hyundai/Kia and most others are V2L only.)
Cyber truck does
That's a terrible suggestion. A car is 20x the price of a generator while and at least 10x larger. A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc. A car is a transportation device, not a stationary energy generation machine designed as a backup in case of power failure.
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end
This is underestimating the ludicrous amount of power an EV's batteries have. You can absolutely power your house for days on end using one. (Of course, that should also give us pause to think about what it means that we spend so much energy for transportation compared to household necessities.) And gasoline has plenty of problems too, like its extremely short shelf-life.
I have two Tesla Powerwalls in my garage, and they (among other things) do just this.
I look at the size of those, and the size of a random Tesla, and I can easily see two of these shoved into the baseboard of a Tesla, much less the larger vehicles.
I know the Ford Lightning was advertised as a potential back up power source for the home.
The real trick is getting the power out of the battery and in to the home itself. It's one thing to run an extension cord to the refrigerator, quite another to get the battery plugged into your home circuitry. That requires more preparation, as well as an electrician.
Cheap way to power the home directly is to get a generator inlet put in ($500-1000) and connect the vehicle to that. You can then use either a vehicle or a gas generator, which is useful during extended outages when you need to top up the car.
Expensive way is to get some manufacturer specific automatic transfer switch (I got Tesla's put in). The hardware is $2500 and the labor is $4K+.
I did both and used both during a recent week long outage.
You underestimate the ludicrous amount of power people use. In January (no A/C used) in my home we used 46kWh per day on average.
4 bedroom house in Austin, TX. A hot summer is around 100 kWh and my Rivian battery is 135 kWh. Which means I can roughly get a one full summer day out of my car's battery (assuming I still need to drive the car and usually leave it at 70% max).
So there you have it, I get about one full day. Not "days on end".
On the other hand here in Washington a little west of Seattle with a 3 bedroom all electric house I use about 40 kWh a day in the coldest month of winter and 8-10 kWh a day in summer.
You could get something like a Span electrical panel and only enable critical loads during a blackout and set the AC a little higher than normal. Even a large house can go down to 20-30 kWh a day.
That's on the higher end of household usage. On the lower end, during a cold windstorm in the PNW I was able to get it down to 600W (15 kWh/day) because I have mostly natural gas appliances. My Cybertruck kept us going for nearly a week with just one top-up (because I don't like to go above 80% or below 20%). We deferred using the dryer and dishwasher, and relied on the fireplace for warmth instead of the HVAC.
On a hot day yeah I'd be running the A/C but ideally you'd have solar to offset much of that.
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Tech Connections did a video showing exactly this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO5fJ8z66Z8
> A car can't power an entire household for days on end using a few gallons of gasoline per day, etc
Average home uses 30kwH / day. Average EV battery size 40kwh. Correct not days on end, but at least a full day to full capacity, and perhaps a few days at reduced capacity. My Ioniq 5 has an 84kwH battery so I guess I'd get a bit further.
kWh
Remember that having PV isn't enough, you also need to have the circuitry to disconnect your house from the grid, because your personal panels probably don't have the capacity to power the entire grid on their own (plus it wouldn't be safe for line workers to have random pockets of energy in a grid that's supposed to be down).
The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode?
If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
> The backup generator that needs periodic testing and maintenance whether you use it or not, and accommodations to store fuel safely if you want to be in full prep mode?
Yep.
> If the electrical grid fails to the point that you're days or weeks without power, having your food unfrozen is going to be the least of your problems.
Happens several times a decade on the Atlantic coast of the US. Well, the days do, at least. Weeks, probably not.
When my family had a windstorm take out our lines for an entire week and we had to toss food, we opted to go for a battery-operated cooler/freezer that charges off 100W solar. Bonus is that we can take it camping too.
Feed it to chickens and hogs!
A 2200W inverter generator + 2000WH battery can carry most households for a week before you need to do any serious maintenance on the unit. About 3 gallons of fuel per day and a mid-week oil change is all you need during operation. You can often run off the battery alone while everyone sleeps at night.
The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use.
I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.
meh - "By Wednesday, the government said that 90% of homes and businesses affected by the blackout had had their electricity restored, according to the Chilean National Electric Coordinator."
I was in Santiago when this happened. While working in the basement of my hostel, all the power went out, and it was pitch black. I didn't really think much of it at the time because there had been several minutes-long outages before in various places in Santiago/Chile. When I got upstairs, I noticed that I had no cellular coverage, nor did anyone else, which is when I realized that this one was different. Took about 7hrs to get the power back on in my part of town.
It's very interesting when there is ZERO internet or any other form of external communication. In hind-sight I'd say it was an interesting short simulation for the zombie apocalypse.
Simultaneously Argentina is like:
"There's too much bureocracy in customs for electrical imports, make it laxer, also no restriction on plug types
Honestly I don't see much of a problem if this is applied to imports of single items by an end user. I used to be that I had trouble importing some device partly because the power supply was not certified by the local regulatory entities. Most of what people import in single quantities are electronics with switch mode power supplies that work from 100-240v and at 50/60hz. I doubt many people are importing a hairdryer or a toaster. Personally if a power supply is approved by the FCC or some other important entity I consider it good enough for my personal use, even if it has a foreign plug.
It is a problem for importing large quantities to resell though, I'm not defending the ability to import 100s of death traps and sell them to people.
As I understand it, the most frequent type of importation by item is wholesale, we can be talking about the import of 500k phone chargers.
I think plug types are not a great risk as users will usually not want that. But in my head the risk is that we import 500k of something that technically works, but is off spec by 10V or 10hz, or the tolerance specs are too wide or too small. It's obvious how too small of a tolerance can cause issues, but too wide isn't ideal either, as there's tradeoffs, you end up importing swiss knife products. Which makes sense for big expensive electronics, but stuff like phone chargers? Subterranean or aerial cabling?
The task of verifying the quality of something is distinct from the task of verifying that it conforms to the local standards. And I wouldn't put it past the cargo culting governments to figure that if it's good enough for the US it's good enough for us.
Well, no country-wide black outs so far.
We had one in 2018 tho :-)
Going to be some incredible long exposure night photography in urban areas that comes out of this
Does anyone know what the root cause is?
The transmission company that triggered this claims a safety mechanism misfired, taking down the main and backup lines. After this 200km section shut down it triggered cascading failures. I heard on the radio that one substation exploded, but didn't find news about it[^1].
Power was partially restored within 44 minutes, but it was more like 2-6hrs before it was back and stable depending on the area.
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I'm not too mad at the initial outage, this kind of thing happens, but I'm ashamed of how many emergency contingencies didn't work great. In Chile we kind of expect a natural disaster to take down power or communications in a large area without much warning due to earthquakes. For instance power is meant to go down locally after a ~7 M_{W} earthquake as a safety feature, so it's going to go down even if it's no one's fault, but the protocols and safety nets didn't work great. Traffic was a mess in cities, particularly Santiago which heavily relies on the subway to get people around, some critical infrastructure had no backup power (Mobile antennas, few Hospitals). Some people reacted poorly IMO, many went to fill up their gas tanks when it made absolutely no sense to me. I guess we really need solar to spread more so people don't even think about using their cars to charge their phones.
I'm also annoyed that most modern cellphones have no AM/FM receivers. Mobile coverage and networks are good, but they stands no chance if everyone suddenly tries to use them.
[^1]: I guess a mix of a power surge together with high temperatures triggered this. I've seen a small transformer explode as it got shorted and light up the cooling oil.
I'm sure the solar proton storm that hit right as Chile was sun facing had nothing to do with it. /s
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=25&month=02&...
FYI - The 3rd worlds power grid, mostly near the equator isn't as resilient to solar storms as the U.S. and other nations in the Northern Hemisphere who've had to harden there grids against such things due to repeated solar incidents. Often because they have no redundancy when a line surges.
Chile is further south than you think and more developed than you think. Unlike most of Latin America, the tap water in Chile is generally safe to drink, so their electric grid might also be better than you expect.
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A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO, but I may be projecting a bit - how are people from Chile responding? I’m sure they’re not happy about the outage, but does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to them?
Chilean here. The curfew was very reasonable due to the scale of the outage initially affecting the ~99.0% of homes, and its the purpose was just to reduce circulation due to restricted policing capacity and the inherent danger of big cities such as Santiago being completely out of energy and artificial light at night.
Plus, both natural persons and enterprises could ask for curfew passes via a website (Comisaria Virtual) created during the COVID-era for doing police paperwork online. Military/police staff were especially understanding and people who didn't have a pass when checked were allowed to get one on-site using their smartphones.
It was as soft as a curfew can get. I didn't see any important backlash on social networks if that says anything to you.
How did the smartphone based pass system work if - as tfa states - telecommunication infrastructure was also non functional?
Most telco and central gov. tech infra was actually working, unstable, but working during the first hours of the outage. I know some friends eventually lost connectivity in remote parts of the country though (for 2-3 hours at most).
For the average chilean: As long as you had 4G-5G equipment with working batteries, you had internet and access to essential gov services.
The infra is generally great, although lately new operators have pushed quality down as they push aggressive pricing and cost savings through dubious lobbying and corner cutting on reliability.
Nowadays some antennas go down right after a power outage because they don't have backup batteries. People also realised that they are quite pricey, so people melting copper lines moved to stealing batteries after the shift to optic fiber. To me this activity is straight out terrorism as it takes down critical infrastructure, I'm generally leftist, but ready to shoot these people on the spot if I actually had a gun.
That's not true. At 7pm local time cellular service in Santiago was pretty much dead. Most antennas only have backup power for 4 hours.
I had (unstable) cellular service all the way through, and chatted with other people too. Probably commune/zone-related.
Approximately 99.0%.
Eh? Isn’t that what the tilde (~) represents? Or am I hung up on symbology and missing your point?
I think they were noting the precision of the estimate.
Thanks, that apparently flew right by me.
On a scale from 0 to Augusto Pinochet bringing American "Freedom" to the people or his next door neighbor, Videla, throwing dissidents out of airplanes, the current government declaring a curfew during darkness is about a 0.
Luckily, I flew out of Chile on Saturday. Although it felt like it was the safest place I have visited in South America so far the empty white powdered dime bags on the sidewalk, people telling me to be very careful walking alone at night, razor wire and electrified fences around properties was a reminder of how dangerous it is.
I have a very close friend who's Chilean but grew up in Brasil after his family immigrated to escape Pinochet. Overall, Chile is exceptionally safe by South American standards, especially outside Santiago (which has all the perks and challenges of any large city).
How's Paraguay? I'm told it's one of the safest places in South America outside France, and safer than Chile.
It is very hot in Paraguay so I am waiting a while before I visit. Today I'm in Lima and eventually plan on visiting Salvador in Brazil. Asuncion has become one of the top destinations for digital nomads and I am curious what it is about this land locked country other than the very favorable tax laws that is attracting people.
?
All of South America is outside France.
Did you mean to type something else?
Guyane (“French Guiana”) is “outside France” in the same way that Alaska is “outside the United States”.
Most of France is in Europe, but most is different than all.
By area, only about 80% of France is in Europe!
Depending where you look your numbers, Chile's crime and homicide rate is very similar to the United States.
Sans school shootings at the very least, but crime has gone steadily up since cartels from Central America expanded their operations.
I’ve been to Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires. Highly recommend Argentina, in my opinion generally safer and much better food (pastas, pizza) Italian influence.
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So true, to you and others that think this way, it's all true - it's truly awful. Please, for the love of god, never visit. Save yourselves.
Ever since I was robbed at gunpoint in Brazil by a man on a scooter I’ve had no interest in going back.
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I won't quibble with your characterization of South America today (even tho i disagree) but I do disagree with your suggestion of its causation. Certainly the lack of beasts of burden were an issue in pre-Spanish times, but the progression of North America and South America are remarkably similar after the British/French and Spanish starting settling. The primary differences really seem to come from a cultural difference between the people of the two continents and the failure of South America to reject communism.
George Washington and Simon Bolivar both lived at roughly the same time and fought similar revolutions.
South America's woes really began in the early 20th century when, despite avoiding the devestation of the world wars, they succumbed to socialist revolutions which ravaged their economies and destroyed their future prospects.
Just looking at the history of Chile in particular, it's a little hard to make this particular story work! Or just, I would be extremely curious here to hear the precise theory/timeline here for you. Similar theories I have heard always seem to fall back on a kind of kettle logic: communism is cultural invetiability, active external cause, symptom, and then the continual generator of ongoing woes post-mortem; was it the "revolution" itself or the fact they "needed" one? It just usually lacks the kind of rigor and nuance we should expect from historical analysis. But I would hope your idea here isn't so simple?
Or, when they succumbed to socialist revolutions which drew the attention of capitalist interventionists. The devastating impacts we've had can't be downplayed.
It's notable that the worst countries to live in are the ones where the socialists won (e.g. Venezuela). The excuse then becomes that these societies are dysfunctional because they have been impoverished by American embargoes, which is plainly not the case because you don't see these crime rates in countries with even higher rates of poverty like Nepal. It's also just obviously not true if you know anything about how incompetent the Venezuelan regime is and how its pork barrel politics operate.
Countries colonized by Iberians are simply mired by the problems introduced by the Iberian attitude to wealth and work (namely that one ought to violently seize the former to avoid the latter). In Colombia alone there are something like 35 murders a day, and quite a few of those are for 3 year old iPhones worth less than the assailant's motorcycle.
The preference for seizing wealth translates into the political sphere in these countries and had a lot to do with why the revolutions there took on a distinctly socialist character. On the one hand you had large landowners refusing to make any kind of concessions to the laborers they were exploiting, and this gives you the guerrillas who financed their operations via the drug trade (the right-wing paramilitaries later start doing the same thing as they lose institutional support).
Both parties distrust each other. Keep in mind that this isn't like the American culture war. Most of these countries were dealing with full-scale civil wars in the last century.
Consider Colombia again: 3 years ago, they elected a former socialist guerrilla as president. One of the first things he did was decriminalize the possession of narcotics. He compared cocaine with whiskey a few weeks ago. This variety of civic incompetence is quite typical in South America, and is the source of most of its problems.
If the issue at the end of day is "attitude" than why even bring up socialism at all? Wouldn't socialism in this rendering just be an expression of something already there to begin with? Idk, it just sounds like you both want it to about bad guys but also be fatalistic and say there was something inevitable here anyway. I don't really understand logically how you can keep both things true here.
Also cocaine is not comparable whiskey? Why is that?
>If the issue at the end of day is "attitude" than why even bring up socialism at all?
It is the result of the Iberian approach to politics which is not cooperative but based on clientelism. They inherited it from the Romans. The general dynamic is that socialist revolutions emerge as a result of landowners seeing other people as peons to be exploited. The socialism itself is downstream from seeing the state as a seat of power to be seized for personal enrichment rather than a public office.
>Cocaine is not comparable to whiskey
Cocaine is far more addictive than alcohol. Neither substance is socially desirable.
Got it. So you are just affirming the same kind of exogenous force your socialist interlocutors would, except its the colonial Spanish/Portuguese, not the United States? And when you spoke of attitude and preference above, you meant specifically those of these colonizers?
And hopefully not to be pendantic about it but you did in your reply precisely show how and why one might compare cocaine to alcohol. I am still confused about your point there, but it doesn't really seem important to your conceits anyway.
> Got it. So you are just affirming the same kind of exogenous force your socialist interlocutors would, except its the colonial Spanish/Portuguese, not the United States? And when you spoke of attitude and preference above, you meant specifically those of these colonizers?
No, you've misunderstood me. There is no exogenous force. South America is itself a product of Iberian colonialism. You could, I suppose, say that South America did not have problems with ineffective governance prior to the arrival of the Iberians. This is somewhat dubious, though, because those governance structures look nothing like our own. The Aztecs were probably effective governors during the time that they ruled, but would anyone really prefer to live in a world where they had won?
People who live in impoverished countries create these narratives to avoid acknowledging their collective failures. There are plenty of examples of countries that have been colonized which are today completely peaceable, as well as countries that have never been colonized which are nonetheless comparatively unstable.
South Americans are particularly susceptible to these narratives. It is usually associated with leftist ideas surrounding decolonialism, but this is by no means exclusive - plenty of conservatives will blame the gringo for problems that are squarely within the realm of their control (at least insofar as anything can be "within our control," but the premise that such a culpability exists is already accepted by anyone arguing that "It's all the Americans' fault.").
> you did in your reply precisely show how and why one might compare cocaine to alcohol.
Petro's exact words were: "La cocaína es ilegal porque la hacen en América Latina, no porque sea más mala que el whisky." This is manifestly not the case. The sort of blase attitude he takes towards a substance that has done so much to destroy his country is emblematic of the civic incompetence I alluded to.
pointing to the socialists as the problem rather than the USA backed dictatorships is certainly a choice...
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It's possible OP is not from the US. Most places in the OECD aren't as dangerous as US cities. But, when you are in a city and see
>razor wire and electrified fences around properties
That is a sure sign that LOCALS see dangers present
It's s deterrent. Very common in Latin America. Most crime is opportunistic and thieves can be in and out well before police or private security arrive. Justice can be hard to come by and police could even look the other way if they are in in it with bribes or in bed with organized crime.
It is shocking at first to see razor wire, electric fences, perimeter sensors, shards of glass embedded at the top of concrete block walls.
In the US you don't know if that house you are targeting has someone inside waiting with a gun. That is shocking to many outside cultures too.
Chile has pretty lax gun laws (by South American standards).
In South America, plenty of people have guns - they just don’t have permits or licenses for them. Chile is relatively orderly on that front, but most places aren’t.
So unlike the US, it’s a lot less likely someone is going to call the cops if someone gets shot.
Most homeless people are more scared of you than you are of them.
I used to think this too!
Gross, unhelpful comment, and essentially just whataboutism. Plenty of American cities are also unsafe and OP didn't say otherwise.
That isn't 'white panic' lol. Are you perhaps insecure about your own race?
> Are you perhaps insecure about your own race?
lol fuck yourself. You have no idea of my race or background.
I think this is the pertinent section?
> Authorities also announced a curfew in effect from 10 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday.
Personally I could understand that both policing and emergency response with no light at night might just become impossible. All the streetlights are presumably out, making walking difficult. If all of the traffic lights are also not working at night, it seems extremely dangerous. And any criminal would be camouflaged by all of the chaos. Much simpler to police the very act of being outside.
I agree it's not ideal, but I wouldn't thin end of the wedge it.
If there is any legitimate reason for an emergency nighttime curfew and martial law, it’s likely this would be it, yes.
Chile is also relatively lightly populated, with the vast majority of its population in Santiago - which is pretty dense.
If anywhere in Chile is going to have a sudden crime spree if there was an opportunity, Santiago would be pretty much it.
Yep. The 2010 Chilean earthquake and tsunami[1] is an example of what can happen in this country during catastrophes: sacking and looting.
Since then night curfews are a given during and after disasters.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake
Or NYC 1977
Counterpoint: huge swaths of the Bay Area went dark for a few days (9–11 October 2019) and we did not descend into martial law.
The Night of Terror during the 1977 blackout in NYC led to 1000 fires, 4000 arrests, and 550 injured police.
The blackout in 2003 in NYC had no looting or violence.
The blackout in Maracaibo Venezuela in 2019 had 350 stores looted and 550+ people arrested.
The difference was the economic and social challenges in 1977 in NYC and 2019 in Venezuela. A recession and high unemployment.
A curfew is not martial law. Regular daytime law abides in all cases, there's just a curfew.
The 2019 outage affected a small fraction of people. It mostly hit rural areas and small towns or subdivisions in hills. It affected only a few hundred thousand accounts in a region of 8 million people.
Yeah, no. Pretty much all of Sonoma and Marin lost power for days. Most of the rest of the cuts were in more rural areas but UC Berkeley and East San Jose got hit. The only county spared entirely was San Francisco.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-10/unprecede...
Over eight hundred thousand is a bit more than a few hundred thousand.800,000 was the entire state. For example, they turned off the entire city of Red bluff. Red bluff is not in the Bay area. The number of customers that got turned off in the Bay area was much less than 5% of the population. I am sure you can see that that is very different from a nationwide blackout.
Counterpoint: The Bay Area is not a dense metro area.
The blackout of 2003. That took out Toronto and New York (among others) for a few days in August.
And several locales called for curfews as well..
Not in Toronto
Rolling portions of the Bay Area (but by no means all, or even most) had well communicated power outages due to weather conditions during that time.
Aka there was plenty of time for people to know what is going on, no one was really surprised, agencies had time to prepare and roll out contingencies, etc.
In this case, no one seems to really know what caused it, let alone have had any warning. And Santiago is the national capital.
For all they know, someone intentionally crashed the grid in order to take the country.
What would you expect the US gov’t to do if Washington DC suddenly and unexpectedly completely lost power? I guarantee it would be pretty much the same thing.
PG&E didn't share their list of folks who required electricity for medical equipment with counties, didn't actually contact everyone effected, and didn't communicate specifically when the power was going to be on/off to most of them. PG&E (still) doesn't do "well communicated".
It really is remarkable how a little forewarning can help. Sure, there was no cell phone service along stretches of 280 but overall it was calm.
Planned outage vs unplanned outage.
I wouldn't say that's any more right or wrong. Localities have to deal with things according to their context, which will have to account for lots of variables.
What is the difference in preparation thought?
Does the Bay Area have generators, battery backup for critical emergency services like police and emergency medical care?
I don't have to live there to tell you they do. Generators are very common in the US, though they are generally placed in locations where they are easy to ignore. I expect every hospital has them, as will your water department, natural gas utility, cell phone towers (hit and miss, many don't have them, many do), any business with a data center on site (the generator might not cover the rest of the building, but the data center and HVAC will be on it).
In many locations your utility will give a substantial discount to power if you have a backup generator and will allow your utility to switch you to running only on the generator when power demand is high. It that is the case nearly every business will have a generator - it is almost paid for off the discounts and so the ability to run normally when the power is out makes it worth it.
In Mississippi I saw generators on 20 foot poles so they would keep operating even when a hurricane flooded the whole region (they probably went in after the hurricane where it would have been needed...). I wouldn't expect that in the Bay area, but it it shows what is considered normal in places that have earned a reputation as backward.
I know Chile is not the richest country, but my impression is they are good enough that I'd expect generators in all the important places at least. Though still power off will turn the city dark overall.
Yes, backup generators are required by the NEC for hospitals and certain other facilities (I’m at lunch and don’t have my copy of the NEC handy).
Generators are extremely common at hospitals, emergency dispatch centers, cell phone towers, nursing homes, natural gas and water pump stations, police and fire stations, data centers, etc.
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You can't post slurs here. I've (re-) banned the account.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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This is common standard procedure during region-wide emergencies. Everyone sees it as reasonable as far as I know due to crime being common during emergencies. We are at an all time high perception of crime. I myself have been victim of two car hijacks this year, and know plenty of victims in my already small social circle. If my only loss of freedom is going out during the night (you still can do it for short trips by filling a form), I think it’s worth it.
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If there were ever reason for a curfew, this seems to be a textbook example of when it is warranted.
Even ignoring crime, a curfew probably helps the health care and firefighting sectors significantly. I can easily imagine my friend group using a blackout as an excuse for a drunken bonfire.
So long as there is enough space to safely have a bonfire (no burning down the neighbor's house or starting a forest fire), and nobody gets so drunk they need medical care there is nothing wrong with a drunken bonfire. Or you can put away the alcohol and have a kid friendly bonfire - they are just as much fun.
Of course many drunken bonfires end up needing health care and/or firefighting. However they need not. How do you fix your friends?
Yes, with proper planning drunken bonfires are fine, I've enjoyed several.
One hastily put together without the benefits of electricity is less likely to be properly planned. Hundreds if not thousands of groups doing the same thing ensures a certain number are going to cause problems. And with emergency services already stressed, banning risky behavior seems fair.
All bonfires have risks, so banning them during a complete blackout really doesn’t seem unreasonable. If you do have an accident, don’t expect an ambulance to come.
Why wouldn't an ambulance come? My experience (this is US) is I expect the local emergency phone numbers to work and the ambulance to come.
A bonfire is what I want people doing. they have fun and with some care is safe enough. They can enjoy the power outage instead of complain about how awful life is.
My local experience with blackouts is cell towers become unusable after 4-6 hours; if the outage started in the middle of the night, sometimes things work a little longer, until everyone wakes up. Emergency calls have priority and can attach to any network, so maybe they would work, but not if all the cell towers are totally offline.
Certainly some towers may have onsite generators with fuel set to automatically run, but not the ones around me, and I've had two multiday outages this winter.
Landlines should work, but I don't know if Chile has many of them. I know they're rare here in Washington State. Wired internet is a maybe, depending on provider choices.
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As long as someone never ever needs to be inconvinented even in a situation were it could make sense to just not do anything which is not necessary for a day or two...
If we had a system, were you could register yourself and the society would be allowed to not help you, that would be great. But no we have a medical code (which funny enough is not enough to let woman die when they have a difficult/livethreatening pregnancy...)
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing, IMO,
As I see it, in a well running society there is enough trust to give everyone flexibility in the short term. If everyone assumes worst intentions and outcomes then your society is effectively no longer functioning. At which point a curfew is the least of your worries.
This is executive powers as it was intended, though, and not a power grab.
I think generally you must confirm that there was no power grab after the emergency has pasted.
Otherwise you can grab power and refuse to relinquish it after a real emergency that justified the executive powers.
That is true but it seems like most authoritarians invent a vague emergency to justify grabbing specific powers (e.g. Trump declaring a "border emergency"), whereas a specific emergency for a specific event has a time limit.
In particular: getting Trump to rescind his border "emergency" will be a long slow process of organizing and accumulating public pressure, whereas there will be an overwhelming amount of public pressure to end the curfew as soon as the power is restored.
> A government declaring a curfew (for any reason) is a bad thing[...] does the curfew etc. seem reasonable to [Chileans]?
This comment doesn't seem to have gone down well with the community, but I wonder why. "Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc. I have done countless treks, even for weeks at a time, without having to depend on continuous electricity.
Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid?
Imagine doing rolling curfews in countries like South-Africa synced with rolling blackouts - just because some vague and hand-wavy "oh so dangerous". Sounds surreal.
I am surprised you do not realize that cities have different civic requirements than countryside. A rolling blackout is generally done during the day with specific targets. Industrial power is shutdown, residences lose power etc..but hospitals, and civic services generally are subject to the rolling blackouts.
There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
>"Emergency" alone does not justify curfews. Curfews are only justified if they are reasonably expected to actually affect the thing that is driving the emergency. This may well be the case with a disease, but here the emergency is simply that the infrastructure needs to be restored.
This makes no sense.. Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
> I am surprised you do not realize that cities have different civic requirements than countryside.
Why do you think that? Stating a difference in civic requirements does not change any of the arguments put forward. I can move around a city without electricity. And so can you.
> There seems to be general distrust of government in western society. When people in Chile seem to have no problem with the curfew, why are non-Chileans so concerned?
This may not be a popular view in the U.S. government right now, but there are good reasons to distrust governments. In fact, most societies have embedded this distrust into the government itself through interlocking powers, constitutions, rule of law, etc.. The desire for good government decisions is not unique to the people of Chile.
> Sometimes, you treat the symptoms, sometimes you take preventive measures against the symptoms while you buy time to address the root cause.
Note how vague you seem to remain about the actual benefits of a curfew. It's a pattern we see in many of the replies on this thread. I think this vagueness is probably an indicator that some commenters don't really know a good reason, but feel the need to argue in favour of a curfew.
... although I do not really understand this motivation. It's a policy decision like countless others, and I have no strong feelings one way or the other - but maybe I'm missing the emotional part.
Let me the clear.. with a countrywide blackout with no specific eta on restoration, it creates potential for crime of opportunity. We should fix the root cause, but we should also take efforts to reduce the potential by higher police presence (symptoms) and reduce the potential for the opportunity (preventive measures) by reducing the traffic to necessity. It is not an indefinite curfew, but only till the root cause is resolved.
A short-term curfew is a minor inconvenience. Something unexpected happened, and now you have to adjust your routines for a day or two. Being able to deal with such inconveniences without making them a bigger issue than they are is an essential skill for those who live in a society.
Chile has a history of looting after natural disasters. It also has a history of massive protests that often cause damage and sometimes turn violent. (The current president certainly knows, as he was a big student leader during one wave of student protests.) In a country like that, a one-night curfew is a reasonable precaution after a country-wide blackout.
>My parents have a place in the German countryside and they are practically self-sufficient in terms of energy. I would definitely want to take the opportunity to visit them, catch up with them, use the time in a socially productive way, etc
Then travel there during the day? Why do you then need to go outside at night?
> Why should there be a curfew just because there is no electricity on the grid?
Because that genuinely is dangerous?
Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
> Because that genuinely is dangerous? Do you deny that people are more likely to commit crimes of opportunity when the lights are off, security cameras are offline, and communication systems are down?
A rise in the likelihood of crime is a gradual, probabilistic matter, whereas a curfew is an absolute, binary restriction on freedoms. (Although in this particular case, fortunately, it seems to be quite lax.) If power outages were a sufficient justification for curfews, we would need clear, documented evidence of the crime increase, measured against other contributing factors, and balanced with the fundamental rights being restricted.
In Germany, for example, crime (and hospitalization) spikes on New Year's Eve—yet no one seriously argues for a curfew every December 31st. The mere presence of an increased risk does not automatically override the need for a proportional response.
Otherwise, any statistical uptick in crime could be used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties without proper consideration of competing rights and interests.
None of this is new knowledge.
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What do you specifically mean by “countries like South-Africa”? I’m genuinely interested.
South-Africa was facing a severe electricity crisis very recently. See, for example: https://theconversation.com/south-africas-electricity-crisis...
I was there for a couple of weeks visiting friends back then and we even used a ridiculous, ad-laden app to look up "our" blackout times. It is also a strong case study for large-scale consumer-led solar expansion, perhaps together with Pakistan. ( https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/pakistan-solar-power... )
On the African continent alone, it is estimated that some 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still have no access to reliable electricity. (Src.: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/0f028d5f-26b1-47ca-... ) Reliable and non-discriminatory (at least not prohibitively expensive) access to electricity remains a serious human development issue.
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Curfews are commonly imposed during/immediately after major disasters in any significantly populated area, pretty much anywhere I have ever heard of in the world.
It's certainly the case in both the US + Europe in my experience.
The bad thing is the sudden change in a resource that the people are dependent on. There's absolutely nothing bad about imposing a curfew during this emergency.
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