Energy Blackouts more likely!

MWT

Verdigris said:

Well perhaps I have misunderstood, but when I looked at the Western Power website with regard to getting a G99 connection it seemed to preclude islanding. You hear plenty of stories in the media about DNOs dragging their feet over simply changing the main fuse, for example. DNOs should be positively encouraging distributed supply and storage, not hindering it.

Some are way better than others, that's for sure, and I know I'm lucky to have UK Power for mine.

I did take a quick look at Western Powers G99 stuff, and I wonder if you mixed up your islanding with their islanding... ?

It isn't well laid out and they reference a situation where through planned maintenance or failure, they have islanded a part of their own distribution network which includes your generation facility and talk about the need to approve if you can continue to generate in that circumstance or not...

It is an unusual circumstance and not particularly relevant to most home users, but the proposition is that if you generate enough power and if it makes sense they could ask you to continue to generate so as to provide power on the segment of their network that has been islanded.  

Ectophile

Verdigris said:

MWT said:

For the rest, modern solutions for modern problems, not something for everyone I freely admit, but Solar PV and a big battery will go a long way to covering the cuts if they do not go on for too many hours/days.

That depends on the DNO allowing you to "island" your house, in a grid failure. At the moment the DNOs seem somewhat reluctant to allow islanding. I doubt this incompetent government will have given it any thought, so there will be not pressure for change.

Allowing? When I had a power cut this summer, I crawled into the meter cupboard and operated a big switch to disconnect my house from the mains, and switched to inverter only.  I left it like that until I got a text saying the problem was fixed.  Because it was a big manual disconnector switch, there was no risk of electrocuting the people fixing the broken power line.

But that only worked because it was summer.  The sun was out, and the battery charged.  In the middle of winter, islanded mode could fall very flat.

Tokmon

half_empty said:

MWT said:

half_empty said:

We had a fire for heating, we don't now, central heating. We have a freezer now, we didn't then (our freezer is good for 24 hours no power). We have computers and other devices that rely on batteries, the most we had then was a clunky lamp on a massive battery. Home internet goes down, not sure how they prioritise street cabinets but they will be off the same supplies as the lighting but with home routers off, no use anyway.
At least I can fire up the bbq to cook on.
No way going to be running candles.

Need to look at the other parts of the chain, not just the street cabs and your router, you may be fine but a power cut elsewhere may have affected you ISP or their interconnects etc.... ... and yes there are precautions in place to maintain power to whatever is deemed essential, but it depends how long a cut lasts of course.

For the rest, modern solutions for modern problems, not something for everyone I freely admit, but Solar PV and a big battery will go a long way to covering the cuts if they do not go on for too many hours/days.

I was thinking more direct impact at the home (I know there are many power plans in place for infrastructure and it has fallen over when least expected....). We have fibre to the home meaning power off, comms gone. Back in the 70's it was interesting as a kid (didn't have a phone then anyway), not anymore with connected lives and freezers and electric pretty much needed in the home.
I don't know anyone with a solar panel/battery set up.

Wonder if there will be announcements for times to power down hard drives?

reminds me. Running out of rubs for the meat for the BBQ. Better get some panic buying in.

A sudden power cut is unlikely to cause any damage to hard drives otherwise most people would have experienced this during normal power cuts. Plus most computers these days have SSD's instead.

[Deleted User]

Tokmon said:

half_empty said:

MWT said:

half_empty said:

We had a fire for heating, we don't now, central heating. We have a freezer now, we didn't then (our freezer is good for 24 hours no power). We have computers and other devices that rely on batteries, the most we had then was a clunky lamp on a massive battery. Home internet goes down, not sure how they prioritise street cabinets but they will be off the same supplies as the lighting but with home routers off, no use anyway.
At least I can fire up the bbq to cook on.
No way going to be running candles.

Need to look at the other parts of the chain, not just the street cabs and your router, you may be fine but a power cut elsewhere may have affected you ISP or their interconnects etc.... ... and yes there are precautions in place to maintain power to whatever is deemed essential, but it depends how long a cut lasts of course.

For the rest, modern solutions for modern problems, not something for everyone I freely admit, but Solar PV and a big battery will go a long way to covering the cuts if they do not go on for too many hours/days.

I was thinking more direct impact at the home (I know there are many power plans in place for infrastructure and it has fallen over when least expected....). We have fibre to the home meaning power off, comms gone. Back in the 70's it was interesting as a kid (didn't have a phone then anyway), not anymore with connected lives and freezers and electric pretty much needed in the home.
I don't know anyone with a solar panel/battery set up.

Wonder if there will be announcements for times to power down hard drives?

reminds me. Running out of rubs for the meat for the BBQ. Better get some panic buying in.

A sudden power cut is unlikely to cause any damage to hard drives otherwise most people would have experienced this during normal power cuts. Plus most computers these days have SSD's instead.

If only it was that simple.

Physical damage to hard drives is unlikely on a clean power cut, they can park the heads safely with residual power, but unfortunately it doesn't always work like that, you often have a "brown out" on the run up to a power cut which can be seen as lights flickering / dimming etc which may not result in a nice clean shut down and there is a risk of hard disks not parking the heads in that scenario. This could result in the heads striking the disk - and you might not even be aware of the damage done until a much later date.

Also upon restoration of power, there can be poor quality supply and secondary power cuts happening soon afterwards which could again result in an unclean shutdown and failure to park the heads.

More likely is data corruption, if the drive is writing something at the time of the power failure, it will lead to corrupt data. Best case is this could just be localised to one file or worse case the file allocation tables creating a lot more problems.

SSD's aren't immune to this either, they use DRAM for caching data that is being written so that could be lost and again if in the middle of a write process, corruption can occur.

But of course everyone will have a backup of their data so corruption is easily sorted out.

And SSD's aren't ubiquitous, certainly not for mass storage. My 32 TB of NAS storage is not SSD and there is a lot more at stake from an unclean power outage. I don't have UPS but that NAS is set to remain powered off at first outage and not power back on  until I do it manually to avoid some of the above issues. 

Verdigris

MWT said:

Verdigris said:

Well perhaps I have misunderstood, but when I looked at the Western Power website with regard to getting a G99 connection it seemed to preclude islanding. You hear plenty of stories in the media about DNOs dragging their feet over simply changing the main fuse, for example. DNOs should be positively encouraging distributed supply and storage, not hindering it.

Some are way better than others, that's for sure, and I know I'm lucky to have UK Power for mine.

I did take a quick look at Western Powers G99 stuff, and I wonder if you mixed up your islanding with their islanding... ?

It isn't well laid out and they reference a situation where through planned maintenance or failure, they have islanded a part of their own distribution network which includes your generation facility and talk about the need to approve if you can continue to generate in that circumstance or not...

It is an unusual circumstance and not particularly relevant to most home users, but the proposition is that if you generate enough power and if it makes sense they could ask you to continue to generate so as to provide power on the segment of their network that has been islanded.  

Thanks for the explanation. It was fairly late at night when I read it, but I do seem to have got the wrong end of the stick.

One thing that did look helpful was that you can make an application, in principle, to see if G99 is possible and then detail the equipment later if you get approval.

[Deleted User]

Tokmon said:

half_empty said:

A sudden power cut is unlikely to cause any damage to hard drives otherwise most people would have experienced this during normal power cuts. Plus most computers these days have SSD's instead.

I use spinning for backups, quite a few and wonder how many people are still running what came in the box pre SSD (which are still expensive compared to platters). I expect that the average user will not see an issue but when you chop the power to thousands I expect to see failures.

Verdigris

But you get "micro-cuts" pretty frequently in rural areas, IME. I've never sustained any damage to anything, apart from the phone nagging me to re-set the time.

Liku

A few years ago when I lived with my parents we'd get power cuts multiple times/year until they upgraded the lines. Was even worse when we lived in Lincolnshire! Any thunderstorm or higher wind and it'd go out for a day or more. The thought now worries me but I am sure I can find a way to cope. Now power cuts are much rarer, maybe 1/year and usually not for anywhere near as long. Definitely do get those micro-cuts still though, usually for a few seconds to a few minutes.

MWT

Ectophile said:

Verdigris said:

MWT said:

For the rest, modern solutions for modern problems, not something for everyone I freely admit, but Solar PV and a big battery will go a long way to covering the cuts if they do not go on for too many hours/days.

That depends on the DNO allowing you to "island" your house, in a grid failure. At the moment the DNOs seem somewhat reluctant to allow islanding. I doubt this incompetent government will have given it any thought, so there will be not pressure for change.

Allowing? When I had a power cut this summer, I crawled into the meter cupboard and operated a big switch to disconnect my house from the mains, and switched to inverter only.

Not usual to find a properly installed and compliant grid-tied Solar PV installation that can run like that...

Which inverter do you have out of curiosity?

QrizB

MWT said:

Ectophile said:

Verdigris said:

MWT said:

For the rest, modern solutions for modern problems, not something for everyone I freely admit, but Solar PV and a big battery will go a long way to covering the cuts if they do not go on for too many hours/days.

That depends on the DNO allowing you to "island" your house, in a grid failure. At the moment the DNOs seem somewhat reluctant to allow islanding. I doubt this incompetent government will have given it any thought, so there will be not pressure for change.

Allowing? When I had a power cut this summer, I crawled into the meter cupboard and operated a big switch to disconnect my house from the mains, and switched to inverter only.

Not usual to find a properly installed and compliant grid-tied Solar PV installation that can run like that...

Which inverter do you have out of curiosity?

Some hybrid inverters have an "emergency power" function; @Reed_Richards has one. My AC-coupled battery also does this but would need a couple of contactors adding to switch over safely, so I haven't bothered wiring that bit up (and being AC-coupled rather than hybrid, it might not be able to spoof the grid well wnough to convince my grid-tied solar inverter).