According to Italy's national grid operators, a cable between France and Italy broke. Plunged the entire country into darkness.

Sven,
That must have been one helluva cable break, if it took out a whole country.
Surely Italy is fed from more than one source?.
Is the feed Overhead?.
Just wondering.

no doubt the diplomats will need a special luncheon now....

I guess everyone is going to want blackouts now, so as not to feel left out!

I would assume that they don't rely on France for all their power, so was it another cascade effect as staion after station shut down with the increased load?

Guess it's time to look for a generator now... I could always set it up in the garden and run a long cord through my window to power the most important items such as CH boiler, refrigerator and most of all computer...
Seriously, I read a newspaper article where the links between France and Italy were considered the most critical links in the European grid. Italy relies on them as they import about 70% of their power. They even feared the entire network could collapse, fortunately only Italy seems to be affected. I think some small areas near the border also import power from Austria, but not much.

Texas_Ranger...I've got to ask. How did you come up with your screen name? I notice that you live in Vienna, are you from the states?

I wonder if all these incidents have something in common?

Are people just using way more power all of a sudden?

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17112/newsDate/1-Aug-2002/story.htm

Warns of exactly this situation occuring in italy due to undercapacity.

[This message has been edited by djk (edited 09-28-2003).]

Bean-counters I suspect. They are the same the whole world over, have risen greatly in influence within businesses over the past 15 years and abhor overcapacity. Everything is for the short term benefit of the shareholders and when that little extra capacity is required, either by demand or local failure, the system fails catastrophically. In the case of electrical utilities, their failures are dramatically obvious to all, coupled with the daisy-chain collapse that seems inherent in these systems. I wonder how much this little lot cost ? - plus NE US, Gtr London, Denmark-Sweden?

The EU rush to deregulate power industries has also caused a few problems.

For example in Ireland, ESB is a state owned company which has happily been supplying good quality service at a very compeditive price since 1927 when a nationalised power system was setup aimed at boosting the economy, helping industry and raising living standards etc.

It was a monopoly supplier. However, as a semi-state company it didn't really behave as a commercial monopoly, like for example Microsoft does. It was founded on the basis of public service not to squeeze every last drop of profit out of the network and its customers as possible.

When deregulation came into vogue in Ireland legislation was passed which effectively prevented the ESB from expanding their generating capacity by either augmenting exsisting plants or going ahead with planned new plants. This was because as the former monopoly supplier and as they had a very high market share they were not allowed to increase it further. However, the private companies that came in did not manage to get large enough plants on stream fast enough to keep the network at a comfortable capacity. The result was that due to rapid growth in electry consumption coupled with the fact that the ESB was legally hog tied that the network has come very close on a few occasions to exceeding capacity.

Emergency measures had to be implemented on a number of occasions e.g. ESB had to hire generator ships and moor them in harbours around the country to augment supply.

Legislation was also passed in breech of EU directives to allow the ESB to fill the gap by expanding power plants as it would be extremely damaging to the Irish economy if we had power failures, much more so than having the ESB remain the dominant player in the market.

ESB's a weird company in some ways. It tends to do everything in-house including fully designing their own power plants and network using a subsiduary ESBI. Stranger still, they're actually designing plants for their compeditors!
http://www.esbi.ie/

I think we have to really think about how electricity is supplied. As a resource it's almost as important as Air and Water! A power failure could cripple a country and cause tens of millions of Euro/dollar/pounds/yen of damage.


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 09-28-2003).]

No, I've never been to Texas. But my first name is Ragnar (scandinavian name), many people think it is spelled Ragner (Okay, I hate them for it, but you can't do more than tell them) and everybody here knows the TV series "Walker Texas Ranger". So one of my classmates invented that nickname. Some people who just know me as Ranger even think it has something to do with Power Rangers :MAD:
The only place in the US I've ever been to is NYC (a 10 days school exchange with a public High School from Brooklyn).

The blackout made the news bulletins here this evening, as you would expect.

Apparently, after the North American blackout the Italian prime minister appeared on TV to assure the citizens of Italy that such an event could never happen in their own country.

Never believe a politician, eh?

Ranger wrote:


Hehehe....looks like I'm in good company.

My name is Sven. Also Scandinavian. Blame my (Colombian) mom -- she was going to Uni in W. Germany at the time.

People wind up pronouncing it:
Swen, Schwen, Swin, Seven, Seth (huh?), Schwinn (like the bike), ES-ben (Spanish speakers), Steve, even a few Zvis for good measure.

You should see the mangling my last name gets: While, Wheels, Well....

I've gotten used to it. What can you do? It's funny actually to see people stumble over themselves. Eventually I just give up and write it out for them.

==

Back to topic. The latest reports I had heard was that France was blaming Switzerland. Switzerland is saying that it's Italy's fault. Hmm....

As one Italian contributor to the Usenet Newsgroup rec.antiques.radio+phono put it:

"Three fighting and no-one worried for my unfrozen meat. D***n!"



[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 09-30-2003).]

TG: I had my mouse scrolled all the way to the right from reading Sven's post when I saw your picture of that goofy looking game! As soon as I saw it I thought to myself..."this must be Think_good". Thanks for all the laughs my friend.

Sven and Ragnar,

these are typical Swedish names. Always confuses me that you are not.

I never get anything spelled correctly, not even things like ID cards. I'm nicknamed C-H in the real world, and many will not know me by any other name.

Part of the problem is that my name is a double name (my mother is fond history and double names were apparently popular in the 18th century) Worse, my parents deliberately chose a mispelling of the name...

Instead of Clas-Henrik I get
Claes-Henrik, Klas-Henrik, Clashenrik, Claeshenric and so on. A dozen different version in all. Then there are four spellings of my last name.

I long ago stopped caring how people spell my name.

Here is the initial technical report (in English, since the grid is international) on the Italian black out.
http://www.ucte.org/pdf/News/20030929-After-the-Italian-Black-out.pdf

Apparently, the reason for this blackout was a three that fell on a powerline in Switzerland. Just goes to show how little margin of error there is in the system.

[This message has been edited by C-H (edited 09-29-2003).]

Ryan_J:
My pleasure. I try to keep things light. Sometimes, however, they can float away.

Speaking of names, there was an episode of Monty Python in which they discuss the least known composer in the world -- in fact, the greatest name in German Baroque music -- Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern schplenden schlitter crasscrenbon fried digger dingle dangle dongle dungle burstein von knacker thrasher apple banger horowitz ticolensic grander knotty spelltinkle grandlich grumblemeyer spelterwasser kurstlich himbleeisen bahnwagen gutenabend bitte ein nurnburger bratwustle gerspurten mitz weimache luber .....

Do these words actually mean anything?

(taking no chances ...)

[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 10-01-2003).]

Was it followed by a four and a five?
(Don't you just love those typos that come out like that? )

It really does say something about the state of the grids and the way they are run when a fault one one line takes out the power to almost an entire country.


Guten Abend = Good evening
Bitte = Please
von = of
ein = a / an / one

That's about all I can see, but my German is extremely limited!

is it me or is there some sort of relation bettwen all these outages and deregulation??

( Milton Bradley knew.....)

btw~ betcha i could shout 'hey sparky' to anyone of you guys and you'd spin around

According to news reports today, it seems that a tree fell taking out a vital link between France and Italy. Also seems that, as demand was low at the time (middle of the night on the weekend), Italy had little in the way of generating plants running. France, according to the story, has mostly nuke plants. Which need to operate full tilt all the time. So France exports the excess power during low demand periods, and Italy was absorbing most of it. The tree takes out one link, and then other links get overloaded. Those cut out, and Italy gets blacked out. Someone in Italy should have load shedded so the remaining links could keep most of Italy alive.

Yeah, me too. I graduated from High School with honors, so I got to a session with our district mayor where I got an impressing looking certificate, which is actually good for nothing except for hanging it above my sofa... and besides it spells my name "Rognar"!

Hmmm, lemme think about those words. Almost all of them either aren't German words or are horribly misspelled. Fried is English, but definitely not German, apple, thrasher and banger probably too. Horowitz is a jewish name. Spelterwasser could be Selterswasser, some ,kind of mineral water. Bahnwagen is railway car. "gutenabend bitte ein nurnburger bratwustle" would be "Guten Abend, bitte ein Nürnberger Bratwürstl", "Good evening, a Nürnberg (city in Germany) style sausage please."

(remainder of translation edited to keep PG Rating)

[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 10-01-2003).]

Oh dear -- The perils of making up words to mock another language and accidentally stumbling upon something offensive. Do you think I should edit out anything here?

What might be relevant to rest of the quote is that banger is British slang for a sausage -- The peculiar British-style sausage, which is nothing at all like weiners, Brotwurst or anything like that.

That rings true. Last I heard over 75% of France's capacity is nuclear.

Jeez, and tried real hard to keep it decent! Must be the difference between Austrian and US mentality. Sorry if I offended anyone.
Anyway, the "name" contained a _real_ bad word mostly used by adolescent males around 12 or 13 (not sure they even know what exactly they're talking about...)

You did a good job at that, no problem there. To clarify, I don't want anyone to think that your comments (or ThinkGood's) were anything but proper. No offense could be taken from anything that either of you said.

I thought it would be best to remove the words in question since we do get a very varied audience I thought there might be some that would not need translation and might be offended by seeing the words. I was trying to be considerate of anyone that might be visiting.

FWI,

Below are the statistics (sitewide) for yesterday (Sept 30, 2003) in Visitor Sessions from the Top 15 Countries (where source is known).


1 United States 8,078
2 Canada 196
3 Singapore 72
4 UK 70
5 Mexico 62
6 Japan 36
7 AU 34
8 Netherlands 28
9 Germany 22
10 Austria 21
11 Sweden 21
12 Italy 17
13 Qatar 15
14 Saudi Arabia 13
15 Belgium 13

Bill

[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 10-01-2003).]

No offense taken! I keep forgetting I'm not the only German-speaking visitor here

Back to the power outage: Now all people keep guessing why the line broke at all.
Some say a tree fell on the line. Now everybody's wondering why they can't keep the area around the lines clear of trees.
by a Swiss sparky

Ragnar,
That's why I was asking if I shoud edit out the posts as well. ECN gets a wide range of visitors and we don't want to offend anyone in their native language if we can avoid it. Thanks for doing the necessary Bill.

I can't help thinking of the railways in Britain:

"We weren't expecting snow in January."
"THere were leaves on the line."
"It was the wrong sort of snow."

And yes, with the heatwave this summer they actually came up with "The wrong sort of heat!"

Off-topic a bit, but there are some good trouble-call stories at this link.




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 10-01-2003).]

Hmmm.... I wonder if this story actually had a serious side to it.

Don't you think the lady could have had an arcing connection somewhere in the room?

I reckon that these series of power failures DO in fact have something in common with solar activity.
I read somewhere back in 1993 (near to the last sunspot cycle at the time) that the Earth could expect to have problems with thier power grid systems over the next 20 years, communications systems were also mentioned in the article.
But, the article did mention that this sort of thing would be caused by solar winds carrying charged particles, of a magnitude never seen before.
I'll see if I've still got the mag that this article was in, at the time I never really took the comments on board.

So electricians should be selling their tools and looking at a career as a gas lighting expert instead?

Electrical systems are potentially very fragile in weird EM fields. Although then again considering that our nervous systems are basically chemo-electric large EM feilds could really mess with us too! Maybe it explains the dark ages!

"At the signpost up ahead, your next stop.... The Twilight Zone....."

This is reminding me of a children's TV serial I saw in the seventies. I can't remember what it was called, but the story was that everything electrical in the country stopped working properly, resulting in complete chaos and disorder. The main family in the story were trying to escape to France, which had apparently remained unaffected.

Sven, Ragnar,
Guys, I have a rather simple name.
Mike Trump, but you'd be amazed as to how many people mis-pronounce my surname, and this REALLY annoy's me.
I have been called Mike Crump I don't know how many times.(and also the other off-shoots from this: Mike Crumpett, Crumpy, you know how it goes!)
And then they find out that my real surname is Trump, and then there is the inevitable question:
Are you related to Donald Trump?. Everybody that I have met through Faults work has asked me this, as well as a few others.
Thank God that everyone at ECN knows my name!.

[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 10-11-2003).]

Besides my name is spelled Ragn_a_r, not Ragner... *sigh*
So we all have our share of misspelled names.