When I first heard that on the news, I wondered if it was that ionospheric EMP I've been dreading for the last three years, albeit confined to a certain region – but it's not! In fact, judging from the Wikipedia talk page that hypothesis is probably hogwash, and seems to have originated from that very Sky News article!
EdgeRabbit wrote: Mon Apr 28, 2025 3:51 pm
Jesus… yall think this will happen again?
So it seems the root cause is unknown for now, but these things are usually a case of a few unfortunate things lining up together, then something trips, then everything else is more loaded so something else trips, then bang, bang, bang. It happens. But unlikely to happen again soon, hopefully!
Yesterday I fell into a rabbit hole of watching these kinds of videos:Then this happens at a much more enormous scale! Also I watched Heartbeat tonight and coincidentally the episode they showed involved a power cut!
–––
Anyhoo, good to hear you're all right Dave, stay safe!
I don’t really understand the reasoning behind it. The government hasn’t given much explanation, but some technicians seem to have reached a conclusion very similar to what some German media outlets were suggesting, and everything seems to point to renewable energy (well, more than renewable energy itself, the electrical infrastructure, which isn’t prepared for it). Around 10:30, problems started to appear: some "oscillations" (small variations that indicate the energy isn’t stable). There was too much electricity generated from solar panels and very little from nuclear sources, which are the ones that help keep the energy "firm" and stable. However, by 12:30, those oscillations got worse, and there was no nuclear energy available to keep the system stable, so everything was shut down as a safety measure. Clearly, a lot went wrong here, since renewable energy should, in principle, be easy to regulate and it shouldn’t have reached that point. The technical side of what exactly failed to cause the situation is a mystery, and if it does come to light, it’s likely I won’t understand any of it since it’ll be something very specific, but yes, many of these situations are definitely a domino effect.
And well, it was definitely weird. At work, we had the UPS and Internet, so I stayed there until 17:00. I went back home (didn’t run into any traffic jams or chaos like in major cities), took a shower (I highlight this because many households didn’t have water supply either), took a short nap, and around 21:00. the power came back. Internet took a bit longer, until around 00:30 am. What hit me the hardest was when the power went out in the lab: the extraction stopped and a coworker stank up the place with his thiols
Magelin wrote: Tue Apr 29, 2025 6:23 am
Hopefully, you’re doing fine! How often do y’all get power outages, anyway?
It’s something very unlikely to happen... Just to put an example, my parents are in their 50s and they have never seen anything like this
Master wrote: Tue Apr 29, 2025 6:47 pm
I could've sworn the forums used to prevent you from posting if there was a post submitted before you submitted your own, was that disabled?
Maybe they forgot to reenable it after the last RD? From what I see, it’s a pain because you have to do it for each (sub-)forum individually, so maybe it was left off deliberately…