South Australia has no power

[System Error Message]

I once tried to find out about lightning protection and if it is possible to use a bunch of super capacitors to store the surge. Lightning doesnt have many watts but you will need a lot of capacitors. It is a DC pulse with high voltage and significant amps. It has a high watt ratings but the actual energy in J is much less as the pulse lasts for a fraction of a second.

A transformer will filter lightning which is why lightning wasnt much of a problem in the past due to the isolation and thicker wire gauges and transformer sizes required in the usual PSUs in the past with grounding that helped to direct the lightning. Currently PSUs have tiny transformers and are switched based and few of them actually have a ground connection.

[vodka]

I heard tonight on the ABC that people are stuck in lifts (elevators).

I don't strange if the lifts are electricals when falls the power the lift stucks  at change a hydraulic lift when goes out the power, the cabin goes down to more nearest level and opens the doors.

What is also great is that most new homes are built with no gas and you need to use electric cookers. Can't make coffee or tea, can't prepare dinner, etc.

But you may have a Campigas bottle  or butane bottle for these situations

Also, the largest power outage in The Netherlands that I can remember was on 27 march 2015, which lasted from 9.30 to I believe 14.00 at my place, but lasted up to 15.30 in others. So that's about 4-6 hours power outage for ~1 million households (households - not people - I believe 1 household is 3-3,5 people).

I am usually pretty bored to death during an outage. I've had half a dozen local outages at work in the past year or so, and I usually would start cleaning my desk in such case and if any interesting reading material at hand read that. If it isn't resolved in like 3 hours, then bad luck.

At home I'm glad that my laptop's battery is good enough to last 8 hours if I want it to. And to be honest I think it's exceptionally rare for outages to last longer than that. Of course it's inconvenient that I can't make any hot drinks and meals, but as long you as keep the fridge and refrigerator closed a few hours should be OK.

So, when  you  will  be more of 10 hours without power(as here), a judge will have to go his home for authorising the  lifting of his body  (cadaver)

[vodka]

I once tried to find out about lightning protection and if it is possible to use a bunch of super capacitors to store the surge. Lightning doesnt have many watts but you will need a lot of capacitors. It is a DC pulse with high voltage and significant amps. It has a high watt ratings but the actual energy in J is much less as the pulse lasts for a fraction of a second.

A transformer will filter lightning which is why lightning wasnt much of a problem in the past due to the isolation and thicker wire gauges and transformer sizes required in the usual PSUs in the past with grounding that helped to direct the lightning. Currently PSUs have tiny transformers and are switched based and few of them actually have a ground connection.

The day that you will drop a thunder , you will remember all his life.  The capacitor blast might form evaporated electrolytic cloud that you might burn his aerial vias and lungs

[Someone]

We had a power outage which lasted for almost 3 hours a couple of days ago affecting a small area.

Maybe half a day is the longest I can ever remember in Sydney.

I cannot remember any Sydney basin power fail since 1964 (about the earliest I can remember).

There are frequent minor dropouts and small areas affected, but most customers never notice. Generators and industrial users do however have some challenges.

[System Error Message]

I once tried to find out about lightning protection and if it is possible to use a bunch of super capacitors to store the surge. Lightning doesnt have many watts but you will need a lot of capacitors. It is a DC pulse with high voltage and significant amps. It has a high watt ratings but the actual energy in J is much less as the pulse lasts for a fraction of a second.

A transformer will filter lightning which is why lightning wasnt much of a problem in the past due to the isolation and thicker wire gauges and transformer sizes required in the usual PSUs in the past with grounding that helped to direct the lightning. Currently PSUs have tiny transformers and are switched based and few of them actually have a ground connection.

The day that you will drop a thunder , you will remember all his life.  The capacitor blast might form evaporated electrolytic cloud that you might burn his aerial vias and lungs

What i meant was the amount of capacitors needed to store a lightning charge would be many, you'd need a building of them.

[Halcyon]

We lost power a few months ago for about 12 hours in the Blue Mountains, although it was localised. A tree came down onto lines during strong winds.

[amspire]

There are frequent minor dropouts and small areas affected, but most customers never notice. Generators and industrial users do however have some challenges.

There have been lots of localised drop-outs sometimes for many days, but no grid-wide shutdown.

[timb]

Are those cable users have all underground cable runs all the way to the power station?

The community I live in has all underground cables but overhead wires outside where tree falls kill power when someone blows her candle.

My home has the same problem. UG for the last 50 meters, OH for out-of-the-yard connection. It is not reliable.
The reliable UG connection I said refers to true UG connection, all UG from power station to end user such as my office. We have a transmission level transformer yard 100 meters away from my office building, then we tap a dedicate 12.47kV UG cable directly to our building. Right out of the door a transformer converts it to 2.3kV, which we feed into our inverter. All lab voltage used are generated from that inverter for safety reason (higher SIL, lower catastrophic short circuit current in case something goes wrong).
The reason we have a dedicated power line is because we do some very high power experiments, such as fast EV charger, EV back feed, solid state transformer, MW level power module testing and etc.

I've seen UG connections go out almost as often as OH connections in some areas. It almost always happens when another utility is trying to lay cable and accidentally hits the power cable.

The company burying new cable is supposed to call Miss Utility 24 hours before burying, so they can come out and mark existing lines; however, it's been my experience they're called "Miss Utility" because they always *miss* one of the buried utilities!

I once had a situation where the Cable Co. came out to bury a new line; unfortunately he had to cross over a power cable which turned out not to be as deep as it was supposed to be... It *was* pretty cool to see a Ditch Witch shoot sparks out the front, though!
 
So, three days without power, the Power Co. finally came out and decided to just bury a new line from the pole to the house (I'm not even sure if they can patch buried lines), which they did and, in the process, hit one of the two telephone lines that Miss had failed to mark!

So, the Telephone Co. comes out and instead of patching the line (which they can do) decides to just run a new, single cable from the street directly to the house to replace what was two separate cables (we had 4 phone lines at the time). In the process, he hits the newly installed Cable line (which the installer hadn't marked after he installed it).

So, I made the phone guy mark the new line he ran, then I went back and marked the path of the new power line myself. When the Cable Co. came back out to (again) run a new line, I showed him all the lines and pipes, then *walked with him* while he buried the new cable.

Anyway, so long as the utility keeps the trees trimmed, OH lines should be fairly reliable. Every place I've ever lived has been OH to the transformer and UG to the house.

Worst outage I've seen was in, 2004 maybe? We had a pretty bad hurricane and lost power for just over 2 weeks! I was 18 at the time and still living with my parents. A few days before came ashore, I was looking at some raw weather data and realized we might get a direct hit, so I told my dad and we drove across the state to pickup a diesel generator. Good thing we did!

We were on well water, so without the generator we would have been completely screwed. It was big enough to run the well, fridge, lights, ceiling fans and our tankless water heater.

After that we got one of those automatic whole house generators and a big ass propane tank. If you live in an area with a lot of storm activity, I *highly* recommend that solution. It's the ticket!

[Halcyon]

Worst outage I've seen was in, 2004 maybe? We had a pretty bad hurricane and lost power for just over 2 weeks! I was 18 at the time and still living with my parents. A few days before came ashore, I was looking at some raw weather data and realized we might get a direct hit, so I told my dad and we drove across the state to pickup a diesel generator. Good thing we did!

I just find that remark amusing. Here, if I was to drive to the other side of the state, it would take about 13 hours one way via the most direct route.

They have very pretty sunsets out there though...

[ludzinc]

Has nothing to do with renewable power, it's the grid itself that failed.

Not *the grid* but the interconnector.

SA cannot generate enough power for itself, so relies on power from other states. 

So our long power cord to Victoria got cut, and we're left in the dark.

[ludzinc]

That's why it is important to be prepared for SHTF.

I'd love a home solar storage system for this eventuality, but practically speaking the odds of the power going down for days at a time across all of Sydney are pretty darn low. It's never happened in Sydney in my memory, so I wouldn't get a system just for that eventuality.
Main problem is keeping the fridge going so food doesn't spoil, athough apart from restocking cost even that's not a big deal for a while.

Problem is that most solar inverters require mains to be present to generate power. 

My understanding is that it's a safety requirement - if there's a local black / brown out you don't want solar supplies keeping the grid live (and lighting up the poor linesman).

If you want independent power, an isloator and a diesel generator is the cheapest option.

[Someone]

Has nothing to do with renewable power, it's the grid itself that failed.

Not *the grid* but the interconnector.

SA cannot generate enough power for itself, so relies on power from other states. 

So our long power cord to Victoria got cut, and we're left in the dark.

That was the biggest contributor to the problem, but the link was dropped to protect the east coast grid. It was interesting to pull up the solar figures for yesterday as SA can end up with surprisingly large percentages of the total load generated by distributed (household) solar. Attached is the graph from yesterday care of APVI (http://pv-map.apvi.org.au) showing the wild fluctuations in supply, so the solar drop out would be contributing but not a dominating force in the event.

[Someone]

There are frequent minor dropouts and small areas affected, but most customers never notice. Generators and industrial users do however have some challenges.

There have been lots of localised drop-outs sometimes for many days, but no grid-wide shutdown.

Its a rare event, but a short term grid wide failure or many smaller failures still end up with similar levels of availability. Here is a plot from 2009-2013 (https://www.aer.gov.au/system/files/2014%20Annual%20distribution%20benchmarking%20report%20-%20November%202014_0.pdf) comparing regions rate of failure, Sydney does well but not by a great margin.

[Rick Law]

The longest power outage in the NYC/NJ area was Storm Sandy.  The flooding also caused gasoline outage.  First few days, all roads were impassible.  No stores were open for the first week and some remain closed for weeks.  There was one known fatality at "fighting over gas" at a gas station during the first 3 days in my area.

For my development, power returned on or about the 10th day.  We had no gasoline for another couple of weeks more as gas stations and the supply chain got repaired.

When the power first returned to another town near mine, we (and probably half our development) went to a coffee shop in that town to charge-up.  Competition for available outlets was stiff!  There, we heard the phone call of a couple.  This couple's car was empty and they called AAA (an auto club in USA) for help.  The closest gas-station with confirmed gas availability was 40+ miles away in the neighboring state (PA).

At or near the the end of the first week, a closer town (with public library) got power and we were able to go there for charging.

I was rationing my driving as I had less than a quarter-tank at the start of the outage.  For about a month, my in-laws calls me when they have gas in their town.  I go there to visit (1 hour driving) and fill-up.

About one and a half month later (since the start of outage) when all my area returned to more-or-less normal, I had a reason to visited a hilly more rural part of NJ.  As I drove up the dark hills, I see houses still without lights, and occasion lighted house with the companion rattling sound of a gas powered electrical generator.

[vodka]

The longest power outage in the NYC/NJ area was Storm Sandy.  The flooding also caused gasoline outage.  First few days, all roads were impassible.  No stores were open for the first week and some remain closed for weeks.  There was one known fatality at "fighting over gas" at a gas station during the first 3 days in my area.

For my development, power returned on or about the 10th day.  We had no gasoline for another couple of weeks more as gas stations and the supply chain got repaired.

When the power first returned to another town near mine, we (and probably half our development) went to a coffee shop in that town to charge-up.  Competition for available outlets was stiff!  There, we heard the phone call of a couple.  This couple's car was empty and they called AAA (an auto club in USA) for help.  The closest gas-station with confirmed gas availability was 40+ miles away in the neighboring state (PA).

At or near the the end of the first week, a closer town (with public library) got power and we were able to go there for charging.

I was rationing my driving as I had less than a quarter-tank at the start of the outage.  For about a month, my in-laws calls me when they have gas in their town.  I go there to visit (1 hour driving) and fill-up.

About one and a half month later (since the start of outage) when all my area returned to more-or-less normal, I had a reason to visited a hilly more rural part of NJ.  As I drove up the dark hills, I see houses still without lights, and occasion lighted house with the companion rattling sound of a gas powered electrical generator.

But how many money  cost  to carry several trailers with gas tank? and generators?

[VK5RC]

If I have the sequence of events correct,  high winds took down 2 or so very large towers that connect the main city grid to some of the Northern towns and where South Australia used to generate most of its electricity (by coal),  in addition there were also a lot of lightning strikes and heavy demand,  the wind turbines are notorious for de-stabilising the frequency of the grid,  one interstate interconnector is down for repairs.  The load became unstable so the interconnector cut out,  I think in the absence of significant base load frequency stability the wind generators either were cut or did so with high wind safety cut out.  Voila!
PS A modern built in gas stove isn't a lot of use in power failure as a lot need mains for safety circuits / gas solenoids. Camping gear is useful.
Edit Tower number corrected

[nctnico]

Being on an emergency generator sucks though. Mains synchronised clocks slip minutes per day!
The camping gas gear is a nice idea though. I already have a camping gas tank for a blow torch so all I'd need is a small stove.

[poida_pie]

more like 20 towers.

[Jay_Diddy_B]

Hi,

I experienced a power outage that lasted about 4.5 days. The reason was an ice storm. The power lines, for the most part, are engineered to take the weight of the ice build up, however the trees are not. Ice built up on the trees and the trees fell on the power lines. A large percentage of the trees were damaged around 20%. After the event crews trimmed trees back from the power lines.

The storm started December 20th. I got my power restored December 24th at about 10.30pm. The best Christmas present ever.

In Canada, that time of year it is cold. The inside of my house fell to 4 degrees Centigrade. I have a fireplace in one room and I was able to burn a limited supply of firewood. I also had a small Honda generator, 700W, that I could run my TV and DVD player. I have since upgraded to a 2kW generator.

Cell phone communication stopped about 24 hours into the event. I assume that the batteries at the cell sites became depleted. When this happened I lost connection to the internet. If only the had Batterisers Batteroos 

Fortunately, the power was restored from the centre of the town quickly, with the crews working out to the suburbs. I was able to buy hot food and gasoline in the town throughout the event.

The worst thing about the whole experience is that I was disconnected from the EEVblog.....

I hope that they are able to restore the power quickly.

Regards,

Jay_Diddy_B

[tautech]

more like 20 towers.

Holy hell. 
What on earth do you make those pylons with? Spaghetti ? 

They showed us only 1 busted pylon on the news here tonight....you poor buggers. 

[RGB255_0_0]

more like 20 towers.

Holy hell. 
What on earth do you make those pylons with? Spaghetti ? 

They showed us only 1 busted pylon on the news here tonight....you poor buggers. 

Chinesium steel, as AvE would say.

[Halcyon]

PS A modern built in gas stove isn't a lot of use in power failure as a lot need mains for safety circuits / gas solenoids. Camping gear is useful.

Not true at all, I've never come across a gas stove/cooktop which mandated power to operate. I just built a new home with a modern (and fairly expensive) gas cooktop, which of course, during normal operation requires mains power to create a spark that lights a flame. But in a recent power outage we had, I simply just held in the knob and lit it with a match (yes, I wanted a coffee). The only electrical component in my cooktop is the thing that converts 240v mains into an igniting spark. The safety mechanisms are completely independent. In fact, I think it might even be a requirement under some kind of standard?

Even in cheap cooktop brands (like Omega etc...) the safety cut-outs are purely mechanical and based on thermal differentials. Once the "sensor" gets up to temperature, it holds the gas line open. If there is a 'flame out' it will quite quickly cut the gas as it cools.

I did also try to run my continuous hot water system off a small 650va UPS, it did ignite when I turned the hot water tap on, but I only got a few seconds of hot water before it cut out. I can only assume it pulled too much current (pumps, fans etc..?) or it didn't like the modified sine wave coming from the UPS and the safety mechanisms cut in.

[EEVblog]

more like 20 towers.

Where did you get this image from?

[Halcyon]

more like 20 towers.

Where did you get this image from?

It seems to be wide-spread in the media today Dave. ABC I think published it along with Fairfax media. Who knows though, could be a complete fakery? To me, that seems like a catastrophic failure never seen before. Aren't those sorts of towers just mounted on concrete blocks? The 'triangle' structures higher up should be far stronger in my opinion (that's why they build them that way).

[JPortici]

PS A modern built in gas stove isn't a lot of use in power failure as a lot need mains for safety circuits / gas solenoids. Camping gear is useful.

Not true at all, I've never come across a gas stove/cooktop which mandated power to operate. I just built a new home with a modern (and fairly expensive) gas cooktop, which of course, during normal operation requires mains power to create a spark that lights a flame. But in a recent power outage we had, I simply just held in the knob and lit it with a match (yes, I wanted a coffee). The only electrical component in my cooktop is the thing that converts 240v mains into an igniting spark. The safety mechanisms are completely independent. In fact, I think it might even be a requirement under some kind of standard?

Even in cheap cooktop brands (like Omega etc...) the safety cut-outs are purely mechanical and based on thermal differentials. Once the "sensor" gets up to temperature, it holds the gas line open. If there is a 'flame out' it will quite quickly cut the gas as it cools.

I did also try to run my continuous hot water system off a small 650va UPS, it did ignite when I turned the hot water tap on, but I only got a few seconds of hot water before it cut out. I can only assume it pulled too much current (pumps, fans etc..?) or it didn't like the modified sine wave coming from the UPS and the safety mechanisms cut in.

old gas stove with oven refused to work without electricity (in the old house, maybe 20 years old)
new gas stove, without oven, work without electricity, the main gas valve however does not