Chaos in Europe

[Alex]

A massive power outage has hit parts of Spain and Portugal. Traffic lights and phone lines are down, the Madrid underground has been evacuated and trains have been stopped.   GB News saying France has had power cut too.

[Raven]

Power Outage or sabotage?

[dextrous63]

Just saw a headline saying cyberattack.

[muddy]

I am in Spain at the moment .
The power has just come on .( 3.30 am)
It went off at 12.30 yester ( lunch time )

It's being said that the cuts were due to wind and solar power destabilising the grid .

I thought it was the Chinese or Putin 🙂

Basically we never went out yesterday except to walk the dog . We went to bed at eight o clock ( hence me waking up at 3.15 am )

Had a bread roll for dinner we had water stored in bottles because nothing worked at all .

This is a forerunner of the future .
 When we are fully dependant on electricity this is what will happen .
And if it's winter and you don't have alternative heating you are Donald ducked .

[klondike]

It's being said that the cuts were due to wind and solar power destabilising the grid .

Now just wash your mouth out with soap. 
How could the saviours of the planet and all who sail upon her adversly impact anything?
Renewables are the magic bullet to solve all our problems including global warming, energy shortages and curing all known ailments. Even haemorrhoids.

[Ashy]

I don't think there is any reason to blame generators (of any type), it's far more like a control systems failure.

These days systems like railways, sewers, electrical supplies and trunk telephony. are controlled by men and women sitting in front of computer screens, or if they are lucky, physical display panels.

Imagine a cyber attack so successful that the main control centres suddenly lost communications with the outside world, everything lights up, alarms go off, breakers drop out, nothing responds to controls. It's even possible that a kind of vicious circle appears where the breaker that supplies the telecoms drops out, and cannot be reset without the comms. 

That's what I think happened. And Spain and Portugal is a very large area to cover by a man in a jeep. In the nature of stories like this, we may not hear exactly what took place.

[muddy]

The electricity produces by solar and wind is more difficult to control as it fluctuates 
When one grid goes down it can cause a domino effect .
As apparently happened in this case .
I am sure there is more to it than that but I'm not getting rid of my alternatives .
At the end of the day my little woodburner will keep me warm and boil a kettle .

[klondike]

They'll deny a cyber attack even if it was. Surprised that they picked renewables to blame though as I'd have expected that to be hushed up too. We are in a period of maximum solar activity so I'm surprised they didn't come up with that one.

The thing I find most odd is that ours didn't go down. It has problems coping some of the time already anyway.

[Mups]

Well I suspect Aliens were behind it all. 

[Ashy]

Imagine this lot conking out, alarms going off all over, and no response to the controls. Maybe even the phones stopped working to call the technicians!

[Mups]

I wonder how hospitals managed?
People on life support or wired up to monitors, or in the middle of Surgery,  or even having to give birth in the pitch dark? 

IF it really was to do with solar power,  probably something to do with all the thousands of acres we've covered in solar panels now!   
Otherise it will be people like Musk,  or Branson  who keep firing huge missiles up into space (like boys and their toys),  and disturbing and polluting the precious atmosphere.

[klondike]

Denying an "atmospheric phenomena" now....

From some random news story...

The cause of the outages remains under investigation, and officials with Portuguese energy company Redes Energéticas Nacionais have denied reports that it was tied to an "atmospheric phenomenon," according to The New York Times. Spanish President Pedro Sánchez has urged people not to speculate.

[muddy]

He did I was listening to him talk on the car radio.

[Ashy]

Most hospitals will have emergency generators, I sincerely hope. 

I'm sticking to my theory of human error. 

[klondike]

Please don't speculate = We are afraid that you might get closer to the truth than the BS we are working on to release.

My money is on a cyber attack and they are afraid of questions like

"How could you let that happen?"
Answer: Our systems are still using Windows XP and we have no idea how they work or how to update them.

In the case of the UK our cash machine network, huge chunks of the NHS and god only knows what else fall into this category plus maybe our national grid.

"Who did it?"
Answer: Probably Russia or China but they took out all our logs too so it could also be Martians.

"What are you going to do about it"
Answer: Bugger all. It will take years and cost billions to fix all the crappy IT systems we paid the Indians to install and we are shit scared of Russia and China.