System separation in the Continental Europe Synchronous Area on 8 January 2021

You know what I&#x27;m missing? The almost realtime map from ucte.org which updated every 3 to 5 seconds on my Pentium3 933 with only 512MB Ram in the browser.<p>I think it needed some plugin, either Java or Flash, but you could zoom in or out, either to the whole of Europe, or down to the substations in the cities and towns.<p>It was like google maps or similar. AND it had <i>all</i> the transmission lines, power plants, and substations.<p>And color coded lines, with KW&#x2F;MW&#x2F;GW and arrows indicating the direction of energy flow on them.<p>Anybody could view it without having an account there. At least I did, from time to time.<p>This way of viewing it in realtime is now gone, or at least not accessible to the general public anymore.<p>Does anybody know some equivalent?<p>Sites with bargraphs and charts need not apply.

How does this affect timekeeping? Normally, if there is a drop in grid frequency, a small increase will be planned later to maintain a long term average frequency of 50Hz so that clocks that keep time by grid frequency stay accurate [0].<p>The network split seems to have made this impossible, during the split, the cycle counts for the two regions diverged, and the split ended before this was reconciled. Will people in one of the regions have to adjust their clocks?<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Timekeeping" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Tim...</a>

Infosec slant: such investigations are made way easier by precise timestamping (everything happens in a few milliseconds), but the source of truth (GPS or other GNSS) is usually pretty easily spoofable if you only intend to move the time a few milliseconds. Galileo has a project addressing this (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;regexpert&#x2F;?do=groupDetail.groupMeetingDoc&amp;docid=36951" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;transparency&#x2F;regexpert&#x2F;?do=groupDetail....</a>) but AFAIK it&#x27;s not in the signal yet. And once it is, it will take years for the devices doing the satellite time to PTP to be replaced&#x2F;updated.

AFAIK the continental synchronous area frequency is long-term-synchronized to atomic time (i.e. the cumulative grid time must stay within X seconds of the reference clock).<p>Looking at the (partial) graph suggests that the south-east part ran faster for the entire duration of the disconnection.<p>Does this mean grid-synced clocks in the south-east part are now permanently ahead of the atomic reference, or are they planning a mitigation (which I assume would have to mean disconnecting again and running the SE part slower for a bit)?

What puzzles me is why everyone talks about <i>clocks</i>..!<p>Clock synchronisation is a nice side effect, but what amazes me is how it is possible to keep this thing swinging somewhat synchronously year after year, and how huge chunks of it doesn&#x27;t crash and burn when events like this happens.<p>(I have worked as a consultant for a power supplier, I was more puzzled afterwards : )

Relevant Wikipedia article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Synchronous_grid_of_Continental_Europe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...</a><p>Must admit I’ve never heard of this before :-)

I was wondering if someone could explain the countermeasures for such an event. Obviously, as the article states, producers are being shut off in the regions with surplus, while drains, who can afford to shut off, are shut off in the deficit regions.<p>Is this an automatic process? Or is it more like someone from the company&#x27;s energy provider calls them and tells them to shut off some devices? And is there not a potential problem, that if too many shut of at once, you now have a surplus again? Or is it coordinated by one single entity?

Something similar happened in 2018. However, it was not a technical problem but a conflict between the power grid operators in Serbia and Kosovo.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;clocks-in-europe-are-running-late-because-of-the-kosovo-conflict&#x2F;a-42867061" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dw.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;clocks-in-europe-are-running-late-beca...</a><p>I believe that if you adjusted your clock during the conflict you had to adjust it again when it was resolved as the resolution was to increase the frequency for a period to reverse the loss of frequency.

Previously, from the 8th: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25685646" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25685646</a>

Seems like an excellent example that preventing a single point of failure means nothing if your system doesn&#x27;t have the extra capacity to handle a single failure.

Aha so this is what caused that big frequency drop people had already reported. Interesting!

I wonder what are the benefits of keeping the grid synchronous?<p>Would it be possible to have multiple smaller grids, still interconnected, but without being kept in sync?<p>I&#x27;m not sure if what I&#x27;m saying is possible or efficient, but converting AC to DC, transmitting the energy, then converting DC to AC so the frequency becomes irrelevant.

There was a incident in Turkey (31 march 2015) that caused a country wide blackout. From what I understand the west side and the east side loose sync. The west side had under supply and the east side had over supply.

If you design an electricity grid to never partition, then you need to keep a substantial headroom of transmission equipment unused to prevent cascading failures leading to a partition in case of failure of just one or two sites.<p>Instead, an electricity grid should be able to survive any partition like this while still keeping all frequencies within the nominal range. The total cost of such a system is lower in most cases (you need more idling generation capacity or droppable load, but less transmission capacity)<p>The EU system here failed to do either here.