Power Grid Vulnerability
Comments discuss the instability, fragility, and frequent failures of electrical power grids, including cascading blackouts, regulatory challenges, overloads from data centers, and vulnerabilities to fires, storms, cyberattacks, or solar events.
Activity Over Time
Top Contributors
Keywords
Sample Comments
No. Power grids are inherently unstable, this appears to have been "just" a cascading failure that couldn't really be planned for.
Most likely you won't have that problem because the power grid will be offline.
The power grid can't be shut down in a few hours.
It's from damage to the electrical grid.
My girlfriend works in a large grid operator (in Europe). According to her there are lots of regulations and contracts on the grid operators about how they must handle reliability. So it's unlikely that Facebook would be liable if this took down half the country, because then it was the grid operator not living up to their agreements on reliability.There are a lot of automated fail-safes on this, and apparently larger industry (which a datacenter is as well) will get disconnected from th
Doesn't look significantly worse than the American power grid ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Until a fire results in the power grid going down...
Relevant parallel thread:"Miscalculation by Spanish power grid operator REE contributed to massive blackout, report finds"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44301186
You should read up on what happens if the grid goes down. It’s not like you can “flip a switch”. If it’s global you’ll have the inability to fix many transformers.
they could blow up the substation connecting it to the grid in that case.