4 ms·
The grid is supposed to tolerate any single failure, even under full load. Of course sometimes the first failure is a fire or equipment malfunction and the seco
by wongarsu 2y ago
The grid is supposed to tolerate any single failure, even under full load. Of course sometimes the first failure is a fire or equipment malfunction and the second failure is a planning failure or someone pressing the wrong button.
- AdamN 2y agoGrey failures are harder for large systems to handle. If a chunk goes hard down that's usually easy. Something like voltage oscillations that trigger cascading failures in a sequence can lead to negative feedback loops that bring it all down.
- alexey-salmin 2y agoCascade failures are common. The weakest link fails, load gets re-distributed evenly, the second-weakest link fails and so on. In theory [a flawed one] you've had enough spare capacity to survive N failures and N+1 failures are statistically unlikely because p^(N+1) is close to zero. On practice [or with a better theory] you can't multiply probabilities in a grid system because random variables aren't independent. 30% spare capacity can go to -100% in a second.