2 ms·

This news cycle was pretty hilarious (and just as sad) to hunt through. From what I deciphered, the actual suggested cause was "aeolian vibrations" [0], which

This news cycle was pretty hilarious (and just as sad) to hunt through. From what I deciphered, the actual suggested cause was "aeolian vibrations" [0], which is one of the three forms of wind-induced conductor vibrations according to this [1] IEEE article. Also known as "flutter" according to Wikipedia [2]. (I'm not in EE so can't confirm nor debunk.) Connected to this, another seemingly made-up term that made the news cycle was "Ging-induced vibrations" (in Portuguese media). Now, I don't speak Portuguese, but all my efforts hunting down this mysterious Ging tremendously failed. However, when I plopped ging into translation models, I couldn't help but notice that "ginga" in Portuguese means "swing", as in cable swing. So I'm giving it pretty reasonable chances that "ging" (no capitalization) might be what "flutter" is in English, i.e. the industry slang for "aeolian vibrations" there. And then the rest was just a typical journo move, much in the way of "the hacker known as 4chan". In any case, it would have been cool if anyone actually linked to where said company made their statement, so that people could independently verify what was actually being said. From what I read, they have since explicitly debunked that they were inventing any new niche atmospheric effects. It's incredibly disheartening that such basic bits of information can become this seriously distorted before going viral, even (especially?) in this day and age. Makes you wonder how trustworthy are the regular news, even biases nonwithstanding, that aren't so readily obvious to be bollocks. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-VzxRfPHjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-VzxRfPHjU [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4773888 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4773888 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockbridge_damper#Wind-induced_oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockbridge_damper#Wind-induce...

plorg 2y ago
I'm part of a listserve for power systems engineers (more from academia than from industry) and the consensus seems to be that a couple of trips in short succession caused wild swings in powerflows, resulting in a cascading failure - this is a pretty boring, if consequential, N-2 event, very similar to the 2005 Northeast Blackout in the US.
miguelmurca 2y ago
Ginga is a Brasilian Portuguese word. I spent all of the day of the blackout listening to the radio (as you might guess) and not once heard the terms "ging" or "ging-induced". Also, ginga would not be swing as in cable swing, it would be swing as in swing dance (rhythmic movement specifically to music). When possible explanations were put forward in the media, they were attributed, usually either to the portuguese representative of REN (the Chinese company supplying power structure to the country) or to an analogous representative of Spain (where the fault originated). It was always pretty clear that the fault was unknown, since this was stated plainly by the aforementioned representatives and the prime minister. I respect the language barrier, but it would be good to take it into account.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  Thank you, that's insightful. Seems like the machine translators misled me pretty hard there.

plorg 2y ago

I'm part of a listserve for power systems engineers (more from academia than from industry) and the consensus seems to be that a couple of trips in short succession caused wild swings in powerflows, resulting in a cascading failure - this is a pretty boring, if consequential, N-2 event, very similar to the 2005 Northeast Blackout in the US.

miguelmurca 2y ago

Ginga is a Brasilian Portuguese word. I spent all of the day of the blackout listening to the radio (as you might guess) and not once heard the terms "ging" or "ging-induced". Also, ginga would not be swing as in cable swing, it would be swing as in swing dance (rhythmic movement specifically to music). When possible explanations were put forward in the media, they were attributed, usually either to the portuguese representative of REN (the Chinese company supplying power structure to the country) or to an analogous representative of Spain (where the fault originated). It was always pretty clear that the fault was unknown, since this was stated plainly by the aforementioned representatives and the prime minister. I respect the language barrier, but it would be good to take it into account.

perching_aix 2y ago
Thank you, that's insightful. Seems like the machine translators misled me pretty hard there.