How Power Blackouts Work

This is the final video in the series on the electrical grid for a while. Watch them all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1BMWczn7JM&list=PLTZM4MrZKfW-ftqKGSbO-DwDiOGqNmq53

Here in South Africa they turn the grid off for fun.

Nice demonstration with the 4 led’s

"Idk how much a car that never breaks down would cost" About $1500 on craigslist for a 1994 Camry.....just sayin.

In 2003 at 3 AM Italy had a serious blackout that involved 56 million people. It was caused by a tree flashover on a 400kV line that supplies power from Switzerland to Northern Italy. The loss of the powerline triggered the two 40kV lines from France to trip as well, due to the sudden increase in demand. In 4 seconds GRTN lost control of the power grid, as a series of cascading events plummeted the entire Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily into darkness. As the grid frequency dropped below 47.5Hz a total of 7.5GW of distributed power plants went offline. The blackout lasted for 12 hours, though some regions were affected by rolling blackouts for two more days. In Rome people were stuck in underground trains. All flights were cancelled, and a total of 30.000 people were stranded on trains. Police described the situation as 'chaos', though no major incidents occurred. Though our little power outage was big for Italy it pales in comparison to the 2012 India blackout, which involved 9% of the world population.

I can simultaneously: 1. definitely respect the engineering aspects of blackouts and the safety it brings 2. be utterly frustrated at the years(/decades?) of mismanagement and shunned preventative maintenance that lead to them being required

"Loss of a service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system" well that is a different perspective

Huh, I've never thought of blackout as a safety feature, but it really is. Thanks for an insightful video!

"When the power goes out it probably means things are working as designed to protect the power grid as a whole." Unless you live in certain areas of California, where it means the power company has neglected maintenance for so long that they don't dare keep the power on because it will start more wildfires.

Blackouts are when the darkness escape the powerplants and cover the cities.

During the North East blackout of November, 1965, the “chichen and egg” issue was addressed by by interconnecting a large group of employees’ cars to provide startup power for a plant in Connecticut (might have been Massachusetts) , that plant kickstarted the North East grid back to life. The process was described in an article in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Sometimes I ride around on my bicycle, trying to figure out where all the interconnections of the local power structures go. Keeping track of that must be a major cartography job! Thanks fir the great video!

You missed the opportunity to say "this may come as a shock" in the beginning

Woah! You guys didnt even stretch the video 10 minutes, immense respect for this channel.

I'm happy in Factorio all I have to do when blackout occurs is to take few stacks of coal to restart it and expand my coal mine.

My coffee machine: short circuits Nuclear power plant: explodes

On June 16 2019, here in Argentina, there was an operational error with a 500kv transmission line wich led into a massive blackout leaving the entire country and parts of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil without electricity for at least 13 hours...

Never understood cascading failures until now. Suddenly it makes perfect sense. Thanks, Grady!

I asked my best friend (an engineering student) why Practical Engineering is such a good youtube channel. He answered: "Because they skip the banging your head on the wall phase".

I have a bunch of lineman friends and wish that more people understood this, "loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system"

Thanks for the video. As a Protection and Control Technician for a large Transmission company, I appreciate the simplified explanation of the "zones of protection", as well as the whole video. I never have a good way to explain what I do for a living to people, and next time that happens I'm going to reference this video! You've got a new subscriber in me.