How did we subsidized east European erotic call centers?
And weird accusations like we Germans did this on purpose like mafia
There is not a source I read about Germany as a country did this.
I understand that German people were using those lines and made it therefore profitable but that's not what the word subsidize implies.
And regarding single Germans: they probably also not subsidized it.
They were either customers or investors
I completely agree that we need more data.
The German government has never issued a firm and unequivocal denial that they subsidize erotic call centers, neither now nor at any time in the past.
It is interesting that more moderate Germans do not condemn the more radical erotic call center supporters amongst their countrymen.
Their silence on this matter speaks volumes.
In that sense, it is not incorrect about the configuration of utility power because it doesn't say anything about that subject.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if some utilities have started installing smart meter upgrades or inline compressors or computer-controlled valves that don't have generators attached to them.
I hope it goes down a couple hours later?
Around here (Germany) your phone and internet is also dependent on a junction box with routers somewhere within half a mile or so of your home having power. But they have four hours of battery backup, and on normal-sized outages they send people out with diesel generators when the batteries start running low (prioritizing business customers). Having it go down from power loss is a decision made in triage, not something that just happens
Asking, coz Canada here. Power outages aren't uncommon (when I say that I mean: expect at least one that makes you get out the generator in 'shoulder season' per year), coz power lines (not talking transmission lines) are mostly above ground, except in large cities of course. But as soon as you get out of the "center" (which depending on city is larger or smaller too) it's good old wooden poles that carry power on the top and cable / phone on the lower level.
Bucket transformer[1] on a pole near you blows up is a favourite but the lines are actually fine, including your cable / DSL. Last time we also lost internet it took about 24 hours after power went out that internet went down as well. Cell phone service from the same company was still fine. The entire metro area was out of power for days and I guess they prioritized topping up the diesel/LP for those.
[1] These guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_transformer
What does happen are smaller scale outages. Power lines are mostly buried along streets and under the sidewalk, just like telephone lines. That doesn't stop the occasional excavator digging too deep and taking a street off the grid. At an individual level it's extremely uncommon, maybe once a decade. But deploy thousands of boxes with networking equipment all around the country and it happens to your equipment all the time.
The 2006 one I had read about before. I love reading timelines of such disasters. Shows how hard this actually is and how much work it is to keep it all running.
Here's another one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003#Tim... And speaking of Canada and power lines (this time it does include transmission lines) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic... While not so severe this is basically the kind of thing I was referring to us happening in "shoulder season". There's usually at least one ice storm or very wet snow event at the start and/or end of winter now and it's very likely that in our wooded area we get trees into power lines and boom the buckets go. When we're lucky it's localized and crews are available to come out and fix it in a few hours. If it's all over the place then it's gonna take a while and they'll have crews from other provinces and the US come in to help as well.
I'd be interested in your outlook on the future of the grid in Germany and Europe though. Of course when France takes a nuke offline, that's usually planned, even when done for a "river water temperature emergency" it's gonna take a while and you can bring that coal plant online like you mention. But doesn't Germany want to reach the climate goals it set itself? How does coal make sense there? And how is shutting down their own nukes a thing when it's OK to use French nuke power?
Or some natural gas, which is quicker. If you have the gas. Re: Russia.
In all of the European (NATO) countries together, is there enough generation capacity if you assume zero Russian inputs (save for say untraceable third party transit or resources) and half of France's nukes going offline? Especially when the sun doesn't shine because bad weather and thus the winds are so high that you have to shut down your wind turbines?
That's where a large, sparsely populated country is a real disadvantage. "Trees into powerlines" isn't really an event in Germany, since high voltage lines are 150 feet up in the air and kept clear of trees (they'll just cut a line though a forest for them). And everything smaller is generally buried. But that would be very hard to do in Canada. And of course we don't have to fight with ice on our transmission lines.
> How does coal make sense there?
Lobbying. And saving the jobs of hard-working coal miners is more romantic and appealing in election campaigns than saving the jobs of wind turbine manufacturers.
It used to make economic sense in the sense that coal plants were cheaper to run, but that has changed in recent years so what you see now is mostly inertia
> And how is shutting down their own nukes a thing when it's OK to use French nuke power?
Oh, there are lots of protests against French nuclear plants too, especially those in the border regions. We just can't do much about them. But the people who don't like nuclear plants aren't the ones running the energy markets.
On the future: Before 2022 the idea was to transition all coal capacity to gas. This was mostly happening on its own anyways due to gas outcompeting coal on price, and new pipelines like Nordstream were going to accelerate that economic pressure to transition. The Ukraine war was a big setback for that.
In the end I believe we are still moving to a future where a lot of power is coming from solar and offshore wind, with natural gas peaker plants to offset times without wind until grid-scale battery technology moves a bit along (molten salt, hot sand, pumped hydro in abandoned mines, etc). In addition to that obviously hydro and pumped hydro from the Scandinavian countries
We are far enough into economies of scale that the generation side is mostly going to sort itself out on economics alone. Solar is becoming dirt cheap, offshore wind is becoming profitable, natural gas is cleaner and cheaper than coal. The bigger issue are transmission lines. Building transmission lines takes decades because every NIMBY fights against them. But the existing transmission lines are built around a somewhat even spread of supply and demand, versus the new situation where we want offshore farms in the North Sea to be able to supply lots of electricity to the South when there's good wind, and the solar panels in the South to help power the North. And politicians from certain parties love to side with "their" NIMBYs for easy political points
Something is only really a backup if the actual fuel is on site, at this point
But if you need enough backup capacity to survive something a multi-state, multi-day blackout [1] that probably gets expensive.
You wouldn't need that for a premium erotic call processor, but a 911 call exchange might, for the portion of their workload they can't pass off to another exchange.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
If you can't get gasoline within a day's drive then there's bigger problems in the world.
For example some can run gas/propane/natural gas
my dude i cannot tell you how much i love these stories of non-faang, real world engineering for extreme reliability.
thank you for posting that.
back then running leased lines would've been way too expensive. So what did the kids running the show did? They got wind of a central office in an older part of Budapest have excess capacity so they rented an apartment in the next building and drilled the wall :D no expensive trenching, no expensive equipment to demultiplex landlines, nothing, just a bunch of wires running straight from the CO equipment into retail modems... We had no idea what we were doing, mind you. I was already doing Linux at the time so among the few installers I was the lucky guy who got to install the Internet at a small business who wanted it to be done on a Solaris workstation. That was a fun challenge... Other installs were Trumpet Winsock. The ISP itself ran a custom linux app, you dialed in and landed on a text app or maybe it was Lynx? can't quite remember, it's been 30 years...
If you're going to come from a different circuit, see if you can at least pull it from a different phase, if we're talking a 120v circuit on 240v service (typical US home service). It's a small improvement, but I'd say 10%+ of the power outages I've seen have been just a single phase going out.
On a commercial 3 phase service, yes, connect redundant PSUs to separate phases, since each phase on the panel actually corresponds to each phase of the grid.
I believe that's a USA peculiarity. Where I live, the usual residential and commercial wiring is from 13.8 kV to 127V/220V through a three-phase delta-wye transformer, in which the primary connects between each pair of phases, and the secondary connects between one phase and the neutral (the high-voltage primary side does not have a neutral). When one phase of the high voltage side is lost (very common, since each high-voltage phase is a separate wire and has an independent fuse upstream of the transformer), what happens is that one phase of the low voltage side stays normal (the one between the two intact high voltage phases), and the other two have a lower voltage which varies depending on their relative load.
Yep. Sounds like you have true 3-phase service, whereas most places in the US just get split-phase.
All depends on how it failed.
I don't have a power outage more than once a year, but we manage to blow a breaker more than a few times a decade (vacuum + water boiler was one).
The two different power sources are different shapes.
To someone who’s setup things in datacentres, it seems pretty reasonable to see that could be 2 different circuits.
Of course it should be 2 separate plugs with the 2 different shapes in them.
As for batteries you can just get a UPS system that supports adding extra batteries to it.
As an example, way back then when this was a very lucrative business, we placed the servers for a premium number erotic call in an industrial park on the border of two districts in Budapest because that's where we could get two independent power feeds without running our own lines. Internet connection wise, one was a simple leased line the other was a microwave connection to very far away. Short of bombing the entire site it was fair impossible for the installation to go offline and -- for the six years I knew about it, it never did. Note the site served German callers, that's where the big bucks came from.