By P Gosselin on 27. September 2022
German Auf1 site here interviews blackout expert Robert Jungnischke on Europe’s growing threat of a unprecedented wintertime blackout. Experts are almost unanimous that a blackout will occur, the only question that remains is when and how long it will be.
Power grid and blackout expert Robert Jungnischke. Image cropped here.
The gas supply bottleneck Europe is intensifying as the weather turns colder earlier than expected. People are preparing by buying electric fan heaters, hoping they’ll be able to keep warm if the gas supply runs out. The problem however, is that these millions of electric fan heaters sold in Europe will end up burdening an already extremely precarious power grid even more.
Already German officials are warning the country “may be facing ‘rolling blackouts’ over the coming winter months” as not only Germany’s but also Europe’s power grid teeter on the brink.
According to Robert Jungnischke, a blackout expert and consultant, many companies and people are poorly prepared, or not prepared at all. So when the blackout arrives, it will be too late to for them. The consequences would be dire. Once a a blackout hits, the total system failure that it causes cannot be fixed so quickly. The damage in terms of economics and lives would be enormous.
Electric chair for computers and electronics
According to Jungnischke, citing power experts, just rebooting the power grid would destroy about 30% of electronic devices such as computers.
The rebooting of an entire power grid after a blackout is a complicated task, as the supply has to match the demand. Both would have to ramp up in unison. Jungnischke explains:
After a blackout, the power gets ramped up, but we have a huge problem. The problem is that there is no load. As I said earlier, power is tied to consumption and the power is regulated accordingly. I have a problem when power needs to be ramped up but there’s not yet any demand. That means the power fluctuates strongly and strongly fluctuating power is death for electronics. That means experts calculate about 30% of computers will be damaged during the ramp up of the power grid.”
He adds that the dependence on solar and wind energy puts not only the German power grid at risk, but also the power supply of all of Europe.
The economic damage resulting from a major blackout would be crippling. Chaos would ensue for weeks or months.
makers of surge guards will , or should, do well. and seeing as “someone” removed the germans ability to recant the idiocy and agree on Nord2(seems the protests to do so were rising) then theyre stuffed.
change of govt overdue as is the dissolution of brussels eu unelecteds
Perhaps a good place to start was when there actually was a widespread European blackout like this one
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
It may not have been a system black, but it did cover a very wide swathe of Europe. Then there was the rather more recent incident when the European grid split into two islanded portions with more limited actual blackout. That indicated that power in France was in fact spending on supply from as far away as Turkey, and the transmission capacity to make that work was inadequate and fell apart on the loss of one link.
The unusual supply patterns being forced on the grid by shortages of exports from France and Germany are certainly going to cause problems. Rotating blackouts are a certainty. As yet the EU has failed to agree on how to share them out, while the UK pretends wrongly that it won’t be affected.
Trump did warn them.
Well, to all, the skeptics in the comments – my computer was destroyed by a local blackout. Normally, if the grid fails, the electricity goes off, and then comes back on again after minutes/hours, so the computer is rebooted once, maybe twice.
What happened this time, was the grid flickered – on/off, on/off dozens of times, with random breaks, from a fraction of a second to a few seconds to a few dozens of seconds. If you have electronics trying to make sense of it, things will get fried.
I now have a UPS that physically shields my computer from interruptions (essentialy it is a big battery topped up from the grid, but the computer is fed by the battery power at all times), but the boilers and any controlled devices are unprotected.