[time-nuts] Blackout in Europe and power line frequency jump

Paul Nelson drhydro at qwest.net
Tue Nov 7 02:55:37 UTC 2006


Hi folks- I lurk here from time to time, a piker with only one little 
FE-5650 and a Russian ships' chronometer to my name... oh, a few nixie 
clocks and a scope clock or so- but I saw this post about the power 
outage and thought I might contribute this snippet-

 From the Risks List- http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/24.46.html


      Widespread European power failure

<"Peter G. Neumann" <neumann at csl.sri.com>>

/Sun, 5 Nov 2006 13:17:12 PST/

A high-voltage transmission line was shut down over a river to enable a
presumably large ship to pass.  This is preliminarily being attributed to a
propagating outage that affected something like 10,000,000 people in
Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Belgium and Spain.  [Source: Danna Avsec,
Power failure hits Europe, Associated Press, 05 Nov 2006; PGN-ed, TNX
to Lauren Weinstein for noting this one.]
  http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=58868

Somewhat ironically, my keynote talk at the ACM CCS 06 included discussions
on network-propagating outages in power and telephony, how they keep
recurring despite efforts to avoid them, and how they might be prevented.



time-nuts-request at febo.com wrote:

>Behalf Of Marco IK1ODO
>Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 3:28 PM
>To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
>Subject: [time-nuts] Blackout in Europe and power line frequency jump
>
>Saturday evening part of Europe experienced a blackout, caused, it
>seems, by a single failure in Northern Germany, then propagated up to
>southern Italy.
>
>A friend that routinely monitors the 0-120Hz ULF/ELF frequency spectrum
>captured the power line frequency jump following the fault. 
>Hre are the links:
>
>  
>
> From: time-nuts-bounces at febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces at febo.com] On
>
>>Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2006 13:08:40 +0100
>>To: ulfelf at yahoogroups.com
>>From: Renato Romero <ik1qfk at vlf.it>
>>Subject: Overload in Germany's power network
>>
>>From BBC web site 06 Nov/06:
>>"An overload in Germany's power network triggered outages leaving 
>>millions without electricity on Saturday night."
>>
>>Here my ELF monitoring from Cumiana (NW Italy)
>>
>>http://www.vlf.it/temp/05NOV06-0000_E.jpg
>>Spectrogram by a geophone (up) and electric field (down)
>>
>>http://www.vlf.it/temp/05NOV06-0000_H-rdf.jpg
>>RDF spectrogram, magnetic component, acquired with two orthogonal 
>>minimal loop
>>
>>http://www.vlf.it/temp/fault.jpg
>>Details of the fault: power network frequency get down to 49 Hz for 
>>many minutes,
>>
>>http://www.vlf.it/temp/fault_timeb.jpg
>>Details in the time domain, about 240 mS showed
>>
>>
>>73, de ik1qfk
>>Renato Romero
>>    
>>
>
>
>Renato told me that during the frequency jump a faint 50Hz line was
>still present. Possibly some part of the network that had detached from
>the rest, or is the Russian network not interconnected with the European
>Union?
>
>Marco IK1ODO
>
>  
>
==================--

Paul Nelson W5GNF              "When I go, I want to go quietly, in my
Ames, Iowa                     sleep, like my grandfather- not 
Senior Engineer                screaming, like his passengers."
Sauer-Danfoss Company
(DrHydro at qwest.net)
                               "More hay, Trigger?"
 ex-Cessna 140 N77149 (sigh)   "No thanks, Roy, I'm stuffed."




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