Posted on 03/11/2019 1:45:09 PM PDT by catnipman
On Thursday, the San Geronimo B substation in the center of the country, which supplies electricity to four out of five Venezuelans from the massive Guri hydropower plant, went down.
No date has been set to restart the plant and most workers were told to stay home on Monday
...
Other experts, including Mr. Aguilar, said the magnitude of the blackout indicated the problem was caused by a major failure inside Guri’s turbines. A Corpoelec supervisor involved in dispatching Guri’s power said he was told by the plant’s managers on Thursday that the plant’s equipment was damaged.
...
Mr. Aguilar ... said the government has tried to restart Guri four times since the start of the blackout on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Also, there have been a *lot* of problems with Francis turbines of late: https://phys.org/news/2015-05-hydropower-turbine-failure.html
Those people just fear great social progress, equality, and a strong Venezuela.......but.......with the right people in charge..........
/s
re: “Corpoelec union leader Ali Briceño said it was brush fire under the 765 KV trunkline which caused a surge in the system and caused Guri to shut down.”
I don’t want to put this in the classification as “idiocy”, but it’s close.
ANY ‘short’ on any of the HV transmission lines is REFLECTED BACK into the rotating machinery as a change in TORQUE and this will be seen as stress and strain on every winding in the ROTOR and STATOR.
They likely killed some steam turbogenerators as they are termed.
This will take some time, maybe years, to fix at their rate of pace (into the ground) ...
I guess socialists don’t believe in redundancy.
Thailand?
Your points are well made.
With 20 turbines, the it seems to me the probability of total turbine failure seems unlikely. I can visualize a turbine problem that developed a control situation that the inexperienced and incompetent staff could not handle. Efforts to solve the problem made at gunpoint exacerbated the problems to the point of unresolvability by other parties than the manufacturer.
We can now encourage further speculative and informed discussion
don’t forget wreckers and kulaks ...
He’s wearing duck britches.
You can see his quack!
Venezuela had huge problem with it's electrical infrastructure even before the socialist came to power. I worked with an engineers from there. He talked about a steam turbine that would spin up to 200 rpm with all the stop and control valves closed. All steam turbines have a Stop/Intercept valve that closes immediately when the turbine trips. This valve sits between the turbine and boiler. This should prevent the unit from over speeding. For the turbine to move at all with this valve closed is disastrous. He also mentioned that many of the units he encountered were operated with the voltage regulator in manual mode. If the generator field breaker didn't open at the same time as the generator breaker you would indeed see a large voltage spike on the generator.
I am guessing that when the High Voltage line failed the protective systems started to kick in. These should have automatically closed water flow valves and opened generator breakers. If the water flow valves didn't close in a timely manner it is possible one or more units went to over speed. Thermal units are designed to withstand a ten percent over speed event. I do not know what the max amount is for a hydro turbine generator set. I do know that you can spin one apart if they are not shut down in a timely manner. Secondly one or more units may have suffered a catastrophic voltage spike causing insulation failure.
It could be as simple as nobody remembers how to black start the generating plants. Power plants require electricity to start themselves. Plants that are capable of starting themselves after a shut down with no external power source are said to be black start plants. The problem comes is that black start capabilities are very seldom tested end to end, you have to shut down everything and bring it up from scratch. They may never have even really designed the generating station with a tested black start capability. Also, even if they have the ability the units have likely suffered years of total neglect. They will need time to work around each issue the neglect causes.
One other thing to keep in mind is that all of these protective systems kick in automatically. Generators spin 60 times a second. When power engineers talk about events on the grid they speak in terms of cycles. The two large blackouts that hit the western United States in 1996 or 97 were both over in less than 12 cycles, one fifth of a second. Simply put human beings can't react that fast, at least not to an event that happens maybe once a year. If the operators had bypassed safety systems hoping to catch problems before they led to catastrophe it may have finally caught up with them.
yeah, i checked that wiki article out too ...
gens could have been irreparably damaged if not shut down quick enough after suddenly losing their load, say if the main transmission lines and/or main substation suddenly failed ...
a combination of sensors and computer control systems would have had to react very quickly to shut down those gens under such circumstances. those kinds of systems would be somewhat delicate and would have had to be continuously and properly operated, tested, maintained, repaired and replaced ...
I’m thinking the same thing. If one power plant provides 75% of the country’s power, then that plant should have a team of engineers on site 24/7 who know how to fix anything that breaks in that plant. The engineering team should also have replacement components stored at the hydro-power plant for all key equipment at the plant, so they don’t have delays in shipping in replacement equipment. This long power outage is the result of incompetent management and corruption by a group of socialist thugs who have been running Venezuela into the ground for decades and skimming off billions of dollars in oil revenue.
It sounds like a huge mess, and I expect to see a team of Russians flying in soon on cargo planes loaded with replacement equipment. But I’m not sure even Russia has all the right kinds of replacement equipment. This mess may take weeks to fully repair.
Accusations that a cyber-attack by the USA caused this lengthy power outage are ridiculous. Cyber-attacks are just attacks on computing devices and servers that are connected to the internet. There’s no need for computers at a hydro-power plant to be connected to the internet. They could easily replace any damaged computers and then disconnect the local network from the internet and restart the plant, if that’s what the problem is. But the problems are apparently much larger breakdowns of heavy machinery and heavy electrical equipment. This is another example of the endless destruction and humanitarian crises caused by socialism and communism throughout history.
Who will need electricity when the streets will be lit by the burning buildings?
We need one of those showing the blackout in VZ compared to “normal”.
Real Venezuela history on the internet! Not fake CNN news!
Meanwhile, enjoy your lights and your soon to be served extravagant last meal.
How you gonna lie about it now, huh?
You will end up like so many DICtators:
Funny thing, he was named Nicolae, too.
I’ll bet China has been in talks with them for a long while and will extend them credit in exchange for a military base there.
‘China would be in the same boat as Japan when they bought the NYC real estate. Nice, but you can’t take it home.’
Japan bought premium golf courses, country clubs, restaurants, wineries and homes throughout California.
Then, they fired every American working in those places and hired cheap labor.
Those systems collapsed under the long range and terrible Japanese management.
I’ve worked under Japanese management twice, for Fuji Film and for Konica. The American top management was corrupt in both cases. I don’t know if it comes down from Japan that way, or if corruption is endemic in the US.
Probably worse than Venezuela. No banking, no credit card, no fuel pumps working, stores all dark and looted.
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