Whole of Sri Lanka hit by power blackout
Water supply and road traffic disrupted for seven hours after main power station suffers ‘technical issue’
Why?
The public utilities regulator said there would be an inquiry into the failure and gave the state-run electricity monopoly, the Ceylon Electricity Board, three days to explain the disruption.
Ah.
Socialists point to the recent rolling blackouts in California as proof that the private sector has failed.
‘Ceylon’ Electricity Board?
I though ‘Ceylon’ was British imperialism, and that anyone who used instead of Sri Lanka was an out of touch Little Englander.
Kalifornia Kommie eco-freak bullshit has failed.
I don’t know if eco-freakery was forced on engineers by the scummy state or if Kali airheads eng are already woke off their own bats but result same either way.
Eco-freakery carries the blame.
Someone drugged the donkey !
tom – perhaps counter-intuitively nowadays, Sri Lanka is comfortable with the colonial past and monuments and place names that evoke the period survive there while being cancelled here. Ceylon survives in the Bank of Ceylon, Ceylon Transport Board and predates the British administration by a goodish long time, depending on the spelling.
I’m in a critical situation, my last 2kg (about 20 weeks supply) of tea. The caddy in front of me reads: “Loolecondera BOP Fannings. Pure Ceylon Tea packed in Sri Lanka.”
That made me laugh out loud
I am mildly following Third World countries that cannot keep the lights on. Beirut has had a lot of problems lately and one of the accusations is that the government is being paid not to repair the electric network by the private generators. May be true,
India and especially Pakistan can’t. The Philippines can’t. South Africa used to and now it can’t. Can’t imagine why.
California and parts of Australia seem to be going the Green return-to-the-stone-age route.
I have had the misfortune of dealing with the Sri Lankan petty officialdom. I am amazed they have kept the lights on this long.
“Whole of Sri Lanka hit by power blackouts”.
Perhaps the (state owned) hamster died and it will take 3 days to train a new one?
Given the wholesale destruction of grid stability criteria in the UK with reducing inertia (neither solar nor wind supply much or any), unpredictable generating capacity (clouds, local wind variations), and local generation that is perpetually in danger of disappearing (tight limits on grid conditions to remain connected), I’m thinking we’ll be in Black Start country in the UK before too long.
Minor technical issues leading to some disaster are an example of “instability” in a system.
Recently there has been an XKCD comic about supposed bits of tech infrastructure that would, if they failed, bring down the whole edifice above them.
This spawned some Twitter discussion about supposedly fragile supply chains, including a researcher who claimed such fragility would be an impediment to suddenly scaling up vaccine production: https://twitter.com/PalliThordarson/status/1295492664893165568
There was a lot of similar discussion when supermarkets briefly had emptier shelves than usual back in April.
My conjecture is that supply chains, even “just in time” ones, are in fact robust, on account of the self interest of the people involved in them, and the price signals of the market and so on. The appearance of fragility comes from somewhere else, possibly the mind of the observer lacking all the information.
Tim, do you see what I’m getting at? I have a feeling you would have something to say about this, possibly involving exotic metals.