
Electrical failure cuts power to all of Argentina and Uruguay, supplier says - jpalomaki
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48652686
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leovernazza
Hi guys, I am a software engineer from Uruguay. I know nothing about
electricity systems.

We are being told by authorities that there is no better system design than
this.

That is, Uruguayan network is interconnected to Argentina, what gives us more
robustness. If something small/medium fails here, Argentina compensates, and
viceversa. This has improved our system for many years.

However, it seems to have this very improbable issue. If something big happens
in Argentina (which is much bigger than us), there is no way Uruguay can
supply the energy they need to keep running.

Is there any other way to interconnect two electric networks (having more
robustness for the normal cases) but avoiding this kind of high-impact issues?

From a computer network point of view, this doesn’t make much sense, but there
are physical limits here I guess...

Why can’t we just have some kind of limit condition to switch the connection
off, instead of trying to rescue the other network?

Thanks for your explanation.

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rocqua
Am I the only one linking this to the news of America having infiltrated
Russian power plants?

Given the timing, it feels like some state flexing.

~~~
forinti
I thought about that too.

Maybe they were trying something new on a development environment, or testing
something that should have worked in production. That would be funny.

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mardoqueo
Pretty weird situation, and it's election day here in Santa Fe province.
Luckily cell towers stood online all the time. Now slowly coming back. Follow
energy demand live from here:
[http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx](http://portalweb.cammesa.com/Pages/ADemandas.aspx)

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samcday
Does something like this ordinarily receive an extremely in-depth and public
post-mortem?

~~~
Dangeranger
That depends on the country of origin and the cause. If this happened in the
US it would require an extensive filing with NERC and most likely several
public hearings before regulators and lawmakers. Then laws would be written to
attempt to prevent the incident in the future. For example, see the
repercussions from the 2003 Northeast Blackout [0].

If this was caused by state actors, in part or whole, then I would expect most
hearings and reports about it to be less public, and occur behind closed
doors.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003)

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canada_dry
> causing trains to be halted and failures with traffic signalling. It came as
> people in parts of Argentina were preparing to go to the polls for local
> elections.

According to this: [https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-
ca...](https://www.as-coa.org/articles/argentinas-2019-electoral-calendar)

... there are only a couple Gubernatorial elections, so likely unrelated.

With all the talk of the USA ramping up efforts to disrupt Russia's power
grid, could it be that some out-in-the-wild exploit hit an unintended target?
I couldn't find any info on who provided Argentina with their equipment.

~~~
H8crilA
Electrical power issues are very common in Buenos Aires (blackouts in blocks
of the city, as well as very poor quality of the delivered power, resulting in
damages to power supply units). I'd rather bet on the general dysfunction of
the state rather than a concerted external effort.

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forinti
El Pais of Uruguay says some parts of the interior have power.

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anticensor
A similar outage happened in Turkey back in 2015.

