A Major Blackout Hits Chile, Leaving Millions Without Power

A massive blackout has hit Chile, leaving millions without power and disrupting transportation, businesses, and essential services across 14 of the country's 16 regions. The Associated Press reports: The National Electrical Coordinator, Chile's grid operator, said a disruption had occurred in a high-voltage transmission line that carries power from the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to the capital of Santiago in the country's central valley. It did not say what actually caused the disruption that pushed much of the country's power grid into shutdown, from the northernmost Chilean port of Arica to the southern Los Lagos agricultural region.

Interior Minister Carolina Toha said hospitals, prisons and government buildings were switching on backup generators to keep essential equipment operating. In a press conference, Toha urged the public to stay calm and said officials were racing to put the grid back in operation and restore electric service across the country of some 19 million people. "It's affecting the entire electrical system of the country," she said of the breakdown in the 500-kV backbone transmission line. Toha said if all areas didn't return to normal by sunset the government would take emergency measures to avert a crisis. [...]

Videos on social media from all over Chile, a long ribbon of a country stretching 4,300 kilometers (over 2,600 miles) along the southern Pacific coast, showed chaos at intersections with no functioning traffic lights, people having to use their mobile phones as torches in the underground metro and police dispatched to help evacuate office buildings.

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[registrations_suck]

Dude. Seriously. Stop using logic and just get with the agenda already.

Jezuz.

Re:All eggs in one basket

[fahrbot-bot]

Wait. You have eggs? And enough for a basket? :-)

Re: All eggs in one basket

[RightwingNutjob]

Why don't you dipshits go voluntarily extinct and zero out your carbon footprints?

Re: All eggs in one basket

[vbdasc]

While my body decomposes, it emits carbon dioxide, so I'll take the planet-preserving path and live some more.

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[thegarbz]

Nobody should be eating any eggs at all. [peta.org]

Reading that makes me sad. No chickens should grow into an environment like that. I'm going to start doing my part, I'm going to start eating more eggs to prevent more chickens from having to live in such a scenario!

Every egg eaten is a chicken saved from a life of misery!

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[Anonymous Coward]

You have a basket?

Re: All eggs in one basket

[RightwingNutjob]

I weaved it myself. Underwater.

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[test321]

There is already no alternative to electricity in our civilization. Personal transportation is the least concern if the workplace, school, hospital, train infrastructure, airports... don't have electricity to run their services. This includes disruption in delivery of liquid combustibles to local deposits, since no modern economy runs commerce without electricity.

Convergence to electricity enables to supplement your energy from several sources. This can include liquid combustibles if you expect an interrupt

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[test321]

Good news that nobody at all has ever considered banning them.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Now imagine you live in a country where there's no gas, no alternatives to electricity.

While you imagine that, I'm imaging a country where you have no oxygen. One is as likely as the other and speaks of a mind where electrical power is ubiquitous and reliable. I worked in a remote area where electrical power was available only sporadically for a few hours twice a week The water still ran. The toilets flushed. The food didn't spoil. I still got to work every day and relaxed every night. Quite enjoyable actually - I could hear people actually thinking for themselves instead of right or left win

checking the facts

[higuita]

https://app.electricitymaps.co... [electricitymaps.com]

so looking to all data from this site, since 2017 until now, they have increase the diversity of energy sources!... in 2017, 70% or less of the energy was "unknown", that we can assume either coal or petrol based fuel (can also be other, like hydro storage, but suspect it is not) , and 30% or less from hydro (we even have a 48% one year later)... wind and solar had less than 10% (yes, more than 100%, but looking to peak output). Now, they have 47% of the same "unknown", 42

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[AmiMoJo]

Renewables help keep the grid up and stable, and help recover it if it does go down.

By being distributed, renewables are less likely to be affected by local disasters. That makes it easier to segment the grid in the event of a failure, and keep parts of it working instead of the whole thing going down.

Many of them don't need any help to get restarted either - fossil and nuclear plants need a lot of energy to restart, which typically means another power plant has to be online to bootstrap them. Renewables ca

Atacama Desert

[rossdee]

Atacama Desert?

Isn't that where the Nazca lines are?

It must of been Aliens...

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[Tim the Gecko]

You might be thinking of the Atacama Giant [wikipedia.org]. The Nazca lines are in Peru.

One person who studied Nazca (and Stonehenge) was Gerald Hawkins [the-independent.com], but his obituary has some skepticism:

the fact that a skilled and knowledgeable astronomer today, equipped with all elaborations of modern understanding, can devise a way to use Stonehenge as an observatory or calculator does not in itself prove that was its original use and purpose. Stonehenge, if you made the right observations or moved the stones about in the right way, could be used nowadays to predict the opening hours at Salisbury Museum, or of Sainsbury's in Swindon.

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[cusco]

Maria Reiche studied the Nazca Lines for over half a century. She found that after accounting for precession many of the lines could be dated pretty closely. Alignments indicating the equinoxes seemed quite important, an emphasis found earlier at Chavin and later in the Inca as well. There are "chairs" carved into the bedrock scattered throughout the Andes, very narrow so the observer is constrained to one exact space. Stars of interest such as Sirius rise or set exactly at the valley between two mounta

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[arglebargle_xiv]

Nah, it was the fault of the Biden administration. Or Obama. Or a DEI hire.

Hey, if it works in the US...

Well, that sucks

[cascadingstylesheet]

n/t

not so good for the Chilean Internet

[john_heidemann]

Of course, a country-wide power outage is not so good for the Chilean Internet. It looks like problems started about 18:30Z (3:30pm local time) and got worse quickly [isi.edu], as we descrribe [isi.edu].