āBut the [Jordan] Peterson crying videos mostly make me sad for him because of how seriously he takes himself, and how rarely, one finds the man laughing. These videos also make me think of something even sadder thanāas Slavoj Zizek once remarkedāhow difficult it is to āelicit from [Peterson] a jokeā: the life and death of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Self-reliant bootstrapping rhetoric draws heavily on the Nietzschean exaltation of the Ubermensch and the will to power. Yet ironically, Nietzscheās death was sadly unNietzschean. Lonely, physically ailing, driven to madness, and plagued by an āurge for the truthā (which he āso detestedā), he found himself calling into question the worldview he constructed upon the rejection of all external authorities.ā
ā Stephen G. Adubato: āBeyond the Cult of Self-Reliant Bootstrappingā
As it approaches a full week, Venezuela's national power outage shows just how hard it is to restart a grid from scratch.
(...)Ā Government statements and reports indicate that the blackout stems from a problem at the enormous Guri dam hydropower plant in eastern Venezuela, which generates 80 percent of the country's electricity. And the already arduous process of restoring power seems hobbled by years of system neglect. It's also unclear whether Venezuela has the specialists, workforce, and spare equipment available on the ground to triage the situation quickly.
"The challenge with black start is always just knowing specifically what happened," says Nathan Wallace, director of cyber operations and a staff engineer at secure grid companies Cybirical and Ampirical Solutions. "It sounds like there may be lack of maintenance and some mismanagement. And typically if a system hasnāt been maintained, that means they really donāt have the visualization needed to understand the state of the system in real time. If the procedure for black start is not accurately representing the state of the system, there can be problems."
A black start generally involves seeding power from an independent sourceālike small diesel generators or natural gas turbinesāto restart power plants in an otherwise dead transmission network. This process is often called bootstrapping. Hydroelectric plants in particular can be designed to essentially black-start themselves. In these plants, waterāoften from a dam, as in the case of Guriāflows through a turbine, which spins it, powering an electric generator. Since it takes relatively little independent energy to open the water intake gates and potentially generate a lot of power very quickly, hydroelectric plants can work well for black start. It is unclear whether Venezuela's Guri plant is designed with this scenario in mind.
What makes any black-start process especially complicated is the need to load balance a system, so that as power surges through, the supply from the generator matches the demand. Otherwise the generation plant will run too fast or be exhausted, causing the system to fail again.
"Itās a large stepwise process to build up load, build up generation, build up more load, build up more generation until theyāve got enough reliability to go to the next element of the system(...).Ā
Venezuela's grid is based on a classic model of bulk power generation. From a centralized plantāin this case, Guriāsubstations transform electricity from low to high voltage so it can be transmitted all over the country and then converted back down to lower voltage for local distribution. This is fairly typical in small countries, though some prioritize adding diverse generation or connecting with neighboring grids to increase redundancy. Black-start researchers and practitioners say, though, that any model has pros and cons. While distributed systems don't have a single point of generation failure, they can be more difficult to black start if they do go down, since more generation sites need to be bootstrapped and there are more loads to balance.
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