Inspired by the very similar thread about school incidents.

  • @[email protected]
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    910 months ago

    You’d be surprised, how fragile critical infrastructure often is. There was an incident in Europe a few years ago, where a single miscalculation in a planned power line shutdown almost caused the entire European grid to split.

    • Boomkop3
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      710 months ago

      It slowed down a bit, and then we quickly learned that maintaining the perfect 50hz wasn’t actually necessary anymore. Few people still have clocks that depend on it

      • @[email protected]
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        510 months ago

        I’m not talking about the incident in Romania, but in Germany.

        A shipyard needed some wires over a river deactivated and that caused an overload cascade, because the river was the border between two providers who had different assumptions about the capacity of the power lines connecting them.

        • Boomkop3
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          410 months ago

          oh damn, ain’t something. I will be looking into that, thank you!

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months ago

        Clocks, true.

        Computer systems in general, however, will start acting very squirrelly outside of an approved MHz range. Wall warts and power supplies can handle only so much deviation from the norm. It’s why high-end UPS systems do power conditioning to provide a pure sine wave.