Thread by @Prune602

‼️ Russia: Mass Power outage in Primorsky Krai

It did shut down the railways.

Here’s a thread about what *appears* to be the cause and what are the repercussions.

Here is nice summation of what is reported to have happened. I’m going to explain what it means

fontanka.ru/2024/08/16/739…

We going to first be using this website which is the open infrastructure map (very handy) and hopefully it defaults to showing electrical infrastructure for you.

openinframap.org/#6.41/46.965/1…

The fault (electrical problem) was reported to occurs in relation to the 500kV transmission. That would be the stuff in purple.

High voltages are used for longer distance power transmission because there are less losses that way. This is really really high voltage.

This article indicated that the problem was a fault on a specific power line.

kommersant.ru/doc/6903416

The power line described as having the fault is the 500kV power (in purple) between the Khekhtsir-2 substation and the Primorskaya GRES Power Plant.

I’ve shown them on picture

This is Russia’s most southern point on the Pacific coast. So it’s a dead end for the power grid.

As we zoom in on the Primorskaya GRES Power Plant, we can see that all of the connections to the rest of Russia’s power grid travel through this substation. (Like I said, dead end)

There is only one 500kV connection to the rest of Russia’s power grid and it had the fault.

When the fault occurred on that line, it caused frequency drop. This likely triggered the protection equipment at the Power Plant to stop trip.

This is what it’s supposed to do. Like tripping a breaker at home.

*sigh* I started trying to explain all the things that could have caused everything (or most of everything) to go off line south of this substation.

Then I realized it’s a lot, a most of you probably don’t care, and may get lost/lose/focus. I realize this is my jam, but maybe not yours. And I have been guilty of making people’s eyes glaze over.

I get deep into talking power stuff and my mother often declares “I’m mentally mast*rbating” and that I should get to the point.

Just know, there’s a lot of reasons it all goes down. Even if they can supply enough power to support themselves independently of the grid.

The trip will still occur.

Someone will need to go investigate the problem (what caused the trip).

These sorts of trips should be incredibly rare, (but Russia is Russia so who knows)

As long as they know that was the location of the fault AND they possess enough power generation capability WITHOUT needing that 500kV feed, then they should be able to begin restoring power without that feed.

But you can’t turn it all back on at once. Certain things LIKE TRANSFORMERS have large inrush currents.

That means that if you turned everything on at once, the power demand would be incredibly high, and things would trip again.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inrush_cu…

So turning everything back on again takes time because of this.

This appears to be the situation that Primorsky Krai is in at the moment. They’ve got the substation online and they slowly turning everything else back on.

It’s unclear yet what the problem was with the transmission line OR if that issue has been resolved. They could be restarting without it, and it doesn’t look like there anything else that branches off from it.

But there are other impacts like THE RAILWAYS!

Train traffic in Primorsky Krai was suspended due to the outage.

This should be temporary. However…

kommersant.ru/doc/6894152

If we look at the Open Railways Map (I’ve switched it to display by track gauges), we can see that there are a few important connections that were complicated.

For example the only rail connection to North Korea. And there’s rail connections to China.

openrailwaymap.org

If I zoom out a bit, you can see why the Far East is a railway bottleneck. There isn’t enough infrastructure.

So if you consider the overall locomotive availability problem, transport through the Far East suffers from that AND traffic jams! 🍿
It gets worse…

Any of these gauge change locations between China and Russia have been problematic because stuff has to be moved from one train to another at these locations.

In addition there is a miss match between how long the train can be in Russia vs China. (It’s a mess)

In addition you have Vladivostok which is a port city.

When you look at the Eastern Russian Railway networks, you’ll see that there aren’t a lot of locations on the pacific for things to enter and exit via sea.

Vladivostok is one of them

You might be thinking “But Prune, you said this was just a temporary thing and things will go back online soon. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that the railways were already under stress.

And the area’s in the Far East are some of the most critical from Russian Railways as Russia tries to both reorient the commerce away from Europe to Asia AND avoid the HOUTHIS!

See, this is April

https://twitter.com/prune602/status/1778528078660300947

In addition, the whole network is under stress right now because of Ukraine’s Special Kursk operation.

Which I explained here

https://twitter.com/prune602/status/1824306493581082799

Is this one even going to cause Russian Railways to collapse? No, but it is like banging your funny bone while a dog is simultaneously biting off a piece of your leg.

🇺🇦: woof

You aren’t going to be that productive while it’s happening.

And they CAN’T CATCH UP. All of these things will continue add up further decreasing Russia’s loading for the year and thus their ENTIRE ECONOMY.

Once again

OVEREXTENDING THE LARGEST COUNTRY ON EARTH IS A VALID OFFENSIVE STRATEGY.

https://twitter.com/prune602/status/1820237131148673325

IT WILL GET WORSE

~ The End ~