What Is A Black Start Of The Power Grid?

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My father was Grid operator - on duty he faced system melt down - and he manually turned off the power to half of the Capital city. That kept the system running and saved the Black out. His supervisor gave him hard time for his decision. But they had simulator and for 6 months they tried everything to save the system, in the end - the only way out was my fathers approach. But nobody ever gave him medal or appreciation. May him rest in peace. Another non known hero that you will never know about.

As a previous power plant engineer, I deeply appreciate you including coffee makers when you listed essential equipment for the power plant to run.

A little black start anecdote: In the '90's I was working as a contractor plant electrician at the North Anna, Virginia nuclear power station during a refueling outage. I forget now if it was Unit 1 or 2. For some reason we were in the building housing the emergency diesel generators. Huge engines. Next to one of these engines hanging on the wall was was a hand crank similar to one you would start a Model T Ford car with. I asked the foreman what it was used for. He pointed to a single cylinder diesel engine mounted on the floor connected to a small air compressor. He explained that in the event of a total blackout and loss of service air, the crank was used to start that diesel powered compressor to charge a tank to power the air motors that start the main engine. I guess you could say that a nuclear power plant is crank start.

I'm a submarine nuclear electrician's mate in the US Navy and watching you explain voltage regulation and generator synchronization has put a huge smile on my face. My ship had basically an identical synchroscope to the one you showed and matching voltages/frequencies is an important part of operating our electric plants.

This reminds me so much of running out of power in Factorio. Your miners require energy to dig up the coal that's required to generate energy, and when you restore power there's often a spike in demand as all of the belts and other buffers have emptied out so all the machines are working at 100% capacity. It's amazing how the game can approximate real-world problems like this.

I'm a Ukrainian living in Kyiv and I'm finally glad to see an explanation on this topic. The power company has been driving us mad because they always turn on our neighbours' apartment building before our own haha. And since this system is still being repaired, a power balancing schedule is in place.

When I was in school for my EE degree (many decades ago), we had a lab where we were allowed/required to play with 5000V. It was also powered by electric motors and we actually set up generation stations which were synchronized with (using a light bulb) and then connected to, the grid. It was all very scary. Even though I was specializing in computer engineering, all EE students were required to take the junior level "power" classes which included this lab. It made me very nervous. I much preferred making circuits with breadboards and fine wires using 5V to using those thick cables to hook up 5000V circuits. 😀 Thanks for sharing this video, it brought back some very good memories.

Boeing 727s had 3 separate three phase generators (one on each engine) The flight engineer had to synchronize each generator before connecting that generator to the bus. The engineer would adjust the frequency with a knob and watch two blinking lights. When the lights went out together the engineer knew it was OK to connect the generators. Called closing the bus tie. 😁

my dad used to work for German railway, back in the eighties... they (still) use 24kV 16 2/3 Hz to run the trains, which is converted from main grid with motor/generator pairs, each weighting hundreds of tons. An Engineer in a hurry managed to engage both, before they where entirely synced... the buildings foundation had to be redone, since both machines did tilt just like yours did... being bolted to the foundation did nothing to keep them from doing that...

One minor discrepancy is that we don’t actually disconnect the transformers from the line when we do a black start. The iron cores of those transformers actually serve as a great way to smooth VAR transients, and we also want to keep station batteries energized because after about 8 hours we lose all remote visibility and operability. So where possible we leave the transformers energized and open the feeders.

Ex-Navy Nuke here. The nuclear plants I trained at still used synchroscopes when bringing turbine-generators onto the plant grid; cool to see them mentioned here. Great stuff!

3:55 "I don't own a grid scale three phase generator...yet." this reads like both a promise and a threat

During the Great Blackout of 2003, The power companies asked customers to turn off heir air conditioners and leave them off for a few days after the power was restored. An upscale suburb near me had their power restored at about 10:00 am. By 11:00 am the power was back out again.

Coffee maker is totally the most important thing during black start. You don't want sleeping zombies doing the startup. Probably will break more stuff. 😂

Back in the 80s I worked overseas at a compound that had it's own diesel generation plant. Being a tech, I got elected to run the plant for the 3 weeks a year that the normal plant manager was on vacation. The plant consisted of 2 big honking caterpillar powered generators of which one would run at a time. Every day I would fire up the standby unit and sync and switch them without dropping the load. As a tech, I understood the forces involved in syncing the generators every day, and it kind of creeped me out. The generator enclosure was very small requiring the operator to stand within a foot of the 2 roaring generators when he synched them up and threw the switch. By the end of my 3 week tour of duty each year I would finally be comfortable throwing that switch, but the next year it would start all over again.

HUGE props to the linemen who spent this past Holiday Weekend working outside, in below-zero temperatures, restoring power to hundreds of thousands of people here in the Northeast!

See, this content beats all the conventional stuff all the time. Grady can just... deliver complex ideas so simply and make you really appreciate what goes into keeping society running. As someone tweeted: "Society is only 36 hours away from total chaos" 😳 Thanks for making such great content - and book - Grady!

As a fellow Texas Engineer, I really appreciate your videos! Municipal water supplies would be another good topic with lots of examples to pull from locally. I know we recently had an emergency repair on our deep water intake that was a fascinating example of how repairs are done on an active utility with minimal (or major) disruptions.

Pump Storage schemes can act like a shock absorber to the system. The ability to consume as well as generate large quantities of power is seriously under rated