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Drak_is_Right t1_j5pfd5o wrote

Reply to comment by lfcman24 in Nearly 220 million people in Pakistan without power after countrywide outage | CNN Business by calbert1735

It also takes time to sync each additional generator with the previous ones on the grid. There is a very fine window on the frequency. Just a tiny dip and everything goes down. Or explodes and catches fire.

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lfcman24 t1_j5pgtv3 wrote

Syncing is usually not that hard. The problem is that you create tiny islands when restoring after blackout and count how much reserve you have if your largest contingency/generator trips in this case. Worst case if you pick too much load after power restoration and suddenly the largest generator trips, you are back to zero. Therefore, companies design their power restoration as small pockets, helps bring all generators online and also helps supporting different island. Synchronizing islands is a bitch but with moderns AVR and frequency regulators they are pretty doable.

Load restoration is a like a total gamble because it’s all done theoretically but rarely any engineers have seen it happen in reality.

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