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Lebanon's National Electricity Grid Collapses (msn.com) 96
Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday October 09, 2021 @08:34PM from the dark-skies dept.
"Lebanon's electricity network collapsed on Saturday," reports the Washington Post, "after the two most important power stations ran out of fuel, leaving private generators as the only source of power."
The state-owned electricity company has been providing citizens with just a few hours of power a day for months, but the total collapse of the national grid will compound the misery of those who can't afford to run generators and had relied on those few hours. The outage marks the latest milestone in the unraveling of Lebanon, which is undergoing what the World Bank has described as one of the world's three biggest financial collapses of the past 150 years.

The banking system was the first to implode in 2019, triggering a 90 percent slide in the value of the currency that has left the government unable to afford fuel, food and medicine imports while plunging millions of Lebanese into poverty. The electricity grid ground to a halt after the country's two main power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel, leaving the nationwide network without the minimum amount of power required to sustain it, said Energy Minister Walid Fayyad.

The government is working to secure emergency fuel supplies from other sources, including the army, to bridge the shortfall until a shipment of Iraqi oil due to arrive Saturday night can be offloaded and distributed into the network. At most, he said, the total outage can be expected to last only a couple of days, and he hoped to find a stopgap solution faster. But the collapse is a reminder of the dire state of Lebanon's electricity sector, which has been unable to provide 24-hour power for decades. In recent months, its capacity has been further eroded by the lack of money and by corruption, with smugglers diverting state purchases of fuel to sell at a profit in neighboring Syria.

A recent deal struck with Iraq to supply 80,000 tons of fuel a month still falls short of the minimum amount required to ensure a stable grid and at most will be able to keep the power on for about four hours a day, Fayyad said.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/le ... ar-AAPju38

So..not a collapse...but more like...turned off for a day because the operators can't charge enough to cover fuel costs?

Good thing "collapses" are this easy to solve.

Elsewhere I read that the grid was being augmented by two Turkish floating power barges producing 25% of the total state power. Lebanon was deeply in arrears, years hehind in oayments, and the Turks were planning on cutting power shortly.

It would be nice if the news could put together more comprehensive stories.

Newfie wrote:Elsewhere I read that the grid was being augmented by two Turkish floating power barges producing 25% of the total state power. Lebanon was deeply in arrears, years hehind in oayments, and the Turks were planning on cutting power shortly.

It would be nice if the news could put together more comprehensive stories.

Now that the news is about maximizing profit, re being quick, vs. accurate or in depth news, the quality of much of the news continues to decline overall, from what I see.

In California, there won't be any generators to save the day. The governor just signed a law that will eventually outlaw all small gas engines being sold. That includes generators.

I was upset when I saw that chainsaws would be included. I don't live in California, but I use small gas powered equipment. Chainsaws are something I use from time to time. When I do, I tend to cut more than one log that fell onto something. I am a long way from an outlet. I don't know how many batteries it would take. I guess they will find that out when they have to fight the next wildfire with electric chainsaws? Similarly, including generators on the list, when they get used in emergencies, doesn't seem right. They are taking away the citizen's options for dealing with trouble, and they are doing it with something obvious.

One of the things I don't like that happens in politics is when those in charge have a poor vision for who those they represent are. This seems like one of those examples. Small gas engines need to go away, but not so fast that the needs of the people are overlooked in favor of doing that. They could probably have thought about the need to use generators. Firefighters will make sure they have gas chainsaws. That's just me making a point.

At some point California will have a back lash movement.

It seems EVERYTHING I buy has a prop 65 warning label. I forget exactly what it was but something like a pound of screws were labeled. They label coffee and fender guitars as cancerous. The furniture in a cancer ward was labeled cancer causing.

More symptoms a single party rule I guess.

evilgenius wrote:In California, there won't be any generators to save the day. The governor just signed a law that will eventually outlaw all small gas engines being sold. That includes generators.

Reading the story on this, assuming "small gas" means small gasoline motors for mowers, yard equipment, small generators, etc, that leaves me with questions.

1). So does this mean that whole house generators that run (commonly) on natural gas or propane are banned too? (I just read the story on the LA Times site -- better than the ones I found with a google search, and it seems clear that FOR NOW anyway, the scope is small lawn equipment and small generators).

2). I sure hope that they have a reasonable grandfather clause for such equipment, and don't ban it even being used (under penalty of large tickets, presumably).

3). Until batteries are good enough and cheap enough to provide some solid backup or one's house for, say, a week, or it's common to be able to run the house easily and reliably from one's BEV, it would be ridiculous to ban whole house air cooled (reasonably priced) generators that the middle and upper middle class might need for reliable power backup, especially given all the weather and power problems California has in recent years (worsening with AGW effects).

If CA is willing to be reasonable about this and stage it and allow grandfathering of a good interval while pure battery products improve, I get the intent and think that's OK. If they're NOT, then I think that's another reason NOT to want to live in CA.

I just gotta laugh at what peakoil.com has become.

Pops wrote:I just gotta laugh at what peakoil.com has become.

How could it have been any other way? From the perspective of those who knew better in the first place anyway.