Recently it was reported that a political dispute between Serbia and Kosovo is sapping a small amount of energy from the local grid, causing a domino effect across the 25-nation network spanning the continent from Portugal to Poland and Greece to Germany.
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| Collapsed electricity pylon after a tornado in Australia. |
“The deviation from Europe’s standard 50 Hz frequency has been enough to cause electric clocks that keep time by the power system’s frequency, rather than built-in quartz crystals, to fall behind by about six minutes since mid- January.”
This is a good example for a phenomenon known as the fragility of complex systems: the tendency for multilayered and interconnected systems like electricity grids, transport networks (think gridlock) and the world health system (think pandemics and antibiotic resistance) to become increasingly prone to failure as layers of organisation and connectivity are added.
Read the piece from energypost by Mark Bryne - “How to ensure resilience in the grid of the future.”
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