US Electrical Grid On the Edge of Failure 293
ananyo writes "Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned, simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse. The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team's conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. 'The problem is that this doesn't reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,' says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage."
Wrong analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Funny)
No, it needs to involve cars. All analogies, especially those pertaining to something technical, must always be reduced to cars.
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Funny)
No, it needs to involve cars. All analogies, especially those pertaining to something technical, must always be reduced to cars.
You're right, you're right... my mistake! "Facebook could probably lose a few gas stations and remain a perfectly stable network..."
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Funny)
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver. (been playing Krater)
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can it be Reaper drones instead?
'cos if the power goes (yeah OK they *might* have backup generators but a tank of diesel can only last so long), then those things will fly round in a circle until they run out of fuel, then crash.
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Funny)
Here's the kicker; one of the big rigs was carrying a nuke which explodes and kills EVERYONE...JUST LIKE THE POWER GRID. It's science.
The moral of the story is that Sally is a bitch for using a shitty tow rope and is responsible for killing not only the old lady but everyone else. Also, what the hell happened to your new tow rope and why did it snap first? You need to get some higher quality emergency roadside equipment. Oh wait...you're dead. Fucking Sally.
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Citroens of the 70's were *known* for this ability - not sure now, because I now know nothing. I could google, but y'know....
Citroen, Facebook Edition, heeyaaaaaa
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Informative)
That's what every Citroen salesman used to parrot, yes.
And it's true! (for some models with self-levelling suspension)
eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HK2nTRvm_s [youtube.com]
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the 2CV6 could run at 40mph on three wheels. Of course, that's assuming it was pointing down a hill with a tailwind at the moment the wheel fell off...
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Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Funny)
A car could lose 25% of its wheel nuts and still remain a perfectly stable vehicle (provided that wheel nut loss was spread out evenly across all wheels). Reminds me of a joke:
A motorist had a flat tire in front of an insane asylum. He took the wheel off, but when he stood up he tipped over the hubcap containing the bolts, spilling them all down a sewer drain.
A patient, looking through the fence, suggested that the man take one bolt from
the remaining three wheels to hold the fourth wheel in place until he could get to a service station.
The motorist thanked him profusely and said, “I don’t know why you are in that place.”
The patient said, “I’m in here for being crazy, not for being stupid.”
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The fibre backhaul between data-centers being cut is a better analogy.
Sections of power plants (most have multiple generators, etc.) are taken offline frequently for maintenance.
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
I was thinking the same thing. I felt a little shafted, to be honest, during the 2003 blackout. In my area (Southern Ontario) power was restored quite early, before 11:00pm IIRC. I wish that it had lasted a bit longer so that I could appreciate the beautiful night sky a little longer. You don't often see the milky way within city limits... I almost wish they regularly scheduled these sorts of blackouts. It wouldn't hurt us to be reminded once in a while that the centre of the universe is somewhere above our heads, and not in the middle of the city where we live...
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Strictly speaking, the center of the observable universe has no correlation to the actual center of the actual universe - presuming such a thing exists.
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I've done this thought experiment and ended up disappearing into my own bellybutton.
An observer standing at the edge of *your* observable universe (13someodd billion light years away from your space) would also see 13 billion light years in any direction. Drawing a straight line between you and him and carrying it 13 billion light years to the far edge of his observable universe and an observer there would also see thirteen billion light years in any direction. Assuming the straight line is in fact straight
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Try living through a blackout when your home is on the upper floors of a TALL (30+ stories) apartment building. Walking up those stairs after a long work day (and an even longer commute) on a hot summer day was /not/ a fun experience. In the dark, no less. Emergency generators for the elevators were, apparently, too much of an expense. And those batteries in the emergency lighting fixtures only last a few hours...
And I couldn't even get online to bitch about it once I got home! I mean, really; it was like living in the 20th century!
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Informative)
Deadly.
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
You did it wrong. I was living in Toronto at the time. Apartment building or not, we just didn't go home. We all banded together to fight a much bigger problem than darkness and stairs. Bars everywhere couldn't keep the beer cold.
Seriously, local bars and pubs were giving away free beer. You've never seen a more instantly-friendly megalopolis.
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We all banded together to fight a much bigger problem than darkness and stairs. Bars everywhere couldn't keep the beer cold.
Ah, I take it Toronto's not in Germany then.
Bayesian Geography is self correcting...
Re:Wrong analogy (Score:4, Informative)
The inrush current when powering on a device (even for something as simple as a lightbulb) from an off state is indeed higher than its steady-state consumption. However, the transient lasts so briefly for most devices (that you would have in your house) that the additional power lost (due to the inrush) probably only amounts to a few seconds worth of actual steady-state operation. In other words, as long as the power failure is reasonably long (a few seconds at least), there will be a net reduction in your power use. For big factories with large electric motors and machinery that require time to spin up, the story is probably a little different... The bigger issue, which you alluded to, is all of your devices (that were in standby before the power failure) coming up to full power once power is restored. [Aside: I have a NAS and a server at home that fall under this category: most of the time they are in low power standby (unless I'm using them), but they'll power up to 100% following a power failure. For those devices, a power failure shorter than at least 1 hour means I might have to pay more for power than I would have otherwise.]
Plus, I'm also willing to bet that your power meter, even if it's a "smart" one, isn't capable of measuring instantaneous current fast enough to detect the full magnitude of the inrush current. It might not even detect it at all, meaning that quite contrary to the idea of the power company making money off you following a power failure, they might actually be losing it. On top of that, the inrush current that occurs after power is restored does put strain on the power distribution and generation equipment, so I'll bet the power company don't see the switching of power on and off as an opportunity to make money off of us.
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What?!?!?!?
Parties?!
I thought the end result of losing power was total anarchy and lawlessness and if you don't have your guns a-blazing, prepare to get completely robbed of anything and everything.
Society's supposed to break down and cannibalization is supposed to start as the unwashed masses start to realize that without electricity, they have no more li
Coincidentally... (Score:2, Insightful)
...I was talking to someone on a forum about a hot-air rework station he bought. It's basically a glorified hair-dryer. Every time he turns it on the lights flicker, and then they dim periodically as the heater turns on/off.
American house wiring seems to be terrible. There also seem to be a lot of barriers to setting up solar feed-in systems. The concept of a smart grid is unheard of.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Informative)
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:4, Funny)
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
Hey! That's one better than some of the climate change theories!
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(I know this was meant as a troll/joke but you're hitting the nail)
No. They have the sample size of "1 earth". Exactly "1 earth". Of course that's due to the lack of spare earths that we could compare ours too. But it is exactly what makes this whole subject statistically "challenging".
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If all you could measure was the global average temperature then yes, you'd have one sample of a simple pr
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Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
Well, I've observed the problem at multiple locations in the US and none in the EU. Still anecdotal, but a quick bayesian analysis does indicate that assuming that there's some kind of issue in the US. I've also had it described to me as being due to the use of different wiring methodologies, but couldn't verify that from personal knowledge. I suppose the effect could be relatively amplified due to the lower voltage and consequently larger currents involved, which would make any resistive load in the wiring
Correct observation, EU sucks more (Score:2)
Well, I've observed the problem at multiple locations in the US and none in the EU.
Older buildings in general have shoddy wiring. Pretty obviously the EU has a lot of older buildings than the U.S...
Modern buildings in the U.S. have wiring that is just fine thanks.
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American house wiring runs on 110V, which is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
The same thing happens in EU house wiring too, but only with very, very high-power appliances like power showers.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Informative)
American house wiring runs on 110V, which is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
Any voltage is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
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OK, but for plenty of devices, isn't it more true that the actual amount of power delivered is more important?
For instance: I got one of these newfangled bitcoin miners that someone with a similar name to one of the company officials (this is where you get your help, I know right?) says draws about 27w on average. He says it peaks at about 35w and you should make sure your wall-wart budgets close to 40w in case of internal losses that weren't measured.
The wall-wart they send is a 13VDC-6A which is of cours
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:4, Informative)
P=IV. Good place to start. Now just consider V=IR too, and look at the implications.
House wiring does have resistance. Not much, but some. So, for the sake of argument, lets assume there is 4ohm in the cables from your transformer to the other side of your house (This is actually rather a lot, but something you might encounter on a long run such as powering an outbuilding), and that you want to run a decently powerful appliance - say, a kettle, 1KW (Make it resistive so we don't have to worry about power factor).
In a 230V Euro house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/230 = 4.35A. Voltage lost in the wiring is thus V=IR=4.35*4=17.4V, or 7.5% of your line voltage. That's not *too* bad - but it'll dim the lights in your shed if you want to make a cup of tea out there.
Run the same numbers in a 110V American house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/110 = 9.09A, voltage lose is V=IR=9.09*4=36V, or 33% of your line voltage. That's... nasty. That's into the territory where your computer crashes and your tea takes too long to boil.
This is also the reason long-distance transmission is done using very, very high voltages (Between 12KV and 1MV) on overhead pylons. Higher voltage means lower current means less voltage drop, and also means that drop makes up a smaller percentage of your total.
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Imagine that, lights on a light circuit, heavy appliances on their own circuit...
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OK, this is the winning car analogy. It's clear to me since I just gassed up my car this morning!
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Our friends with 220 outlets can push about twice the number of watts thru the same sized wires as we can. When they do resisitve losses are halved at the same power.
And twice something that is near zero is still near zero.
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If the home is built by the typical zero skill contractor then yes. there are issues inherent in the design.
They use 14 gauge wire instead of 12 gague to save money and cut corners. Then they chain a LOT of outlets instead of home running. Then they use undersized distribution panels and order undersized service because they dont want to run the proper wire for 200 amp service to the street connection point.
In the 1920's most homes were built to be as cheap as possible. Today they skimp on electrical
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Actually EU houses tend to have thicker wiring and outlets can handle more current, so voltage drops are lower. Having more current available used to be safer too because it would guarantee tripping an RCD, but the newer ones don't have that limitation.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Funny)
Solar panels is un-American.
Try to set up a gas-driven backup generator first. You will get tons of support and advice. Then try to add some solar panels "to help a bit when it is running over capacity"
Then you might be allowed to sneak over to full solar as long as the gas-driven generator is clearly visible.
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Hey, I mine my own coal and use a coal-powered steam generator to refine oil to gasoline, then I use the gas-driven generator to power my flashlight, which directs a beam at my solar panel, which boosts the volume on my crystal radio. If I drop acid, the tinny sound seems stereo-ish.
I hope to win a ribbon at the science fair.
cheers,
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a hot-air rework station he bought. It's basically a glorified hair-dryer.
Yep, my hairdryer goes up to 300 degrees celcius.
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Then it's not worth glorifying it.
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glorified hair dryer... Are you that much of a moron? Please go ahead and put your hand in that air stream.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Informative)
not enough sunlight in many parts of the country
Actually most of the USA gets more sun than Germany [wikipedia.org] but they are building out their solar capacity at record speed. [thinkprogress.org]
high capital cost, maintenance costs, etc
In case you missed it, the price of solar cells has fallen off a cliff in the last few years. And some companies [solarcity.com] will install the system for no money down, then sell you electricity at a rate lower than the utility.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of Europe (and much of the world) pays more for electricity than the average American. So what? The fact remains that in much of the USA it is already economical to install a solar system. And as time goes by, that trend is going to continue.
But the real game changer will be the advent of affordable, grid-level storage, which is just around the corner. In particular, Khosla Ventures [wikipedia.org] is backing two novel technologies that are expected to hit the market around the end of next year. One is the liquid metal battery [ambri.com] that came from a research project at MIT. The other is a new twist on compressed air storage [lightsail.com] that uses a type of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression. Both of these offer cheap, simple, reliable electricity storage.
As the grid becomes more distributed and "islandable" it will naturally be more robust. And storage is a key enabler to make that happen.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hm, american electricity prices: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a [eia.gov] obviously in $ cents.
A link that compares several countries (in german, but the countries should be easy to read) prices in dollar cents:
http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13020/umfrage/strompreise-in-ausgewaehlten-laendern/ [statista.com]
German electricity prices according to wikipedia however are 25 EURO cent.
Pretty strange, as far as I recall I pay 17 EURO cent per kWh.
So you are right: you pay less per kWh in the USA: However you use between 4 to 10 times the electricity a German household or person does. So bottom line you pay far more than we do.
You know efficiency can be defined arbitrarily. You seem to define it on "cost per kWh" we define it on "consumed kWh".
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So you are right: you pay less per kWh in the USA: However you use between 4 to 10 times the electricity a German household or person does. So bottom line you pay far more than we do.
It's also hotter in most of the US, and air conditioning makes up a huge portion of our energy usage.
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You figure sounded high so I thought I'd check the weather.
Temperatures in most of Germany average about 15 degrees lower than most of the U.S.
A major component of our electrical usage is air conditioning.
Other than A/C I run a fridge (which is probably double the size but still rated at about $75 per year) a few LED light fixtures, and one computer which is in sleep mode 16 hours a day.
But the A/C is huge. My bills run $40-$50 7 months a year, $75 1 month a year, and $130 4 months a year. The difference
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If there is enough sunlight in Germany and the Netherlands then there is enough sun in the whole of the U.S.A. except maybe for Alaska, and I said maybe.
What about wind power?
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Insightful)
Delivering electricity to a socket isn't hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
Re:Coincidentally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Delivering electricity to a socket isn't hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
You missed two other factors...
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create *unpredictable* production spikes and drops, and where the source of some of the generation assets is hundreds of miles from the distribution points it needs to get to, is hard.
Lots of people like to talk about how much sun the US gets, and how much space there is to put up wind farms. But they don't realize a few things. One, the best places for PV farms and wind farms are far, far from population centers...and that means that utilities have to figure out how to manage VARS over those distances which is still not a problem that's entirely been solved. T. Boone Pickens had to bail on his whole wind farm venture in the Southeast because of this. And two, while the cost of PV panels (as would be put on the roof of a home of business) has dropped significantly, the majority of the cost of an on-premise solar installation is the anti-islanding gear that ensures the safety of any linemen who show up to deal with a power outage, assuming that only the end of the break in a line that leads back to the rest of the larger grid is live. And the cost of that gear has not changed much at all.
The story of the 2003 blackout (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, the problem can be almost entirely blamed on FirstEnergy of Ohio. They had, in a matter of hours:
- A software bug in the monitoring tool.
- No backup monitoring, so when the first one wasn't started properly there was no way of knowing there was a problem.
- A plant shutdown due to poor maintenance.
- Multiple power lines failures due to not cutting back trees as they were supposed to.
- Alarm systems breaking, that were simply ignored.
- Utterly failing to notify nearby states that there was a problem so they could prevent it from spreading.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it. And if the US electric grid is in trouble, I'd have every reason to expect that it was other electric companies doing the same sort of thing.
Can we get Morgan Freeman [wikipedia.org] on the case?
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Re:The story of the 2003 blackout (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, the problem can be almost entirely blamed on FirstEnergy of Ohio. They had, in a matter of hours: - A software bug in the monitoring tool. - No backup monitoring, so when the first one wasn't started properly there was no way of knowing there was a problem. - A plant shutdown due to poor maintenance. - Multiple power lines failures due to not cutting back trees as they were supposed to. - Alarm systems breaking, that were simply ignored. - Utterly failing to notify nearby states that there was a problem so they could prevent it from spreading.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it. And if the US electric grid is in trouble, I'd have every reason to expect that it was other electric companies doing the same sort of thing.
Can we get Morgan Freeman [wikipedia.org] on the case?
I can tell you that the industry has really taken this event to heart and learned from it. The linked articles are based on some awfully shoddy conclusions- the scientific article is about interconnected networks in a theoretical sense, and not one of the references has anything to do with the electrical grid. The other link is from "somebody" making conclusions about the power grid based on the scientific article. The grid today is not the same grid we had in 2003. For the last 10 years, NERC [nerc.com] has been throwing down standards and requirements for electrical production and distribution based on the lessons learned in 2003. NERC's website may make them seem like "recommendations", but for many parts of the country, an power station or transmission company must follow their standards if they wish to do business.
A failure of the type experienced in 2003 is unlikely to happen. Even if a company such as FirstEnergy makes colossal screwups, rules are in place which make the other parts of the grid more robust to that kind of problem. The chance of a large-scale blackout is reduced in the last 10 years (as opposed to the articles arguments that it is the same, or greater than ever before).
Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
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Intresting chart:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6409butolt8la_&ctype=c&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=gci_2.07&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&dimp_c=country:world&idim=country:USA:JPN&ifdim=country&ind=false&icfg [google.com]
According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.
Unfortunately, this one here doesn't have data for the US: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days [nationmaster.com]
But 8 hours power outage p
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Intresting chart:
http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=z6409butolt8la_&ctype=c&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_y=gci_2.07&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&dimp_c=country:world&idim=country:USA:JPN&ifdim=country&ind=false&icfg [google.com]
According to this, the quality of the US poer grid is compareable to Slovenia.
Unfortunately, this one here doesn't have data for the US: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ele_out_day-energy-electrical-outages-days [nationmaster.com]
But 8 hours power outage per year sounds more like a developing country to me. (Here: 17min in 2010. Drop from 18min in 2009)
The first chart appears to be an opinion survey- "How would you assess the quality of the electricity supply in your country (lack of interruptions and lack of voltage fluctuations)? [1 = insufficient and suffers frequent interruptions; 7 = sufficient and reliable]". I don't make a habit of dismissing charts completely, but this doesn't seem to be based on actual data about the power system. People in the US have an opinion of their electrical grid which is comparable to the opinion which people living in
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Which sounds bad... until you actually look at the data. Then it looks pretty dang good. But soundbites sweeties! Have to make it sound bad.
It's always easy to have unreasonable standards.
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Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have. The average electric customer in the US loses service for about 8 hours a year. That is 99.9% reliability. The average Japanese electric customer has 5 minutes of outage per year. That 99.999% reliability sounds great, but those extra 9's cost them dearly. The average TEPCO customer pays about 26-32 cents per KWH. My cost in Connecticut is about 8 cents per KWH. I don't want to pay 3-4 times as much for electricity just to have five 9 reliability. Do you?
I wonder if the increased reliability in Japan has to do with being prone to frequent earthquakes. Consider how other posters have complained about losing power after simple rain or wind, even in parts of some major North American cities. Five-9s reliability in a normal, relatively quake-light year may be the difference in keeping most of the grid running even after a moderate tremor (i.e. nowhere near as extreme as the 2011 quake), or getting it back up and running more quickly.
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I wonder how much of it has to do with population density. I'll betcha a LOT. I assure you that the Japanese, per capita, has a tiny amount of electrical grid wiring compared to the US. We have a ton of people like me living in rural areas, and we have long power lines feeding us. That's a lot more opportunity for a tree to fall and knock out power to a lot of people. You don't think that might account for the .099% difference in reliability?
In my area the houses are far enough apart that each house
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Think about it. Unless you live on the end of a low-population road, your electricity is probably more reliable than any other service you have.
Well, if you compare it to my telephone land line service, not even close. We have NEVER lost our land line connection, ever. (Not that I'd expect the electrical company to match a perfect record) I keep one old corded telephone around that plugs directly into the jack, and no matter what storm we've had (South Jersey) it has never been out of service once in the 21 years I've lived in this house.It's not even an upscale neighborhood. A lot of people -especially techies- think it's stupid and backwards
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You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it.
Cut corners? Can (or cannot) get away with it? Buddy, those are heresies.
It's about the magic dust the free market fairy uses to increase efficiency if only let alone and deregulated.
(grin)
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> If anything, the organizing body (Midwest ISO) should shoulder at least half of the blame since they exist _solely_ to prevent that sort of thing from happening.
It's called a cascade failure. There is nothing reasonably preventative or reactive that could have been done once 3 outgoing lines from Ohio were down.
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Yep, that is exactly the approach. Since 2003, Midcontinent ISO a.k.a. Midwest ISO (and the other ISOs covering other regions of the country) have spent additional tens or hundreds of millions of dollars beefing up the amount of monitoring, the speed of response, and the amount of information available to the real-time grid operators. If anything goes down (and this is inevitable) the goal is to contain the blackout to a small area and keep everything else running. In 2003, the grid operator didn't figur
Inherently unstable (Score:5, Informative)
As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?
Re:Inherently unstable (Score:5, Interesting)
As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?
The challenge is balancing the system's ability to self-heal with the system's ability to self-destruct. There is no reason that losing 3 transmission lines (out of a dozen running through the corridor) should have done anything more than taken three lines worth of subscriber capacity offline. If the system "let them go dark" there wouldn't have been a cascading failure. Instead, in an attempt to self heal (something that works great for just one or two lines going down) the system self destructed instead. Identifying where the tipping point is and acting before it is reached is the only real barrier to preventing such a large problem from happening again. Shame it's taken 10 years to really understand the problem.
I know most of you don't live where I do... (Score:5, Informative)
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Agreed... I'm usually set quite well up for minor power outages. In my old house we used to lose power a lot because of company a block away kept blowing the lines. It was always for like ~15 minutes a week. So combined with being used to going camping I'd make sure I was prepared for a day or two of no power.
BUT... I hadn't really prepared for being without power for a week... which happened twice in two years due to storms.
On a personal level it was just mildly annoying since I had tons of warm clothes
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Most Americans should be basically unprepared for regular or severe power outages. If the basic utilities are failing enough that it's accepted as a regular thing, shouldn't you be up in arms?
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I'm not saying the article's point isn't valid... I think the country should re-think its grid. If nothing else it would mean lots of jobs for a couple of years. Also... I DO know that in NJ they are re-doing portions of their grid... I see them replacing the high-capacity towers and re-routing things.
It's a regional thing... America isn't as "bad" as some people make it out to be. In my case, my block (and only my block) would lose power due to a company a couple blocks away overloading something. Unti
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I understand the technical challenges of living on the 30th story of a building are much greater than for my house in the middle of no where...
I would have thought the opposite. A 30 story building can get by with a central standby generator (or central battery/inverter) serving all tenants/condo owners, etc., but there's a greater psychological challenge in that extended outages are rare enough that the money spent installing and maintaining the system seems a waste until it's needed.
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Upstate New York is a large and diverse place. I've lived here for 30 years and I could count the memorable power outages on one hand. The power has rarely gone out for me in a mix of city, suburb, and rural locations. When it has, it's almost always been just a few minutes.
'extrapolated to the real world' (Score:2)
Oh, I see.
An outage that involved 'the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada...cutting power to some 50 million people' WOULD be very hard to extrapolate to the real world.
Thank you, I thought otherwise on first glance.
Re:'extrapolated to the real world' (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup... (Score:5, Funny)
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IMHO, the gold standard is an automatic natural gas generator capable of running the whole house, including central air conditioning (we generally lose power when it's super hot out).
But these things are like $10k installed, and that's awfully hard to justify when the power goes out twice a year for about 12 hours at a time.
The LP gas kind seems like the next best choice -- $800 for a Generac 5500 watt model. We usually have at least 20 pounds of propane around the house for the grill and gas firepit, some
Distributed Power Generation (Score:3)
The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production. Individual homes can often produce as much power as they need with solar and micro-wind turbines. If they tie in to a micro-grid [rmi.org]--essentially a neighborhood-level grid--they can load balance against their neighbors.
Decentralizing power production yields many other benefits, too. Individuals save tons of money on power bills (the cost of solar, for example, has been dropping dramatically [thinkprogress.org]), the country produces less CO2, and everyone has a lot more money in their pockets they can boost the economy with.
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I'd agree, but the cost is still a pretty big barrier to entry for most people.
I'm not just talking about the cost of the power generation equipment itself here, but the big picture. For example, I'm renting a townhouse from a guy right now, and while I'd love to generate some of my own electricity and get off the grid? I'm not even allowed to put anything on his (recently re-shingled) roof. Even running a small backup generator during a power outage is problematic here, thanks to decisions like hard-wirin
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Generating home power isn't a all or nothing situation. There are levels you can get into that have lower prices for entry.
Break-even calculation (Score:5, Informative)
It does not make sense in your situation as a renter, but when you own it does, even with where installation costs and everything else are now. The average American family uses 940kwh/month.
Let's take the case of a house in NYC, which has both some of the highest labor costs (pertinent to installation costs of solar panels) and electricity costs ($0.35/kwh from ConEdison). You need 26 290W panels to produce the electricity you need. The cost of panels plus installation totals $48.5K. After just the federal incentive it comes down to $32K. The ConEdison-provided electricity costs $4K/yr, so that's a break-even time of 8 years. Most people own their homes longer than 8 years.
When you factor in the New York State solar incentive of 25% the break-even drops to 5 years. When you consider that ConEdison's price per kwh has increased more than 10% every year for the past 10 years, that break-even time drops to 4-4.5 years.
If the upfront cost of $22K is still a barrier when you buy that house, you can shop around for energy efficient mortgages. They lend to you at an advantageous rate so you can afford to upgrade the home's energy efficiency, as in they knock of a couple basis points. The savings over a 30-yr mortgage are huge, on top of what you save on the electricity (most solar panels are rated for that long).
In short, it already makes financial sense to do this stuff, and since the cost of going solar dropped 80% between 2008-2012 it's only going to get easier.
Glad I live in Texas (Score:2)
A downed transmission line in Ohio or wildfire in California shouldn't affect me.
http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/united-states-of-america/graphics/USA_grid.gif [geni.org]
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Nah, it just means that when Texas power goes down, the rest of us don't have to give a shit.
Corporations Rule (Score:2)
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Old News (Score:2)
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130318-treading-softly-in-a-connected-world/ [simonsfoundation.org]
like software I have worked on (Score:3)
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Meh, any library is one character away from total failure.
Deregulation at work (Score:3, Informative)
We decided that regulating how much maintenance work utility companies have to do on their lines stifled innovation, so we deregulated. Naturally, said companies cut back on maintenance to save money. This was covered pretty well in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, flawed as he may be in terms of his self-importance.
Democracy Now discussion [democracynow.org] from 10 years ago.
california outages in 2001 (?) underscore this (Score:3)
particularly when a forest fire burned one of the transmission lines, and another got so hot it sagged and shorted out. we had 24 hours of battery backup in the DA Hotel in San Jose, and when the Liebert went down, so did our service for 3 or 4 days. rotating blackouts for several weeks.
take any two lines down into any city, and you'll have the same thing anyplace. any two. even a piddly little 40 KV feeder.
Free beer (Score:5, Insightful)
I lived in Toronto at the time. We were without power for about 24 hours. We all banded together in a crisis situation to drink the beer while it was still cold.
Local bars and pubs were giving it away free. And it was patio-season too!
And I got to mock all of my friends whose cars were useless only because they didn't know how to manually open their garage doors. Funny.
I'm looking forward to the next power failure.
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Fortunately my grid somehow survived most of the 2003 outage... we lost power for maybe 30-60 minutes. Meanwhile, a 20 minute drive to the east or the north were without power for the day or whatever... which stunk because it was hot.
So we lucked out there; a nice little peninsula of electricity.
Unfortunately, in the last 2 years we had 2 major storms: Sandy and a freak snow storm. Both of those times took out my town's power for a week each.
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That happens everywhere my friend. I think the same story can be told in every major city in North America. If a cloud passes over my neighborhood the power goes off proactively, and I live in the capital of Canada! I never bother to set the clock on my microwave anymore because it never says set. I have gotten used to seeing flashing 12:00 everywhere. I wish manufacturers would stop building useless clocks into every kitchen appliances these days. I wish they could invent a power system that wasn't
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The Swiss would like to greet another War-Untouched country, and demonstrate some modern infrastructure.
Eurotrash (Score:2)
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How could this post be modded Informative? The only information it contains is that the author of the post is an idiot. Europe was not "utterly destroyed". It's not just one country. Countries were affected differently, depending on where they were with respect to the fighting. We've already heard from Swiss and Swedish readers who live in countries that have working infrastructure despite the fact that they were not "utterly destroyed" in WWII. I didn't reply to this post before because I assumed that the
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National security could be pulled for the power or cooling water needs of new regional NSA sites?
The US grid seems to be well maintained, well thought out for the big power needs for large scale cold war production and now select tourist sites.
Long term what was build generations ago and patched up with a view on shareholder return will have to be thought about as populations shift and energy needs change again.
Smart meters and pe