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Will The Power Grid Fail?
rhyder writes: "This article from CNET explains the increasing chances that the nations power grid will not be able to support the growing high tech economy.
Maybe it is time for those of you running e-commerce servers out of your home to check out Home Power and generate your own electricity."
Here in Vermont, there are financial provisions for the people who have the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in their back yard. So how much money would you accept to have a power plant in your back yard? Keep in mind that the more money you want, the more money that electricity is going to cost. But if that's the price we have to pay for adequate supplies of electricity, then let's get ready to pay it.
For that matter, how many other things do you not want in your back yard? How much would you have to be paid to have them there?
Maybe someday we'll ALL have undesirable things in our back yards, and we'll ALL be subsidising each other.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
First of all, there is a huge up-front expense for installing solar panels. Several thousand dollars. So I wouldn't say that you aren't giving up anything.
Secondly, there are the maintenance costs. These things can and do break (if not the panels themselves, then the supporting electronics), and you as the owner would have to have them fixed. And given the extremely low demand for people who fix solar electrical systems, you can bet that it costs an aweful lot to have someone fix it for you.
Lastly, electricity from even a government-imposed monopoly is just so damn cheap, relative to all the alternatives. Solar power is just not a really good alternative yet. Hopefully the technology will continue to be developed, and those with lots of disposable income and an environmental bent will continue to test and improve it.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
There have been some bad trends in terms of power consumption for computers recently. The first two are less significant than the third, but they'll all notable when multiplied by 100 million:
1. CPUs requiring 30+ watts of power (50+ for an Athlon), so much that they need their own fans. The geeks that *think* they need 1GHz so they can get 350fps in Quake 3 are a blip on the radar, but realize that these kind of machines will shortly be common in insurance offices and secretary's desktops.
2. High-powered 3D graphics cards being standard in all machines, even though 90% of those machines are only used for word processing and web browsing. Most of the recent chipsets are hot to the touch, even with heat sinks, and many are starting to ship with their own fans.
3. The design of window managers and application software that provide incentive to purchase larger monitors. Having a big monitor is a geek goal, but it's getting more and more uncomfortable to use most window managers on reasonably sized monitors (say 14" or 15"). If you think about it, you're only focused on one application at a time, and the rest of your screen goes to other applications that you're not using at the moment. Windows managers could use a good rethinking here, as it's starting to seem silly to spend your days word processing inside of a window that only takes 50% of the screen. Sure, you could maximize it, but then you just have giant margins. I would be happy with a small monitor, if applications and desktop environments were designed for small monitors, and not huge ones. This is similar to the "gotta get me a massive SUV" trend. People think bigger is so cool, until gas prices get near $2.00 a gallon.
I remember when I first found out about the "Y2K Beta Test", A.K.A. when one of the major cities in New Zealand lost power.
Now lemme clarify. I'm not talking about that piddly little 24 hour blackout that hit San Francisco last year and caused all sorts of havoc and fingerpointing or whatnot.
Nah, the same kiwi's(and I say that with awe and respect) who pretty much invented all that is extreme also had probably the biggest blackout in modern times:
Months.
Big city.
No power.
I remember reading this incredible diary documenting what the city went through(gigantic oil tankers turned into floating generators; power backup systems that survived their "smoke tests" but were never meant to run for weeks on end, etc.) but I can't find it. The best I can see is this link, which does a pretty good job of explaining what happened for those many, many, many months.
I'll leave it to people here to discuss whether it could happen here, but lemme tell you: It has happened, and oh, it did suck.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Three words:
Prisoners On Treadmills.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Your skin offers a certain amount of resistance to the flow of electricity. There isn't any "more rapidly" to it... it either goes through your skin or it doesn't -- humans aren't inductors (not much anyway.) 1.5V isn't sufficient to move any current (and it's the current that kills you.) 12V might be enough to notice. 120V AC is very noticable. 220/240V AC freakin' hurts. 440V AC will knock you off the ladder :-)
It only takes a few milli (yes, MILLI) amps to kill you. 100 or so nanoamps can cause serious nerve damage. Your skin usually provides enough resistance to protect you from the occasional causual shock.
The frequency of AC power affects how badly it can hurt you. Less than 100Hz tends to penetrate the skin rather well. Higher frequencies penetrate less -- the current flows over the surface instead of through the flesh. Have you ever played with a Tesla coil? Ever touched a "plasma globe"? I, personally, have touched 37,000V sources (at 25kHz mind you.)
Just remeber the Great Storm from a couple of years ago. After Hydro Quebec got most of Montreal up and running, there was a trangular patch of land in the South East (? correct me if that's wrong) that couldn't get ANY power, because they lay in some weird dead zone between all the major conduits.
Granted, this was "act of god" and not over-consumption, but the fragility of the system was belied very quickly.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Read through the reliability assesment reports of the North American Reliability Council (NERC). You will find that power companies are scrambling to build enough generating capacity to have adequate power availability margins. The "safe" level is a 15% margin; most regions are expected to fall below this in the next few years while the construction of new capacity is completed.
Interestingly, the western side of the US is projected to have the best power generating capacity while having the least reliable design. Many areas have power grids that aree inherently reliable in design, but have insufficient capacity to meet demand.
-JD
- standard house current 120 volts is enough to mess you up but not kill you
WRONG. It's people like you that end up killing themselves changing a light bulb. If you can feel the shock then it has the potential to kill you. You feel something because there is current crossing nerve endings. Prolonged exposure (more than a few seconds) to 120VAC can (and does) cause second and third degree burns on and under the skin (electrolysis and boiling of the water in the blood and flesh) as well as nerve and tisue damage.If the current flow crosses vital organs, there can be serious organ damage -- including perm. heart arythmia due to pacemaker damage and/or heart muscle nerve damage, kidney failure, reduced lung capacity, and the ever popular "walking funny"... I've had more than enough "training" on the hazards of working with and around electrical devices from my days in high school. (Seeing an idiot "jump" over a set of workbenches after saying "What's th[at?]" while trying to point to an exposed high voltage cap on a color tv picture tube, you come to appreciate some things. Yes, the area was clearly marked and we did tell him to keep the f*** away from it. He was rapidly static-charged to about 30kV (much along the lines of a VanDeGraf generator) -- of course, I was laughing too hard to help him. He was unconscious for a few minutes and his hand and fore-arm was numb for a few hours. Afterwards there was the requisit three tons of paperwork -- the school board can be so demanding when a student almost kills themselves.)
To the best of my knowledge, the choice of 60Hz had multiple factors, but there was no big "switch" from 50 Hz to 60. There are some old systems in the local steel mills which still use 25Hz power, but nothing that runs at 50Hz. Increasing the system frequency requires re-engineering (and most likely replacing) all of the power plant equipment in the country. It's also a bad idea because it would increase the energy coupled to the environment in terms of stray electromagnetic fields, which already play havoc with underground pipes, and which may contribute to cancer, leukemia, etc. (The last point is highly debated lately).
Increasing the voltage in the home requires replacing all the home wiring in the US, for zero benefit, the problem is the big lines, not your house. Higher voltage in the home is an increased hazard, I've survived a few hits of 110 accidentally encountered, I would not have been so lucky had there been 440 volts available to push current through me.
The standard is set, messing with it won't help the supposed problem pointed out in the article.
--Mike--
There is always concern because of the growth in home electronics over the past few years; I'm definitely guilty of adding to the demand... Last summer caught us by surprise, not because of lack of generation, but because of reactive power modeling errors, but that event, not to mention Y2K, made us take a hard look, and all of our models are correct to the best of our knowledge.
As to the NIMBY phenomena, I point you to our Queue A map as to where new (planned) generation is scheduled to be built in our zone. Its a double-edged sword; everyone wants the electricity, but noone wants the plant in their county.. But if you put the plant too far away, then you have the added problems with transmission...
Other ISO's:
California
New England
New York
Keep in mind that the CNET article was entirely about CalISO (which is only a few years old and not as developed yet as the east coast) which is only one piece of the entire puzzle. And I'm sure "HomePower" thanks you for the free advertisement, but I hope next time you at Slashdot try to cover the other angles in the story first, other than the pop-answer. Rememeber, one Nuclear plant generates over 1100 MW of power, thats 1,100,000,000 Watts, or about 167,000 times the output of the lead article on HomePower, and those people are the exception, not the rule.
-- Scott
Oh, btw, if it gets back to me, I'm not an official representative of PJM LLC. Thats what Customer Relations is for.
This sort of thing just goes to show why the whole concept of a public utility is severely outdated and needs to be replaced. Government interventionalism worked back in the days of building an infrastructure, but it invariably fails when it comes to maintaining and expanding a service.
Privatised utilities can offer a far superior service to consumers given the competition built into the free market socioeconomic model, and the privatisation of utilities in countries like the UK has been an unqualified success for both consumers and utilities, allowing people to choose exaclty who offers the best deals on their gas, electricity and so on.
What America needs is to have more privitised utilities - look at the success we've had with our health service, it is the envy of the world with the best equipped hospitals to be found anywhere. Surely it is obvious that this success could be used elsewhere, such as in an ailing electrical market.
Of course, the only real danger here is that the Government will attempt to privatise the industry whilst remaining in control of it through legislation and "industry watchdogs", stifling the benefits that privitisation should bring. As I'm sure all libertarians out there would agree, that would not be a good thing at all for anyone.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
The biggest problem is the persistant NIMBY (Not in my backyard) attitude of people. There is no way you are going to be able to build a new power plant in city limits. People will protest no matter how good it may be for others. This means the power plants have to be built relatively far away increasing losses through transmission and the chance of outages.
Secondly other types of large scale power projects, for instance nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams, are almost impossible to build because of enviornmental/political reasons. No matter how clean nuclear power may be (you have to remember that Chernoble was a horrible design along with inept staff) provided it's well run (look at the system France uses and the Candu reactors used in Canada) political reasons have killed almost all new reactor projects.
This leaves a whole lot of alternative power. But even then people don't like the idea of wind power, too noisy, and would probably protest against solar a bit too. (uses up a lot of space and doesn't look very good) And then you have the fact that wind and solar are relatively expensive and unreliable. There are efforts in place to promote them, in some places you can pay extra money to have your electricity generated from alternative power sources, but those efforts will need to be scaled up a lot before they are realistic alternatives. Of course with the fuss over nuclear and hydroelectric alternative power may be a very realistic alternative...
My favorite visualization of this is to imagine a table with a weight on it. The volts is the height of the table, the amps is the mass of the book. The bigger the weight or the higher the table, the more it is going to hurt if you it lands on you.
At standard house current 120 volts is enough to mess you up but not kill you (assuming you don't lower resistance by dunking yourself in salt water first). At around 240 volts though there is a problem in that the current can cause arythmia in the heart which is very bad.
In fact, you are actually better off at higher voltages to some extent. If you get hits at say 440 or higher, it will stop your heart, but it will likely start up right away. At some point the voltage gets high enough that it won't restart on its own.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
You obviously haven't tried to build a nuclear power plant lately. As far as I am aware, Duke Power was the last ones to try to get a license for a new plant in Cherokee, SC. Duke abandoned the site after a few years of red tape and public lunacy. Earl Oensby bought the site and filmed the Abyss in the flooded reactor building (which was already half built.)
As of fall 1989, no new nuclear plant had been granted an operating license since 1974. The NRC grants 30 year licenses after which the reactor is supposed to be decommisioned -- all fuel is removed, the core is drained and the containment building housing the core is filled with cement. However, the NRC, is what I've long thought to be the stupidest thing in the world, has relicensed several of the >30yr old reactors. [After 30yrs of exposure to high levels of neutron and other radiation, the reaction vessel is no longer steel.]
Glad to see the mention of Homepower Magazine.
Aside from being full of interesting DYI projects
for the tinkerer, there are real solutions in
there for someone who seriously wants to break
their reliance on the grid.
More importantly, though, is that Slashdot is much
more foreward-looking then the rest of the press
out there. Most of the time, journalists look
at the power problem and report "We need more
power plants, more lines, and cheaper fuel". Rare
is the day when someone in the press says "There
are serious alternatives to builing large
generating plants out there".
People already have the legal right, in many
states, to produce electricity and put it back
on the grid. Were everyone to put a panel or
two on their rooftop, you'd knock off your own
reliance on the grid and reduce demand. If
people use higher efficiency electrical components
or simply didn't do things like leave their old
refrigerator on in the shed during the summer so
that the compressor runs all day (or build a
styrofoam 'cozy' around it), then demand would
go down or at least stabilize.
But you never hear about these because the
utilities want you to think that there is only
one way and one place where you can and should get
power. You don't have to be a nut to do lower
your dependency, and you don't even have to do
all that much or give up anything you're used to.
So Kudos to Slashdot for raising awareness!
All we need here is a nuclear generator built atop an island constructed of landfill. In fact we better build two just in case a tornado destroys one of them... Then build a bunch of parks. matt