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Power Outages Strike East Coast
fordp writes "CNN, CNBC and others are reporting that major power outages are happening just after 4:00PM EDT in New York, New Jersey, Detroit, Ottawa and Toronto, Toledo." There are reports of a Con Edison transformer on fire on 14th Street in NYC, and lots of people stuck in trains and elevators. CNN is reporting that it is, according to power officials, most likely not related to terrorism, because you know you were wondering. The Niagra Mohawk power grid is overloaded, which feeds electricity throughout the northeast U.S. and into Canada. Update: 08/14 21:06 GMT by P : The mayor said there was no fire, that it was black smoke brought on by an automatic shutdown because of the power grid failure.
..You don't have to worry as much about port 135 being open.
And in other breaking news, a great chorus of laughter could be heard clear across the country, apparently originating from California.
Mayor Bloomberg was just on the radio and said that the Con Edison transformer on 14th Street in NYC is not on fire. It just release some black smoke when it shutdown due to the grid overload.
I'm in Manhattan right now, near Colombus Circle. All power is out across all 5 boros. No traffic lights, hundreds of thousands trapped in the subway... I'm dialed in through Verizon (wow. good network, right?) on a laptop, through a PBX with a battery backup.
According to the radio, the 14th street power station is burning. Of course, it also is talking about blackouts from Cleveland to Toronto. With no power, my poor tropical fish have less than a few hours to live, and I already hear a crowd in the street screaming, but it's mostly good natured right now.
I'm sorry, this seems like sabotage. I've got 100 gallons of fresh water, and a sword.
And I'm posting on slashdot.
Oh well. I guess I just wanted to say hello. =p
Here is a link to the solar flare situation there is an X class happening right now! http://sunspotcycle.com/
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
finally got that extra long extension cable rigged up....
This is kind of weird. I work at a mid size hosting center and ISP and since we normally run on generator power, we didn't know that there was a widespread power outage. Things started popping up on our monitoring system -- and they all seemed completely unrelated. Of course, it turned out that all the things going red were customers with T1 lines and such, that were in buildings losing power. :)
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I bet it is running on linux and the OS license
was revoked by SCO.
He also said that there was no grid overload, it was just being shut down for regular maintenance.
...that this is due to a single fire at a major ConEd substation.
So this one isn't terrorism (so they say), but I'm sure terrorists will be delighted to know that they can throw five major cities into utter chaos by taking out one substation and getting an assist from the domino effect.
~Philly
I always wondered what that wall switch was for and today I finally turned it off. My bad. After dinner I'll go turn it back on.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
Don't believe that sunspots can trigger power outages? Think again.
Should serve as an example to the Department of Energy. The U.S. needs a distributed power generating system ASAP. Lots of small solar and wind generators all over the nation. Every block should have one.
Right now, "officials" are saying this probably isn't terrorism. But I bet it's giving al-Qaeda some ideas.
If an accident can make this happen, I'm sure a cleverly-placed explosive can make it happen much more easily.
And once all those cities are out of power and essentially crippled, the real strikes start.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get some tea on for when the FBI guys come knocking on my door. Does Ashcroft take one lump or two?
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Yeah, I'm in Cambridge and our power is f
+++NO CARRIER+++
Didn't anyone notice the time the blackout happened? 4:11pm! That's 4-11! OH MY GOD! THE TERRORISTS WANT INFORMATION!
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
for a terrorist who goes by the name 'Trinity'.
four-oh-four
I'm typing from 30 miles southwest of Boston. I've heard reports that Boston is affected; but here in the suburbs, we're not having any problems.
It's worth noting that, no matter what caused the initial problem: The results we're seeing are exactly what happens when the populace fails to concern itself with potential problems. We Americans, even today, suffer from a serious case of "It'll-never-happen-to-me." Experts have warned for years that our power grids had dangerous "pressure points," where small problems could cause massive failures.
Unfortunately, when we hear the phrase "potential problem," we hear the first word and never bother to listen to what follows. "If it's not a sure bet, why worry about it?" Well...here's why.
crib
Please don't read my journal
there will be a baby boom next june.
Have fun folks
Oh please, won't somebody think about the children!
Blah.
inside this building there is a level where no elevator can go and no stair can reach. This level is filled with doors. These doors lead to many places, hidden places, but one door is special. One door leads to the source...etc... Now that the power is out we have only five minutes to find the door on that floor.
No. Many of us realized that it is august and bloody hot, and an outage was likely. Lots of major problems occur w/o terrorism being a likely cause.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Can somebody pick me up a TiVo when the looting begins? I'll pay for shipping.
Everybody Wang-Chung tonight!
This collapse was predicted years and years ago. When I was working for a power equipment manufacturer (transformers, relays, switches, capacitors), marketing was playing this sort of thing up to the utilities.
As equipment gets old it becomes less and less efficient. This includes the transformers that bring the power from high voltages to low voltages to your home, and the generators that produce the power. AND it includes all those Air conditioners that are running in hot weather.
No-one has been able to afford to bring new generators online recently. And probably not to upgrade/replace old less efficient equipment. And I'm sure most people haven't bought new ACs either because of the economy.
It wasn't so long ago that something similar happened to Chicago during a heat wave there. And we all remember a few years ago that California had rolling blackouts because the grid couldn't handle the power. And NYC suffered similar blackouts for the same reason in the 60s and 70s I believe.
Unfortunately since its such a large grid its going to take a while for it to come back up. You have lots and lots of main power generators. Each one has to be brought back onto the grid one at a time. Each one has to be synced to the current AC 3 phase system within 5-10 degrees of what's there or when that generator comes on it might cause all the generators to drop out. Syncing a generator takes time and patience.
Then you have to bring the consumers back on. Every time you bring a new section on you have a hell of alot of inrush current as Air Conditioners and motors start up. This is why your lights dim a bit when you turn on certain pieces of equipment. Imagine the dimming you get as 1000 Air conditioners come on at once. If its too much a relay might trip off and the grid might collapse under the strain as a generator falls offline. And yes this is a real meaning to the word offline, the generator is not on the power lines anymore.
It will take time for everything to come back up, and con-ed isn't going to rush it. They will take it up in stages, make sure that everything is ready to go before bringing up the next stage. A collapse this large can happen again and again if they rush. But it might be quicker, the reports don't saay how big the failure was and how many generators fell offline. It could just be that all the distribution substations tripped, but I doubt it. For this to be so widespread the generator protection relays probably all fired off and took their generators off the power grid.
Don't you just love cascading failures? Overloaded power grid; all the generators are close to their shut off point. One fails, all generators go into the range of shutoff, and off they go one right after the other. They probably all fell offline withing 30 seconds, and will probably take 3 days to come back on fully.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
There is also the Enron factor. A couple of years back when Cheney gave Enron the green light to manipulate the California energy market California was making deals to buy any capacity it could
During the period the market was being manipulated the cover story was that it was California's fault for not allowing new plants to be built. Power plants have a major lead time so the only way to get generator sets for new power plants to be built in the West was for NYC to give up the generator sets for a bunch of gas turnbine systems planned to be deployed in the East.
Thank Bush, Cheney and their big friend 'Kenny boy' Lay for putting the interests of Enron before the national interest. First they screwed California and now NYC may well be getting hit by the unexpected results.
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Actually with Mars being so close it will give people in big cities a very rare chance to see this site without all the light polution by which they are normally surrounded.
I just got reports from Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Casablanca and they are all unaffected. Baghdad is still out but that seems to be an independent cause.
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Reporter Shepard Smith at JFK airport said over the Fox News network that airport maitainance workers were delayed in fixing the generator because they were initially denied access to it because they could not be cleared to access the generators without the metal detectors being powered.
I know it sounds strange, but I'm sort of sorry that I'm not in New York for this (I moved to Boston 25 years ago). Yes, I know that it's a monstrous pain in the ass for everyone and even has the potential for injury and loss of life (e.g., heart attack from climbing stairs), but both blackouts I've been in ('65 and '77) were interesting experiences.
I was five years old for the first one and scared out of my wits when the lights went out. It was an early evening in November, around 5:30 PM, and I was sitting on the kitchen floor, watching TV (the Winchell-Mahoney hour). Lights, television, even the streetlamps outside went out. My first thought: "Mommmmmmmmm!!!!!".
We ended up walking over to my aunt's house a couple of blocks away and eating the cake that my mother had baked that day. That was our dinner. Blackout cake. She never made it again after that, but I remember with all the flickering candles it seemed like someone's birthday.
My father got stuck on the subway for 36 hours, though. Bummer for him.
When the '77 blackout hit, I was living with my father on the 15th floor of a building on East 96th St. I'd just gotten home from my summer job and turned on the radio. The DJ was complaining about the turntables running too fast (overcompensating for low voltage?). Looking out my bedroom window, I saw the blackout roll uptown: the Empire State Building went out first, then the rest of Midtown, the Upper East Side, and then us. It was a hot, humid night and you could see the occasional flash of heat lightning.
I checked on my neighbors, an elderly couple, before heading down to the street, where I bartered a couple of cold beers for a handful of candles. People were bewildered, wondering if the Indian Point nuclear plant had blown, or if the Rooskies were attacking. It took about an hour for the looting to start north of us and for most of the night there was an endless parade of NYPD patrol cars headed uptown, four or five cops in each, all in full riot gear.
I don't want to downplay the millions of dollars of damage that happened that night, but my neighborhood was pretty peaceful. It was like an instant block party, people sharing food and beer and the occasional joint, oldtimers (I guess that's me now) talking about the '65 Blackout (which, like today, started at the Mohawk grid and covered roughly the same area).
Fifteen flights up was nothing for me back then; I ran track in high school.
A couple of years ago my neighborhood in Boston lost power for 36 hours. Nothing big, maybe 25,000 households, but I was bereft. No cable, no Internet, just a battery-operated radio and, of course, candles. Off the grid.
But it was educational. I never realized how dependent I was on technology and the network, how much of my time is spent in front of the silicon devils (TV and computer). Thirty hours with nothing but books and an acoustic guitar for entertainment. When the power came on, the first thing I did was fire up a web browser. It was like a refreshingly cool shower of meaningless information after having to sit and stew with my thoughts.
Shit. I think I'll go to the basement and throw the main breaker. Just for old time's sake.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
1) Generators run their units with minimal loads
to keep in sync, so that when it's
time to ramp up, sync is not an issue.
Mostly true.
Gas turbine plants are made for peaking, and can supply whatever is demanded within a second or two- but their capacity is limited.
Many of the baseline load plants, steam plants, take sometime to change power output. Nuclear power plants are the worst.
I just started working at a nuclear powerplant, so my understanding may not be fully up to speed, but here's what I know so far:
When our plant is disconnected from the grid (not easy, because we have three lines running out on seperated paths, but it happened last year), we have a whole lot of energy in the system, and no place to put it- so we trip the plant. that basically means that the control rods drop into the core within seconds of being disconnected from the grid, and the plant starts to cool down.
We have in-house diesels to safely shut down the plant with, but they can't put out the voltage or power required to run the largest motors in the plant, which are needed to start power generation back up. Essentially, we need to be connected to the grid to start and run the plant.
These large motors, combined with everything else, use up about 3% of our plant capacity. I don't think we can run at 3% capacity, but I'm not positive. Basically, even if we knew ahead of time we where to be disconnected, I don't think we could ramp down the plant far enough to run only house loads off the main generator.
Short version:
1) A nuclear power plant can't start or run without being connected to the grid.
2) Once connected, they take about a day to get up to full power output.
3) Nuke power plants are typically a grid baseline load- meaning they're the last to have to cut production in the face of reduced demand. Nuke plants account for 20% of our electrical consumption.
2) The grid doesn't have to be brought up with
all generators and exchanges linked, they
can be brought up as islands and rejoined later.
4) Generators can only keep in sync when the grid is there to sync to. If the grid is disconnected, one plant starts, and everyone syncs to that. But I don't believe it takes very long to sync, maybe minutes. Though it is possible that if it's only one plant per 'island' they could drag the sync back to match with other islands.
That's all based on the assumption that other plants work roughly the same as Seabrook Station in Seabrook, NH. I do not claim authorative knowledge.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I thought the "grid" was, basically, composed of consumers and producers of energy. I know that there is a balancing act between supply, demand, and the requirement to balance the loads within line segments, but it was my understanding that as long as there were consumers for your energy then you could generate it.
That's an oversimplification, I know. But I don't understand this case: A major power producer goes offline, but the consumers don't. Why can't the remaining producers take up at least some of the slack?
www.howstuffworks.com might have some good information, but I don't have any direct links.
The grid is composed of three parts: producers, transmission, and consumers.
Now when a major plant goes offline, typically other plants do take up the slack, so you've got the right idea. For example, in October, Seabrook station will go offline for refueling, and no one will notice, because we're paying other plants to generate the electricity we committed to. The excess peaking capacity of the grid goes down, so there's a smaller margin for peaks, but brownouts are largely avoided.
Now in comes the transmitters: It's often referred to as 'The national electric grid' but that's not quite correct. The system is capable of transmitting power from Maine to California, and Florida to Toronto, but there's a lot of sub-grids with sometimes minor connections between them, and these are typically open- there might be a small connection for keeping sync, so they can close on demand.
Each inter-grid connection can only carry so much current- the lines would heat up and start to sag, substations would catch on fire, that sort of thing. This can't really be tolerated, so when a connection's capacity is overloaded, the breakers pop open and the 'donor' grid just gives a big 'fuck off' to the recieving grid.
So when this happens, it starts to ask even more of the other grids it's connected to, increasing the chance that it will cause an overcurrent trip on these other lines.
These connections can also be manually opened and closed by the grid controllers- in NH, the control room is in manchester, and I think it's run by a company called ISO. An overcurrent trip may require a lineman to visit the substation in question, i'm not sure.
Now, every plant except nuke plants runs lower than it's actual capacity to keep some peak demand reserve, so in general, they can pick up the slack when one goes down. Each powerplant does have it's limit, though. If demand on a particular plant exceeds it's capacity, the voltage will drop, and the plant will likely trip on undervoltage, or a grid connection might trip, or the plant operators might shut the plant down to preserve the equipment. (Most things in my powerplant like to run at one-steady state speed. Since voltage is proportional to speed, lower voltage means the main generator and turbine slow down. I won't go into the details, but suffice it to say, it's no fun)
Shutting down one plant will of course increase demand on other plants. So I'm sure you can see by now that once a cascade starts, things can really start to go to shit.
This is ideally avoided by having ridiculously over-rated transmission lines, and grid excess generation capacity well above the output of any one or two or three plants. However, I don't think we've really beefed up our transmission lines since the 70's or 80's, and new powerplants are often stalled or killed by NIMBY's and groups like greenpeace who haven't the slightest clue how a nuke plant works, how it's different from a bomb, and how many robust safety systems there are between the radiation and the public.
We've been setting ourselves up for problems for sometime now. It's time to build new power plants, and beef up transmission lines, cause demand sure as hell won't recede.
Corrections to my statements are welcomed from people with more than my meager two months in the power industry.
**Nuke plants typically run at full power
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Every normal shutdown procedure should come complete with billowing clouds of black oily smoke.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
From what I've seen on TV coverage, they showed the source of the black smoke. Looked to me like a refinery or something with the safety flare-off stacks burning. I live in the heart of petrochemical alley down along the southern Mississippi River, and believe me, whenever there is a widespread power failure, they all do the same thing.
There are many stages to the processes that turn oil into gasoline, plastics, and other petrochemical products. Whenever there is an upset to the process, such as a power failure, complex systems (on backup power, of course) are designed to shut down the plant in a controlled manner to prevent a catastrophe, and many times that involves venting unprocessed flammables to safety flare-offs to be burned off.
About 7 years ago, a transformer failed at a major substation over by where I live, plunging a large area into darkness. Within seconds, a series of loud explosions were heard at a nearby plastics plant. People living in the area were panicking because they thought that the plant blew up, but the TV and radio newscasters calmly explained (to those who could recieve the broadcasts) that it was part of the safety shutdown procedure, that the loud booms were caused by safety pop-off valves and what looked like burning Iraqi oil wells was the safety flare-off stacks burning.