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Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story?
It's just a few hours after the Northeast U.S. power outage, and facts are trickling in; as of right now, it looks like an accidental overload knocked out a large part of the Niagara Mohawk power grid. A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry. The question that's probably occurring to many of us is, did late-'90s deregulation play a role in today's power event? I don't know the answer, so I'm turning it over to you -- moderators, please check links and up-mod the most informative, pro or con. Here is some information to get you started:
"We support deregulation 100 percent..." (N-M spokesman, 1997; notes N-M wanted to sell generators and "concentrate on the transmission and distribution of energy" -- did it?);
N-M made some bad investments and is
scheduled to request a rate hike (did it?);
and N-M's own website says:
"Deregulation [has] changed the laws and regulations governing the electricity industry to promote competition..." (how so?).
I don't see how this has to do with deregulation. It has more to do with poor design of the power infrastructure. From what I have heard, the way the power grid works is there are switching stations which link various networks together much like a router on a lan. When one switching station goes down, for whatever reason, there are fail safe systems which move affected areas over to other switches.
What can happen is, if all stations are working at or near capacity and a part of the network goes down for whatever reason (fire, or too much power being drawn for example) then when power is routed from the other switching stations they become overburdened as well and there is a ripple effect of outages across the grid.
When this occurs, power companies have to be careful when bringing power back online as they may become overburdened again as soon as they become operational. The U.S. power grid has become extremely complicated and vulnerable as it has scaled. Fail safe systems often fail in their fail safe components.
Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation. I have not researched deregulation sufficiently so I can't really argue for or against it, but blaming everything on it is not helpful.
Visualize the world of wine
The rolling blackouts in California were rationing exercises. This, however, is an unplanned disaster.
I guarantee you that if a power outage happened anywhere OTHER than New York City, the mass media outlets would barely be covering this event at ALL. For example, if this had happened in, say, Seattle-Portland-Vancouver, nobody would raise an eyebrow.
Right now I am looking at "LIVE" footage on CNN of a few people loitering in the streets and what looks to be traffic as usual. Drudge Report says "CONCERN OF FIRES". Concern? This is drudge report material? Please.
I am sick of the NYC bias we see in the media. Self-importance is so passe. Please make this story go away, I give CNN and Fox News a big "OFFTOPIC" (To their credit, Fox is now reporting the story that some terrorist mastermind yadda yadda yadda has been capture).
Lame.
This certainly sounds like the 1996 Great Northest Blackout.
http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html
Robert
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
Deregulation is good because SCO suxs!
evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.
...if you asked us to pass judgment on the guilt of Scott Peterson or Kobe Bryant. It's way too early to turn this into a rant against deregulation.
"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"
l /main546097.shtml
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
The people that RUN THE FSCKING GRID do not know what went wrong and /. is posting articles asking if X caused it???
Are you insane?
But I don't think de-regulation is a major part of this. The california problems were cronic problems that went on over a long period of time.
As far as it is known now (3 hrs into the event) this is a one time deal due to equipment failure. In the summer due to Air Conditioning and other things power grids run very near the max so if something major fails then you are running much above 100%, this starts blowing breakers and shutting things down. The radio just said in 3 minutes 21 plants shut down, so once things start to fail and they can fail fast.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
"We support deregulation 100 percent..." (N-M spokesman, 1997; notes N-M wanted to sell generators and "concentrate on the transmission and distribution of energy" -- did it?);
N-M made some bad investments and is scheduled to request a rate hike (did it?);
and N-M's own website says: "Deregulation [has] changed the laws and regulations governing the electricity industry to promote competition..." (how so?).
Also, show your work.
Pencils down!
Just because a politician calls it something doesn't make it true.
CA got messed up because their power system was RE-regulated with a set of stupid rules that certain less-than-ethical companies took advatage of. It was the REGULATIONS put in place that caused everything to fall apart, not a lack of them.
paintball
"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"
l /main546097.shtml [cbsnews.com]
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
I'm going to steal wind up radios before those new fangled Opterons. At least I'll be able to use them!
Omnis amans amens
In the coming weeks and months, we might well find some sort of "smoking gun" memo that details known flaws in the power grid system. It might be a flaw that could have been fixed with a small investment of capital... or it could be an obselete system entirely. Without more information, it is impossible to tell. I agree, it seems like it's too soon to begin pointing fingers - but knowing the cause of this event will go a long way toward preventing it elsewhere.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Yes. Let's turn slashdot into a rumour-mill.
Oh wait...
It's bad enough that the paid editors can't be bothered to actually edit their site. It's also bad enough that the paid editors almost never produce the content -- it's all reader-submitted links to someone else's story. But now they want their readers to dig up the facts, write the story, and then give the content to Slashdot, providing the editors with more ad-hit revenue?
Never have I been happier that I blocked all the Slashdot/OSDN ad servers years ago.
Running Windows, unpatched with the Blaster worm causes power outages!!!!!
No. Equipment on the power grid failed. This is going to happen with or without regulation or deregulation, unless you can manage to outlaw entropy.
Although I'd imagine there are a number of groups within the country who would like to try.
i think that we should hold on this discussion topic until those from the north east coast can join in. everyone please stop posting.
They want to rule the world but can't even build a decent power grid. Losers.
...Niagara Mohawk expects to be able to deliver a sufficient supply of electricity to meet customers' needs throughout the summer months.
e ws.html#2
From http://www.niagaramohawk.com/house/homenews/homen
I like the last bit in that title line, "Is there a story?". A friend of mine from Bangladesh recently moved back there. I was chatting with him on ICQ when I noticed every 2-3 minutes he'd go offline and come back. He told me that the power kept going out. It is a regular occurance, and the external modem he was using to connect to the net wasn't on the backup power system.
:)
Here in New Orleans, we lose power about once a week for 10-20 minutes (more frequent if it rains, also depends on where in the city you are). Sometimes, power is out for a few hours. It's just a way of life.
I realize that it's impressive that such a wide area recieved a blackout, but really, is this such a big deal? Everything should be fixed soon. People just need to relax. Maybe GO OUTSIDE!!!
----
Squirrel
...surely has something unspecified do with Microsoft (and now possibly ATI).
...are totally lost when you hand over control to monopolies. At that point, it becomes a matter of philosophy--do you trust politicians or corporate executives?
Ideally, deregulation leads to competition, where fear of competitors causes private companies to do the right thing.
As it stands, most latter-20th-century deregulation has been a bust, because it just hands control over to a different oligarchy. And not all that different at that.
We're in the middle of a power outage and all /. editors can do is start the blame game.
There is no proof that deregulation or anything else is to blame for this. From what has been on the news thus far, it is due to a surge in the grid which turned off power distribution points by flipping their effective fuses... just like a surge in your home.
So why start to point fingers right now? It could have been a lightning strike, or a wandering bear, or terrorism, or maybe it was another Pinky and the Brain's scheme to take over the world!
Get over it... get the FACTS before you start to point fingers.
In March, 1998, Auckland - New Zealand's major city (though not the capital, that's Wellington, in case you need to know) - had a FIVE week blackout.
This was after the system was privatised. They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.
Five weeks with no power. In a major(-ish - hey, I live in Sydney) city. Incredible.
If any city NOT privatised has suffered such an indignity I have not heard about it.
So I blame privatisation - the accountants tend to outrank and overrule the engineers (heard that one before? Remember Challenger?)
"Cats like plain crisps"
What excuses do you want to give me for this type of "accident"?
When do you think we'll be seeing the next one?
Now they just have to deal with Google. ;)
I originally posted this as anonymous before I realized I wasn't logged in. Now I'm modded as redundant. That'll teach me to desire karma! ;)
what no tech talk ? your gonna make me read wired.com
Care to give details/references?
The rolling blackouts were caused by energy companies gaming the market and withholding power in order to drive up prices. Cascade events are purely accidental and difficult to predict due to the complexity of the grid. It's like a butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, or something like that.
How can I steal data if all the computers are off?
Ohhh, you mean stealing in real life.
That ain't gonna happen, there's natural light out there. You know what natural light does to a well CRT-baked skin.
On November 9, 1965 this happened before. Maybe not exactly the same thing, but from roughly the same area, and cascading in what sounds like (based on preliminary reports) in the same way.
Deregulation was not in effect then; so if there is a strong parallel between the cases, it's then doubtful that it was due to dereg.
When more facts are in, we will know.
Got Wisdom?
That is just a goddamn stupid comment.
I am not an outdoor person. I did go hiking with my father when I was a kid, but since I've lived most of my life in various cities and spend most of my waking hours basking in the cold glow of CRT tubes. Still I do know how to survive without electricity: how to light a campfire, build an adequate shelter, boil water so that it's safe to drink and cook and dry food on fire. How do I know it, I ran a rehearseal for before Y2K (yeah, go ahead and laugh but better safe than sorry) and went outdoors for a night. Just me and my rucksack.
Goddamn moron. "You can't be without it" my ass.
As a subscriber, I saw this being prepared for posting, and dropped him an email saying it would be a bad idea to slashdot them in the middle of this. Granted, the public site may not be linked to anything internal, but it's good that they changed the links from Niagara Mohawks site to the Google cache. ;)
Now they just have to deal with Google.
In case people are wondering how the power grid works, here is an article on howstuffworks.com on how
The power grid works
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Is it still not dark then? Well... give it a couple of hours :)
Maybe regulation/deregulation is not as much the issue as redundancy in the power grid. I would think that it would make sense for there to be enough reduancy and backup systems in a power grid as large as the one described so that black outs such as this one do not occour.
On the other hand, the need for redundancy, or possibly for areas to draw power from other sources is expensive, and does not fit the model of a profitable buisness. Regulation could help by fueling money into redundancy and requireing a certian ammount of backup systems in place so that major black outs occour. Also, as far as I understand, the power grids is large cities have not grown to keep up with demand in said cities making blackouts or atleast brown outs more plausable.
Then again, this is only news because black outs of the magnitude happen so rarely. In all likelyhood this was a freak accident on the level that will not happen again for another 30 years or so. Hopefuly the people in charge of both the power grid in most areas as well as most major metropolitan areas have backup plans for when events such as this one occour. One can only hope.
I just saw the first political spin on this mess. Bill Richardson, the Former Energy Secretary, was on CNN saying we have a "third world power grid". What he didn't say and the CNN sycophant wouldn't bring up is that while he was in office the Clinton administration turned down every request to build new or upgrade existing power stations. The theory of the grid is that when one part of the grid needs power it can be shunted from areas with excess capacity. Just as in California (who also refused to build new capacity) THERE IS NO EXCESS CAPACITY! When one part is at capacity, they all are.
Quite frankly, we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power. Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
What a bunch of reactionary tripe. I know this isn't supposed to be real news. I mean, it's just news for nerds and all that, but come on. Where the hell do get off putting such ridiculous, unsubstantiated, fear mongering on the front/top of *any* news medium?
Jamie, you really need to think and take a few deep breaths before you go posting crap like this. There's hardly any facts available as it is, but those that are available indicate technical failures. Not too surprising given it's the middle of the fsck'ing summer and a hot & humid one at that.
Put your little tinfoil hat on and go sit in the corner until you've calmed down.
As a subscriber, I saw this being prepared for posting, and dropped him an email saying it would be a bad idea to slashdot them in the middle of this. Granted, the public site may not be linked to anything internal, but it's good that they changed the links from Niagara Mohawks site to the Google cache.
Now they just have to deal with Google.
Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: New York power outage, deregulation disaster or the work of SCO terrorists... discuss!"
Sorry everyone, this one was my fault... I accidentally plugged my toaster oven in the same outlet as my microwave. :(
NO CARRIER
It has been my observation that when the government says they're going to deregulate an industry, what they really mean is they are going to re-regulate it.
The California energy "deregulation" included such wonderful non-regulatory freedoms as: Prohibition on construction of new power plants, Purchasing power at a higher, mandated rate, and selling at a lower mandated rate, etc.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Yes, this smacks of page click whoring.
Try to maintain some level of dignity even if your parent corp is on the verge of bankrupcy
...people freaked out when they turned the power grid on
So let's see... you think these "less-than-ethical companies" would be better behaved with fewer rules? That makes a lot of sense. You're blaming the regulations because companies found ways to abuse them. How about a little blame for the companies that abuse them?
More flamewars = more ad impressions.
Booyah.
A litle too quick to blame anything/anyone. Shit happens. Deregulation? Maybe. Being a structural ironworker, regulation sure has helped me. (OSHA regulations). But, I doubt deregulation helps the elecrticity markets maintain service and order. Neither regulation nor deregulation work in every situation all the time. Human error? Probably. Electricity is an *on demand* business. Prolly someone just guessed wrong at a critical moment. Kinda like when i fell off the iron.... woops... wrong!!!
It was the REGULATIONS put in place that caused everything to fall apart, not a lack of them.
Possibly, but if one of the San Onofre's 1100MW reactors had not been down, in combination with droughts in the Pacific Northwest, demand may not have outstripped supply.
Dastardly
We have been converting our system to run on wood with the surplus inventory we now enjoy. Its all our fault, the beavers went on strike.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Last theory from Canadian governement is a thunderstorm near the border of canada-us, US-side, that cause the blackout.
What you need most is that Nuclear plants have ways to keep working when their connections to the Grid are broken. If they can't output electricity to the grid, the plants have to power down, because the electricity can't go anywhere. And Nuclear plants will take more than a few hours to cool down enought to be started up again.
At least 9 nuclear plants are power-down right now, it's all that electricity that won't be able to rejoin the grid fast enough to normalize the situation.
In a deregulated environment, the interconnection of the systems becomes even more critical, since more power is being moved between companies and networks.
Without a well regulated grid in operation, the market in power breaks down, just like it did today.
The term "deregulation" is a bit of a misnomer. When a state goes through "deregulation", its not actually removing regulation from the power company. It's simply changing the existing regulation. A better term would probably be "different regulation", because after "deregulation", there are probably more regulations on the books governing power companies than before the deregulation process.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I realize you have blackouts at least once a week in New Orleans, but we're talking about electricity outages here, not blackouts from alcohol overconsumption.
USSR got messed up because their politbureau was fucked up with a set of stupid rules that certain less-than-ethical persons took advatage of. It was the OPPRESSION put in place that caused everything to fall apart, not some inherent lack of freedom in the true Communism.
At this point in time...the situation is still being evaluated. *we don't know*
More importantly, the people that run the power grid *do not know*.
Some poor schmuck on the front lines probably knows...but he ain't talking yet.
I would think that deregulation would work against something like this happening on such a large scale. Shuoldn't deregulation cause a larger number of smaller grids to be created, which when they fail would cause more of a rolling blackout then a single large area one. of course thats just my 2 cents.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
I am in Beamsville/Grimsby, Ontario and as of this posting (7:37 p.m.)we have power. This area is serviced by Niagara Falls but I am not sure why this area of probably 30 miles is the only spot with power in Ontario or New York.
Stay tuned for new sig...
How the FUCK did this get modded as Insightful?!
The only reason Niagra Mohawk's grid is in the news is that black smoke was seen coming from it. It was misreported that it was on fire. Many regional grids are affected. The focus on Niagra Mohawk is unwarranted. For all we know, the source problem could be in Canada. It will take much time to figure it out. Maybe weeks or months.
"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry. "
The CA power crisis was a direct result of the failure to build a single power plant in CA for the last 15 years. The fact that the state was playing around with a half-assed form of deregulation in which the price to the consumer was still regulated is a coincidence. The fact is, CA wasn't able to supply enough power for itself, so was forced to by power on the open market.
Vote for Pedro
Don't wait for the facts! Let's point fingers NOW! What did Bush know!?!?!
I don't know anything about how a power grid works, but that won't stop me from having an opinion!!!
Make the government regulate the power industry!!! But keep their goddamn paws off our precious internet and Linux!!!
They used to point at the airline industry - remember? "Oh, look how great the airline industry did after it was deregulated!" Yeah, well, so now the taxpayers get to bail them out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. Might as well have subsidized them from the beginning...
Yes, this has happened before. Go to the video store and look for the PBS series "Connections" with James Burke. Episode 1 in that series starts with a dramatization of the 1965 blackout. Started when an overload protection circuit (i.e. breaker) on a Niagara hydroelectric distribution line "did what it was designed to do" (says Burke). The result was a wave of cascading overloads that took out the whole Northeast U.S. power grid.
All this really indicates is that power utilities run their systems with virtually no protective margin. Or, it could be said, demand has outstripped whatever margin they ever *have* had.
The power distribution system could benefit from an "expert system" that watched large regional events to quickly detect (and isolate) rapid sequences of such failures. Not a small task, but straightforward in theory.
Power's back on, as of approximately 7:30 PM EDT in Rockland County, NY. (Suffern)
Hey, you asked us for crying out loud!
In all seriousness though, the power grid isn't running Windows, is it?
Alex.
Yeah, you blame person who shot the gun, not the gun which they used to shoot.
Sure, maybe there is mismangement of these plants as a result of poorly done deregulation, but its poor journalism to start speculating and jumping to conclusions before we even know what the facts are!
Personally, I spent $800 on a moderate 10w solar cell, cables, power invertor, deep cycle battery and assorted switches to power an outdoor shed. It would have cost twice that much to run electricity to it. Now I have enough power to run all my power tools and a few lights.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
Yeah, should have been Informative.
While I'm not 100% sure of the facts in Niagra, I think in a general sense, "deregulation problems" are due to poor implementation. California's a prime example. They "deregulated", but continued to over-regulate other aspects of the power companies' business, which meant they could not effectively compete.
Fundamentally, it comes down to an economics issue: do you believe that competition drives down prices and up quality of goods and services, or do you believe that state-owned industries provide cheaper, better goods and services. The trouble with "deregulation" is that they try to walk the fence and end up failing at both...
California put some rather peculiar rules in place regarding how much should be paid to move power at certain times. What ended up happening is that companies were able to take advantage of these fees by moving power around unnecessarily and at peak times, forcing the state and other consumers of the power to pay more. It was the rough power equivalent of having your cab driver take you from O'hare to the Loop via Milwaukee.
So yes, in this case, eliminate the rules that dictated that the price of power was based on the competition for transmission lines at a particular time (something the people controlling the transmission lines could easily inflate by moving power around unnecessarily) and the companies would not have been able to misbehave. The regulations gave the power companies the ability to set the prices for what they were selling.
paintball
Private-entreprise zealots quickly lose steam whenever you point Hydro-Quebec at them as a shining example of profitable State ownership.
It wasn't deregulation back in '65, it was those damn UFOs
God grant me serenity to accept code I can't change, courage to change the code I can, and wisdom to know the difference
Last report from Possum Lake was they have plenty of beer and duct tape to repair the faulty generators.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
With less rules, there would be more incentive for more companies to get involved, and then there would be a free market for power, so the possibility of gouging would go away. Under regulation, you're at the mercy of the govt., which means low to no profit. Not worth the risk.
Vote for Pedro
Maybe you should have waited to post this thread until after the Power situation is all sorted out, so that the people with the first hand views on the subject could get on to see the thread...
Shawn Asmussen
If the damn Sims would simply accept paying more taxes, I could build the nuclear plant and maybe get a stadium too. It would make them all happier too!
Why Is My Power Plant Aging So Quickly?
Hmm. Night approaches....
Why Am I Getting Riots?
"I may be Love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."
Look, people. There isn't anything or anyone to blame for this.
The Niagra Mohawk power grid serves the area in question. The way a power grid works is that there is a mesh of generation stations that are all interconnected by high-voltage transmission lines, 480kV on up. Each generation station has a primary service area and one or more (usually more) entry/exit stations where energy can either enter or exit the primary service area, depending on what they're telling the control system to do.
A network of generation stations makes up a grid, and at the boundary of a grid, there are similar entry/exit stations.
All generators, whether they be nuclear, hydro, wind, or whatever, have TONS of safety interlocks that engage at various points during abnormal conditions to prevent catastrophic failure. One of these interlock behaviors is to shut down and remove the generator from the grid in the event of an overload.
The likely sequence of events in this situation is that there was a failure at one of the generators in the N-M grid that resulted in the shutdown of that generator. What happens when a generator shuts down is that all of the entry/exit points flip to "entry" mode to allow neighboring generators to take up the slack. Most generator companies have agreements with their neighbors to buy however much electricity they need at whatever the current price is, without acknowledgement, when one of these shutdown events happens.
Anyway, once the initial generator shut down and the entry/exit stations flipped to entry mode, the neighboring generators were unable to take up the slack, so they in turn shut down as well. Then, a domino effect set in until it reached the boundary of the N-M grid, or when someone at the operator station woke up and hit the red button that prevents the transfer stations from automatically flipping to "entry" mode.
Keep in mind that it didn't necessarily have to be an overload that caused it - a generator can shut down for a number of reasons.
This all could have been a control system failure, an operator error, or some other unfortunate combination of events that happened to lead to a catastrophic grid failure.
It was the rough equivalent of a cab company having 1000 cabs servicing the O'Hare to Loop route, and making sure that all 1,000 left at the same time, whether they had any passengers or not, thus assuring the passengers they did have paid more in fares for the time sitting in traffic. The time spent in traffic is an artificial cost created by the person controlling the service, just like power line congestion was artificially created by those conrtolling the power lines.
paintball
Can I post?
No, it wasn't a smoking gun, it was a smoking power station on East 14th street, haven't you been paying attention?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I love that everyone from Bloomberg on up is blaming the Canadians.
Everyone sing along now...
Blame Canada, Blame Canada
*mutter, mutter*
Something about Anne Murray, too.
Thanks god idiots like you don't receive karma for those "jokes" anymore.
Yep. That's why I got modded up. Twice.
You must be new here.
Wild speculation is our business.
*Sees 4-digit UID* oh...wait
You see, we old-timers remember the good old days, when Slashdot was like an exclusive club, patronized only by those netizens "in the know", and when moderation was not just unimplemented but irrelevant, because none of those thoughtful and intelligent first users would have even thought of submitting a comment to a story unless they already knew it was insightful and interesting.
.
.
.
Naah, I'm just yanking your chain. It's always been like this.
I posted this in the ealier article about the power crisis. This thread didn't exist then, but it seams more appropriate here.
I live in British Columbia, west coast of Canada, and we have a publicly owned power company called BC Hydro. However our provincial government, which is very pro business, has been making moves to privatize this public utility by selling off portions to private companies.
The most recent branch to be sold off was to Accenture, a Bahamas based (i.e. tax shelter) spin off of Enron. If you don't remember Enron, here are some highlights: one of the biggest bankruptcies in US history, massive corporate crime, a major contributor to the California energy crisis due to power brokering, a major political contributor to one George W. Bush's election campaign and one of the script writers of Bush's current US Energy policy.
One of the major arguments of our provincial government's privatization campaigns is that companies can run these utilities far better and at lower cost to the consumer than can public institutions.
Well, I'm wondering, how many of you the east cost have seen your power bills going down. Don't every one raise there hands at once.
Now the reason I point this out is I see a direct coloration between the movement to have Open Source Software being deployed in public infrastructure Vs. Closed Source, and Public run utilities, such as water and electricity, Vs. Private Market Driven Operation.
I think most people who frequent Slashdot don't need an explanation in why an OSS solution should be the only standard for a democratic government. Just as I think they can see the rationale for publicly accountable organization running the fundamental utilities that support society, consisting of both Business and the People. However I think no one really understands the extent that Business now has in dictating government policy, and shifting that policy from serving the people to creating profit at the expense of the People, You and Me, whether we are American, Canadian or any other nationality. Health care is a prime example. The Struggle between Linux and Microsoft in India is another.
There wasn't deregulation in California or anyplace else in the county. There was re-regulation.
The governemnt changed and relaxed the rules by which power companies play. The rules were not removed.
The new rules were/are a mess and we (the consumers) would be better off with either the old more controlling regulated monopolies, or a true open market system. Unfortunately from here we will get neither.
What will happen is more regulation to "fix" the re-regulated stuff that was supposed to fix the original percevied problems. The resulting tangle of red tape and beurochracy will ensure that nothing useful will happen for at least another decade.
I do know this: under strict government ownership or control, there were few power problems. Prices were predictable and supply was ample and capacity was kept under control. It's been this under partial privitization and re-regulation that all these price fixing issues, sudden under-capacity, and grid overloading have occoured.
Did the government see these problems coming and bail from the industry instead of fixing the issues? Is it the companies that took over trying to maximize profit instead of maximizing reliability? Is it the regulators who can't keep straight what is supposed to be happening?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Same thing with power, personal debt and quarterly reporting. Doubling the cost of electricity to expand the grids capability or rationing power (no aircon) will not be well received. A short-term view will always win over a long-term view if there is some pain involved.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I have NPR on and from what they said it looks light a lightning strike at a plant in Niagra Falls NY may be the cause of this.
There will always be weather events (lightning, snow/ice etc) that will cause power problems.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I wouldn't be proud of it - that's pretty sad, reusing jokes on fucking slashdot. How pathetic.
Just think how many would-be moderators in the northeast aren't contributing to your daily karma fix right now! Maybe Rob will open his vast stores and hand some out to the needy until this crisis is over!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
WLS Chicago has just reported the Canadian PM said that lightning struck one of the Niagara Falls generators, and that might be initial cause of the cascade. They also reported that Hilary Clinton suggested a connection between the deregulation and these events should be investigated.
The Great Eastern Seabord Blackout -- blacked out everything from Toronto to, at one point, northern Florida, with large parts (particularly New York area) out for circa 18 hours or so.
Had nothing to do with deregulation, since there wasn't any at the time.
Stuff happens.
-- Alastair
The plant was struck by lightning. Nice try though, maybe you should submit that paranoid dribbling to Kuro5hin.
When we saw the lights of New York City go out, we knew our work was done.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts ...
Jamie, you ignorant slut.
It was LAST YEAR.
Let's all have a moment of silence for all the linux and *bsd boxen whose legendary uptimes were mercilessly snuffed out by this service interruption. Some clung to their UPS's bravely until every ampere of juice had been drained.
They will be missed, and we will build even longer uptimes to replace them.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
This is the largest blackout EVARR!!!!!11
Get a clue. Not everything is a media conspiracy.
One of the costs in getting power is that power's distribution - transmission lines cost money, and moving power over transmission lines thus costs money. California, as part of their "deregulation", put in place a system where the price of wholesale power was affected by not only the amount of power, but how the power got from point A to point B. The real pitfall with the rule was that it ALSO took into account supposed congestion on transmission lines - prices were set higher for wholesale power delivered when there was apparently a lot of people wanting to transmit power over given lines.
The obvious pitfall being that power line congestion could be artificially created - Enron (and others) took to moving power around more than necessary, creating more congestion, and thus artificially inflating the prices local power providers had to pay to get power over transmission lines.
Even worse, not only did the "deregulation" regulations allow Enron et. al. to artificially inflate the price of wholesale power, they ALSO prevented local power providers (the guys who actually delivered the power to your house) from raising the prices to make up for it, forcing them to sell power at a loss.
This could only go on so long before the local power companies started to run out of money, at which point they just said "Screw it", and instead of delivering power at a loss that they couldn't pay for anyway, they just stopped delivering power at all.
paintball
You are obviously correct in that California's power system was never deregulated. It was re-regulated in a manner that all the politicians and relevant corporate stooges called "deregulation." And that doesn't necessarily make it so.
Of course, so long as my power company can force me to give them an easement to put power lines on my property, they will not be, technically, deregulated. So long as they can use public resources, they will not be, technically, deregulated.
That suggests to me that it is completely impossible (due to political reality or physical reality is unimportant) for the US to actually deregulate it's power industry. All we will ever get is "re-regulation." Unfortunately, all the politicians (liberal & conservative alike) called this "deregulation." All the media called it "deregulation." All the think-tanks called it "deregulation." If the public doesn't have any way to know about the true consequences of legislation that's this complex... we'll get fucked every time.
I guess my point is... ok, no point. Still. What do you think we should do about the power industry? If you want *real* deregulation, then you're going to have to explain how the hell you'd define *real* deregulation. And before you ever passed your law, you'd get a bunch of politicians and corporations in there fucking things up.
The one source that I want someone to dig up for me is this: a pre-shortage, pre-"deregulation" article suggesting that the California "deregulation" legislation was the wrong kind of deregulation. Then I'll know who to follow for the right kind of local political coverage for the rest of my life.
If you can find that, I'll kiss you on the mouth. (You can kiss my girlfriend if you'd prefer.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Montana went through 'de-regulation' a little while ago. After de-regulation commercial power rates went through the roof causing many businesses to go bankrupt. Residential power rates have been raised over 50% since then as well. All these rate hikes have happened despite the fact that Montana ships nearly 1/2 of our energy out of state. In addition to this Montana's largest power supplier sold all of their power plants to an out of state business. The business that bought them is on the verge of going bankrupt and our governor who started all of this wants to bail them out... Overall de-regulation has had a very negative impact on Montana.
That's because no one gives a rat's ass what happens in Canada, eh?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Let us not forget that is the 60's this exact thing happened. The whole northeast went out, and it was traced back to this exact thing. What have we learned since then?
Here in colorado, we had the 2'nd lowest energy costs in the nation (behind washington). Since dereg, we have gone up into the upper third. Now for the funny part. We have some of the best winds in the nation and actually pay a premium for the wind energy. We are the top Natural gas producer. We had some of the newest generation plants. The energy was clean and the outages in the city were minimal (during a heavy snow storm, you may get some minor outages). Yes, there were outages in rural areas, but that was out of PSc hands.
Now, the electricity is dirty. I do not even have to test it. My UPSs are contstantly cutting in and out. We have easily 5x the number of outages and our bill now looks like it came from california or texas.
But you take your gamble.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Because it FUCKING true, but to many morons like you still believe the media spin.
Actually, I found this a long time ago and think it is somewhat related... a movie of an exploding power transformer:
g
http://205.243.100.155/frames/mpg/XfrmBlast1.mp
(from www.teslamania.com)
Gray Davis must be held accountable for this blackout.
Regulated, deregulated, etc... does it really matter? Every once in a GREAT while, a certain part of the nation goes through something like this. It's happened before and it'll happen again. I'm not trying to say that deregulation didn't lead to a series of events that caused the problem, but until there's more data, anything that is said is 100% conjecture and cannot be part of a meaningul discourse. Personally, I file this in teh shit happens category.
How would I know? INAGE! (Im Not A Grid Expert)
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
The Califonia Power Crisis certainly wasn't do to a real power shortage, but a cerated one
l yn ch.pdf
http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/051502
one day soon, every home and business will have its own fuel cell, and the grid will only be used to power the electrolysis required to produce hydrogen, which each consumer will be able to store in some quantity. electrical consumption will decrease, and everyone will have enough stored hydrogen to run their own shit for awhile in case of outages. once again, technology will change the whole game. 20 years? 50? hard to say, but the hydrogen economy is coming...
Right. As long as the utilities have to petition the PUC to raise rates, I don't see how you can cal it deregulated.
In fact, it sort of seems as though what happened here in CA is that they deregulated the bulk suppliers, but didn't deregulate the prices consumers pay. But I don't really know if that's right.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
I am in Montreal and, so far, the power hasn't even flickered!
IT'S BEGUN!
What happened in CA was REregulation. They merely replaced one set of poorly developed governmental rules with another. Not allowing electricity suppliers to buy forward contracts, FORCING them to rely on the spot market, is what caused their problems.
be supplimenting the power grid with solar. Solar is only really bad for the environment when run non-attached to the grid, because it stores it's power in batteries. We should have a grandfather program where all new houses had solar power (if conditions in the area were condusive) and attached to the grid.
Currently if you want to hook up you have to go though mountains of paperwork. If you had thousands of houses getting rid of 1% of their power consumption during peak hours and giving the rest of the grid the power it's generating when the hose is not using power, we would have a huge reduction in these problems. Hell, even if we all started using just Solar powered Air Conditioners that would probably make a huge difference too.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
"You mean I actually have to interact with people?????"
Ted? This is your coworkers. Please stay in your cubicle. Thanks.
lack of knowledge rarely deters people either from voicing their opinions or arguing strongly for their position, no matter how insane or inane.
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
blame canada!
If you let prices float based on supply and demand, usually the market will set a proper price. I fully believe this is the case.
But you need to have a proper supply in order for competition to kick in an dprices to eventually fall to fair levels.
But with energy there is barely enough supply! This is the problem that occurred in California. There was barely enough supply to cover demand, so competition never occurred, which caused price inflation. As well, when Enron shut down power stations, this caused prices to skyrocket because all of a sudden there was too little supply.
In order for a free market to exist, you first need a market in which competition can be sustained. This means you first need adequate supply.
We need something like 3-4 times the number of power generators we currently have before a free market would be able to give good prices to consumers. But because power stations are big budget items, it could take decades for that to occur, meaning the energy companies get filthy rich off of our backs. Go talk to people in San Diego that quadrupled their power bills once deregulation kicked in 1999/2000.
Although I firmly believe in free markets, I think crucial infrastructure items such as power should NEVER EVER EVER be dictated by free markets because corporations such as Enron and Dynergy will try to extract as much money from consumers as possible, and because it's so vital they have us all by the short-and-curlies, which is exactly what happened to California.
Ah, yes. As in regulating retail price without regulating wholesale price. It's no wonder the power distribution companies when bankrupt!
English -- gotta love it! / The engineers refuse to refuse the rocket until the refuse is removed from the launch pad.
Bulk suppliers were given rules for setting prices that let the bulk suppliers artificially inflate the prices paid for their power.
Local providers were stuck with whatever price the state let them set.
paintball
The law that some called a deregulation law in California did not deregulate the power companies.
Electricity transmission is (and was during the blackouts) controlled by the Independent System Operator, which is a CA government agency. In addition to controlling the flow of electricity, it also implements price caps and production limits. It also refused to let power companies build new stations.
How exactly is that "deregulation"?
True deregulation (which politicians will fight to avoid, because it takes away their beloved political power) is the only thing that will prevent crises like these.
We have a similar problem in Phoenix this week. One of the two gasoline pipelines into the city was shut down, because of a problem (when inspectors said it could run at 80% with no risk). So now we have gas shortages and inflated prices.
Companies with a government regulated monopoly provide piss-poor service, because they have no competition. Government babysitters don't increase the quality of a service, only the price. Competition imcreases the quality while decreasing the price.
Maybe someone just turned off the water?
"The people that RUN THE FSCKING GRID do not know what went wrong and /. is posting articles asking if X caused it???"
It's my firm belief that not sacrificing enough geek virgins is what caused it. The geek gods are displeased.
There was no deregulation of the power industry in California. Repeat. There was no deregulation of the power industry in California.
"Deregulation" means the reduction of the total regulatory load. This did not happen. The power industry was every bit as regulated in 2001 as it was in 1991. Bureaucratic micromanagement of power production and distribution remained unchanged.
So why do people think that it was deregulated? For the same reason they think NAFTA is a "free trade" agreement: the government lied to them.
There was a recent state initiative that allowed competition in the arena of power delivery. This was not deregulation. In terms of just the competition, it actually worked with regards to some alternative energy companies. But the massive load of regulation made it foolish to startup a mainstream power company in California.
The crisis in California came about because the population was continuing to grow at a high rate, while no knew power plants were being built. Any first year economics student can tell you the result: when demand grows while supply remains fixed, the cost will go up. The crisis escalated because of government mismanagement.
Where there criminal acts by power companies that contributed? Of course there were! But the status of an industry's regulation has nothing to do with crime.
Shun the Orwellian newspeak that claims that deregulation caused the power crisis. Do not trust the politicians who say the solution is to give more power to the politicians.
Maybe the power industry should be regulated, or maybe not. That's a side issue. But don't perpetuate the lie that the industry was deregulated. No political opinion is so noble it can afford the mantle of deception.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Now, when it comes to who runs the show, I've got news for you. When stockholders are answered to before customers are all hell breaks loose. CEO's become needlessly ostentatiously rich, employees become commodities, customers get ignored, and other evil things happen. Get your information straight before you criticize other people. (Granted privatization isn't always the cause of said things, nor is the stock market, but they are contributing factors that cannot be ignored.)
They just did it in such a manner that the regulations allowed wholesale pricing to skyrocket while retail price was held low.
If those wholesale price regulations had not been there, wholesale providers would not have been able to artificially inflate the price, and the whole mess probably never would have happened.
paintball
20 million people without power because of a lightning strike?!
I find that utterly amazing. Talk about your "point of failure". I'm sure a lot of investigation is going to be looking at how this cascaded so far (after '77, supposedly safeguards were put in place to prevent this very occurence)
How can the power grid be structured to be more like the Internet? Is it possible?
This all seems so mid-20th century. You would think our tech would be way beyond this now... (maybe the tech is, and it's just a lousy implementation)
This is what happens when you trust mission-critical services to an illegal hacker communist operating system like Linux.
When I was little, I was vacationing with my friend and his family in Calistoga, CA. We were in the hotel room while his parents were out eating dinner somewhere in the town.
We had brought along a Sega, VCR, and an old school Atari. Well, we wanted to plug them all in so that we could switch between them easily. Behind one of the beds, we found one of those 2 plugs into 4 thingies. So we took it from behind the bed and moved it over to the TV area. We began replugging in all the equipment until all the expansion plugs were filled. Then we began to wonder if this was really a good idea. We hesitantly thought it was ok, and I said to my friend, I hope we don't blow the electricity. Just then, he pushed the powerbutton on the Sega and what should happen??
THE LIGHTS WENT OUT!! Like the same exact instant he pushed the power button!
We freaked! I mean, we were scared shitless, scared that the hotel was going to get royaly pissed at us, maybe put two 9 year olds in jail. So we thought we'd leave the room and go down to the pool. But when we opened the door, we noticed that the whole hotel was dark.. oh crap! Then we looked further and saw that the whole town was dark! AAAAAAAHHHHHH.
Now we were REALLY getting scared. We tried to calmly walk downstairs on the verge of starting to cry, and bursting out in uncontrolable laughter. We thought we had killed the electricity for all of Calistoga.
We figured that we had better find my friends parents and somehow decide to tell them if we blew out all the power. After wandering around the dark streets for a while in search fo the restaurant, we finally found my friends parents, now dining with the rest of the restaurant by candlelight, and told them we think we had blown the city fuse or something. They reassured us that we probably didn't do it, and sent us back to go swim under the stars.
Fortunately on the way from their restaurant, we heard the volunteer firemen who had gathered at the fire house say a big bolt of lightening had struck a near by power pole, and that was the cause. Still, we weren't quite convinced.
Anyway, long story short, don't plug in too much shit at a time.
Power grids are much like a tower built of cards... They have to be maintained in a delicate equilibrium. Both too much power flowing in or out and too little power flowing in or out are bad things. At the same time grids are evolved - bits are connected to other bits when it becomes possible, so they aren't regularly structured.
(There's a really interesting problem of determining a fair/best representation of the state of the whole system from incomplete and possibly faulty data from many sources. I once had the pleasure of working on such a system.)
Because there's such inter-dependency between portions, and because too much and too little is bad, there are automated isolation switches at many points in the system. They respond either to local conditions or according to a centralised control room. Most often they respond to local conditions because the control room doesn't have a fully real-time picture of the whole network. (And even if they do, it's possible for it to be incorrect.)
So, if you have a little accident in the wrong place, a fault can propogate through the system, triggering automated shutdowns. In fact it's probably not possible to design a network with local decision for these safety valves where this can't happen. I think that this has been shown theoretically, but I'm not sure - it's been a few years.
There can be HUGE difficulty in bringing the system up again. It's not something that you can easily test your disaster plan against, and the sequencing of supply and demand is important in order to avoid automatic trip states.
It's entirely feasible that it may take weeks before the network is restored to a similar state. The worst scenario state could involve months.
That's the technical aspects.
But there are underlying reasons that may have contributed to this happening.
1. Competition. Competition is a two edged sword. Because electricity is a commodity, the primary way you can judge companies is on price. The cheaper it is for you, the better. That's good for consumers. So a large force, in a market economy for electricity is towards cutting costs.
But when you don't have enough money, spending it on averting possible disasters is harder. You switch to risk management techniques instead of risk removal. Especially since the cost of failure is bourn more by your customer than you.
2. Insufficient planning. Most networks aren't homogeneous. They are owned by more than one company who co-operate. Sometimes laws stop companies co-operating on areas where they should.
I think that the US should take this as a great big cluestick. I wonder how much this cost? It turns out that unregulated or markets with low amounts of regulation sometimes create failure. Sure, they are cheaper, but sometimes they are disasterous. It's important to get the balance right, and it differs for different products so ideologically driven decisions are likely to produce bad effects sometimes.
Secondly, if you are aiming to change things from a known safe state to a new unknown state, a carefully controlled, slower, planned change can have a lot of advantage. It may cost more, and be non-optimal in terms of time, but time is more easily measured than safety margin.
As well as technical things like powere grids, I'm thinking of regulated to less-regulated markets. Of non-GM food to GM-food. Of world trade policies and intellectual property right expansion. Of privatisation. And more.
It USED to be that people thought ahead. It was normal to keep the electrical capacity at 30% above usage peaks. This way parts of the system could go down for planed and unplaned maintenence and there would not be black outs. It USED to be very well planned.
:(
In the last 30 or so years. It has become harder to build new plants, coupled with a lazy engineering and planning malaize that has come over nearly every part of the civil engineering branches of local and federal government. This left the west with less than 5% of capacity over peak usage (It's still about that today).
Obviously the same back east. So a single failure anywhere cannot possibly be taken up by anyone else.
A complete lack of far range thinking/planning over the last 30 years has brought us to this. Here in the west we have a similar crisis involving water that is very close to blowing up in our faces.
We had it too good for too long. Everyone "forgot" what it took to make it that good in the first place
Oh well.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I wonder if the systems at the power plants had DCOM enabled.... :-)
LINUX FOR THE NUKES!!!
As long as the power industry is dominated by the large investors who currently dominate the industry, there will never be a "natural" economy with a supply/demand that will adjust naturally. Despite deregulation, we are moving in a direction where consolidation of power suppliers and overly powerful electric resellers will be able to create a false scarcity of electrical power like we saw a few years ago in California
Micro suppliers could aleviate the conditions that led to the massive blackouts that we observed to day by placing cleaner, smaller, and more efficient power sources closer to where the electricity is being used. This would also make our national electric grid more resistant to terrorist attacks by distributing power generation, make localities less dependant on the owners of long distance transmission lines, allow homeowners the option of choosing power from the grid or from thier natural gas feul cells (in the basement) depending on which comodity has a more reasonable price, allow municipalities to reduce the cost of sewage treatment by turning sewage into natural gas or electric, and allow family owned farms to reduce costs and supplement thier agricultural incomes by selling electricity generated either by windmills or from natural gas from thier animal waste
Fuel cells are more efficient (85% of the energy contained in the natural gas converted to electric as opposed to 35% to 45%) and cleaner (natural gas fuel cells give off only water and CO2, no CO) than burning natural gas or oil for power generation.
A micro supplier market will decentralize the electrical generation market making power delivery more reliable and less vulnerable to outages, and will place natural, market based controls on energy costs by reducing the ability of large power companies and resellers (remember Enron?) to create a "false scarcity" in the market.
Read, L
There are eco nuts, but American LostWages (Los Vegas) style power usage is also largely to blaim. Conservation measures have largely been ignored by the republican "pigs in paradise" attitude toward resources. This goes for all forms of resources. You want it all right now, and the concequences of blind consumerism are starting to hit home! Canada tried a wage and price control sceme and it failed also. The upset of Kensian market forces are the result of rabid consumerism and no way to regulate. Cost is the only way to reward conservation and punish gluttony. There are going to be power price increases and the pigs will howl till they finally get the message. It is the only other alternative, if we do not, then the limitations of resources will. As you pointed out it just did!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
YOU FAIL IT!
Enron pushed through electric power deregulation in 24 state legislatures, which made it possible for them to create the "markets" they needed to rip off consumers. They also had personal contacts and meetings with George W. Bush and probably most congressional and state legislators. By removing the accountability factor of government oversight it makes you wonder. Congress investigating themselves? Do you think they will find themselves guilty of any wrong doings? What a sweet deal.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
After this fiasco, no doubt those Al qaeda is aiming for those big power transmission tower along the backroads.
It's just a few hours after the Northeast U.S. power outage, and facts are trickling in; as of right now, it looks like an accidental overload knocked out a large part of the Niagara Mohawk power grid.
I follow you so far.
A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry.
Uh-huh.
The question that's probably occurring to many of us is, did late-'90s deregulation play a role in today's power event?
It is?
I don't know the answer, so I'm turning it over to you -- moderators, please check links and up-mod the most informative, pro or con.
You don't know the answer, so you're turning it over to who? Slashdot readers? Moderators check links? Yes sir. I'll get on it right away, sir. Moderators mod the most informative? Oh I was thinking of modding the least informative up. Silly me.
Here is some information to get you started: "We support deregulation 100 percent..." (N-M spokesman, 1997; notes N-M wanted to sell generators and "concentrate on the transmission and distribution of energy" -- did it?);
I don't know Jamie, did it?
N-M made some bad investments and is scheduled to request a rate hike (did it?);
I don't know Jamie, did it?
and N-M's own website says: "Deregulation [has] changed the laws and regulations governing the electricity industry to promote competition..." (how so?).
I don't know Jamie, how?
I'll tell you what I'll go find out for you. You just sit tight and I'll send that right over to your fax in a jiffy. Umkay?
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
In 1965, I lived near Hartford CT and happened to be watching as the whole valley went BLACK in an eyeblink!
Absolutlely awesome. I'll never forget that night, a new insight into our fragile culture.
I'm in grand rapids, and around 4pm all the fans in the apartment slowed down for about 30 seconds, then sped back up. The UPS made some clicking noises.
In Kalamazoo, they lost power. that's a good hour and a half to the south from where I am, so I feel lucky that we have power. I don't know how much of Michigan has power, but according to the reports the southeast doesn't.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
How about one thats in fucking english next time?
We have the dumbest world leader EVER.
"We have been hit by rolling blackouts"
No we haven't... he can't even watch CNN correctly. Bush is a total fucking moron.
I think we can fix this problem if we all run out into the street and fire AK-47s into the air randomly. I mean, that's what the Iraqis do and they live in the 3rd world where power outages are much more common. So, they must know how to solve these kinds of problems. Oh yeah, and don't forget to chant "Death To America" and blame "the occupiers".
It may not be as effective or brave as volunteering to guard a transmission line or organizing your local community to chip in and purchase a generator so the frail can have AC, but it will help you blow off steam.
Seriously, I wonder how this will play in Iraq. Will it fuel the anti-American sentiment, e.g., "those incompetent bastards can't even keep their own grid running so they should just get out" or will it give them an appreciation for the difficulty of maintaining such a system in a war zone? Will they learn to understand the importance of the volunteer spirit and be shamed by the fact that most New Yorkers, people not reputed for their civility, are generally not tearing their city apart?
The cynic in me says they won't.
If any Iraqi can read this, prove me wrong.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And dont forget to read to the end for the 'songs';
Various Odes to Mercury Energy
This isn't as good as I was hoping for, but here it is anyway, to the tune of
"Day-o" (I think that's what it's called):
Powwwwwwww eeeeeerrrrrrrrr!
Pow-ow-ow-er!
Workday come an' me
Wan' me power.
Hey mister Mercury man,
Gimme back me power
Workday come an' me
Wan' me power.
BLUN-DER-ING MERCURY
(TO TUNE OF QUEEN'S 'BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY')
Guitar solo)
I see a little UPS in place of pride,
Battery power, battery power!
Pass the fuel for the generators.
Diesel does just nicely
But it's very very dicey,
BANG
Generators?
Generators? (GENERATORS?)
Generators they don't go,
(Burning generators just don't go. )
-jon
Oh wait, now it's fire?!
No matter what caused this at a single power plant, my original point still stands... it's remarkable that a single point of failure could ripple so far.
Blackout kills *NYC life-support
It is common knowledge that *NYC is dying, that ever hapless *NYC is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *NYC is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *NYC community. The numbers continue to decline for *NYC but FreeNYC may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeNYC continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenNYC leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenNYC. How many users of NYC are there? Let's see. The number of OpenNYC versus NetNYC posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetNYC users. NYC/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetNYC posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of NYC/OS. A recent article put FreeNYC at about 80 percent of the *NYC market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeNYC users. This is consistent with the number of FreeNYC Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeNYC went out of business and was taken over by NYCI who sell another troubled OS. Now NYCI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *NYC has steadily declined in market share. *NYC is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *NYC is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *NYC is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *NYC is dying
Is it just me, or is this nearly the identical condition that triggered the 1965 blackout?
At 17:15:11, 9 November 1965, an overload at a generation plant near Niagara Falls tripped out a relay, whose load was dumped on adjacent lines, overloading them and tripping them out. The effect cascaded down the power network and, within fifteen minutes, almost all of New England and eastern Canada was in darkness.
It's almost 40 years later, and it's beginning to sound like the same damn thing happened again!
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The story here is lightning. Big brother government can't save you from lightning.
I hate sigs.
You can kiss my girlfriend if you'd prefer
Woohoo! I hope she's cute! One quick question though, is this a full french kiss, or just a quick Aunt Maybelle peck?
Anyway, here's some articles from the Cato Institute. The first two came our immediately after AB1890, but before any effects of it occured. Maybe they don't count because of the date, but they do have references to pre-AB1890 articles: "Stranded In Sacramento", and "High-Voltage Swindle".
And two not specifically about California, and before AB1890, so these should count: "A Historical Perspective on Electric Utility Regulation", and "Regulatory Reform in the Electric Power Industry".
And some others for your reading pleasure: "Electric Utility Reform", "Time to Repeal the PUHCA", and "The Public Utility Holding Company Act".
Just a quick trip to Cato. I'm sure there's other stuff from local California publications, but it's time for me to move on to other posts.
p.s. Please send photo of girlfriend, so as to heighten the anticipation...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
But some people might brave it for some Natural Light... being hammered might make the outage go quicker... although the beer might be warm.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
Oog the caveman did it.
Umm, in a free market its hard to get two radically different prices for the same thing. AFAIK the regulations forced a un-realistic price differential into the market, which was exploited. So YES the rules did contribute.
Basic rule of capitalism: profit potential is the primary reason why progress occurs at all. If there's no incentive to do something, why do it at all? Health care is a prime example: why would anyone invest money in cures for diseases if there's no profit potential?
E.g., note how little private, non-charitable money goes into AIDS research, and how much government money goes in. Why is so little private money invested in it? Because AIDS is a behavioral disease that already has a good antidote: responsible behavior. Yet government continues to pour money into it, as if there weren't already a solution.
If government were the only source of health care spending, you could expect more of the same: loads and loads of money spent on the wrong things because priorities were set at the behest of special interest groups, instead of based on what people actually need. The market gives people what they most want, which is typically what they need.
The more time goes on, the less convinced I am that we defeated communism...
This topic should have been brought up about 2 days later. None of the people affected by this have any power to run their computer...
Chaos will always win out over order because chaos is more organized
The Energy Wed
All this deregulation is like training wheels capitalism. We deregulate critical industries like power and the airlines, they manage them horribly and then they bail them out. What's the motivation for any of these companies to perform? They can pillage their industries and then walk away and guys like Gray Davis look like the bad guys for stepping in and spending the money to pick the problem.
This is slashdot for god sake. Built on the freedom and deregulated world that is the internet, yet so many here are proclaiming that deregulation is bad. You are wrong. If Sprint had network outages with their T1 service all the time, you better believe I would switch to AT&T. If Niagra Mohawk goes down frequently, in a deregulated environment I would buy my electricity from another provider. If there is a financial incentive to keep the network operational the provider will. That is capitalism. That is deregulation.
Those who claim that these events will be more likely in a 100% deregulated world, again I disagree. Imagine how much money was lost today -- all those electric meters that didn't turn for hours; the man hours spent to fix the network. The power provider has no interest in seeing a complete failure of their system.
California's problems weren't from deregulation, it was from a half ass deregulation that tried to insulate the consumer. PG&E was forced to buy electricity from the Enrons and Calpines of the world at $1.00 and sell it for $.10, which forced them into bankruptcy real quick. I blame Davis, not PG&E.
I'll take a rain check on that kiss. :-)
I play Nerd-Folk!
From the BBC news website:
"But US officials were looking at a power transmission problem from Canada as the most likely cause of the biggest outage in US history, said a spokeswoman for New York Governor George Pataki.
"
'Nuff said...
TheMagpie.
Power is back on in Ohio I live in lorain county west of cleveland
Deregulation has nothing to do with this, and laws of physics have everything to do with this. Even under dereg, grid stability and then market management is the responsibility of a third party quasi-governmental agency called either an ISO or a Power Pool. Of them, PJM is considered by many to be the best...
FERC Order 2000 changed everything. FERC mandates that smaller power pools should merge together and be like PJM. This trend has already been under way and for that reason you see things like new financial markets for congestion, better rules for management of transmission capacity, etc. For these reasons the kinds of games that can be played have been drastically reduced, although in any market some gaming always happens.
This is my sig.
The NASDAQ trading computers are located in Connecticut. The place you see in Times Square has nothing to do with trading.
T-shirts! Get your t-shirts! Tell people where you've been by wearing a t-shirt!
Main Entry: deregulation
Pronunciation: (")dE-"re-gy&-'lA-sh&n
Function: noun
: the act or process of removing restrictions and regulations
Uh, lets see, California's version of "deregulation" meant they were only allowed to purchase power on the spot market, no long term contracts, etc.........smart move. I don't know what "deregulation" caused this but I'm sure Cheney and Enron must be behind it just like California, right? Poor Gray Davis, he is just a victum. We are all being hosed by the free market zealots--you know at least the price of bread stayed the same for seven decades in the USSR.
um, yeah. jokes never get repeated here.
That means that Neo is already in the building! We shall be set free soon.
For all of you who are saying that because liberals or environmentalists are to blame for this because they prevented infrastructure improvements:
Every single (democratic) country in the world has liberals and environmetalists. Yet presumably, their grids are better than ours (otherwise there is no cause to complain).
If a government can't reconcile these differences of opinion into a coherent policy, this is the failure of the government as a whole. If someone made a decision that new plants have to be built, it would happen, and there would be very little that liberals could do to stop it, other than picketing and writing letters.
It is when elected officials have no policy in the first place, and the relevant departments are asleep at the wheel, that important work becomes subject to the wihms of the populace.
Finally, I revise myself : they said it was a thunderstorm, but now a Canadian's official said that it was a fire near a nuclear facility in states that started it all. And then, an assiatant stop it and said that any details must be said by american official, we don't know more. So a terrorist incident CAN'T for the moment be absolutly denied. A nuclear accident cannot neither be denied.
I moved to Alberta from BC, to the left of Alberta on a map for those that don't know Canada, where the power is generally supplied by two companies, BC Hydro or West Koutenay Hydro (recently changed their name to something I can't remember). BC has abundant supplies of energy in the form of hydro electric power and depending on where you live you are supplied by one of these two companies.
My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh. On top of the KWh rate, I pay a consent fee and a storage rider and a whole host of bullshit fees that I did not see in BC because of REGULATION. I paid usage in KWh and that was it. I could even look on the meter and calculate my KWh usage and get a rough idea of what my bill was going to be (if you remember this from High School). You sure as hell can't do that here, who knows what the "storage rider" will be this month.
I have never understood the deregulation mentality; electricity is a necessity and business, especially high technology sectors, require and are attracted to cheap, reliable power. Deregulation has done none of that here in Alberta, costs are up and generation is down to maximize profit. I know several companies that locate themselves in BC due to the high demand they place on electricity, power that cannot be supplied by other provinces at such an attractive rate.
Now they are talking about partial deregulation of the BC market. Once again businesses small and large will get the shaft and the electrical producing companies will reap the rewards. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It definitely is a failure of the system put in place after the last failure like this. However, part of the safeguards did work: last time, many generating plants were damaged during the failure, but this time they shut down before they took damage.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
What deregulation? It hasn't happened yet. People itch to blame those greedy businessmen for screwing things up, but the fact is that most businessmen are only playing the game. The government sets the game's rules.
Competition is now considered the sole purpose of capitalism. I'll give you that competition is one of the healthy attributes of capitalism, but its purpose? The government forces businessmen to compete. It's like gladiatorial combat. Businessmen can't do anything to help "the system" because that would benefit all businesses, that's co-operation, and you can't have that, it violates anti-trust laws. Also, if you're a businessman with an idea to improve the whole system, how can you get all businessmen on board? First it's just you, then it's you and one other business, then at some point you've got a majority, and legally, that's the same as a monopoly! If you're in business you have to compete. That means you can't be allowed to share your ideas or bring other businessmen on board.
What if your only competitor goes bankrupt? Then that makes you a monopoly. But the government will presume that you must have been a monopoly all along. Of course! Never mind that they were incompetent and you were competent, the government sees competence as "economic power" which you must have used to "put them out of business." So you were a monopoly, and must be punished -- for being productive and successful, if your competitor was not. Not that you would have been permitted to help them, of course! That's co-operation! That's a monopoly! No, you have to match their incompetence so they can compete with you. That's the only safe thing to do!
The government loves this, because it alone is exempt from the antitrust laws, and so it alone can propose and implement anything that improves the entire system. So it gets bigger.
Sometimes the people in government are competent and produce real improvements; Soviet Russia produced Sputnik. Sometimes, too, businessmen who are entrusted to solve the problem are corrupt and merely enrich themselves at others' expense, without producing any wealth. However, if the government solution isn't the best solution, you're stuck with it. If businessmen are allowed -- but not forced -- to compete, then many ideas will be presented, the best idea will rise to the top (above the scams), and then it will dominate until a better idea comes along. This doesn't happen very much in government; most politicians have no way to know which ideas have value and which are pie in the sky, so of course it comes down to who knows who. (Even the competent politicians can fall into personality conflicts, a better idea might never be implemented if it comes from a political opponent, for example.)
People don't understand this. People keep switching back and forth between a forced monopoly (government-run, of course) and forced competition (which people erroneously call "capitalism").
This is why the California power crisis happened -- because the California government passed hundreds of pages of "de-regulations" which were designed to force competition. No business was allowed to accumulate too much of anything, even if doing so would have allowed it to do great good -- because the presumption was that it would rip people off instead. What could the businessmen have done? If you ran Enron, what would you have done? What options would have been open to you? What, if anything, would have been legal and profitable?
Forced competition and a forced monopoly are two sides of the same coin: force. The only solution is freedom. The freedom to compete, or cooperate, as you see fit, to present your best ideas to the public for sale and let them take it or leave it. But not the freedom to stop anyone else from doing the same. That's capitalism. That would be deregulation.
Let companies compete -- or co-operate, at their own discretion -- to build power plants and power lines, to run power lines all the way to homes. Then let's see if deregulation fails. But until that happens, you don't really have deregulation, and you don't really have capitalism.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
Right now, numerous stargazers are pulling out their dusty telescopes for some clean astronomy. Something not possible unless you drove out into the boonies where the light interference and pollution is minimal.
Think of them all pulling their fist and going "YES! Mars here we come!".
As at this time it has not been determined exactly why the Northeast Blackout of 2003 has occurred, there has been much speculation that it is due to Niagara Mohawk's grid failure.
Being an "insider", I would just like to say that the thought that is running through my mind about this is that several years ago, when the original Niagara Mohawk wanted to sell the company, suddenly all the engineering employees were told that they were no longer to perform preventative maintenance work on tranmission and distribution lines. For quite a period of time, they literally sat around with nothing to do. Then the company was sold to a British company, and this "hands off" attitude has continued.
So, I am very curious to know whether NiMo's lack of maintenance has something to do with today's problem. Another aspect of this problem is the fact that many long-time technical workers at Niagara Mohawk have either retired or been forced out, with their jobs not being filled. The crew sizes are down considerably. The amount of work never decreases - it mostly likely increases - but there are less KNOWLEDGEABLE people on board to handle such technical matters.
I truly hope that a full investigation into this matter is done, and if NiMo has dropped the ball, they be held accountable.
Whether terrorist or not that is what happened.
Cost of a 1 day North America NE power failure - Priceless
This is just plain really bad management. Call it deregulation, call it whatever. What happened today is AVOIDABLE with proper management and investments.
The costs associated with the failure in management here may outweigh the costs of even 9/11. What irks me even more, is that this is NOT THE FIRST TIME this has happened to New York.
Whom ever is managing this system is going to be fired. The entire management chain of all the companines involved will be wiped clean (or shuffled around to make it look like their fired).
Of course, it's going to be played by the politicians and press as, "Oh dear, how unfortunate, a fire, a lightning strike, a <PICK YOUR FAVOUTITE EXCUSE>. Can you spell SNOW job ?
BTW - the hospitals had better get prepared because 9 months from now a certain wing is going to get very busy !
I'm not paranoid, they're just out to get me.
Im a programmer for a provider of automation equipment for electric utilities. One thing that many may not realize is that it actually requires power to operate much of the power grid. Once the power is gone things like substation batterys quickly die out. Once they die generators have to be brought in to supply things like breakers with energy to operate. There are thousands of substations and other portions of the grid that take a long time to bring back.
In addition some power companys have switched to completely "high tech" systems in which power has to be present to operate physical equipment and power to operate things like fiber ethernet infastructure. In other words some power companies do not have a means to control equipment in anyway other than over a network which requires power to operate.
It could be argued that a power grid is much more difficult to maintain than a data network due to the fact that the service which it provides isnt required to provide the service that it provides =). A router can go down but it can always be replaced and power and network hookups will be waiting for it.
Due to these factors power grids are very vulnerable to the domino effect.
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
(Working from memory here, so please excuse, if this isn't 100% correct.)
Didn't this happen (As parent described), back in the sixties.?? Something like most of the eastern sea board going down. Turned out it, all was started by a single ceramic isolator, cracking or similar.
My Paintball Pics
LIGHTNING sparked a fire in a power plant in upstate New York near the Canadian border, triggering a massive blackout today across the northeastern United States and southern Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chretien's office said.
"We confirm that there was a fire in the Con Edison power plant in the Niagara region on the American side," a statement said.
Canadian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Heather Blunner said the fire in the Niagara plant was caused by a lightning strike.
I see a lot of scepticism above about the lightning claim, but you gotta admit it *is* possible - think of it as Nature's way of slashdotting man ;)
My question is this, and I'll pose it cautiously seeing how a lotta folk have been worried about terrorism last few hours:
If a single bolt of lightning can disrupt a single power station and kill such a massive area's power supply... isn't it time for a major revamp of the system before some terrorists decide to exploit this vulnerability?
I live in Orlando, FL, lightning capital of the world, and our power system is GREAT. I can't tell you the last time I had a power outage. Hell, it's been at least a month since a brown out (power going out for a blip, enough to reset a clock).
wha? wha?
outage, what outage?
That's like saying a NWA jet crashed because of airline deregulation. The logic just doesn't hold up to the simple thoughts of an 7 year old.
Major Microsoft worm starts on Monday... Major power outage on East Coast on Thursday. You make the call!
On the other side of the coin, we just learned that two or three well placed attacks could plunge the entire nation into darkness and we can start planning now to make sure that doesn't happen. Do you think we will?
I'd start by mandating that towns either take their traffic signal systems off the main power grid or insure adequate backup power for them. The last thing we need in the middle of a blackout is traffic jams preventing emergency vehicles from getting where they need to go.
I'd also make sure hospitals and air ports have adequate backup capacity. Apparently a lot of them don't.
Then I'd have the Al-Capone Teamwork dinner with the CEOs of the various power companies, during which the NiMo CEO would get asked why one power station going down can take out a quarter of the nation's power. You know how that scene goes. Teamwork!
That'd be a good start I guess. Gives us something to do for the next 5 years or so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Margaret Thatcher fucked up pretty well everything for us British. I'm going to say this once, and only once... Letting private enterprise take over public utilities is one of the worst ideas ever formulated.
I will be one of the first to dance on that cow's grave singing "ding dong the witch is dead"
thank you go asking it.
Regardless of how corporations "optimize" their profits from the grid, someone has to be held responsible for this design. How do we go about changing it, if it's headless and unregulated?
No doubt, these very same companies will *NOW* be begging for federal dollars to speed up the necessary modernization efforts...
The first thing I did when I came to this discussion was search for 'Bush' to find out how people were going to use this event as an excuse to do some Bush bashing. When none came up, I was a bit disappointed, but I started to wade through the posts. Yours was quite sensible...at first.
The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.
Excellent!
The free market is not the solution to every problem. Get over it.
The state is not the solution to every problem either. Get over it.
Very well said, and balanced, too.
The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The solution to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves.
Oh, you lost me. You could have taken one of those, plus one of these: "The answer to every attempt at oil drilling is 'No!' The solution to every foreign policy problem, even those involving violent thugs who have no problems killing and torturing citizens and neighbors, is to talk and plead over decades," in order to sound as thoughtful as you began.
Not everything is about Bush. Get over it.
Evil is the money of root.
The failsafes in the grid are to protect the hardware, not to keep the power on.
As for the duration of the blackout, generation has to match the load. It's very difficult to start everything back up when so many generators have to spool up to match umpteen sections of the grid....
End of story, no conspiracy here.
-a guy fron CA
This same kind of blackout happened twice during full regulation of electrical energy, and now once during the (still early days of) deregulation.
This event has all the hallmarks of a transmission failure, not a generation problem. There appears to have been plenty of power capacity. Transmission is still handled by highly regulated ISOs, despite generation deregulation.
This isn't like the California situation where the state set up a "deregulation" law that made the ISO incapable of getting an efficient market rate for power from generators.
What does need to happen is that NIMBY anti-transmission line political forces need to be eradicated. We need more transmission lines in the East, and more generation in the West.
You all know that phone system conveys its own power so phones stay working when power is down.
But did you know that also hold true for DSL service?
It does in my area (north of NYC). Power has been down for seven hours, but I just hooked up my DSL modem through an extension cord to my car (which has an cig-lighter-to-AC-adapter) and DSL is working fine and that's how I'm posting this.
Oh, and my laptop is running off a battery which, using the above mechanism, I can recharge in my car as needed.
Quite handy. I'm not positive if this works for cable modems but I don't think so. I'd be curious if someone could confirm/deny that.
--LP
I wouldn't be proud of it - that's pretty sad, reusing jokes on fucking slashdot. How pathetic.
Just like reusing trolls?
But not when it involves a monopoly. If there were redundant electrical lines (one per company), then there would be an incentive to deliver higher quality, but since case-flow is guaranteed, then the only thing the private company cares about is ruthlessly lowering costs (NOT prices), and since there is no legal obligation to keep eletricity 24x7, the state of affairs reflect this.
I'm hardly a socialist, but clearly, utility/monopolies should be heavily regulated by government; at best they're incompetent. The private companies are incompetent and greedy, too.
Being a software guy I only know who to make a few eclectrons at a time do my bidding so....... What happens to the smarties who've installed solar arrays ot power their homes and are feeding excess power into the grid? I can just see the whole of NY powered off a ./er's roof... maybe not.
There are 10 sorts of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who dont.
Well, as an ex-patriate New Yorker, I am sick of the middle America bias we see in the media's coverage of culture. This is news and, whining aside, it's bigger news because it happened in NYC.
Well, as a Californian, I say suck it, East Coast!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The original post was very informative. EmagGeek was right on track when he mentioned that one generator got knocked offline for some reason and because of that the power grid compensated by rerouting electricity from other generators.
My dad was vice president of electric supply for NIPSCO for a number of years after having worked his way up the chain of command starting off working at a power plant as an electrical engineer. As VP of electric supply his job included ensuring NIPSCO was generating enough power to cover the needs of all the power customers (including several steel mills), working with regulators to ensure the rates were reasonable so that money could be spent to increase capacity when needed, and working with environmentalists to ensure that emissions were well below accepted government levels.
NIPSCO was a company very interested in serving its customers. As a heavily regulated utility the only reasonable business decision is to service your customers the best that you possibly can. My dad took that to heart. He was strongly opposed to deregulation. Why? Because the simple fact of the matter is that my dad was somewhat of an exception. Most executives tend to look strictly at the bottom line and lose sight of the forest for all the trees. He knew that deregulation would inevitibly lead to cost cutting in areas where costs should not be cut simply because without regulation the power company is at the mercy of its shareholders and shareholders are very often in it strictly for the money.
So, tonight I had a discussion with him about this mess. First of all, the background. Apparently a generator went off grid this afternoon forcing other generators to take up the slack. That can happen for a number of reasons. Equipment does fail, humans do make mistakes, etc. What's supposed to happen is that the rest of the generators and the grid should have enough capacity to take up the slack. Should there not be enough capacity then someone needs to lose power. This should happen at the customer side. That is, a portion of the customers should be blacked out to reduce the load on the grid and allow normal operations to continue. I believe that is what you meant by "putting a release on the chain." You are correct, that's what should have happened. The fact that it didn't indicates that there was some major problem with the logic of the grid. It would have been far better to cut the power to thousands of customers than millions.
Bad logic was part of the cause. The other problem was a seriously overloaded power grid. The power grid was designed to handle the situation where a power company normally had sufficient capacity but due to generator failures was unable to meet demand. Notice that I said failures (plural). If a few generators are knocked off the grid the company ought to have enough energy to supply all of its customers. Furthermore, it ought to have backup generators that can be started and on the grid within an hour. Those backup generators are just that: backups. They cost a hell of a lot of money to operate but they aren't as expensive to build as a main generator. If a few more generators get knocked off grid it's reasonable to expect that a power company will be unable to handle this situation without buying power from another company. That is what the grid is for.
Unfortunately, because of government stupidity (deregulation) and corporate greed the grid is now being used in a way it was never intended to be. It is often loaded to near full capacity drawing power over very long distances. The idea of deregulation was that loosely regulated for-profit companies would compete to generate electricity which the local power companies could purchase instead of generating their own. Because the power companies no longer had to be responsible for providing capacity in excess of what is needed the rates could be
If you check the market data at The Independant Market Operator (Ontario's energy market) there is a price peak starting around 3 or before (prior to the actual outage). What that says to me is that some capacity was offline for some reason.
Has anyone else heard this?
News for UW students
Of course, everyone assures us that deregulation is done for the good of the customer. Give me a mother fucking break! I'm sure everyone is just bending over backwards to go out of their way to help we consumers catch a break on our utility bill. The truth is that we get fucked up the ass with a 10" cock until we cry out in pain until the day comes when we get these corporate fuck sticks back under the control of the people (yeah, that's the government, remember?)
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
Theres a pretty good photo album of all the news coverage today.
4 2
Available at:
http://hackingthemainframe.com/gallery/albun
That won't help with the transmission lines and generating capacity that never get built because of NIMBY. The average citizen is capable of being just as pig-headed, greedy and duplicitous as the worst utility executive or politician. We don't want a transmission line in our backyard. We don't want a new power plant in our county. We don't want a new landfill in our county. We want it cheap, we want it now, and put the nasty bits in somebody else's backyard.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The biggest single problem is the NIMBY syndrome which makes it impossible to build additional high-tension lines or power plants in the metro NYC area.
Niagra Mohawk is stuck between a rock and a hard place... increasing demands continue to stress tramsmission systems that exceeded their capacity a decade ago. The political and legal climate in New York is such that it is possible for "interest groups" as small as 4-5 people to halt power plant construction for years.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If a "Power Grid" is discovered to have a single point of failure. Is it still a grid?
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
I am not sure about "deregulation", but in its pure form the free market approach (with the half-alive, half-rotten bodies of almost or completely failing/failed companies, paid for by investors, not general public) might've prevented it. It seems (as of now) is that all that was needed to deal with the current situation was a bit of extra capacity in the power grid, and it was not there partially because not enough companies have tried to compete on this market. It's silly that one can buy (wholesale) an entire telecom satellite fleet, but a thick copper cable ( ;-) ) is such a rare commodity today... Gets one thinking about the possibilities of the energy companies having just a bit too much of goverment-sponsored monopolies, not too little...
Just my $0.02 (or 1/4 of an kWt/hour)
Paul B.
Lets see... If we invade Canada, oust the current regime and divvy the place up into between 1-3 states, we'll have only ourselves to blame for regional blackouts. That would certainly be much simpler!
Unfortunately, we'd end up with a bunch of French-Canadian citizens like that...
Bad idea. Never mind.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Those of you who want to blame this on deregulation and Martha Stewart need to pull your head of of your modded computer case.
The power networks were hopelessly out of date way before de-regulation - Even in the early 70's, the control networks were not properly maintained. Most of the SCADA systems were never properly installed, way back when the regulated monopolies ran stuff. Default access passwords, etc. Blaming this on deregulation is foolish - The power (and indeed, most utilities) have always had aged and poor technology because there is little incentive to upgrade - They always got a fixed rate for running the monopoly.
I guarantee that the infastructure costs since de-regulation pale in comparison to the "lost sales", lost goodwill, and months/years of "investigations"
Just another "anti corporate" slashdot liberal.
all I can say is "you are crazy for even thinking this sort of nonsense!" This is a product of having a populous and a press with no financial or economic background and education. Let me be clear... nearly a century of regulation resulting in our current poluting decrepit power infrastructure is to blame. Top that off with politicians and not economists instituting "RE-REGULATION" not deregulation (which really only occured in Texas and maybe Alberta, Canada) and you have a royal mess. The true solution to which is probably a little bit of old fashioned PROFIT for private companies in an open market. That's the way to clean up and modernize the national shame that is our current power infrastructure.
Obviously this is the work of the 10,000 volt ghost and rest assured Scoob and the gang are already at work medelling around for clues.
I like the last bit in that title line, "Is there a story?". A friend of mine who used to use Win 3.11 recently moved back there. I was chatting with him on ICQ when I noticed every 2-3 minutes he'd go offline and come back. He told me that he keeps getting hit by UAEs. It is a regular occurance, and the operating system he was using to connect to the net was even less reliable.
:)
Here in Win XP, we get hit by worms about once a month for 10-20 days (more frequent if a new exploit's been found, also depends on which version of Windows you are using). Sometimes, the system is out for a few hours. It's just a way of life.
I realize that it's impressive that so many computers get infected, but really, is this such a big deal? Everything should be fixed soon. People just need to relax. Maybe GO OUTSIDE!!!
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
"If Linux developers had designed the power grid, then..."
Maybe you could find some story where this comment is on-topic and post there, thus raising the bar back up where it belongs.
This is not the first massive northeastern blackout. There were wipespread blackouts like this in the early 1960s. The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity designed in so that the entire system could recover from large transients and short duration system oscillation without tripping protection devices. They beefed up the system so it could ride through these events.
The safety margin is gone. Demand has grown but capacity has not. If lightning runs in on a substation, it can trigger a chain of events leading to a couple generator switchyards opening their air breakers. From there, the overload snowballs.
Does deregulation play a part? Yes. Power brokering activities create additional burden on the system. There is less incentive to increase capacity. There is also diffusion of responsibility.
The electric power industry was not broken prior to deregulation and didn't need fixing. It's infrastructure and regulated monopolies suck less than gov't run or private run ventures.
This is apt to get worse.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Having family in SE Michigan, I tried to check on the details of the blackout in that area. The Detroit Free Press, a Knight-Ridder newpaper has this story which would have been appropriate for just about any paper nationwide. In contrast, the independent Toledo Blade actually offers a local account of the goings-on, with relevant information like when the power is expected back. Is one-size-fits-all news good enough?
Computer-illiterate power plant manager + Blaster = Blackout
What causes cascades like this actually has very little to do with megawatts
and everything to do with frequency. See, every generator on the power grid is
syncronized to a common source. Indeed, before a power plant comes back on
line it must first syncronize its generators. The generators normally sit
there running at a boring 3600 RPM (60hz*60 seconds). All plants have a
monitor that kicks them off line if their frequency varies by more than +/- a
hz or so. As an aside, the power grid is not always EXACTLY 60 hz. The
frequency of the entire grid is allowed to float a bit, though drifts are
corrected so the frequency averaged over a certain time is a nominal 60 Hz.
The cascade happens when a either big plant or a big load suddenly goes off
line. In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but
in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much
like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the
right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off
making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to
fall off the grid like dominoes.
The opposite happens when a load suddenly goes away, but in that case the
generators' frequency abruptly jumps upward, which also results in it tripping
off the grid. Either way the result is a cascade like happened today.
Once the dominoes (generators) begin to fall off, the grid becomes unglued.
There's an old saying in the power industry:
59.5 Hz = trouble. 59 Hz = BIG trouble!
I believe the new power management software mentioned in the news reports that
should have prevented this works by intelligently shedding loads distant from where the anomaly occurrs (for example, shedding load in NYC for an anomaly in Canada). This would give the generators time to react to the change. Obviously it didn't work.
If power plants can be run on windows 2000 or XP embedded OS's, who needs terrorists.
Another reason to run anything on Linux (or BSD)
So long as it aint SCO
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Who modded this up?
If you have fuel cell in your house, and electrolyse hydrogen to power it you will need MORE electricity than you do today, since neither the electrolysis or the fuel cell are 100% efficient.
Was NYC Slashdotted?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Parent of this post is actually insightful, much more so than the top post in this thread.
And besides they're saying this is the biggest blackout ever (not sure if that's true).
The industry isn't unregulated, its less regulated than before.
The old regulatory system used profit regulation. By this method, a utility was automatically given a 6% return on investment as long as the investment was necessary. To be sure the investment was necessary, the industry got approval from the PUC. But most PUCs or laws allowed getting the return on investment if the equipment was generating power.
So, power companies would come up with all the reasons for building a huge electrical system:
- we will have twice as many customers in 10 years, but costs are rising, so we should double capacity today to save money
- a $500M nuclear power plant is the best solution because it won't require fuel like coal or oil
So, the utilities had huge incentives to over design the system.
And as long as a nuclear power plant is brought into production, the utility gets 6%, and the more expensive it was to get it into production, the greater the return on investment.
Today the regulation is different. Utilities are heading toward the day when power plants are completely out of the regulator picture. That means that you make money if you sell enough power to justify, or lose money otherwise. And there are various programs that mandate that utilities buy power such as wind and solar. So the system is now one where the utilities have no interest in building power plants because the return on those is unknown today.
The other factor is that electric power generation is moving to a distributed model. Right now, we have the "mainframes" and "mini" power plants, but the direction is toward "PC" power plants all connected together in a network. The current powerline structure is like a mainframe with thousands of terminal lines running from offices to the computer room and a small number of mainframes connected in a net. But in a decade the system will be like today's internet, millions of small power stations all connected in a mesh.
It doesn't make sense to invest a billion dollars when it might not get used and if you can't rent it, you will lose money. There is no ensured profit.
But the reason for deregulating is that the power system is changing just like mini and PCs changed the computer industry.
There are a couple of problems in the interim.
The power companies want to control everything because that's how they grow and make money.
The PUCs don't want to piss off their next employer so they don't teach the public and investors about the direction of the industry.
The politians don't want to piss off their contributors, so they don't talk too much about it either. And most of the time, they try to find "green" things to pitch that won't change the way things are done, but these green proposals are actually based on emerging technology.
And Bush is an oil man, and every energy problem is solved by oil, so we drill off Cape Cod, in Alaska, the White House lawn, and invade Iraq to protect the virtual oil pipeline of tankers.
The power industry wants things the old way but they know that the days of cheap oil are gone, that nuclear power is incredibly expensive, and that they have too much overhead to build wind power plants - a utility project requires about 100 power company employees and contractors for a year. To put up 100 wind power towers will cost $150,000 each without spending a dime on the equipment, while a small company will build them and get them online in 6 months with only 5 employees.
Returning to the old regulator system would result in 100 nuclear power plants and 500 coal plants in Canada and Mexico with billions in power lines.
Without regulation, we'll have a million wind farms in 20 years.
As I had just posted on www.fark.com the other day, I didn't even know you guys _had_ liberals in the United States. I thought it was just conservatives and.. well.. guys a little more conservative.
I have to admit there's those very few leftists like Noam Chomsky, but it's not like he has any influence other than on people who agree with him anyway. All five of 'em.
The whole situation seems a lot like a dutch blackout on 23 june 1997. 3 generator shutdown due to failure, other get overloaded and shutdown as well. An intresting report can be found in this report. Here are some details in dutch.
Your way works when there's competition, sure.
But when you start deregulating industries that aren't sufficiently competitive for any of a variety of reasons, you have a problem. When you deregulate, and the price for a commodity goes up, rather than down then you either shouldn't have deregulated or you should have kept price caps in place until there was some actual competition in the industry.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
James Burke, in "Day the Universe Changed" (or was it the original "Connections") detailed an incident in New York where the SAME DAMN THING HAPPENED about 30 years ago.. this switch tripped, and shunted power to here, and so on until things got overloaded, and kept shunting power up the chain until all of New York was in the dark. Funny, seems no-one learned their lessons... or the people who learned those lessons were forced into early retirement. Humans make me sad.
meh
well... now hang on one minute...
I just want you to realize (if you didn't already) how broken deregulation is in California.
Because of deregulation + Enron + incompetant state government, I now pay a nice low rate of 12.9 cents per kWh.
And thats just on the "baseline amount" Myself, being only somewhat conservative in my use of power, consume about 275% of baseline, and my price works something like this
0% - 100% of baseline : 12.9 cents / kWh
101 - 130%: 13.6 cents / kWh
131 - 200%: 14.9 cents / kWh
201 - 300%: I forget, but probably about a penny more.
Electricity is electricity. Why should it cost more than 3 times as much in California as in Canada, and more that 6 times as much as in Arizona.
Especially when I pay huge freakin taxes so the government can subsidize my rates. BTW: those rates are AFTER the 20-some-odd-percent "subsidy"
I'm feeling a little verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves.. I'll give you a topic:
Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story?
along with 97% of the world's population.
and probably more than half of the people who read this.
It's your own stupid fault. ha
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Saddam wasn't a good guy by any means. But neither were people (theirs and yours) dying from DU poisoning, and chaotic acts of military violence and a complete breakdown of society, oil being stolen by the US to pay for it, and all the ripe new big-money industrial contracts being handed out Western and Israeli instrests. (Which is why the existing infrastructure was destroyed. This, my friend, is rape.) --Napoleon also justified his conquests and pilages by calling himself a 'Liberator' when he marched into countries. Same lie, different year.
In any case, I don't recall anybody in Iraq ever asking the US to go charging in to their 'rescue'. --Heck, I thought the war was supposed to be because the world trade towers were destroyed by terrorists. Though, unless you haven't been listening, there is and never was any link between Iraq and 9-11. Wolfawitz himself stated this very directly.
So then the war was supposed to be about the big bad 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'. Which were never there to be found, (despite a botched CIA job to plant some).
So now, Bush and his followers are retroactively trying to justify their actions by saying, "Oh, well we were liberating Iraq from Saddam. Yeah, that's the ticket!"
B*U*L*L S*H*I*T.
But such items hardly matter to people who don't bother reading before answering. Such people just believe what is comfortable.
-FL
So the US had a major power outage, so what. Yeah we saw it on the News over here, but we really dont want to know any more about it.
Where's the technology angle in this story?
Where is the relavence to the Global audiance that Slashdot has, rather than the US audiance.
Why was there a need to start a whole new story and discussion on this when it had been posted and discussed not 3 hours earlier?
Out of interstest, I'd put money on US slashdot readers being in the minority compared to the global readership.
The power distribution everywhere in the western world is done using high voltage 3-phase AC systems.
They fail, if
a) the frequency slips or
b) if the power balance between production and demand gets to big.
The reason for all the hazzle of AC distribution is that it's simple to change voltages via transformers.
With modern power electronics, transformers will no longer be needed.
A DC distribution grid will be much more stable since the only reasons to take a generator off the network will be overload or overvoltage.
There is no frequency to lock to. There is no syncronizing phase when the generator starts production again.
At times with high demand, the DC grid voltage will drop. Surplus production will push up the grid voltage.
Circuit breakers can be set to turn on at a certain voltage, that automatically will turn on demand when the grid voltage can drive the load. Low priority areas can have the high-voltage switches, high priority areas have low-voltage switches.
Combine this with a varying price: Low voltage = high price, high voltage = low price and you'll get system which can smoothe out changes in the balance between supply and demand.
Will it work? Well, we do have some DC links from Denmark to Germany and to Norway. They are relatively small but power electronics are developing fast.
-- From Denmark
You don't get Karma for Funny mods any more. What, you didn't know?
What happened to the idea of power cooperatives? Where I am from there was a time when companies were not interested in providing power, because they didn't think it would return enough on their investment. So the people started a coop, this not for profit now regularly returns it's profits in rebates. It's not just a matter of private vs public, we should be asking why aren't all utilities coops? It insures both the lowest prices and highest service to the customers by closing the gap between the interests of the shareholders and the customers because they are now by definition the same people. Shareholders are no longer able to decide that their monetary gains are worth more than crappy service to people they never met. If an executive wants to remain employed he will maximize service, minimize costs, and not seek outrageous compensation for his efforts.
Power companies (and transmission holding companies) stand to make a healthy profit leasing these lines to other companies who want to push power over their grid. There is a rather detailed system in place to assure this.
Find out more about the power industry for a good laugh, a good cry and a good scare. It's more frightening than you might realize.
(p.s. Yes, I work for a power company.)
This now concludes our broadcast day.
Only a few days ago, I posted a comment on Slashdot that we all take our power grid for granted. It's one of the first things that I remembered. Well, the *first* thought I had was that this was the result of grid overload and poor power planning, not terrorism. A couple of Europeans working for some independent TV station interviewed me. I expressed what I felt were the causes behind the outage, and mentioned that people in the Third World live with unreliable power like this every day.
You can find Arnie's real enemies in the Religious Right, all of whom are members in good standing of the GOP.
Here's something from the Traditional Values Coalition:
"The recall election in California is heating up as TVC's Chairman Rev. Louis P. Sheldon takes on Arnold Schwarzenegger's moral values and fitness for public office."
Their problem is that they don't think Schwartzenegger's a Nazi, either.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Okay, what's the bets that maternity hospitals in the area are scrambling to ban all leave for next May?
Egen hard ar guld vard.
Swedish proverb meaning
Your own core is worth gold.
Well I think it actually means home sweet home.
http://www.geocities.com/reactor1967/
The question around is deregulation responsible for the power outage is probably a yes and no. Under deregulation you can and will delay building new power plants until there are disruptions. You also will be more apt to look at maintenance and captial expenditure with a more keen financial eye. Love 'em or hate 'em the nukes keep the mid-Atlantic states flush with power. New York buys a lot of its power from Canada. When the nukes shut down due to age, there are no plans to add capacity until there are routine disruptions (black outs). All new capacity will be small fossil-fueled plants peppering the landscape because they are the least politically contraversial. I guess we will really need that Iraqi oil, huh? We will not feel the true affects of deregulation for a number of years. The bottom line is that electrical power is no longer an "essential" service by definition of being deregulated. The black out might have been contributed by cost cutting and lack of reserve capacity.
As an engineer for one of the largest regulated utility companies in the Southeast, I can shed a little light on the situation.
Under a REGULATED system, the designated utility for a geographic region owns and operates the generation, the transmission, and the distribution systems.
Under a DEREGULATED system, there is a designated Independent System Operator (ISO) that handles the transmission system. This ISO can buy and sell power from any generation company. Likewise, it can sell power to any distribution company (the people who you pay your monthly bill to). These ISO companies tend to handle the transmission system for large geographic areas, say the Northeast. The ISO is generally a 3rd party that has no stake in either generation or distribution. It is their job to buy enough electricity to ship through the transmission system to meet the demand of their distribution customers.
Based on the information that I've seen so far (and it's been very little) it looks as if the ISO was not operating the transmission system correctly and had the system overloaded. When one link of this overloaded system was broken, there was not enough capacity in the remaining links to support the load and the system began shutting itself down.
These scenarios have a higher probability of happening under a deregulated system.
JB
If the central office is telling contractors to do stupid things, how would that be different than the central office telling regulated employees to do stupid things?
The power outtage has nothing to do with politics.
This is my sig.
The power in Quebec never even went down, either. They had better failsafes and better redundancy, such that the power was never off there.
Perhaps more interesting in a different way, they had roughly 10,000 MW to spare and were waiting for Ontario to ask them for it, and guess what? Ontario didn't.
Pride makes the world go round.
Stuff.
Yes, but one counter example disproves a theorm.
Deregulation to blame?
Hm, funny.
Demand...increasing. Supply....decreasing.
I would have thought a shortage of power might have had something to do with NIMBY environmentalists (cf. Walter Cronkite) fighting the development of every new power source tooth & nail for the last 40 years.
But no, I'm sure it's REPUBLICANS fault.
-Styopa
Earth has a biorhythm cycle of 40 years, with a 2nd harmonic of 20 years, which relates phenomena in the physical "3 dimensions" with higher dimensional quantum physics phenomena. There was a hyperspace loop created between the August 12th 1943 Philadelphia Experiment, and the August 12th 1983 Montauk Project. Interesting 2nd harmonics are mid August 1963 and mid August 2003. Montauk's Camp Hero undergound base at the point of New Jersey is the location of the Delta T / Hyperdimensional project whose activities we're being gently awakened to through programs like "7 Days" and "The Time Tunnel" and "StarGate SG-1". One simply can't go on tweaking anomolies into the time-space continuum without creating some "side effects". Montauk is part of the underground network, other parts of which are referenced:
1 .h tml
i es .html
http://www.kahealani.com/articles/al_bialek.199
http://www.kahealani.com/articles/dulce.html
http://www.kahealani.com/articles/quantumrealit
All Rights Reserve Without Prejudice, Angela Kahealani. All information + transactions nonnegotiable + private.
CIA didn't try and plant any WMDs...that's just BS, and you know it.
A scientist digs up a gas centrifuge he was ordered to bury in his back yard, and people blow it off as nothing to do with WMDs.
Some people seem to be hoping and praying that the WMD evidence won't be found, because it'll prove that they were wrong.
The evidence is being gathered even as we banter back and forth about this:
read this article from yesterday
I can't wait to see how conspiracy theorists about all this twist the report when it comes out.
NYC, can't be, as everyone knows that Boston is the Hub of the Universe.
While I do think deregulation was bad, I don't think you can blam this on it.
I worked for a power company many years ago. Every time we tired to expand or improve the system the "not in my backyard" crowd and the environmental whacko did everything they could to stop what ever we were planning to build. While I am sure the power grid design is part of the problem don't blame it all on company management/engineering. The amount of red tape is unbelievable. My advise: Get UPS systems on critical systems and obtain your own backup generation for work and home.
Deregulation does have a share (and I'd say a major share) of the responsibility. When the systems are deregulated, the standards for service are shot to hell. There are innumerable examples of this but California is the perfect one.
Once deregulation of power, transit, water, or whatever, happens then all the big corporations go and have a field day. The reason there is poor infrastructure is it's cheaper to build with crap components and poor design. Take away all the safety precautions and increase your stock dividends. This is why Niagara Mohawk failed.
There's an informative article about the backstory here.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
I am not going to translate the whole thing, but it says that some of the National Grid USA system is based on OPC from Northern Dynamics which uses COM/DCOM for communication.
nice theory anyway.
url: http://heise.de/security/news/meldung/39451
I think Southpark has it right!!!
BLAME CANADA!!!
Long Island residents fight tooth and nail against the construction of ANY power plant in their neighborhoods, whether coal or nuclear. This attitude didn't change until the past 2-3 years when the LIPA was basically forced to ignore the complaints due to capacity problems.
Needless to say, it takes time to build new powerplants, and Long Islanders are paying for NIMBY now. This massive grid failure might likely not have happened if Shoreham had been allowed to begin operations.
Meanwhile in New Jersey, where we have at least one (I believe more than one) nuclear plant (In Forked River, NJ) and a number of coal-fired plants, all we had to deal with was a brief flicker at 4:10.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
NiMo sucks dogballz.
This posting on heise (German word for slashdot in some way) shows some interesting points:
* National Grid seems to use OPC
OLE for Process Control
OPC is based on the COM/DCOM modell.
Further investigation is under development...
One thing that can help is to fine a monopoly service provider for each day they do not provide the service. Forget the fact that there is a loss of income from downstream consumers, this obviously doesn't help focus their minds. Privatisation can only work when there is responsibility and making them pay will help to concentrate their minds.
See my journal, I write things there
Microsoft got too many support calls and figured it was time to reboot the Eastern seaboard. ;)
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
Also I think there is enough of a difference between the meanings of deregulation and privatization that the distinction should be made clear. I for one will vote against any politician who auctions off our assets.
There is not enough profit in the price for electricity to modivate a power company to jump thru all the hoops to put extra capacity on line.
Everybody wants power but they don't want the plants in their back yard, we all want clean power but not nuclear. If power companies could get a small bonus for having extra (10% +) capacity and also grid stability bonuses/uptime bonuses.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
FACT. SEUDO Deregulation passes because state owned utilities are loosing money or on the brink of needing huge capital investments that the state does not want to fund.
FACT. Deregulation in the power industry will never work untill the barrier of entry into the power generating industry is on this side of impassible. If generating power were such a boondogle, a normal functioning market would see new players enter the market, so exisiting players would lower their margins untill it was no longer attractive to potential competitors.
FACT. The only industry that has ever been truly deregulated is the airline industry. I don't see anyone complaining about the price of airline tickets.
Not everything is about Bush. Get over it.
At this point the right is the ideologically driven party. The left is pragmatic. To give an example, Tony Blair is a left wing politician but he is certainly not driven by socialist ideology.
I could have said that the answer to every problem is not nationalization. Only I can't actually think of a single serious politician who makes that kind of claim.
What is interesting about the Bush administration is the way that absolutely every external circumstance is used to support the pre-existing policy. At first the justification for huge tax cuts for the rich was the forecast surplus - even though everyone who cared to loo knew that they were false. Then when the economy was no longer doing as well the justification for the same huge tax cut for the rich was the deficit. No serious economist have ever claimed that the best way to stimulate an ecoonomy is to eliminate inheritance taxes for estates over $2 million.
The solution to the energy crisis might be to drill in Alaska. However forcing the makers of SUVs to put fuel efficient engines in them seems a better solution. The oil in Alaska can only be drilled once and would only account for a years worth of gas burned by the inefficient SUVs. Building an efficient engine is not impossible, there are plenty of fuel efficient power plants. It is not the engine design, it is the engine manufacturing plants that the car makers refuse to modernise so they could built more modern designs.
As for starting wars in the Gulf, Bush is good at starting wars but he has yet to finish one or win one. The Taleban is back in control in significant parts of Afghanistan. The main Al Qaeda leaders are still at large. Invading Iraq is a damn poor way to catch Al Zawahiri and Bin Laden.
Talking to people is not always the answer, but this administratipon cannot even talk to longstanding allies such as France and Germany. With the exception of Blair (who is likely to be gone from office soon) they do not have a single ally they have not bought.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The common element in the four previous major North American blackouts (northeast in 1965 and 1977, west twice in summer 1996) is that a significant portion of the generation capacity was located geographically distant from the preponderance of the load, and was carried over long distance transmission lines that had no spare capacity. Once a small failure or series of small failures that affected that long-distance transmission facility occurred, it caused instabilities in the grid that quickly isolated the loads from the remote generators, knocking all the generating capacity offline and resulting in total blackout.
The technology solutions for this are basically twofold: 1) add additional capacity to the transmission system, and 2) develop generating capacity nearer the loads.
Transmission system: the biggest impediment here is economics. For all the talk about electricity deregulation, the only part of the electric system in the US to be deregulated is the generation component. Both transmission and distribution remain heavily regulated, with fixed ROI. Therefore, capital does not generally go into these segments.
Distributed generation: this is all sorts of things: co-generation, gas powered stationary fuel cells, building integrated photovoltaics, some changes to existing laws to make it somewhat easier to build power plants near urban areas.
The sad fact is that there will be some who will hold this event up as proof supporting their particular political agenda. But it just is not so.
And the ability to own something and make a profit has what to do with bad engineering or maintenance mistakes? If you want to know what goverment run agencies are like ask the England or Canada about their health care.
Evil Man
That's bullshit.
Electric power is generated through an alternator (conceptually the same as a motor). The alternator's shaft is mechanically driven to generate power. It is usually driven by a turbine, using water (hydro) or water vapour (nuclear, coal and all others). Both parts together are called a generator.
Overloads on the grid will not cause the generators to slow down significantly as they have huge inertial mass! These things are BIG BIG BIG, and are being driven by huge mechanical forces (e.g. hundreds of cubic feet of water per second). This is never why you get domino effects.
When a relay trips it is usually to protect the alternator's windings, which can only handle so much current, beyond which they get damaged (they MELT). Other equipment downstream from the generator are also current-limited.
Therefore domino effect occur when demand on the grid exceeds total available supply, and each generating station on it gets overloaded, in turn disconnecting itself from the grid to protect itself.
In economic terms it was a disaster, and I really don't know why the problem lasted for so long. If the other power lines couldn't take it, why didn't they use phased power cuts.
See my journal, I write things there
Interesting excerpt:
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
I have worked in the power business for over 30 years and the real fact is that the power system hasn't been deregulated. It has been Re-regulated. This has esatblished an enegry marekt where electricity is traded like cattle. Market clearing price rules the day.
In the past power utilities worried about reliable power to their consumers. Transmission and generation were planned to be built to meet increasing demand with a large margin for unexpected events ( spinnig reserve, or generators required to be runnig but not supplying load were and still are used for contingency planning). Due to overzealous environmental activists and NIMBY (not in my back yard) philosophy building new generation and transmission while keeping electric rates low has become a daunting if not impossible task.
The changes made to the industry do not help these issues. The "Energy Market" approach created hurts everyone except the large nationwide corporations. The problem is it is too late to return to the stable efficient systems we had. Power utilities were forced to split into "Generation" "Transmission" and other groups and were forced to sell assets. I know it sounds trite, but everyone needs to look at what is really happening and write/call/visit their governmental representatives to try to find a real way to solve the impending disaster. Also, the government needs to listen to actual experts, those with experience, not the idiots and "public servants" they now have making policy
I orginially posted this to my blog for my friends but came to my attention that there was a discussion that could use a little help. Also the power engineering community has been expecting this for a very long period of time California was just the first to go (the grid in California has a different stability point due to its geography), east coast next, and then the Midwest will be the next one to go (I would guess that Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are going go next year)
First to address the technical details.
Q: Why was the blackout so wide spread?
A: A number of factors could lead to this, most of it was the grid failed fairly quickly, the grid was stressed and the all plants were at peak capacity. When the automated protect circuitry kicked in to protect the system most of the trips would have been over voltage and over frequency which are substantially faster trips than say over current. The overvoltage/frequency rise in fact would travel as a transient wave on the power lines at the speed of light all the way back to the power plants where the main generator protection would trip to keep from arcing the generator windings. Also power plants tend to be grouped in certain regions, many regions (think urban) don't generate enough to support themselves.
Q: Why are they saying some stations have damage?
A: Sometimes the generator protection isn't fast enough to prevent the transient from making it back to the source. Also if there isn't a place for the energy to go, the generator having a huge amount of inductance and generating in the kilo amp range, will create an open circuit voltage large enough to arc itself. Generator protection is a last resort; it is preferable to take out load in a controlled manner.
Q: Why will it take so long to repower everything?
A: Power in the United States is distributed using AC at 60Hz. Each and every generating station has to be synchronized with the grid at the connection point or else there will be a tremendous amount of harmonics generated and thus huge amounts of power wasted (plus a whole slew of power related problems that I won't get into). So when the whole grid goes down like it has the power companies and ISOs have to energize the main power transmission lines while leaving all consumers and generators off, then bring up generators near the border of the black-out first and gradually move toward the center of the blackout. This is because it takes time for a signal to propagate between point A and point B, thus while the whole grid is in sync at 60Hz there is a phase difference between point A and B associated with the distance between. Granted this could be accomplished with modern technology but power plants don't have any newer technology than what would have been state of the art in about 1970. Also the time it takes depends on the type of plant and type of trip. For Example take a steam (nearly all big ones) power plant: generator protection notices an over-voltage occur on the line, it trips and takes the generator out of the circuit, the generator over-voltages, so the winding energizer shuts down removing load from the steam turbine, the turbine overspeed protect trips and cuts steam pressure, the boiler preasure relief goes and now the plant is totally off-line. It takes about a week to bring a boiler online from cold. So lets hope the big plants didn't have trips going all the way back to the steam system.
Q: Why did some states loose power while their neighbors didn't?
A: Due to de-regulation the grid is segmented by ISOs and they have to buy power from one place and sell it to another until eventually the person buying it is a consumer. Some states at that time were not selling near their peak capacity either because they were charging more than someone else or because the interconnect was too week to supply that much. I would suspect a combination of the two.
The human aspect of the problem:
My suspicions as to what probably caused it was, instead of admitting they couldn't handle the lo
In Soviet Ukraine, that was another story (Chernobyll).
See my journal, I write things there
Has anybody checked to see if this happened?
"Today's failure is a dramatic reminder of the importance of the uninterrupted flow of power to the health, safety, and well being of our citizens and the defense of our country. "This failure should be immediately and carefully investigated in order to prevent a recurrence. "You are therefore directed to launch a thorough study of the cause of this failure. I am putting at your disposal full resources of the federal government and directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense and other agencies to support you in any way possible. You are to call upon the top experts in our nation in conducting the investigation. "A report is expected at the earliest possible moment as to the causes of the failure and the steps you recommend to be taken to prevent a recurrence." Signed, Lyndon B. Johnson
...you think these "less-than-ethical companies" would be better behaved with fewer rules? That makes a lot of sense.
It does make sense. Unethical companies would ultimately fail due to an unsustainable business model. Microsoft will fail. The RIAA will fail. It is only a matter of time before the market sets itself straight.
How about a little blame for the companies that abuse them?
Regulation is often a reaction to a corrupt company that burned and got burned, yet the regulation comes before other companies have the opportunity to fill the opportunity. An earlier poster mentioned an example about JetBlue and Southwest airlines. These are perfect examples of companies rising up and showing up the big old bastards (AA, United). Other great examples: Lindows is an upstart with Microsoft in their cross-hairs. Sun is releasing Mad Hatter with Microsoft in thier cross-hairs. It requires only time, and someone will take advantage of the opportunitiy to provide better service. The problems start when the government comes in, shoves a company like Lindows in the mud, and regulates Microsoft all to hell.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Around here (Michigan), the systems that went down were Detroit Edison, everything that's powered by the Fermi II Nulcear plant, and The Board of Water and Light in Lansing.
Consumers customers in the state ended up (for the most part) alright, and experienced either a couple of blinks or nothing at all.
Now, around here The Board of Water and Light is about as public as it gets. Their prices are inflated, and the service is definately not worth what you have to pay. Depending on where you live in East Lansing, you get wither Consumers or BWL.
If people had a choice here, they'd mostly go for Consumers cause they're more efficient, and their service is more reliable (demonstrated yesterday).
There are alot of people here who would like to see competition increase here, especially after last night.
Competitive pressure can be amazing, becuase if you make a quality product (in this case a power system), it saves money in repairs, and lost business. Saying that a "greedy businesman" is going to instantly cut corners to save cash is... well.. ignorant. Managers and decision makers decide whether each decision will save or cost money, and the smart ones know that if you spend now, it'll save vastly more down the road. Those people are the ones that survive ultimately.
Yes, there's pressure to cut costs, but cutting them too much results in closed doors at the office.
Cable companies have some obligations too as regards emergency broadcast capability (at least they did in cold war times). It should work if you can find power at your end. However, if you share your cable connection (i.e., an apartment block), the building distribution amplifier might not have emergency power.
See my journal, I write things there
It takes a huge amount of force to turn your magnet through a coil when you're powering a city. If the city gets shut off, and the load disappears, I can see how the load on the turbine (or whatever is providing the spinning) could accelerate, or decelerate when a load suddenly appears. Whether or not your parent post is correct about this situation, what he says is plausible.
De-regulation works well when there is a competitive marketplace and it fails utterly when there isn't. Witness the airlines for examples of both how it succeeds and fails. If you are travelling between major hubs in the US, you have multiple airlines to choose from and the price you pay is pretty low. If you are travelling between off-hub points, then you pay a premium because it's likely only one or two airlines serve that route.
The electrical industry, much like the phone and cable industry is too dependent on the connection to the house to be truly competitive. Ultimately whoever controls the wires into the home runs the show and has a competitive (and frequently regulatory) advantage over anybody who would need to run new wires.
There seems to be this belief that privatizing and de-regulating are magical cure alls for many problems. They aren't. If a market is naturally prone to creating uncompetitive monpolies, then neither government nor private industry will make it more efficient over the long run. Thus you are better off with government where at least the motivations are to please the citizenry rather than please the shareholders.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Deregulation creates a dis-incentive to have "spinning reserve." Spinning reserve is generators running without load, to compensate for failure of a power circuit or generation station.
In California prior to de-regulation, spinning reserve was kept at the size of the largest plant on the grid. With 1GW of nuke power on the system, that means you need a lot of gas-fired plants to be idling.
Spinning reserve increases cost without the opportunity for increased revenue, so economically you must be forced to maintain a high ratio.
As for "failing safe," the switching systems have about 8 milliseconds to determine if there is a problem, and then it will take 50 ms to actually open a switch. A fault has enough energy to vaporize things... you must fail safe! The restore process is just a function of electrical equipment... motors and transformers need 6-10x initial current to energize the magnetic field, and that will overload upstream supplies if everything happens at once.
In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but
....
in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much
like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the
right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off
making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to
fall off the grid like dominoes
This sounds like a poor design. The grid needs to be able to switch off nonessential loads - such as air conditioners if a generator station goes down. Can we have circuits or devices that automatically shut down if notified that the power generation is in trouble. We have wireless technologies and smart devices that ought to respond to information about disasters - another portal for hacking
On the flip side, people who really need power should make sure they have the backup power to last through a long blackout.
What about the audacity of office towers? Many of them are frigid cold in the summer time with almost no thermostat controllability. Some have lights on everywhere 24/7 even if no one is there from 5-8. I suppose there aren't that many such buildings per capita but WTF?
Would major insulation help reduce the need for air conditioners? Also, global worming um warming would be reduced if people don't drive around so much for frivolity. In short, don't have so much fun.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
A few years ago they deregulated the gas industry in Georgia. Instead of having one company that ran the gas lines, provided the service and read the meter, you now have lots of companies to choose from.
The idea is that prices will go down because of competition.
Well...I'm not sure about the actual gas prices, but my gas bill used to be $8 in the summer...now it's $22 - the price of gas may not have changed, but now there is a couple of charges that all companies make - meter reading fee and gas-pass thru charge which come to about $15. Why?
Because that one company still maintains everything, provides the gas - however, all these companies get to do is read your meter and bill you.
So, nothing changed at all in the gas infrastructure, just the billing. Otherwise there would need to be a gas line for each company going to each house for true competition.
I'm sure power is the same way...one (aging) infrastructure providing the power and everyone else reading the meter.
It shutdown Edwards AFB, could it have caused the power grid failure?
The worm affects Windows computer systems badly.
Granted it is only supposed to hit Microsoft this weekend, but if you were clever with a cyberwar attack, you'd then release another, nearly identical worm with the real target in it, after the first version had been analyzed and the decoy attack site publicised.
What do you think?
I live in the Niagara Falls area, ~1 mile from the US-Canada Hydroelectric plants which generate some of the most expensive free power in the US. (You should see my fscking bill)
I was at my cousin's house yesterday morning, and we just completed installation of his Brand New Central Air-Conditioning around 4pm. Overjoyed at the idea of "mmm.. cold air," we started it up and Bingo.. the straw that broke the camel's back.
You heard it here first, folks.
Yep. I remember having to learn, while in the US Navy as a nuclear engineering tech, to bring generators online with a manual throw of a circuit breaker. You watch the phase meter, and (it takes some practice!) throw the breaker at just the right time so it comes online in phase.
It's sort of like swinging a tennis racket or a baseball bat to hit the ball just right.
Edith Keeler Must Die
And after the series of smaller blackouts in 1999 the fed commision a study resulting in a report:
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/post/postfinal.pdf
So, just this morning I heard W announce a federal investigation into the situation that I'm sure will culminate with a similar report. But somehow I suspect that one of the top recommendation of this report will involve burning more fossil fuels to produce electricity and opening up more federal lands to drilling, yeehaw!
is that it was so hot that everyone had their air conditioners turned on full blast. Just think about it - millions of air conditioners, not enough energy.
Here's my theory on what happened.
m l
t echnology /soho_impact_030623.html
I believe it was due to an unpredicted solar storm. This site talks about the effects of solar storms on the electric power grid.
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/eiskappenman.ht
Evidently the SOHO Satellite isn't functioning properly at the moment...This site talks about that. This is the only satellite that monitors solar wind and geomagnetic storms.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/
So, solar wind could have been the culprit for the blackout catastrophe.
p2p comunity mass downloading avril lavigne songs
its very sad people didnt notice this
name your god and bleed the freak
Ed Stroligo.
and places where there can be competition should be privately owned.
/w oversight. In a complementary manner, since there can be competition between power plants, this should be let up to the market, if we need more power, corporate interests will build more plants, etc.
Thus, the grid (a singleton) should be operated by the government so that we have internal competition, that is competition amoung contractors who do the actual work.
And power plants should be operated by private interests (regulated/charged appropriately and equally for pollution of public goods, such as the air or water, etc).
Companies should not run the grid beacuse there is no external competition, the only way to get competition is to have contractors competing on very small jobs
NOOOOOOOOOO not starscream ANYONE but STARSCREAM
After giving up on trying to beat Linux at the uptime game, they finally devised a plan...
..... ;)
Yeah, I'm waiting for someone to come up with THIS theory
The job of a corporation is to do everything it can to make money. Since you don't make much money when you are thrown in jail, that is appended to say, the job of a corporation is to do everything it can to make money, within the boundaries of the law.
All rules will be taken to their extremes. All rules will be applied in a worst case senario. That's why rules must be constructed so that they cannot be abused, and the worst case senario isn't worse than it should be.
We do not live in a system where we have to depend on the kindness of companies not to screw us over... We have a government that is supposed to make sure that companies do not screw up over. If they aren't doing that, what the hell are they good for??? Give the news media something to talk about?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The problem isn't deregulation. Deregulation is a good thing, not a bad thing. The problem was that it wasn't accompanied by eliminating the power-supply monopolies that the government created.
Right now, we have no choice where we get our power from. What we need is to completely deregulate the industry and introduce real competition, which would mean that consumers would have a choice of which power-company they use.
This would take some time, as new companies would have to enter the market, build their utilties, and what-not. However, this problem is *never* going to be solved until we completely de-regulate the power-industry and create a free market there.
Simply regulating one monopoly is not going to solve problems. Decreeing by law will not change economic realities. Currently, there are regulations on how much power-companies can charge. This means that they can't put in the investment to upgrade their facilities, and leads to problems with there being shortages of supply (similar to there being shortages of water due to absurd regulations). You say that people can only charge so much, then they don't want to supply their product.
However, simple de-regulation, if not accompanied by the introduction of competition, will solve nothing, because companies will act from a monopoly position, and will have no incentive to provide the best service to their customers. How much business have the power-companies lost? One day, maybe a couple of days. They haven't lost *any* customers, because customers have no choice. If customers had a choice, then power-companies that have these kind of problems would lose millions of them.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Simply de-regulating and leaving these government-designated monopolies in their position of monopolization doesn't help.
What you need is to completely deregulate everything and allow for real true competition, so that companies have to compete to keep customers.
It is very much broke, and does very much need fixing. The problem is that due to liberal propaganda about how evil capitalism is for "public goods" like power, no-one even questions that maybe we shouldn't have a government-supported power monopoly, that maybe we should have real true competition.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Only generators that are powered by steam turbines or very fast flowing water run at 3600 RPM (or 3000 RPM in Europe).
Generators can have n*2 magnetic poles, where n is integer > 0. Generator with 4 poles will run at 1800 RPM.
59.5 Hz = trouble. 59 Hz = BIG trouble!Generators always run at EXACTLY 60 Hz. Even a very small difference would cause terrible things to happen (generator rotors could shatter, large voltage spikes).
Imagine a generator running at 59.9 Hz. It lags behind 36 degress in phase every second. That means that in half a second its phase would be exactly an opposite of grid phase!
What happens when you increase the load on a generator is that angle between magnetic field and the rotor increases (it is a bit more complicated than that but this is Slashdot after all).
Operation is stable only until this angle reaches 90 degrees. At that point the generator can no longer keep in sync and must be shut down.Oh yes, and I am an electrical engineer.
the problem isn't de-regulation. The best service for consumers is provided by a completely de-regulated free market with competition. If companies cut corners, and consumer's don't like that, those company's will lose business to other company's that don't cut corners.
Get rid of all these stupid regulations, and introduce real competition into the power-supply market -- so that consumers can actually choose between power-company A and B. Right now, the power-company's haven't lost anything other than a day's worth of money. If this had happened to one power company in a free market, it would lose millions of customers to other company's.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The German newsticker Heise reports that National Grid USA is a reference customer of Northern Dynamics. Northern Dynamics denote themselves on their homepage "Home of the OPC Experts". OPE stands for "OLE for Process Control", which uses Microsofts COM/DCOM. And this one has the security hole used by W32.Blaster.
. 08.03-00 1/
They think, that affected machines do a frequent reboot and thus communication in the National Grid USA is made impossible and the grid might go down.
More details are in the report on heise:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15
Mod to +5 funny.
Thank you for your time.
I work in the Utility industry. We have been trying to build new transmission lines and power plants for over 20 years but have been blocked by environmentalists, government, our own customers, etc. The entire industry has been running the system on 30-40 year old hardware (lines, transformers, powerplants) and have only had a couple of large outages since then. I think that we are doing very well with what we are allowed to build. The utility that I work for is still regulated, still have our generation and have just lowered our prices ... and we are number 1 in the nation for reliability! Maybe deregulation is part of the problem.
From gregpalast.com ...
Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.
And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.
Greg Palast takes a look at why the lights went out.
so the point of your post is that you don't know anything? and you end the post as if you're Perry White telling everybody they are moderators, ordering them to post stuff?
Go to cnn.com and read what's happening. You are not channel 5 action news director.
Good ol' slashdot, turning a physical problem (lack of power) into a social one (deregulation). It's like that time they interviewed an author, and rather than ask him about relevant issues, they asked him about the merits of typing his books on linux. You know how people make fun of nerds? sometimes you guys deserve it.
Windmills are actually a pretty decent solution to domestic energy production. Unlike drilling in ANWAR, which serves no real purpose except pissing off the environmentalists. You don't hear the Shrub talking about drilling off Florida, because that would send his corrupt brother to the unemployment line and diminish his chances of stealing the vote again.
What bankrupted CA's government was a massive recession followed by a manufactured energy crises. What the fuck are you thinking?
The people who manufactured the crises rigged the market through collusion. They intentionally kept power plants offline. They were invited to Cheney's little love-fest to strategize further.
The Bush team's response to the gang rape of CA ratepayers was to help hold the victim down so her struggles wouldn't cause injury.
As for tax cuts - you can certainly target them. Shifting the tax tables down would certainly help those who pay the most, but it would have a semblance of fairness. Dropping the top rate just helps those at the top, no semblance at all. Eliminating an inheritance tax - come on. This has NO bearing on your "pay the most tax" canard. It's not like it's a coincidence that the inheritance tax - which only affects million dollar estates - affects only the rich!
As a matter of efficacy, for economic stimulous the best tax cut package goes to those who spend the highest proportion of income. Those folks are at the lower end of the food chain. Cutting payroll taxes to pre-Reagan levels would do the trick.
Righties have a pretty shitty record on the economy. Who screwed up the economy and budget? The righties are in charge, numbnutz. Clinton is the only pres. who's managed a budget well in the last 25 years. I give Bush sr. partial credit for the last half of his term.
Your post is just so poorly reasoned it's staggering.
There is a reason that millions of people left Europe and migrated to the US. They were tired of Big Brother, long before the book was written. They wanted a place they could raise a family, work for their own future, and not have the government round their sons up and send them to die in every piss-ant skirmish that the king/queen/prince/mayor/etc decided was needed to save their honor.
None of what you said is true. First of all, monarchy has nothing to do with liberals/left/etc. If anything leftists are the ones who are strongly in favour of overthrowing institutions like monarchy, along with stuff like religion, etc. The French Revolution is a good example of that (other revolutions like the Russian Revolution and Communist Revolution accomplished something similar). If anything, it is conservatives who are in favour of status-quo establishments. Just go and study your history--proper history. You'll find that the people who were advocating the overthrow of monarchies were liberals. Those who were in favour of the monarchy were often conservatives (although I admit that these were only the elites). Conservatives actually LIKED the monarchy because it supported and strengthened religion. Conservatives only got sick of th establishment after taxes were raised high.
Second, what you said about people leaving Europe was complete nonsense. They did not leave because they wanted to be away from the monarchs. That is wrong because even when the settlers came to USA (for example) they were still under the power of the monarch. If the people really left to get away from monarchy, they would have formed an independent country. Of course this never happend for a long time (until the American Revolution). Most people who fled to USA were fleeing from religious persecution and economic suffering.
The biggest problem with the US today is that too many people have forgotten that aspect of living in the land of the free. They think we should emulate Europe. Why? Where did both World Wars start? Why should we be dragged into acting like that? Unfortunately we have. Now we think we have to do all the stupid things Europeans have been doing for a thousand years. And of course tax everyone to death to pay for it (oh wait, that is another of the stupid things Europeans think is normal).
Clearly shows your lack of understanding of history or the world. You blame both World Wars on Europe yet you fail to see the cause of those wars. The wars happened in Europe, and not in USA, for a simple reason. Europe was a superpower. The wars, if you recall, was mostly a battle betwen these superpowers. The reason USA never had any war is because it wasn't a superpower at that time (it's true whether you admit it or not), and it is geographically isolated. If there is a next world war, USA will be right in the middle of it. Do you know why? And no, it's not because of Europe. It's because USA is a superpower.
As far as taxes are concerned, contrary to your beliefs, Americans paid similar taxes (to Europeans) throughout most of the 1700's and 1800's. The whole anti-tax movement only started in the 1900's. Even hardcore conservatives didn't preach anti-tax views until the last century.
And for the record, the second biggest problem with the US today is that the religious right can't dissociate their version of GOD from their civic life or their political and legal activities.
Since you are on the right, that's your own problem. You are probably more religious than anyone on the left (just a guess) so you go and figure out how to solve that.
While many Africans did the same, and were free men, the majority were brought over as slaves.
AGain, your lack of history is appaling. The majority of Africans weren't brough over as slaves. ALL of them were. Every single African-American (don't mix up with hispanics or Carribeans) can likely trace their life to slavery.
Liberals in the US like to make this group think they deserve
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
It's socially useful to have postal coverage to places outside dense urban corridors. Sure, UPS/FedEx et. all would like to have a crack at mail delivery in NYC.
How about a remote village in Alaska? Not much interest, especially at a flat rate.
Those are U.S. citizens living there, my conservative friend of intedeterminate age. They need to be linked to the rest of the body politic.
The service is actually pretty good for first class mail. I grant some difficulties with packages.
I'm sure very few people realize this, but a very bitching storm came through Memphis two weeks ago and ripped it a new asshole. There were still people without power two weeks after the storm. TWO WEEKS. I personally was without power for over a week. Thank God I work at a hospital and was able to get my /. fix there.
So to all you damned spoiled Yanks, quit yer bitchin'.
Come on - he's a pure politician, living his whole life off his dad's name and connections. He is not the poster child for his party's mantra of personal responsibility, now, is he? Poster child for bailouts in the expectation of political favors, yeah. Exhibit A in the usefulness of connections to get criminal records expunged, yeah.
He's been responsible for hundreds of people each doing decades of hard time for using what used to be his drug of choice.
Everything out of his mouth is a lie, every gesture calculated and rehearsed - and phony. He's constantly doing photo ops at programs he then cuts funding for. He's gung ho for free trade, then supports farm subsidies and tarrifs for steel. Pure whoring for votes.
He mouths off a lot about freedom, and implements a police state. We crossed the line where the executive branch can decide to lock someone up - and just do it. And keep them there. And when has a police agency had a power it did not abuse? Only with the kind of oversite that is totally out of fashion post-Patriot Act. Even by the supine standards of the 1950's- 1960's the FBI was still a rogue agency, spying on anyone it felt like. Now, boy, they must be really feeling their oats.
What is there to like, unless you stand to inherit big?
I don't want to be completely pedantic, but this seems in slightly poor taste when somebody died from the blackout. Not that I didn't chuckle myself.
(For those who don't wanna clicky clicky, there has been one heat-related death so far.)
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
I can't quite understand the willingness to trust the assholes who colluded to create the CA power crises.
Cheney and Bush's response to the gang-rape of CA ratepayers was to hold the victim down.
Since then they intervened to insure the rapists got conjugal visits with the victim, by holding them to long term contracts purchased at the height of the crises from the people who brought it about.
Shameful.
Corporate waste is definitely comparable to government waste. When profits, or more importantly , stock price sours, they do ham-fisted measures like axeing departments rather than actually trim budget waste. It's hard to cut waste from hundreds of budgets, so they chop entire budgets.
Spending cuts are as arbitrary as the spending itself. The problem of government and corporate bureaucracy is similar: the incentive to do a good job is divorced from the job itself. Tech support measures calls concluded, not problems solved. If the customer can be conned into blaming something unrelated, that's a score! Similarly, if you have an open PO with someone, it's less hassle to pay more with them than get the best price elsewhere.
Bureaucracy is always and everywhere devoted to its systems, not the results those systems are an imperfect means to obtain. And it's the same in public and private sectors.
There was plenty of capacity, but the energy providers colluded to keep plants off line. It's a fact. If it weren't the energy industry, people would be doing perp-walks. But they are much too important to Shrub for that.
mod this up. the poster makes some very insightful comments.
what are you, stupid!!! this is an obivous trooll and deserves the be flamebait, or at least modded down to obscurity.
And here it is.
The power failure may not be a direct result of power deregulation but the problem with grid's design cannot be fixed by the kind of deregulation proposed by the Power Industry i.e., the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or FERC. The kind of deregulation so far in North America changes the ownership of utilities into private hands. The so called bulk power market championed by Enron rested control of the Grid from regional and state power authorities. Real deregulation would be a very different thing. Think of the current power industry like you would Microsoft and then think of the upstarts: small companies and individuals building solar, micro-turbine, and wind generators and selling the output freely on the grid. This kind of deregulation would cause power to be generated distributed over the grid such that large infrastructure would not be stressed. This model would spell the end of the bulk power industry with its giant powerplants and enormous transmission facilities.
You're a moron. Even Adam Smith didn't believe that, and you obviously fancy yourself a follower of his. Regulation in itself is just a tool, neither good nor evil.
You're a moron.
Thanks for the vote of confidence.
It seems that corporations that can persist indefinitely regardless of corruption and criminal deeds do so with the support of laws that insulate them from their victims.
Sure, regulation is a tool, but how often is it used to provide a genuinely better balance of power between the people, the government, and the corporations? If anything, the balance of power now-a-days is so artificially skewed that I don't know what the future brings--it's sort of like worrying about a meteor of apocalypic scale that may, or may not, come.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Utility companies are squeezed between customers, who expect to pay the same price for electricity they did ten years ago, shareholders, who expect to see both short-term actual profits and long-term expectations of profits and government, which expects them to spend most of their slim margins on R&D, maintainance, infrastructure improvements, risk analysis, training, redundant systems, etc. to keep everything running smoothly and safely.
Throw competition into the mix, so that individual companies are forced to spend yet more money on marketing, complex billing systems and interoperability, and the situation becomes even more difficult.
Any company that voluntarily enters this business either:
a) Has no clue what it's up against and thus will probably make countless mistakes; or
b) Intends to fudge its books and then commit financial suicide while it's executives resign and retire on their stock market earnings.
Either way, it's no good for the consumer.
That truly is tragic. For the record this had not happened when I made the post, and had I heard of it I would not have made light of it.
I'm sure not looking forward to the end of my own uptime.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Well, I don't know about BS, but in all fairness, the story is murky. --It stems from several sources and it comes from angry agents who accuse the CIA of botching the affair, making intel assurances it was wrong about, and getting American agents killed in the early days and hours before the war began. This is related to deals cut with Saddam's people, among other things. I need to study the material further before I can speak with authority on the matter, but it's not nearly so open and shut as you suggest.
A scientist digs up a gas centrifuge he was ordered to bury in his back yard, and people blow it off as nothing to do with WMDs.
Those pieces were from a nuclear program which was over a decade old. --Yes, I know the 'evidence' was spruced up by CNN and FoxNews, but seriously; that all stemmed from times during and before the first Gulf War, when yes, Iraq was probably trying to re-build the nuclear program which had been destroyed once already by the Isrealies in the mid -Eighties. But people didn't blow off the discovery. After looking at the details, they simply realized it was nothing. Seriously; if CNN and FoxNews thought that it was a worthy bit of evidence, they would certainly have spun it into something more than they were able. But the fact remains, you need not just a nuclear power plant to make weapons grade material, but a whole Uranium refining industry in order just to use the part in question. You can't really hide a whole nuclear power plant.
The evidence is being gathered even as we banter back and forth about this:
I read your link. For goodness sake, man! It's quoting one of the core liars of the Bush gang, and he's beating the dead pony of those flakey 'papers' discovered in a government office by the secret service. Sheesh! --All in the (apparently correct) belief that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will actually believe it. --DESPITE the fact that the 'evidence', (just like the rose garden parts), was already determined to be worthless! --Next thing you'll be telling me is that the plagerized paper written by a university student which Blair held up as evidence and told us was prepared by the British Secret Services is now suddenly valid again!
Did you happen to read the part in your article where it said that NO WMD's HAVE BEEN FOUND? Papers planted by the US secret service and actual warheads are two VERY different things. I'm sure the report you are waiting for will be a glowing endorsement of the Bush gang, (seeing as it is being WRITTEN by the Bush gang! DUH!)
Look, you are being lied to. The more you try to defend the people abusing you, the more a victim you become. I know it's hard, and I know it's easier to pretend that you are not a victim, but you will only disservice yourself in the long run by clinging to illusions.
Good luck to you.
-FL
First off, you are right about the four pole units...they do run at 1800 RPM. The grid does NOT always run at exactly 60 Hz! It's NOMINAL frequency is 60 hz. Why? it's difficult to get excat speed accuracy out of a huge turbine. Also, the grid does NOT sync to a common source. Usually generators coming on line sync to the grid power available to them at the time. I'm an electrical engineer too.....
A local supermarktet serves its customers, as the more products they sell, the more they earn. If they cut corners by making their policy in reordering the corn flakes such that they are sometimes short of corn flakes, they know that people will go and buy the cornflakes in another supermarket and might notice: "Hey this is better than the old one" and stay there. They lost a long-term customer.
If an electricity company doesn't sell any electricity for a day they loose about 0.3% of their annual turnover. And they don't even have to pay for the electricity they didn't make themselves. It is not an important penalty if they go "out" for a relatively short period. Their clients won't go running for other suppliers etc.etc.
So, who profits from 365 days of electricity and not 364? It is "the community". How about paying the electricity companies a bonus (of say 3% of their annual turnover) which is reduced by the number of person-hours squared that they didn't deliver any electricty? The constant should be such that they blew their bonus for this year completely with this event.....
I think the state could fund that bonus as an incentive to keep the reserves high and the reliability up. Maybe it should be the consumers: After every year they get to charge you the bonus if the electricity worked the whole year.....
Obligatory Fight Club Reference:
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
That, ultimately, is the risk of deregulation. That the total economic costs will have much greater importance than any social costs. Even if the hydro companies were to be sued for the disruption (unlikely, IMHO), the cost would still probably be less than it would have been to retrofit the old grid to more-modern standards.
This is not to say that all deregulation will result in this, just that there's a much bigger risk than there is with public industries, since the government (theoretically) has the public interest, rather than profit, as its primary goal.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
"DSL modem" (I wish people would stop using terms like that)
Why?
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
On the contrary, the outage has much to do with deregulation... this story covers it rather clearly..r tid=257&row =0
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?a
The whole point is, because there's no competition on the power-company market right now (no free market, government-sponsored monopoly), you *can't* switch. That's exactly what the problem is. The government needs to eliminate regulations (all of them) and allow the free market (competition) to solve the power-problem.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE --- The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights It's like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.
Source: Greg Palast, 2003-08-15 00:00:00.000
Candidate: Enron
I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.
To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.
And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.
The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull creator of the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned "power markets" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.
Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.
Most important, FDR banned
Suffice it to say, there are still some large gaps in your knowledge and perception of the issues which I think need filling, but I also do appreciate your filling in some of my own gaps.
For instance, I didn't realize that certain of the infrastucture of Iraq had not been directly taken out by the US. Although, at the same time, I see things like all the power lines leading to Baghdad destroyed; every cable tower along the miles and miles of highway used by an arm of the approaching US forces into the city was blown with professional army engineering skill at the same point on every one of the hundreds of line poles. Whether or not this was a US action (which would make basic tactical sense; take out the power of the city you are invading), or a geurilla resistance action which took place after the invasion is not entirely clear, (though I am apt to lean toward it being a US move, if simply because it would be virtually impossible to get away with such a massive project and not be caught post-invasion).
As for guns being handed out by Saddam, I suspect that this was only when it became obvious that there was going to be pitched battle in the streets of Iraq when the US forces came. --And I certainly don't think that this is any indication of basic, day to day policy.
However, I defy you to find any video of people in the US doing the kind of AK-47 firing into the air thing that you routinely see in the middle east. Such scenes characterize the ugly side of their culture, just as Jerry Springer and Black urban riots characterize our ugly side.
Okay. That's fair. You DO see the AK-47 air shooting. --I don't think it's anywhere nearly as universal a behavior as we in the West are led to believe, but it's certainly there. But you've hit the nail on the head when you point out our own modes of expressing the same dark things exist as well; These are modes of expression which I don't think are entirely different except in the form of expression itself. --I've been through Detroit. I've seen the, to this day, unrepaired post-apocalypse of the 60's race riots. --I personally know Americans who have been terrorized by their own country men at shotgun point in the streets of LA.
It's barbaric and horrifying, but in and of themselves, these are not good reasons to disrespect an entire group of people based on the actions of only a few who happen to be very visible. --For instance, the US black population is only around 10%, and only a much smaller portion of that are the gun toting, desperate kids. But those are the ones we see in the news.
The same goes for people in the Middle East, except the skew is even more pronounced. There are millions of hard working, good people in those countries. I have met some of them in my own travels, and the poor represention of them in the Western media is put right there in your face. --And it's enough to make you cry when you realize that it is largely based on those skewed images that innocent people and their kids, no different than you or me, are being savaged by American forces blinded by bad television.
-FL