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?).

Comments

Nothing to do with deregulation

[mjmalone]

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.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[antirename]

So far this is an isolated event... it looks more like an accident than the result of bad policies (CA deregulated power, refused to construct new power plants, signed some dumb deals, etc.). The parent post is correct about ripple effects. Everly system has potention bottlenecks/points of failure, and it sounds like one of those went down and overloaded the rest. No clear place to point fingers yet... if there is place to put the blame, CNN hasn't found it yet :)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[TedCheshireAcad]

Oh God no, no power to run the computers.

You mean I actually have to interact with people?????

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Wesley Everest]

I don't know if the overload was due to deregulation, but one of the purposes of regulation is to ensure that the power company can satisfy demand, even relatively unlikely peak demand. It's possible that deregulation led to them running leaner with less margin of error for a big spike in demand.

Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage and there you go -- overload and outages. That's one possibility. I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[macdaddy357]

I disagree. It could be related to deregulation. Give greedy businessmen a corner, and they'll cut it. If there were things that could have prevented this, but were costly, they were eliminated with deregulation.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jabber01]

Right. What we're seeing here is a lan-storm.

Deregulation would only help this sort of crisis, because it would be in the individual stake-holder's best interest to shield themselves from such an event.

But, considering how rare these grid overloads are, increased deregulation would do more harm than good, because it would complicate the normal daily function, and allow price gouging at every turn, while preventing the rare outage.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The previous major blackout for the area was in 1965. That is one HELL of a MTBF. By comparison to deregulated California, we in the North East will keep our 29 year uptime, thanks.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[straybullets]

It has more to do with poor design of the power infrastructure

well, bad design is linked to deregulation, since good design takes time, and deregulation wants money fast. It goes the same for taking good care of the existing installation : it costs money, and deregulation is about profit more than service.

the true fact is that deregulation is a joke, it was well seen with the english rail system. And the joke is on us !

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[mjmalone]

The power grid was designed and put into operation long before deregulation started.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[PFAK]

I'm going to have to disagree with you.

Deregulation usually ends up having the power company as a corporation, and not a Crow Corporation or such. When a power company (or any other company for that matter), has to become profitable they will cut costs, and when they are cutting costs the level of service usually falls.

The most likely reason that this has happened is that the power companies did not want to spend as much money on the grids to maintain them, and make sure that they were in complete working order, and add more grids and upgrade their equipment -- all because of deregulation, and saving money on in the "short term".

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[bperkins]

A deregulated industry will attempt to operate its power system close to capacity at all times as much as possible. This leaves the system open to problems like today's.

Deregulation may work out in the end, but so far what I've seen doesn't impress me very much.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ascii3f]

Wrong. It has everything to do with deregulation.
If a power company builds a new power line at their expense, they must allow other companies access and sell power using that line.
Companies aren't building power infrastructure beyond the minimum required because they get screwed. You will see more of this happening.

PS Full Disclosure. I am biased as I have worked in the power supply business for several decades.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Frymaster]

i live in alberta. a few years ago, the provinicial government - which has an ideologicl committment to fiscal ultraconservatism - deregulated the power industry.

the results have generally been regarded as disasterous - most notably a rise in power bills for both domestic and industrial consumers that topped out at well over double. the power rate increase resulted in less disposable consumer income and increased cost of doing business in the province and was regarded as an election-killer by the current administration.

so they spent their way out of it to the the tune of $2.3 billion. that was direct subsidies to rate payers. of course the whole subsidy was a charade since those same rate payers were going to pay for their "subsidies" in income tax increases or reduced social spending in other areas. clearly a case of cutting you a cheque with your own money.

so who got rich? the power companies. same service, same power, more money.

bottom line: electricity is a necessity. like water, or the police service. it is a completely inelastic commodity and privatizing it is only encouraging the new power overlord (since there is, really, only one major power provider... a monopoly) to charge the maximum the market will bear and damn the consequences.

source here: here

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[mjmalone]

Then what do you blame all the past outages on? This is not the first time large scale outages in major metropolitan areas has occured.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means that CNN hasn't found a suitable Republican to pin this on. Give it a few hours, they'll find somebody.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[OECD]

Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation.

Not just Enron:

• The CA legislature set up a "deregulated" market in which long term contracts were not allowed. It wasn't deregulated--it was assinine-regulated.
• EDS--who set up the CA "deregulated" market--made a ton of money holding seminars that taught Enron et al how to 'game' their market.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[straybullets]

The same for the british rail : it worked perfectly. deregulation came in and it went down in flames, late trains, dirty wagons, and dead peoples in accidents : you need to take care of the infrastructure, you need to plan for the future, and keep the whole engine running smooth.

You can't do that if you have to keep an eye on your competitors and keep lowering the prices some more, and fire those expansive workers.

forget what you've been told : open your eyes and think.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[PFAK]

The reason that deregulation occurs is to stop these problems, so why do they still continue even after the company has been deregulated.

There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[plague3106]

Since the same thing (basicall) happened in '65 I'd have to agree that its probably just a design flaw in the system.

Actually, its not..the plants shutdown automatically to prevent damage to equipment from overloads. Short of building new power stations, I don't think this kind of thing can be prevented.

Being near Philly, i'm glad that the grid isolates the problem as well as it does..

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Daetrin]

Then what do you blame all the past outages on? This is not the first time large scale outages in major metropolitan areas has occured.

The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know." Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.

Obviously the power company didn't say "Haha! We've been deregulated!" and then intentionaly pull the plug. However reduced spending on maintenance and backups could reduce the threshold at which such an event occurs.

I don't know enough about the industry to say, but theoretically they've installed equipment since 1965 that should theoretically prevent occurances such as this. Why didn't those systems operate as intended? Was the overload just too big to prevent, or were they not installed or maintained properly?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[(54)T-Dub]

Well on thing is for sure, if terrorists weren't considering our power grid to be a viable target they sure are now.

I've heard experts warning about this type of thing since 9/11, but I was always a little skeptical. Living in california I tend to be skeptical of anything the power companies have to say.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[plague3106]

That doesn't make too much sense to me. Assuming the blackout is a result of cost cutting, it seems like an unreasonable risk, because now that the power's out, people CAN'T use the power, and thus the utilities can't bill until they lights come back on.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[djblair]

A former DTE employee, I am typing this on my laptop with no power here in Detroit, MI. I agree, this is certainly not a result of deregulation. Perhaps I can offer some insight on some of the specifics.

The reason so many plants are now offline is because of a safety system put in place to protect their generating equipment. An overload can severely damage generators. The device which disconnects the plant from the grid is a shoebox-sized relay. The great northeastern blackout of 1965 was actually caused by a defective relay.

However, it is highly unlikely that a relay was the cause of this outage. If not for faulty equipment, what caused it to happen? Since the problem seems to have originated in Niagra Falls, New York, I suspect that a major line which provedes part of the northeastern US with power from generating plants in Canada went down. This event would have triggered the above scenario, causing plants in both the US and Canada to shut down.

It is interesting to note that, as with land-based phone systems, little has changed in the way power is distributed to customers in the last 30 years (certainly advances in fiber optics have advanced phone systems, but the last-mile copper systems have remained unchanged in over 50 years). Hopefully now, systems will be put in place to prevent outages of this magnitude from happening again. A system of automated switches with real-time network links could be used to disconnect parts of the grid instantly before the problem could spread. Maybe we will see some of this technology in the future, now that there is a definate need to persue it.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ergie]

I agree. Seems like that had this problem before... http://www.ceet.niu.edu/faculty/vanmeer/outage.htm

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, CNN has been so hard on the Republicans these days, which is so unfair because so many Republicans have been doing so many things so very well. The way they blow any little scandal all out of context and proportion and just harp on it for weeks on end, their steady refusal to walk the party line, their whole anti-war attitude, their open mockery of the president, it's just ridiculous. And I hate how they have that "Impeach Bush" ticker running across the bottom of the screen all the time. Damn liberal media. That's why I only watch Fox.

Re: Nothing to do with deregulation

[Black Parrot]

> 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.

However, there are supposedly safeguards against rippling across zones or even sub-zones of the grid. See what I gleaned from the news and just posted under the stale article.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[plague3106]

So how do you explain the Great Blackout of '65? Thats well before deregulation isn't it?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[plague3106]

Doesn't deregulation usually mean you can choose your power generator? So that if their prices are too high, you can switch to someone else?

Re: Nothing to do with deregulation

[Black Parrot]

> I don't see how this has to do with deregulation.

Yes, but think how many page hits it's going to generate when the flamewar between the outspoken and politically polarized IANAEconomists populating Slashdot gets warmed up.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[murr]

Interesting thoughts here, but I don't agree that electricity is a "completely inelastic commodity". Californians were able to save a surprisingly large amount of power with relatively simple changes during the electricity crisis.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[macdaddy357]

The only risk publicly traded corporations worry about is not making projections for this quarter. If short term buck grabbing causes a long term problem, it will probably be someone else's problem. Besides, the boys in the boardroom can always blame the lowest level drones, and assure shareholders they will be dealt with.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[rsborg]

That doesn't make too much sense to me. Assuming the blackout is a result of cost cutting, it seems like an unreasonable risk, because now that the power's out, people CAN'T use the power, and thus the utilities can't bill until they lights come back on.

That would make sense, if you don't compare what they saved (in running lean) vs. what they lose (in one blackout). In short, I bet "unreasonable risk" you pose, would be, financially reasonable if it only happened occasionally, and that's probably what they calculated. The same concept as "acceptable level of casualties"... and although not as amoral, still causes hell for everyone not making that extra buck that the power utility is.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Mikeytsi]

Nope, the last one was in 1977. The one BEFORE that was 1965.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Chris Burke]

Deregulation would only help this sort of crisis, because it would be in the individual stake-holder's best interest to shield themselves from such an event.

Well, that's one possible outcome, but I wouldn't say only. It is also in the stake-holder's best interest to cut as many corners as possible, reducing costs and maximizing profits so they can cash in and get out before the inevitable disaster hits.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Vakara]

That's the theory, and that's what they told us out here in CA. In reality, you get screwed. They told the citizens of Monatana the same thing when they deregulated the Montana Power Company. Look at how screwed they got.

I'd like to know if there was a successful case of electrical deregulation in the US?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[modicum]

The government does not provide water and police services because people 'need' them. If that were the rationale, then wouldn't we want the government controlling all farms (because people need food) and drug production (which many people need to live). The reason we have the government provide police service is because it is a public good, so it cannot be effectively provided privately. The reason we have regulated monopolies provide water service is because that market is a natural monopoly.

The idea behind electricity deregulation is the improved technology allows electricity to be structured as a competitive industry and not a monopoly. It has largely succeeded based on the ability to structure the new electricity market in such a way the competitive providers actually enter. Governments have been largely inept at structuring these markets, which is why the results have been mixed. It sounds like this didn't happen in Alberta, which is too bad. But we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that the government needs to provide everything we think we 'need'.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[hammarlund]

You are correct in that the power companies buy and sell electricity to various markets as demand varies. However, the problem in California was not that the California power companies were limited in the price they could charge due to deregulation. The problem was that they DID NOT PAY their bills to the Nevada power companies that sold them the power needed to meet the demands in California.

They did not pay the bills so to keep their "bottom line" looking good. They HAD the money to pay their bills, they just didn't pay them. So, the other power companies shut them off and wouldn't sell them any more. This created the artificial power crisis in California.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[GigsVT]

The problem is the same as phone deregulation, as long as you only have one wire coming into your house, you still have to pay that company, one way or another.

I'm generally libertarian, but I'm in favor of something someone else posted on Slashdot a while back. The local government should just own the natural monopoly on the last mile, and the power/phone companies should be given non-descriminatory access to the system, free to compete with one another.

The way it stands now, the incumbents hold all the cards on these "deregulation efforts". It's not practical to try to run multiple wires (or pipes for water) to every house for this stuff.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[letxa2000]

This has nothing to do with deregulation. There have been huge blackouts decades before there was deregulation. Heck, this same grid was the same one that caused the big blackout in about the same area in the late 60's, IIRC.

There is no inherent reason why deregulation will cause problems. In fact, the opposite is true. But electric deregulation combined with new environmental regulation is definitely a bad thing. You have the electric sector needing to do one thing and an environmental sector impeding that. Which is more important is open to debate, but you can't ignore the fact that environmental regulations limit what often needs to be done to keep the electrical sector functioning.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[blamanj]

you need to take care of the infrastructure

Indeed, what often happens with deregulation is that you get a lot of people who see how they can make a quick buck and who cares what happens down the road. One mechanism that could be used is to force companies that participate in these utility industries is to require a very large bond to be put up against future problems and upgrades. They now have a stake in the future. If they cut corners too much, they lose their bond, and so they're economically forced to consider the consequences of their actions.

The other issue is that the "intersection points" need to be addressed in a similar manner. Otherwise you get the situation we have now in the DSL market where the customer gets caught between the CLECs and ILECs.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[utmecheng]

No way. The cost of dealing with a wide-spread blackout like this one is gigantic. Think about how many man-hours were billed in today's fiasco? They had to shutdown all generators and then turn them back on. That combined with the damage done to their system and the repairs they will have to make means big losses. Not to mention parent's point about loss of money tonight. When you have rolling long term blackouts due to localized stresses then you can point the deregulation finger, but with major grid-wide blackouts its a huge financial burdon.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Zeinfeld]

The same for the british rail : it worked perfectly. deregulation came in and it went down in flames, late trains, dirty wagons, and dead peoples in accidents :

British Rail did not work 'perfectly' by any standard - with the possible exception of the privatized service.

The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.

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.

There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.

Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought. The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The problem to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves. The problem to every economic problem must be to give stupendous tax cuts where at least 80% but hopefully as much as is possible goes to the richest of the rich, and in particular rich Texas oil-men. One thing is certain, W. is not going to say a word about the NYC power cut until he can work out how it can be used to justify some policy to benefit Texas oil men.

The free market is one thing, if you could establish a free market in energy that would be a great solution. The problem is that it is not possible to do that, the market is illiquid, supply and demand are constrained in certain ways. But to the ideologue these problems simply cannot exist, they don't exist in the theory so they cannot exist. Its like a robot in a bad 1960s Sci-Fi serial. So the ideologue plows ahead with a broken scheme and creates an unmitigated mess.

That is exactly what happened with privatization of BR. There is no reason the UK rail network cannot be private, it was built entirely with private capital. But the Tory privatization plan based on the politics of sticking your head in the sand was never going to improve matters.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[qtp]

You are still held subject to the transmission charges of the private monopoly that owns the lines between your home and the plant. Cost of electricity goes down, transmission costs go up. Everybody happy except for the customer.

In California, the supposedly competing power generation companies created a scarcity of power by bringing down one third of thier power plants for "maintenance" during peak season, the largest reseller (Enron) refused to increase supply to meet demand, and instead decreased supply and raised prices. The only municipalities that remained unaffected were the ones that held on to thier municipal (socialized) power companies.

Gray Davis was blamed for the mess, and the companies got off scott-free (thanks to deregulation).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stmfreak]

bottom line: electricity is a necessity. like water, or the police service. it is a completely inelastic commodity and privatizing it is only encouraging the new power overlord (since there is, really, only one major power provider... a monopoly) to charge the maximum the market will bear and damn the consequences.

The real problem with so-called deregulated utilities is that they are all a single monopoly from the consumer's point of view.

When your utility fails, you are screwed. Short of getting in your car and driving to where the utility is working, you are at the mercy of the utility . This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.

When your utility hikes the rates, you are screwed. You cannot just flip the switch over to the other utility's lines and start paying less. This is not deregulation; this is monopoly.

For utilities to become truly deregulated, all levels of government need to relinquish their grip on their citizens and allow companies to negotiate contracts directly with you and I. Presently, power, phones, water, sewer, garbage, cable... these utilities are selected by your city or county in a one-size-fits-all contract. The winning company has to follow the government's rules for the courtesy of raking you over the coals. Competition is over once the selection has been made. This is not deregulation...

If you look at what cellphones have done to the telecom industry, you can see how only when consumer choice enters the equation do companies get on the "more for less" bandwagon. Until customers can choose between power company A and power company B from their current home, we're going to have no end of problems brought about by waste, corruption, greed and the lack of customer service or concern you would expect from a monopoly.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[IM6100]

There's an ideological component involved, too.

Just look at the language you're using: 'Not deregulated.' Now, that could easily be changed, since it's a double negative. Regulated, i.e. controlled by an outside body.

Why should anything be regulated unless it's necessary for it to be regulated? Are we all big enthusiasts for government granted monopolies? Maybe Microsoft should be in charge of all computer opeating systems. Prices might end up being cheaper. (service wouldn't be better, but please don't claim that you get good service from 'you've got nowhere else to turn' utility companies....)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[IM6100]

So you're saying a regulated power industry has no qualms about wasteful excess capacity? Because they're guaranteed a sure-thing market?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[heli0]

"The most likely reason that this has happened is that the power companies did not want to spend as much money"

No, they want to spend billions building new plants so this does not occur. The NIMBY crowd prevents this from happening. Hell, they won't even let them build windmills. Without new production capacity this is going to become a more common occurance.

Re: Nothing to do with deregulation

[solaris doppelganger]

California is and has been controlled by Democrats far longer than we've had power issues. The recent power problem WE are having is a result of a refusal to build new power stations for the last 10 or more years. Deregulation isn't deregulation if that process is ridiculously regulated. It's not our biggest problem anyway. What we need is more generating capacity, not more laws. If you want to know what happens when Democrats run a state, look at California, we're a peach. Why not connect the same dots in New York?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Darby]

I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an optomist among us.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Gilmoure]

But they now have the perfect excuse for a rate hike. A quarter or two will look bad but profits will be up in the near future (or so I surmise, based on my long experience playing Alpha Centauri, whacking people with sticks in the SCA and drinking large amounts of Guinness listening to Clan N'gal late at night).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Ashen]

Cheaper because they usually end up subsidized with tax money or granted tax breaks? I think not...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[S.Lemmon]

Deregulation will be fine the day I have a choice which power company hooks to my house. Problem is they usually have a local monopoly - regulated, at least there's some control over pure profiteering.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[scorch89]

Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation.

The blackouts in CA were a direct result of a poorly designed market. In the politicians rush to be the first deregulated state, they let a PhD economist set things up so that the big three utility companies had to sell off most of their generating assets. They also forced them to buy most of their power in the short-term market instead of letting them procure longer-term power supplies. They did this in order to make sure the market had liquidity - but it came at the expense of reliability.

It came down to how much CA was willing to pay to keep the lights on. And boy did they pay through the nose. I should know, I'm not only directly involved with power markets in CA, I'm also a ratepayer. Ouch!

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[devilspgd]

Less expansive workers consume less food too, so you'll save at company events.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stanwirth]

I agree with you, macdaddy. The power failures in Auckland NZ in 1998 were caused by deregulation. Lasted over a week. The cause was failure to properly maintain underground mains -- lines maintenance had been farmed out to a variety of cut-rate contractors who just didn't do a bloody thing. They had to call back in the old AEPB (Auckland Electrical Power Board) engineers who'd been made redundant in the deregulation craze of the mid-90's. Brought back in as contractors at top dollar, might I add.

The solution was to separate the lines companies from the generators and retailers -- i.e. re-regulation was introduced

This hasn't fixed things, really, because the lines companies now have no incentive to invest in maintenance, and the maintenance the do do (when there's a blackout -- we get 'em all the time where I am) is way piss-poor and the contractors do it in such a way as to maximise their own revenue.

For example, a few weeks ago, the power went out in a big rain/windstorm like it always does. So, Alstom (the same contracting outfit that maintains the public telephones for NZ telecom, which is the latest spectacular privatised public services failure story here) comes out to solve the immediate problem, which is the fact that some wet bamboo had blown over the three main lines servicing the whole valley, shorting us out. So they remove the one piece of bamboo causing the short. I watched them. This bit of bamboo had come off a whole stand of bamboo right next to the main lines, and there were over a DOZEN other bits of bamboo in the stand that had obviously also been blown over the same three lines -- burnt off at the same spot. I asked the Alstom guys if they could request that the stand of bamboo could be reported as the cause of repeated problems -- Answer? oh, no, that has to come from "head office."

Now, there was another contractor (different company) halfway up the road cutting down some foliage on behalf of the lines company -- foliage which had nothing to do with the problem . Funny, that. So I went and asked the tree cutter guy, there with all his gear and ladders, if he could please either cut down the stand of bamboo that was the real source of the problem, or notify "head office" (the lines company) that there was just a tad more foliage trimming that would need to be done to solve the source of the problem . No, he couldn't do that. He'd been sent out to cut down some tree branches, and by god that's what he was going to do.

Now why should either of these contracting companies do anything to solve the cause of the problem? After all, leaving the source of the problem in place assured them of ongoing work -- at top dollar . While this ate into any budget the lines company might have for other maintenance (like maybe uh, moving the 40-year-old overhead lines to a safer and more modern underground system so we don't get the spectacular exploding-transformer effect every time there's a lighting storm maybe? DUH!)

Privatisation is the cause of our blackouts, that's for sure! And it's caused the rates to go up. Worse service, higher cost, poorer maintenance.

And what's the deal? They privatised and deregulated the airline, the electric companies and the phone company -- but in each case, as a sop to the poor NZ citizen, who may have been losing an asset but was certainly getting poorer and more expensive service, they earmarked blocks of stock that could only be issued to New Zealanders.

So that some New Zealanders could have the privilege of purchasing an asset FROM THEMSELVES. They only fell for it because of this farking myth about competition leading to better service and lower cost. Yeh right.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[dobber]

Anyone notice on CNN that the PM of Canada reports a lightning strike, and then Accuweather reports that there was no chance of a lightning strike within 100 miles of the Niagara Mohawk plant?

Somebody has some figuring out to do...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[dbrutus]

One thing that nobody's mentioned to this point is that adding capacity (transmission lines) has gotten radically harder because of political activists who want to shut down every improvement to power generation and transmission that is proposed. The reasons vary from aesthetics to environmental concerns to outright luddism.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[leviramsey]

That one was comparatively minor. Only NYC was really affected (though it was severe for them). The '65 outage took out everything from Canada to DC, IIRC, including Boston.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Daniel_Staal]

And involving the government would have solved any of this how?

(You've got a red-tape bound beuacuracy. Governments are famous for them.)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[John_Booty]

Kennedys and a bunch of other wealthy left wingers live on the Cape

It's a pretty sad and homogenous state of American political affairs when people call the Kennedys "left-wing". They and other Democrats are generally slightly left of center, yes... "left-wing"? No.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[leviramsey]

And that's probably the root cause. Since the 60's, there's been minimal power plant construction in the Northeast (and what there has been has been simply replacement of infrastructure). Combine that with gigantic increases in demand (growing population with more appliances and so forth) and you've got a bad situation. This is akin to say Comcast thinking that they can serve all the Northeast's cable modem users (who are KaZaa addicts) with a single OC-3 to one backbone point, and the routers and switches are Linksys purchased from Best Buy.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[thayner]

Sounds to me like they're overregulated. Get rid of silly rules like that, telling other companies that they can either make deals or build their own lines. Then, likely after a few years of turmoil, you'll see the free market working.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[topham]

If the PM of Canada said it it probably didn't happen.

Nobody has believed anything from him in atleasta year.

sad but true.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[caramuru]

The problems with the Northeast grid are well documented. Technology Review had an article, http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fairley07 01.asp, two years ago that discussed the vulnerabilties of the Niagara-Mohawk link between Canada and NYC as well as possible solutions to the problem. Unfortunately, it takes time and a great deal of money to implement solutions to problems such as these.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[lrichardson]

OK, the logic goes something like this: governments are supposed to provide an infrastructure for society to work. Necessities, like police, military, fire departments, clean water, roads, and, *surprise*, in this day and age, that also includes electricity.

Now, the government can certainly subcontract these things out. There are very few big highway construction companies run by the goverment. And, although the police are entirely gov, there's a lot more dependence on 'private' security.

Now, deregulation. The US has a major problem, called shortsightedness. Politicos are only interested in what they can loot during their term, and, if possible, re-election. Companies are concerned with profit, and surviving a bit longer has taken a very secondary role. So, maintenance, or improving the safeties/redundencies/cut-outs in the power grid - it just ain't gonna happen (or, only under extreme duress, and far less than required).

The situation in California was a debacle. But that had more to do with how the law was done ... companies that kept both generating and transmission couldn't raise rates, while those that split apart, could. Seems imbecelically stupid. So, a number of companies did the 'split' ... and I use the term loosely, as the owners of the predessor tended to have majority holdings in both the new pieces. Enron (and others) manipulated the market, buy playing buy-and-sell. The original companies simply started tacking on little hikes at each of the several new, and completely artificial steps of the process. The net result was the avg cit in CA ended up paying triple ... for exactly the same product, made by exactly the same people, delivered over exactly the same power lines. The difference was that numerous unscrupulous, immoral and total bastids were taking more money from the end user, under varying pretexts.

So, the question, was deregulation to blame ... in part. The companies in question are trying to maximize profit, at the expense of long-term viability.

That strategy has Apple down to what, 3% of the market?

Unfortunately, when we're discussing the infrastructure we all depend on, that's a very stupid idea.

For reference, look at the what has happened to the phone system since deregulation kicked in ... the average phone bill is staggeringly higher (and the average cell phone bill runs ~$60, despite their 'low cost' plans), and the people at the top are rolling in more dough than ever (Hello? Verizon workers? Can you hear the bills crinkle as Seidenberg rolls in his $9.5 million? Or Lee in his 15.6? How does your labor battle over healthcare sound now?)

It's not that deregulation is a bad thing ... just, we aren't seeing it ... what the elite are trotting out is a dog-and-pony show, designed to cover their act of ripping the public off.

As for the power companies, let's learn from CA's example - just say no to deregulation. Heck, let's nationalize the bastids ... while all the 'competition' was (allegedly) lowering rates, Canada had cheaper power ... from a monopoly! (Yeah, I know, the same greeding scum-suckers managed to break that up, too. And now the consumers are seeing their bills double (as of last winter). )

Ah well, as long as I can read by the glow of my monitor ...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[monte48lowes]

Deregulation?? Didn't something similar happen with cable television? I seem to remember some politician worried about the price of cable TV. Now look at the prices, they are astonishing. Maybe deregulation would work if there were someone to regulate how the parties involved operated. But then would that be real deregulation? Sometimes money can't be the bottom line, especially when the service is of great importance.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[TylerB11]

A system of automated switches with real-time network links could be used to disconnect parts of the grid instantly before the problem could spread.

That's exactly whats in place - but much simpler. Inbetween each power terriory is a couple interconnects that couple the grids together. They have switching relays similiar to the ones on the generators that monitor the power moving in or out of the territorry (in the case of ConEd NY, in) The nanosecond the power falls out of the acceptable tolorance for phase, voltage, or amperage, BOOM it drops the connection. Thats what SHOULD have happened today - when we lost power from the 5,000 MW lines from canada, it should have started to brown out the NY power pool, and the other pools should have broken off and kept their section of the grid up. the problem is, really, our reliance on outside power sources in canda, and the huge power consumption by NYC - ConEd can't make even close to enough power to cover their load - imagine if the hippies got their way and closed indian point?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[leviramsey]

Argh... proofread before posting...

Make the last bit: the residents say, "We think wind power is a great idea, but this wind farm will ruin the views of the water."

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[dspeyer]

Or not get out.

Seriously, I don't think the power companies have been significantly harmed here. They won't lose customers, seeing as the outage was purely geographic. All bad will is directed against the power companies equally.

Let's face it: the only thing power companies compete on under deregulation is price. They have the same product, the same reliability, etc. This means the only viable business model is to cut every corner you can.

But money is the one true god, and questioning deregulation is unamerican, so we don't see a problem here, right?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nathanh]

You mean I actually have to interact with people?????

You are interacting with people. The fact that you use a computer to do so is no more disturbing than speaking to someone via a phone.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stanwirth]

And involving the government would have solved any of this how?

First of all, rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem -- so they wouldn't get future callouts on cold rainy days. Who the heck wants to go out on a rainy day for n+1 emergency calls-- when they could schedule preventive maintenance requiring them to go outdoors during the months when it doesn't rain nearly as much.

When the government was directly involved (i.e. owned the power companies, and the telephone companies, and the national airline), there was *one* bureaucracy -- that was still ultimately accountable to the public. And the quality of service was very high.

Now there are half a dozen "state owned enterprises" (SOEs) which means the public still foots the bill, but now (being "privatised") we have absolutely no oversight, and they are accountable to their boards to make a profit, rather than directly to the people to provide a service. In the case of the lines companies and phone companies, the quality of service is directly related to the integrity of the lines themselves -- and without public feedback, there is no incentive to improve service, because the lines companies still have a monopoly. No such thing as competition there. Yet the SOEs were set up on the pretext of "providing competition" where no competition can possibly take place. It's an argument that would only appeal to a neocon ideologue.

Furthermore, because it's ex-government department employees in these SOEs that operate the SOEs but now without public oversight -- well, it's the same fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving do-nothing slobs you get in government departments, but now they can do nothing for more money and nobody but other fat, lazy, corrupt, theiving slobs --other ex-government bureaucrats--are looking over their shoulders. The public has no right to even find out what's going on---because now it is a private company.

They're more organisationally inefficient and cut more corners on service and funnel more plum contracts to their buddies now than they did when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy-- because at least when it was a government monopoly/bureaucracy, we had some right to oversight. New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.

Unfortunately.

(You've got a red-tape bound beuacuracy. Governments are famous for them.)

And when the NZ government-run electricity, telephone and airlines were privatised into SOEs, the tape only got longer, redder and meaner--and more expensive.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Yes, govenments aren't the most effiecent places, but they have less of a focus on profit, and more of a responsibility for the people.

The proof is in the pudding of course, and his point was that things were better when the gov was involved. You seem to give the impression that the problems has always existed, and that involving the govenment isn't going to solve the problems. The problems were introduced by the commercial companies, after the gov stop being involved.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ChrisCampbell47]

One thing is certain, W. is not going to say a word about the NYC power cut until he can work out how it can be used to justify some policy to benefit Texas oil men.

Specifically, and mark my words, they will work out how it can be used to justify licensing and building new nuclear reactors. Even though this problem will likely to be traced (as before) to a shortage of transmission capacity, not generation capacity. Oh, and they'll also figure out a way to make it necessary in the war against civil lib^H^H^H terrorism.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[dspeyer]

The grid could (read should) isolate these problems. If, say, the heavy industry of New Jersey got cut off as soon as the plants started running in the red, there would have been enough capacity. Everyone else could have kept their power, and when the usage dropped low enough, they could have come back too.

As it is, the entire network tried to support eachother, and failed as one. Nearly a dozen generators are still offline, because they went down in the failure and need an outside kick to start them. This shouldn't happen.

I'm not sure if this has to do with deregulation or not. On the surface, it seems to be related to hubris -- the system is designed on the assumption that it can hold if it just shuffles everything right. We need a "give up" routine and high-usage low-priority areas to use it on.

Now, this problem is old, and can't be blamed on deregulation. Nonetheless, had our best engineers been trying to improve the system, instead of trying to convert it to capitalism, this might have been taken care of.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> When a power company (or any other company for that matter), has to
> become profitable they will cut costs, and when they are cutting costs
> the level of service usually falls.

No, the current situation with "deregulated" utilities is it is a Democrat's idea of a free market further corrupted by mercentilist Republicans wanting an assured market and assured profits. You can't deregulate half of a market without bad results. The alternative to cutting cost in a free market is raising prices, but THOSE are still in the hand of government control.

Not sure if a truly free market is possible with current technology of wires to houses only possible though emminent domain land grabs, but we can and should get a lot closer. Leave a government controlled entity with a monopoly on distribution and let the market supply the content at market rates.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[bluGill]

Depends on how you operate as close to capacity as you can. My utility tries to get closer to capacity by charging less for power used when they are at less than capacity. (Mostly implimented in the form of people heating water at night and storing it for the day, devices to prevent all air conditioners from kicking in at once, and heaters with a non-electric backup they can start when needed)

A good solution that I'm surprized more utilties don't impliment, by shifting some of the use to they save a lot of money and help prevent problems like this.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[God! Awful 2]

Excellent comment. Like the Buddhists say, there is always a middle way. The main problem with Dubya is that he was elected by only a handful of votes and yet he pursues an extremist agenda.

-a

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company
> is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.

Kid, you are obviously not old enough to remember the bad old days of The Phone Company. Since the big breakup Long distance rates are fast approaching flat rate for everyone everywhere and local service is very affordable if you just say no to all of the optional crap they try to peddle to get their margins up. Hint: Answering machines are $20, voice mail is $5/mo, you do the math.

If you want to see what the loving hand of government does do a business, go look at Amtrack or the Post Office.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> The excuse for the 1965 power outage was effectively "we didn't know."
> Obviously they know now, so "tbey didn't care" is a plausible theory.

A temporary failure of a complex system like the American power grid every few decades doesn't sound like a "I don't care" attitude to me. Sounds like imperfect systems built by imperfect humans. The engineers will study this incident and improve the system. And we will discover yet another failure mode after another couple of decades of rapid demand growth. NIMBY attitudes towards building power plants are most likely the largest contributing factor though, since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.

Of course as a Dean supporter, brains and rational thought isn't likely to be your strong suit. Raw emotion, mostly a blind hatred of Shrub, are his draws.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[TheSync]

No - there was plenty of capacity at the time.

Graph of capacity/demand

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nelsonal]

Experts have been worrying about our power infastructure for at least the better part of a decade. Our world politics prof was tellng us that he could educate a team of 4 or 5 who could take out most of the power and water infastructure in LA or any other major city in one night, with the right places attacked, in 1997.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Phleg]

Why does everyone always say that private companies cut costs? It's simple economics, there are two ways to increase profits: cutting costs and increasing revenue.

A company is just as likely to try to cut service in order to reduce costs as it is to increase service to bring about more revenue. In fact, both actions routinely happen at the same time, and the majority of the time they're beneficial (i.e., eliminating bad, unproductive sectors of the business and adding new, hopefully useful sectors). Please--can the FUD and put up a real argument.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nelsonal]

The idea behind dereg was to work like the phone system, have a regulated monopoly that delivers the last mile network, but give a choice to consumers for providing generators. If you could create that market it would work very well, notice how much smaller long distance bills are compared to about any time in the past. The problem is that you generally still only have a single choice in generators, rather than several. Out here we have several generators, but they all sell power to the local power distribution company, who resells it to us at a blended rate. I don't know why we can't pick our power company from the local dam, coal fired plant, a hypothetical startup that provides solar power (clean but slightly higher priced at first) or imported from the surrounding states, but that part of deregulation never seemed to be included in the final working plans. Is billing that much more difficult, since it seems like it wouldn't be too difficult to have many compaies delivering power into the grid, and many consumers taking from the grid. Yeah, it would equalize power generation prices across the country, but it sure seems like a good idea to me.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Phleg]

The reason that deregulation occurs is to stop these problems, so why do they still continue even after the company has been deregulated.

And the reason we have security officers administer networks is to stop people from breaking into the network, so why does it still continue to happen even after they've been hired? Let's be honest: shit is going to happen, and nothing's going to stop it. Turning services over to the state won't stop it, privatizing services isn't going to stop it either. The hope is to reduce it, hopefully to the point where it becomes a negligible risk.

There is arguements for both sides, but usually when a utility company is not deregulated, prices are cheaper, and service is better.

Gee, prices are so much cheaper when half of the operation costs are being paid through taxes. Who would'a thunkit?

I haven't personally done the research, but I have a lingering suspicion that if you were to compare the average, long-time state-held facility with a comparable average long-time privately-held facility, the privately-held one is going to have lower operation costs. Now, this may come at the cost of reduced service, but this isn't always necessarily a bad thing. As an exaggerated analogy, it could very well be like paying $500 a week for someone to mow your grass. If you were to stop the service, you wouldn't have your grass mowed. On the other hand, you'd have $500 in your pocket. Which is more valuable to you is, well, your decision. But I'll take the cash.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[777333ddd]

Actually compamies would probably love to build extra grid capacity but seeing how Govt rules prevent this in terms of interstate transfer, nothing gets done until days like today. We need LESS regulation of the grid and then maybe enterprising companies would jump in and address the demand.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Tailhook]

The day after they deregulated the system in 1965 the same exact thing happened. God damn greedy corporations!

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nelsonal]

The problem in California was that their "market" was set up in a really bad way. The set the price for everyone based on the final bidder's bid. The reason that there was constant "maintenance" work being done was pretty simple as long as the down firm rotated and the down firm could make money by shutting down prices remained very high. There is an excellent, if a little simplistic, example of this market on Prof. Krugman's page. Whatever you think of his politics, his economic thought is generally spot on. Most of the problem keyed off of the drought in the Northwest, and rules that changed that required that certain levels of water run through for salmon runs. The dams weren't ready for either change and had to cut power by enough to allow the limited power systems of California the chance to greatly increase prices. I think the big lesson to learn here, is when you set up the rules that will create a market, you shouldn't let the groups that could be the biggest beneficiary of those rules write them without some independant expert checking.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Jade E. 2]

If you look at what cellphones have done to the telecom industry, you can see how only when consumer choice enters the equation do companies get on the "more for less" bandwagon.

You're absolutely right. Now, go invent non-lethal wireless power distribution :)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Phleg]

That's the ticket, companies never plan for extra capacity in order to prevent system failures. Because obviously, the greatest way to increase profits is to piss off your customers with frequent outages of service. I mean, after all, this strategy worked with Enron, didn't it?

Admit it--you never could get that business degree, could you?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, Arnold's father was a Nazi. That's just a statement of fact.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Cloud 9]

If you want to see what the loving hand of government does do a business, go look at Amtrack or the Post Office.

Amtrak runs efficiently, with a very small number of accidents compared to, say, airlines. As far as the USPS goes, figure out a way to handle the exceedingly high volume of mail that goes through every facility's doors every day, and I'll tip my hat to you.

What you seem to be forgetting is that those two are examples of services with _very_ high volume. It takes a great deal to keep all that running smoothly. Do you think you could do a better job?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Daetrin]

Of course as a Dean supporter, brains and rational thought isn't likely to be your strong suit. Raw emotion, mostly a blind hatred of Shrub, are his draws.

Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory." It was an "imperfect systems built by imperfect humans" is also a plausible theory, however unlike you i'm not jumping to conclusions on the issue. I'd rather consider all the possiblities and then compare them to the evidence once we've got that information. Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the discussion, which seems less than rational to me. If you want to flame, go ahead, but flaming someone for being emotional rather than rational seems just a bit hypocritical. It seems to imple that you don't have the rational evidence to back up your arguments and therefore have to resort to insult to make your point and hope no one notices.

since had the industry been able to build new plants to keep up with demand the system wouldn't have been running so close to capacity and that isn't a problem for engineers.

The fact that they're low on capacity isn't a problem for engineers. The fact that the entire grid got dragged down by a problem in one section is however. Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired. Better than putting several states in the dark.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[deanj]

Yes, but it's something Arnold's far from being, which is what the implication that Curic had. What she didn't mention were things like this this article but instead when on her Democrat talking points, trying to screw him over with false implications.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[allism]

Given the remarkable aplomb NYC seems to have handled this outage with, I think terrorists may be considering power grids LESS of a viable target. The residents just aren't reacting in a way that would encourage thinking that mass chaos would be triggered by a power outage (I'm talking about outside of the inconvenience of the outage itself).

I am proud of the reactions of the residents of the affected areas.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[spun]

Utilities are a natural monopoly. Think about it: would you want a dozen different electrical, phone, water and sewer hookups coming into your house? On the other hand, the company that put up the infrastructure could lease it to other companies, but why would they unless forced to?

So instead, we allow a monopoly, but regulate it. Taxpayers also subsidized the initial investment in infrastructure, buying easements to run lines and paying for quite a bit of the infrastructure. Rather than deregulating these natural monpolies and handing over (partly) publicly funded infrastructure to private companies, we could create utility cooperatives. Most every place that has a cooperative pays less than nearby places that don't. The only reason that most power and phone companies aren't is that the monopolies fought hard against it.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[qtp]

when you set up the rules that will create a market, you shouldn't let the groups that could be the biggest beneficiary of those rules write them

Agreed. Power generation is an area that I believe a competative market would be beneficial as long as it is truly competative, but I doubt that competition can be fair when the last mile is still a privatized monopoly, especially if the last mile carrier is also competing in the power generation market.

As for my politics, I'm not really all that dogmatic as far as the "free-market vs socialism" aguments go, as I don't believe that either ecconomic philosophy is superior in all cases. I do believe that certain services better serve the public if they are socialized (water, sewage, anything that is a "natural" monopoly that cannot be avoided).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[OzPixel]

Oddly enough, here (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), we have that choice. This has been available for around 6 months now, but I'm not sure it's had a huge impact yet (in other words, I haven't been bothered to compare prices between the different supply companies ... ).

David.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[perlchild]

Considering Quebec's power grid had power to sell to our NYS neighours(that was a spokesperson on tv), but couldn't, because their grid was down, this seems more like a distribution problem, than a production problem.

Building new plants, which are competing, but having a monopoly on the last mile is just going to create another ILEC/CLEC mess... Maybe if government would deregulate the HARD parts(last mine, getting power from source X Y or Z to consumer A without overloads brownouts or blackouts) perhaps it might work. But lately deregulation has been "we have this industry which needs a huge capital influx that shows up on the government's budget this election year, let's privatise and deregulate it...

Deregulation "might" make sense if you deregulated the every day money industry, but you wouldn't have competition there(it's too hard, and the margins would be too thin for "real" competition)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[grendel_x86]

Its kinda funny, the news here (Chicago) has been harping on the fact that it cant happen here.

Apparently there were a couple of screw-ups here a couple of years ago, and Daley(Mayor) Gave them the ultimatium to fix it, or get out. The power grid here is now redundant, and made to NOT do the cascading falure thing, according to 'them'.

I was going to move East... but now i think ill stay here.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[PFAK]

Obviously deregulation is a different concept in the United States then it is in Canada.

In Canada, deregulation means that a certian service (e.g. Phone, etc.) is not regulated by the Government, regulation here is related to the price of the service, or product.

Phone companies in British Columbia (to say the least) have to have their rates approved by the CRTC, if they are not approved (which they have not been in recent years) they price may not be raised.

What' do you think deregulation is?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> Amtrak runs efficiently, with a very small number of accidents compared
> to, say, airlines.

Compare the number of commercial aviation takoffs per year with the number of Amtrack departures. Now compare the failure rate. And lets not even consider the difference in complexity between running a train along nice straight steel rails and putting jetliners up and bringing them safely back down again.

> As far as the USPS goes, figure out a way to handle the exceedingly
> high volume of mail that goes through every facility's doors every
> day, and I'll tip my hat to you.

I haven't a clue how to do that, but FedEx and UPS would love to have a go at it.... if it weren't illegal. And that my young liberal friend is how the Post Office stays in business with their abysmal service; threaten to put any competitor in jail.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Cloud 9]

What you call abysmal, I call acceptable, given the volume. Try sending a 5 oz. letter for .35 via FedEx. You'll get laughed at.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[leviramsey]

There's a major difference in the way that deregulation has been done in the electrical industry versus the telecom industry, which makes the ILEC/CLEC debacles unlikely.

The ILEC/CLEC thing is a retail deregulation, while the power dereg has, for the most part, been on the wholesale (and bulk retail, which is basically the same business) end. The way dereg has worked, you still get a bill from at least a de facto if not de jure monopoly; however, they buy the electricity from other providers. This is more like how ISPs buy bandwidth from a variety of Tier One ISPs and retail it to their customers than the ILEC/CLEC model.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ascii3f]

Wrong. I know exactly how it works.
You are right though, under present rules any company can and will use any available line.
As a result, no company wil expand their lines and what happened today will be repeated.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[perlchild]

interesting point, however a few people were mentioning "pick your generator" and my point was "where's the competition in distribution?"
You CAN pick your isp now...
Where can I pick my power distibution company? (ok so here(QC) it's regulated tighter, both production and distribution, than you'd believe possible, the only part of government that's making some money... plus our ice storm of a few months back made them clean up their act...)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[spacecowboy420]

I am curious - if the media is so liberal, and I am considered a liberal, why is it that I am always annoyed by the news? You would figure, being liberal and all, that I would love the media and agree with more than 10% of what is showed.

awwww, I answered my own question. It's that 10% that the conservatives hate - must be a liberal media since it isn't all conservative.

Forgive me for thinking about tomorrow instead of how to fill my wallet (or the wallet of an other rich guy).

Conservativism is like standing in the way of a 4 ton boulder (progress and inevitability) coming down steep hill, thinking "God" will help me.

The conservatives should quit answering questions by invoking "God" and tax cuts, and instead use reason (as in, get out of the way, or get squished when "God" doesn't show up to save you)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> Perhaps you missed where i said it was a "plausible theory."

Except it isn't a plausible theory. Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care. They just don't, and no amount of hating "big corporations" is going to change that and for you to even be floating it as a theory speaks volumes.

> Ideally if routing through the other sections would overload them and
> kill them as well, it would be better to just disconect and let that
> part of the grid go without power until the problem can be repaired.

True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.

> Nor did i start out by trying to insult the other party in the
> discussion, which seems less than rational to me.

If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your .sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle. Difference being that Sharpton knows he is just a novelty candidate while Dean could actually be nominated and that would put him one case of "silver foot in mouth" on Shrub's part from the Oval Office.

In case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly a fan of the Shrub either. I will still admit in public places that I voted for him, but with the other hand holding my nose. Rather see a Libertarian make a serious run someday but they are stuck in 'going down in a principled stand' mode instead of engaging in the compromise required to get the 50+ percent needed to get a chance to DO something instead of just talk.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage

It's summer. Fucking expect it.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[mOdQuArK!]

I haven't a clue how to do that, but FedEx and UPS would love to have a go at it.... if it weren't illegal.

Ummm...no they don't. I used to work for a competitor of FedEx, UPS (and USPS), and I learned from several executives in that company that they were EXTREMELY happy to let the USPS handle single-envelope letters, especially when the USPS is required by law to deliver said single-envelope letters to all the tiny little podunk towns which can afford to print themselves some official stationary. There's no way those companies could charge what the USPS does & afford to deliver letters with the same quality of service that the USPS does.

If FedEx & UPS were required by law to deliver "packages" as small as letters, and to all the places that the USPS does, it's very doubtful they'd be able to do as well as the USPS does.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[tqft]

: electricity is a necessity. like water

So is food. Regulate food? Like in the former USSR and Eastern Bloc countries?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pavera]

Only one very large problem with your logic.
Clinton deregulated the power grid, not Bush.
Power Deregulation started in 97-98 not in 00-01
so you need to check your dates before placing blame, just because the problem occurred during this presidency, doesn't mean this president created the problem.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[kmonsen]

You are forgetting that as long as there is a single source the situation is different. If one food company tries to this kind of thing you just buy from someone else. Since it is not practicly possible to have to companies offer you power all the way to your home, there will always be some kind of monopoly. Private companies with monopolies are a nightmare for the consumers, they will find a way to earn money on your expanse.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ascii3f]

Yes it was.
Poor planning, due to not understanding the risks to the system or not expanding the transmission capacity.
It has the same result, many dim bulbs.
Get used to it. There wil be more events.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[KjetilK]

Hm, I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but let me try to address some of the issues you raise anyway, as I understand them.

Here in Norway, I can personally choose from a large number of power companies, so seemingly, they meet your condition for a well deregulated market. It still doesn't work, because all the power companies work in the same environment, and since they all make money from hydroelectric power, that means, weather and climate. Now, in the summer, when it is nice and warm, they are not making enough money on the home market, so they sell as much as they can on the international market, so that when the winter comes and we really need that power, there's going to be real scarcity and prices will skyrocket... It has happened every winter since the deregulation occured (I'm fortunate enough to get heat from a nearby plant which produces heat from burning garbage, meaning I get the cheapest of electricity, garbage or oil, but very few are that lucky).

As long as the environmental factors are as dominating as this, deregulation is not going to do a lot of good.

In the telecom market here, the situation was very different, and the deregulation was a good thing, but unfortunately, it was done in a very ill-thought-out manner. The main difference is that there are so many technical things that may be done differently, and it is important that the consumers are allowed to make that decision. The old state monopoly wasn't bad at all. They worked very well there, and Norway had amongst the lowest phone rates in the world. However, they privitized the whole company, but with their market dominance, they are (or were) almost a private monopoly. What they should have done, was to keep the old copper on state hands and commodized it, so that all the other telcos could compete on the same copper, and then gradually phase it out by laying down new wires.

Now, the other problem is that all the telcos aim only at the mass market, and nobody cares about the few geeks... Meaning, there's no way for me to just buy the bandwidth. I have to go for a full package with all kinds of software, webspace, email-addresses and stuff that I don't need, because I run my own server. But this is, I guess, quite a different matter.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[LimeColoredSloth]

IANAE (...not an economist), but from what I've heard from an economist professor who was involved with the deregulation in california, the jist of the problem is that the transitional phase that government set up artificially restricted prices, which resulted in lowered revenue and resultant output problems. In the end, it was gov't regulation during a phase of deregulation that caused the problems.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Simon Brooke]

I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an optomist among us.

That's an optometrist, actually...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Simon Brooke]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it...

It's broke. HTH

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[LimeColoredSloth]

In the US, power companies used to be regional monopolies, and they would usually be bought out by the government("nationalized") or be restriced on pricing. Deregulation in the US means bringing competition and giving consumers a choice. The phone lines have been deregulated, and it's a much easier process to draw new lines per telephone company, but for electric deregulation it's not easy to do this, so they share power lines. A market is created where distributors buy power from different power sources.... sort of like the stock market but more confusing.

In theory, competition will allow better, cheaper, uninterrupted service (think of food lines in USSR vs US).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sheimers]

> I don't see how this has to do with
> deregulation. ...
> What can happen is, if all stations
> are working at or near capacity ...

Now please explain WHY ALL STATIONS work near their capacity.

Europe (or was it just Germany, I don't remember exactly) has about 20% more capacity than the highest peak consumption observed on the electrical power grid.

In Europe at the moment, many powerstation run at reduced production because of the exceptionally hot summer (thermal powerstations have problems with their cooling system, hydroelectric powerstations have little water because of the dry climate), but still we have no Problems.

Deregulation in the US possibly don't allow for a 20% reserve because it is too expensive if you have hard economical competition, which directly leads to the effect you described.

Stefan

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pkaral]

That would make sense, if you don't compare what they saved (in running lean) vs. what they lose (in one blackout). In short, I bet "unreasonable risk" you pose, would be, financially reasonable if it only happened occasionally, and that's probably what they calculated.

You are perfectly right to assume that this calculation is made. However, utilities give customers very strict SLAs with next-to-no tolerance for downtime. Furthermore, a blackout like this is bound to be followed by regulatory decisions that will cost the utilities dearly.

In other words: The cost to the utilities of this thing will be predictably astronomical. Even though they probably did the "risk vs. cost" analysis, they must have found that "reckless" costcutting would not be worth it if it increased the risk of a catastrophic event like this.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

No, I voted for the lesser of evils. Either Al Gore or G.W. Bush was going to be the next President. Al Gore was a menace and GW would at best get little done against the inertia in Congress. Then 9/11 hit and I'm really glad Al Gore wasn't there so I don't feel nearly as bad for voting for Bush. Overnight Bush seemed to grow out his rich preppy kid routine and start acting like an adult and Leader of the Free World. Guess you just can't tell how people will react under pressure. Of course there will be damage control to clean up some of the PATRIOT Act bullcrap, but anyone who doesn't think Gore would have done equally bad if somewhat different crap in that dept doesn't understand the Democrats and their love of Government.

On the other hand Harry Brown not only had zero chance of winning, he doesn't deserve to win. That was the heart of my complaint about the Libertarians, they haven't figured out that running a candidate pledged to plunging the nation into instant chaos not only isn't going to win, he doesn't deserve to. Which is of course why running a Libertarian for president is probably daft in the first place. We need to find a way to take a few lesser offices and prove that we can govern and convince a few more people that our philosophy actually does help them. So that by the time we elect a Libertarian president a Libertarian dominated Congress will have already cleared a lot of the ground ahead of him and restored a great deal of the old Republic and returned us to a government limited by the Constituition.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MourningBlade]

That would make sense, if you don't compare what they saved (in running lean) vs. what they lose (in one blackout).

Consider what would happen if people had a choice of power providers. I don't mean selecting your generator, I mean selecting your generator-to-outlet providor. Right now, there is only one of those.

If people had a choice, however, between the company they're currently blacked out with, and the company that's running just-fine-thanks, do you think that they would switch? Perhaps in droves?

The worst thing for a business is not to lose face, it's to lose face when you have a competitor. That's the problem with many of these "deregulation" schemes.

Some of these other posts regarding the fact that politicians are just throwing "deregulation" in the face of every problem are correct: it's foolish. You can't just invoke the magic word and have everything go well.

Instead, the politicians come up with this system where the "little guy" can compete with the "big guy" by using the big guy's own power system. Surprise, that doesn't work.

As a question to see what people think: what do you think would happen if the power company for a city was restricted to generating, and the power distribution structure was auctioned off piece by piece to third parties. Also, waive right-of-way restrictions to allow other distribution companies to come in. Remember, we still have a regulated generating company. The generating company then decides what distributor gets what contract for what area, and whether another gets a backup contract.

Not suggesting this as an idea, it's just a thought experiment. What would happen?

There's a ton of problems actually converting to a deregulated (TRUE deregulated) system.

It's not really a competitive market if there's only one company or if all the companies are required to use each other's services in order to compete with each other.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sheimers]

Yes, and it worked perfectly then. I suspect power consumption increased, and nobody invested in an improved infrastructure because it was not profitable after the deregulation.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MourningBlade]

rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem

That's the difference between having private maintenance contracts per issue rather than an SLA. Sounds like the city got taken for a sucker.

I'd be interested to know what you think would've happened if they had a maintenance contract with a service level agreement, and the possibility to hire another group if this one didn't work out (and teeth to the contract so that if the SLA isn't met, no/little money is paid).

There's not much difference between government workers and contract workers when they're both given a cushy exclusive contract in their favor.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[fenix down]

Yeah, well "minor" as in massive looting and arson instead of blackouts in Canada. The 65 outage probably cost about a tenth of the 77 one, if you put it all together.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[fenix down]

Power on! Fuck ConEd anyway! Fucking fucktards! I hope Bloomberg calls them incompetent idiots like every other goddamn mayor in history.

Right now, I kind of doubt that the system was under all that much strain. Compared to other weeks, this week was cool, like 80s-low 90s. I'm sure there were a buttload of ACs runnning, but normally when you have this kind of power failure it's because of a SERIOUSLY overstrained system, like in '77 you have serial killers and a deadly heat wave, so EVERYBODY was inside with the AC on.

My bet is that this'll turn out to be a fuckup somewhere in upstate NY. Some plant that got shut down badly, started putting out unstable current, something like that. The reason it spread has to be the 40s anachronism that is Niagra-Mohawk, whatever the cause. That's a problem for why you say, but the system is miraculously stable outside of a emergency situation. The thing is, it's delivering power from a hundred thousand tiny deregulated plants all over the place, which I bet it's still assuming are heavily regulated and completely coordinated with each other. It's not necissarially deregulation's fault, but I'm betting no matter what the root cause, deregulation had some impact on the scope or duration of the whole thing.

Once again, fuck ConEd. Fuck them up their stupid asses.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sql*kitten]

The same for the british rail : it worked perfectly. deregulation came in and it went down in flames, late trains, dirty wagons, and dead peoples in accidents

I'm guessing you're too young to have ever actually used BR, or have clear memories of doing so. It sucked. Not quite as high-profile as modern failures, but then nothing was because the media lacked the ability it has now to actually be there as things went wrong. But it was late, and filthy, and unsafe.

The problem faced by the old BR was that it was forced to provide services where they weren't economically viable - running trains to tiny, out-of-the way villages where almost no-one used trains anyway, for example. This starved it of resources for the core infrastrucure - the busy intercity and commuter routes. And it also faced the same problem that modern train companies face, unions who refuse to link pay to performance.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sql*kitten]

The solution to every domestic energy issue must be to drill oil wells in Alaska. The problem to every foreign policy problem must be to invade a country in the gulf with large oil reserves. The problem to every economic problem must be to give stupendous tax cuts where at least 80% but hopefully as much as is possible goes to the richest of the rich, and in particular rich Texas oil-men.

It was all going so well before you went all rabid. Let me just point out:

• The solution to every domestic energy issue is not to put up windmills
  
• The solution to every foreign policy problem is not to blow up their pharmaceutical industry with cruise missiles, as Clinton did in Sudan
  
• The solution to every economic problem is not to give huge raises and generous pensions to government workers thus bankrupting your state, as Davis did in California.
  

Incidentally, of course tax cuts are going to benefit those who pay the most tax. If people who don't pay Federal income tax anyway get the money, it's not a cut but a grant. No wonder lefties can't run economies, they even struggle with simple language!

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[spurious cowherd]

Actually they do know.

Federal Power Commission investigators found a single faulty relay at the Sir Adam Beck Station no. 2 in Ontario, Canada, which caused a key transmission line to disconnect ("open").
This small failure triggered a sequence of escalating line overloads that quickly raced down the main trunk lines of the grid, separating major generation sources from load centers and weakening the entire system with each subsequent separation.

As town after town went dark throughout the northeast, power plants in the New York City area automatically shut themselves off to prevent the surging grid from overloading their turbines.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[cyclist1200]

Right. It's long been publicised that the northeast power grid is flakier than most reality shows. Solar activity has knocked this grid over before. Extreme temperatures have caused problems in the past. It was only a matter of time before this happened.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[awtbfb]

I am typing this on my laptop with no power here in Detroit, MI.

Addict.

On a related note, you win the "Nerd of the Day" prize.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[old_unicorn]

You need a two party political system - Nationalise, and fix everything, then change governments, and privatise it and make it more efficient, then change governments and nationalise the lean industry, invest in the system, (power, phone lines, whatever), then change governments, and privatise it all.... Repeat ad nauseam.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[knghtrider]

We have exactly that system here in PA--but since deregulation began we have gone from around 30 companies generating power to 6. Larger, more economically solvent power companies are swallowing smaller ones, thereby artificially creating the monopoly deregulation was supposed to prevent. If you couple this with the fact that not all companies service a given area, where does the consumer win? When I moved here and first requested electricity, I tried to shop around. What did I find out? I only have one electric company servicing me, so dereg in that respect was inneffective.

BTW--the same thing happened with my telco provider, and the one that services my area can't accept electronic bill payment because they have polled their customers and the majority don't want it.

Deregulation is not a panacea everyone seems to think it is. Personally, I like the idea of utilities being regulated and controlled. This opinion happens to come from a man who is a former employee of a utility. Thanks to dereg, the parent company (foreign-owned) gets to utilize profits from US owned subsidiaries to reduce their debt and recover from losses they suffered due to poor management. Consequently, budgets suffer because of a high demand by the parent of deeper profit margins, and there is no money for routine preventative maintanence. Without money for PM, you end up in a 'fix things as they break' role. Couple this with the fact that the company now cannot afford the number of employees they have, staff reductions are necessary. It soon ballooned to 40% across the board with some areas getting higher percentages of cuts to make the 40% average, which is bad news for both employee and consumer. Not only that, but even the remaining employees have low morale because they are constantly being told that more cuts could come at any time, since the budget numbers are too close to call.

I don't want to come off sounding like a bitter ex-employee here, either. Fewer employees--especially in the areas where forward-thinking and action are required--does not add up to the ability to provide quality service. No money for parts, no money for people and you're back to break-fix, which actually costs more in the long run than proactive management. Unfortunately, profit motive is always short-term. This is perfectly exampled by the fact that the nearly 60% budget reduction in IT, and the cutting of 80% of the IT staff is the direct cause of them getting hit by both Slammer and LoveSan/MSBlast this year. A friend who still works there told me yesterday they still probably aren't cleaned up from MSBlast because they have road warriors who are on vacation. They are so concentrated on being REACTIVE, they are not being PROACTIVE.

There isn't a simple solution, I'm afraid. Even though I'm in favor of regulating utilities, I'm pragmatic. I realize that regulation also causes more problems than it solves, since it (by default) creates bigger government. The old 'who watches the watchers' scenario. It seems like the proverbial Catch-22.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Muad'Dave]

I agree, with one slight distinction. Utilities are not natural monopolies; infrastructures are natural monopolies.

I have long thought that there should be the concept of what I call a "10% company". This company would be required to provide the infrastructure needed to deliver a particular service (water, sewer, cell coverage, electricity, etc). Any provider of that commodity would pay the cost+10% to use the infrastructure. Any provider would be allowed to use the infrastructure - no huge obstacles for the little guy. The 10% overcharge would be used to maintain/upgrade the system.

Imagine how cool it would be to have every cell provider in the US use the same towers! Imagine being able to separate your cable TV connection from your cable TV content provider. Imagine being able to buy power from your favorite [green source du jour] - even across the country.

What has worked so well for the internet (connection provider not necessarily equal to content provider) could work wonders in other areas.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sql*kitten]

And all this while being massively underfunded by the Tories in an attempt to make it look bad because they hated state-run institutions for ideological reasons.

Bliar (not a typo) could blame "Tory underinvestment" for the first year or two, but he's had 6 years, massively increased tax and spending, yet he can't even maintain services at the same level as the Tories, let alone improve them! That's because his own ideology can't differentiate between effort and results.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stan_freedom]

.

The problem is not regulation, deregulation, privatization, nationalization or any of the surface reasons thrown about. The real problem is people who substitute ideology for thinking about a problem.

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.

There are occasions when you have to use one strategy and occasions when you have to use another. Understanding that there are potential problems with a proposed change is essential if you are going to avoid them.

Instead what we get is politicians who use ideology as a substitute for thought.

This is the most lucid statement I have read on /. and far more lucid than anything I have heard/read on Fox, NPR, WSJ, etc.

Thanks for enlightening my morning.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Eccles]

That's the difference between having private maintenance contracts per issue rather than an SLA.

Huh? How would the Symbionese Liberation Army help with power line maintenance?

Boggled...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[whatch durrin]

From the examples we've seen of "deregulation" thus far with major utilities, it doesn't work very well.

It seems that privatization could work, however, if the companies involved are held to very high standards by regulations. When a utility is planning on going from public to private, the gov't should strictly outline what is expected of the private company. If the company thinks the expectations are unreasonable, they don't take the contract.

If the company agrees to the regulations, then jacks prices to the customer (unreasonable above what the public utility prices were) after the utility is transferred to them, you'll get an immediate public outcry, and can know very quickly whether a private entity is capable of managing the utility.

I'm not saying privatization is the key everywhere, I just think it may not be handled correctly in all situations. Municipalities can't just throw a set of keys to a private company and hope for the best...it needs to be a gradual process, with oversight, as the company proves its capability to provide for the public good while making themselves enough profit to survive.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'll never fault the USPS again. They got a personal package from the eastern United States to South America door to door in under 3 days. FedEx and UPS both refused to even send it, since it was not a commercial package.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[truffle pig]

I would agree with your statement that this has nothing to do with deregulation to the extent that there probably isn't a problem here where we will be able to point directly to deregulation causing.

The problem I see with deregulation is where it runs into your commnents about poor infrastructure design. Without regulation there is never going to be any motivation for the infrastructure providing power companies to do anything to make large changes to their distribution systems. From the power companies standpoint there is little payback on making changes to the infrastructure. As these are projects that do little to sell additional power or services

I think that the government needs to stike a better balance on the regulation issue and find ways to encourage utilites to invest in their infrastructure. I would imagine that in these days of terrorism fears the utilites could probably lobby the govt for money to invest in their power system or at the very least tax credits.

I just don't see that deregulation is providing any real benefits to the consumer. Personally as a result of deregualtion I have seen my power costs rise and the quality of service decrease.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stan_freedom]

My wife tried to send two packages via UPS ground yesterday. She was quoted $13. She went down the road to USPS and sent them for $5. However, if I needed to get the packages sent overnight, I would have chosen UPS. If my wife was ideologically impaired, she would have only gone to UPS or she would have only gone to the USPS. However, as the original poster indicated, she thought through the problem and came to a logical decision.

The USPS fills an important role that private enterpise would never fill, by providing service even in rural areas. Think about the crappy job private enterprise has done in providing broadband to rural areas. My father's farm didn't get electricity until after WWII when the Rural Electrification Authority showed up.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

California did not refuse to construct new plants; this is a Limbaughesque lie. In fact, the predictions were that deregulation would lower the cost of power so much that nobody _wanted_ to invest in building a plant; there simply weren't any applications made during the period which deregulation was being discussed because nobody thought they would be anything but a big waste of money.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[whatch durrin]

Amtrak loses money every day. In fact, if you purchase an Amtrak ticket, they lose money on you. They only stay in business because of government backing.

The USPS is in bad financial shape also. They're increasingly finding it harder to compete with FedEx/DHL/UPS. Hell, if it weren't for those private companies, the USPS wouldn't offer anywhere near the number of shipping options they do.

In the end, it's probably good that the USPS exists to provide some competition in the mail delivery business. But don't kid yourself into thinking your $0.37 stamp is the only thing paying the mailman's salary.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[GnrcMan]

> Kid, you are obviously not old enough to remember the bad old days of The Phone Company.

Oh yeah? Look what happened when they deregulated payphones. Price doubled. Just because breaking up AT&T worked out well, doesn't mean the cookie cutter's going to work for everything. And phone companies were (thank god) not just turned loose to do whatever they want. They are required by the government to maintain certain service levels and prices. QWest has been slapped by Washington State for not maintaining said service levels.

I happen to think that utilities *should* be regulated or even owned by the government. But, then again, I also don't appreciate paying 50 cents for a local call on a payphone. Wierd how my liberal mind works, isn't it?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nanojath]

Concur. The myth of privatization is the myth of the "free" market in general - that competition is always and ever leading us to the best possible product at the best possible price. We all know how business actually runs. However, that doesn't necessarily mean deregulation is universally bad. I'm against it, personally, because the experience so far is that it has been implemented very poorly. But in theory, it could work - provided it is properly, pardon the irony, regulated.

It doesn't take a genius to see how an insufficiently robust and redundant power grid and poorly implemented deregulation could be synergistic. Mmm, maybe we could start getting China-style electricity in the good ol' USA.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[bperkins]

A regulated utility is suposed to operate in the public interest. A nonregulated utility operates to make money.

Currently the allegation is that the heavily regulated distribution campanies refuse to upgrade distribution because the regulators won't let them raise rates to finance it, in effect that regulation caused the problem.

This may be the case, but it reminds me of pro-communists who keep saying that communism never worked out because it was never fully implemented.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

Mod parent up, please. We shouldn't be debating these things without their historical contexts intact.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[whatch durrin]

Considering Quebec's power grid had power to sell to our NYS neighours(that was a spokesperson on tv), but couldn't, because their grid was down, this seems more like a distribution problem, than a production problem.

It could actually be considered both, and have two solutions (redundancy?).

1. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The interface between grids should be "smart" enough to know that it can only suck so much power from the neighboring grid, and open the circuit, isolating the outage to a small area. One vote for a distribution problem.

2. One power plant goes down, forcing its customers to pull power from a neighboring grid. The neighboring grid has enough excess production capacity available to supply the downed grid next door, thereby not overloading its own system. Alternatively, the grid with the original problem has enough excess production capacity to cover its own ass in the event one of its plants goes down.

Two solutions to the same problem, and maybe a way to provide redundancy.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Reece400]

I work at a travel center in Canada just before toronto, because traffic was crazy in Toronto, and many needed gas,, they all just stayed there. However, we couldn't let anyone in the building so there were no washrooms, etc.. needless to say they were quite angry,, after three hours they were really near forcing their way into the building.. finally they got the generator working so thoy could let them in though.

Reece,

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

Indeed, what often happens with deregulation is that you get a lot of people who see how they can make a quick buck and who cares what happens down the road.

The free market would tolerate this only for a relatively short amount of time. For example, UNIX thrashed about for some time, but, now, largely without government intervention, computers work together relatively smoothly. The biggest contribution by the federal government to UNIX was standards rather than laws (take, for example, TCP/IP).

As far as companies finally working it out, CDE was born out of the disparate proprietary GUIs, such as Sun's OpenWindows. Now people can gripe about CDE all they want, but it really isn't that bad (I use it every day--it gets the job done).

We also cannot forget non-government standards bodies, such as ISO, ANSI, IEEE, etc.

Given time, companies will do the right thing, because, eventually, they are left no choice. It is only the flash in the pan companies that do something brash and greedy and leave a burning swath behind them (Microsoft will be one of these companies if they don't change dramatically).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

The problem faced by the old BR was that it was forced to provide services where they weren't economically viable...

I guess in the USA we would call these things AMTRAK, the airline industry, and subsidized bus systems in small to mediums cities (most cities just don't have the population density of New York or Chicago).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nwf]

Good point, letting economists run the show frequently leads to failure. Reflect on Russia's current plight. They had some good ideas on how to convert from socialism to capitalism, but the economists at the World Bank and IMF forced them to operate using unproven methods or else no loans. The result? Disaster! See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000952D 3-D5DA-1EDC-8E1C809EC588EF21&pageNumber=1&catI D=2

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[love2hateMS]

Unfortunately you do not understand at all what happened here. This is a failure in the power TRANSMISSION system, which is not deregulated. It is highly regulated. There is no profit incentive for anyone to invest in it because the regulations are so restrictive and expensive that nobody will risk their capital. The problem is that ancient equipment has laid unimproved and unmaintained for decades because it costs too much to keep it up. The environmental laws alone make it almost impossible for anyone to actually upgrade the archaic system. This is a failure of regulation, not deregulation.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Gumshoe]

Only one very large problem with your logic. Clinton deregulated the power grid, not Bush.

It was Bush senior who ordered the deregulation in 92 just before he left office, not Clinton. The deregulation may have occured in 97-98 but the process started much earler.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

...when they are cutting costs the level of service usually falls.

Only if deregulation leaves them with a monopoly on thier hands, and any highly regulated system cannot be deregulated overnight. Fixing the damage done by regulation is 10 times harder than it was to naively impelment it. Slashdotters, just look at all the shitty software and IT projects you've worked on for great examples of this ("lets adopt framework XYZ...this newgroup posting said it worked well for them...").

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[whatch durrin]

Isn't it entirely possible that before said deregulation you were paying the same price, except you only saw what was on the bill? The utility industry was most likely subsidized by your tax dollars, in addition to the monthly bill you paid.

Post deregulation, your power company (private) probably didn't have the luxury of having a healthy tax revenue in addition to billed customers, so it had to get the income from somewhere...increased prices!

Add to this the decreased revenue seen by the government since the bubble-burst, and you've got a recipe for an ill-informed, seemingly cause-and-effect, backlash against the deregulation.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

The NIMBY crowd prevents this from happening.

There should be at least a few people prowd of providing power to their neighbors. If a city, though good fate, happened to have 30-foot tidal swell in their harbor, I would think building a non-polluting tidal power plant would be great for the local economy. The big problem is that no one has the courage to tell the fishermen "tough noogies."

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[bheerssen]

if there is place to put the blame, CNN hasn't found it yet

Oh, but they will... they will. Even if they get it wrong the first time, they can always contradict themselves later.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jdevore]

You mean they don't even have the internet? This can't be.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

Deregulation may work out in the end, but so far what I've seen doesn't impress me very much.

That's because there really hasn't been full deregulation. The government still has their fist up the companies' asses, it's just that you can't see it when the CEO is standing behind a podium.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

the results have generally been regarded as disasterous

Deregulating a regulated system takes years if not decades for the system to repair itself. With so much government meddeling, there is no doubt a heaping steaming kludge left in their wake. The reasons prices increase after a deregulation is that the companies have to make a profit, but the beast they have to live with gives them little choice but to get money any way they can.

In time, the companies would figure out how to trim the fat. Independent standards boards, consumer purchasing power, political parties and groups, and journalists would help keep the companies honest. Embarrassment has a monetary value, too, you know.

It's just that this all takes time, but people are impatient and greedy themselves. When a deregulation fails everyone is to blame.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[DGtlRift]

Not quite... you are talking about signals and the problem is power transfer. You can transfer high voltage (low current) hundreds of miles, but not thousands.

The situation is that the current grid can support most of the taxing situations, but with a heat/humidity wave in all the north eastern US and eastern Canada there is a high use of air conditioners and all the plants are running at near capacity. All it takes is one plant that is selling surplus power to pear stations to remove itself from the grid. If that station is running a dangerously high load that could damage the generators then it will cut the flow to the grid (still keeping it's local customers online)

Now all the stations must get there power from somewhere else, and the load of the other power plants sudenly jumps, which now it's a cascade reaction. The other plants remove themselves from the grid for the same reason.

The belief that there was a fire at a plant is most likely not true since once a coal plant removes itself from the grid, suddenly there is very little load on it. This means that there is little electro-machanical resistence in the generators which means that not all the fuel (powdered coal) is being burned to turn the generator. So all the unspent fuel will go up and out the stack untill it is adjusted for the new lighter load.

As far as dereg being responcible for this, indeirectly it is. Since the private sector is involved, for the most part their concern is short term gains for their investors. Meaning that the plants themselves are treated as a commodity and they are bought and sold at a whim. If you are going to own something for a very short term, are you going to invest in improving the infrustructure (the grid itself) or are you going to wait for a hot and humid day to sell?

I think deregulation is a good idea, but not complete dereg. The power network itself should still be managed by the government if the private sector is not willing to do it. The power needs of the US and Canada continue to grow, but there has not been any significant improvement in the system.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sphealey]

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...

Have to disagree a bit. There is a long history of very smart and very dedicated engineers who worked from 1885 to 1980 or so to build a reliable, economical electricity delivery system. These people were very much aware of the problems you discuss, and they spent a lot of time, effort, and in some cases lives to design and build systems that would mitigate them. Not to say that anyone or any system is perfect - the 1965 East Coast blackout was a real shock to power engineers worldwide. But the same people got back to work soul-searching, reanalyzing, and fixing.

Starting in the 1980s however things began to change. With deregulation electric utilities could no longer "afford" dedicated groups of specialized engineers - or so they said (for some reason they could still afford helicopters for the CEO and BoD). So they "downsized" (fired) many if not all of these dedicated people, and did not replace them. Their functions could of course be "outsourced", but as anyone who has managed contract engineering knows you have to have knowledge in-house equivalent to the outsourcer in order to manage that process well.

And in any case, once utilities were no longer peers but competitors, it became necessary to start keeping secrets. So a lot of the information which is needed for system security calculations is no longer freely available.

Well, I could go on. And I should also mention the decreasing desirability of careers in heavy electrical engineering as compared to, say, semiconductors. And a lot of this is debatable. But in any case I think you have to look a little deeper than saying "they screwed up".

sPh

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Rinikusu]

Post Office == abysmal service?

Um. I've mailed out thousands of letters over the years. Thousands. Never had a lost letter. Never had a package pilfered. Never had a box come in completely destroyed (as I have with UPS). And for .37, it's not a bad deal.

Granted, it would be nice to see some competition, but hey..

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jabber01]

If you think of "deregulation" as an economic and political concept, then it makes perfect sense to talk of increasing it. Optimal linguistic expression is not necessarily optimal semantic expression. More people understand "deregulation" than "regulation", and so it makes more sense to talk in terms of the former.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jabber01]

No, it's not. It's simply not unbreakable. Considering the date of the last regional outage, the Northeastern power grid is damned resilient.

Show me something else that runs 24/7 and has done so for the last 38 years.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Rinikusu]

I for one welcome our new Robotic Bunny-Human Power Overlords.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

The only risk publicly traded corporations worry about is not making projections for this quarter.

Aren't corporations forced to do this due to regulation?!?!?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pmz]

New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.

Ultimately, the basis for this is that the private sector had to absorb the fallout from the government. Blaming this on privatization is short-sighted.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

...how the administration blatantly lied to justify the war...

Which is your (and their) opinion. Nice of them to share their opinions while supposedly reporting facts.

...or how the war in Iraq is a total debacle...

Which is contradicted by reporters who are *there*. Not to mention that the Iraqis who no longer fear that they or their children will be tortured or killed for holding unpopular opinions would probably not agree with you or CNN either, and which is again total opinion. Nice reporting, again.

...or how their relationship with the Saudis compromises their own unwinable war on terror...

So now CNN can predict the future too? Where were they on 9/10/2001?

...or how their foreign policy has made us either hated or humiliated in every corner of the planet...

Hated by the French, who profited from Saddam's reign, to the tune of billions that should have gone to the Iraqi people? Hated by the Russians who see their chance at recovering the $12 billion they lent Saddam go byebye? Hated by Muslims whose religion has been twisted by those with their own agenda to make us hated anyhow?

...their domestic policy has crushed our civil rights like a nutsack under their heel...

Nice try. Homeland security was unanimously voted for. That means liberals voted for it too. Stop trying to blame national hysteria that affected liberals in power just as much as a result of the Bush administration's actions, because it simply isn't. You may want to conveniently forget the Democrats who spoke so eloquently for the creation of the dept. of homeland security, but I have not.

...while enriching their corporate masters at our expense...

That's what *all* politicians do, except *some* of those at the local level. If you think the liberal politicians are any less under the thumb of special interests, you're not only foolish, you're deluding yourself. Again, being blind to your side's faults (especially when they're the very ones you're railing against) is rather unrealistic. Where do you think most campaign money comes from? Hint: it isn't from regular people choosing to donate that money to their favorite candidate. That does happen, but it isn't the major source of major party candidates.

...It's like you can't just turn on the news anymore and watch your president land on an aircraft carrier and wave a flag and be happy.

Umm, that's exactly what I watched for like 2 weeks. In fact they just did another story about it on CNN the other day. What an important story! Almost as important as 16 words or 8 lines or whatever the meme of the day is regarding intelligence that HAS YET TO BE INVALIDATED. The Brits believe it, but I suppose trusting allies is against the liberal platform or something.

I wish they'd just focus on the important stuff like the Kobe trial or put a bunch of talk shows on where they yell about how stupid liberals are. That always makes me feel better.

Sure. As if the Kobe trial wasn't big news on every freaking channel for days. I suppose CNN wouldn't stoop to covering a celeberity trial, huh? Nah. They wouldn't spend months on something like that, a celeberity accused of some crime. They wouldn't ignore serious stories in favor of something like that, would they? No white broncos on CNN. No sir. They don't care about ratings, just reporting the facts and allowing people to come up with their own opinions....HAHAHAhahaha sorry I just couldn't say that with a straight face.
Also, I've yet to see anyone besides bill o'reilly actually yell about how stupid liberals are. Personally, I don't find liberals to be stupid, but I sure do find some of the pages from the 'liberal's guide to blaming everything on Bush' to be quite funny.

For the record, I am a fiscally conservative Libertarian, and I find the liberal's insistenc

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sphealey]

A temporary failure of a complex system like the American power grid every few decades doesn't sound like a "I don't care" attitude to me. Sounds like imperfect systems built by imperfect humans. The engineers will study this incident and improve the system.

Agreed. However, due to a combination of deregulation, downsizing, and the decreased desirability of careers in heavy electrical engineering (compared to microelectronics), there may very well not be a "they" around to study and fix the problems. Electric utilities today are a lot shallower in technical and managerial depth than they were in 1980, much less 1965. And it is not clear to me that unregulated competition provides any incentive to undertake long-term and complex investigation/management of interconnection issues.

sPh

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

California did not refuse to construct new plants... ...nobody _wanted_ to invest in building a plant...

Oh, I'm sorry, I always thought refusal meant you didn't want to do something, and acceptance meant you did want to. I see now that's all a conservative lie! Refusal means you DO want to, and not wanting to means you accept...wait, now I'm even more confused than you are.

I would think that if no one wanted to construct new plants, that would mean no new plants were built...How is that not refusing to build new ones?

"Bob, I think we should build a new power plant."
"Nah, I don't want to. It isn't financially smart."
"Ok, well, as long as you don't want to, we won't build one... just don't refuse to!"
"Well, that's what I just did."
"Oh Bob, you're so silly, don't you know that words only mean what we want them to these days?"

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[geekman2000]

Actually power companies didn't fire many engineers, the advent of deregulation made many of them quite rich and many took early retirement, especially during the tech boom. However if you are refering to those who aren't actually degreed or have their PE I guess you're right.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[QuackQuack]

well, bad design is linked to deregulation, since good design takes time, and deregulation wants money fast. It goes the same for taking good care of the existing installation : it costs money, and deregulation is about profit more than service.

This system was regulated from almost 100 years ago till maybe half a decade ago. How much time does good design take?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[op00to]

I don't know if you have a "Board of Public Utilities" over there, but in the US, when all else fails, you can talk with them. If that doesn't work, we can go to our congressman, and they can usually fix the problem if it is extreme enough.

Remember, these are busy people, so the squeakiest (not neccesarily the most annoying) wheel gets the grease.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[op00to]

How do environmental laws affect the power grid infrastructure any more than a regular business would be affected?

I just spent half a year studying the EPA and NJDEP, and read nothing about the power grid infrasturcture being affected by "environmental laws" any more than any other industry.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ealar dlanvuli]

Refusing in this sense probably means:

Arguing against building a power plant in the face of information that would lead one to think they were required.

If there was no information to say they were required, no one ever refused to build one, they just never saw the need and it never made debate.

I have to agree with the left wing poster.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[arivanov]

It is a result of american dislike of mathematics and long term scientific projects.

You cannot replace mathematics with elementary computer control systems based on simple feedback. That is the reality. And the american power blackouts are one of the common illustrations given in mathematical modeling classes in most of Europe of why simple feedback systems fail.

After the big blackout of the sixties every single European country has put this task to their universities and/or specilized institutes. In all cases it was given to mathematicians, not engineers (or ended up with the mathematicians after the engineers failed).

I happen know some the people who did the modelling in three countries. It took anything between 7 and 11 years to come up with viable models as well as analysis of viable failure scenarios. The scenarious have been rolled out by the 80-90-es so we are talking 20+ development and deployment cycle.

As a result you simply cannot take out the grid like this in any European country unless the country has grown complacent and has stopped updating the models to account for change in power usage patterns.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sphealey]

Actually power companies didn't fire many engineers, the advent of deregulation made many of them quite rich and many took early retirement, especially during the tech boom. However if you are refering to those who aren't actually degreed or have their PE I guess you're right

Given that I sat in a division where 700 engineers were fired, many of them only a few months away from qualifing for lifetime health benefits, I would have to disagree with you there. And I have never heard of a "rich" electric utility engineer. One with a lot of accumulated vacation time, yes. But monetarily wealthy? Not in my experience.

sPh

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

The "refuse" power of California was typically blamed on environmental regulations and NIMBYism; portraying the power debacle as a failure not of deregulation itself but of overregulation (silly environmental laws, as Limbaugh would say).

The problem with that point of view is that nobody applied to build a plant while deregulation was being discussed.

It is entirely possible that California (the state) and its local governments would have "refused" to approve any given plant which was proposed by a utility or private company, but the misleading part of your statement is that you ASSUMED they would have refused to approve; when in fact, nobody ever applied.

This is, again, because deregulation was being painted as a panacea for lowering rates; and nobody (utility or private company) wanted to risk a huge capital investment on those terms.

So again, for those keeping score, the "conservative lie" is that "California refused to build any plants" (implying that California refused a bunch of plants which were being proposed by helpful businessmen); the truth is that everybody (outside perhaps Enron) thought no new plants would be needed.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nenya]

It sounds to me like your problem is that you didn't really privatize. True privatization occurs when a previously government run entity is spun off as a private corporation with no ownership by the state. There are still regulations that must be followed, but a "State Owned Enterprise" isn't a move towards a capitalist economy, it's a move towards a fascist economy. NZ seems to have engaged in nothing more than a semantical change. Make the corporations truly private and see what happens.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[op00to]

What about giving cushy government positions like Bush Jr. does to his daddy's buddies and business cohorts? Is that the solution to every domestic economic problem?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be interesting to note that while criminal organizations like PG&E and Enron were manipulating the California energy market, the one county completely immune to the resulting blackouts was the one county with socialized power: Los Angeles, powered by the municipal Department of Water and Power.

We hear that private firms are _always_ "more efficient" than public works, but such a naive view discounts the effects of common human greed.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[geekman2000]

Given the number 700 I'm pretty sure our definitions are different, for I don't know of any power company that would have had that many as a whole, much less one division. When I think engineer I think PE. Of course the only friends I have from power industry from that time were from protection, harmonic, and system arch. groups. I must confess that I have no knowledge of those let off imediately after the energy crisis and prior to deregulation which caused severe panic in several markets. However after the advent of deregulation and development of the systems that debuted what? 10 years ago?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Matrix272]

Where do you think most campaign money comes from? Hint: it isn't from regular people choosing to donate that money to their favorite candidate. That does happen, but it isn't the major source of major party candidates.

Actually, George W. Bush collected more money from the lower-income brackets (donations under $1000) than any other candidate, including Gore. It seems ironic that the poor generally "support" Democrats while volunteering money to Republicans.

Then again, at the same time, african americans generally support Democrats too, even though common sense says that they shouldn't. The average lifespan of a black male in this country is lower than the retirement age, which means that most black men will never see a penny of their social security... yet they still vote for the party that wants to increase programs like social security. Of course, we won't mention that it was a Republican president in the 1860's that freed the slaves.

On the other hand, hispanics also generally support Democrats, even though Democrats are foaming at the mouth trying to prohibit any hispanics (or blacks, for that matter) from having any positions of importance. Where was Clinton's black Secretary of State? Did he ever have any black or hispanic heads of departments? But of course, the Republicans are the enemy because Republicans believe people should make their own living rather than forcing some people to support other people. Maybe that'll change once Bush decides to make Condeleeza (sp?) Rice his Vice President in 2004, clearing the way for her to run for President in 2008. (What? A black woman REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT? That can't be allowed!)

I never understood the mindless zombie-like following the Democrats have from the minorities of the country... but last week I spoke to someone who cleared it up a bit for me. He told me that all his Democrat friends honestly don't know too much about politics or the issues in the country, and just vote Democrat because they "feel" that Democrats "care" more. Say that when you have to pay $10,000 of your $30,000 income to taxes for other people to sit at home and watch soap operas...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sketerpot]

I am curious - if the media is so liberal, and I am considered a liberal, why is it that I am always annoyed by the news? You would figure, being liberal and all, that I would love the media and agree with more than 10% of what is showed.

I know why I'm generally annoyed by the news: they take something that might be interesting the first time you hear about it, and talk about it for a very long time, not really adding anything. With slashdot you can scroll down the page. With the newspaper you can go for the comics section. But with the TV news, they just sit there, talk, and pipe commercials at you.

As for US liberalism---have you noticed that even the "liberals" try to be as conservative as possible? They act like there's a big difference, when really they're just a toned-down version of the same thing. But there's more to, say, George Bush II than just God and tax cuts---there's also war and patriotism. :~{ Anyway, see you spacecowboy.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Well said. I guess I should have concentrated more on the sources for the grandparent's post, as I really haven't heard anything (before today) about california refusing to build new plants, the way I heard it on Limbaugh's show was just that the state agreed to make up the difference between what consumers paid and what companies charged, and that's a big reason there's so large a state deficit. From what I can tell (although I am by *no* means all-aware or anything) the grandparent was building a straw man to knock down based on his/her opinions on what a conservative *might* say. He appeared to attribute it to Limbaugh without actually doing so, which precludes the 'Hey Limbaugh never said that' argument, so I was just trying to point out flaws in his/her post. I really don't know what went on in CA, but I *do* know that where I live, in Texas, we're most likely going to experience a variant of it. I suppose my experiences following the deregulation here may allow me to provide better analysis.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[modicum]

The idea behind competitive electrical markets is that there can be lots of producers plugged into the grid, all of whom compete to sell you electricity, so it would be a competitive oligopoly. If that is not possible, then deregulation makes little sense.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[3247]

On the other hand, the company that put up the infrastructure could lease it to other companies, but why would they unless forced to?

Well, do exactly that: Force them. It works for electricity and phone lines here in Germany (and other EU countries). (Water and sewer is a bit more difficult, though.)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[zummythegreat]

At a locale book store, I was flipping through a book and read a very interesting point of electricity. If the price to make a phone call were to rise to $500 a minute tomorrow, most people would stop making phone calls. If bagels were to rise to $500 each, most people could give up bagels. If electricity were to rise to $500 a watt, could most people stop using electricity?

The problem with electricity is just like water, most people can't just give it up. Until there is an affordable way to generate your own electricity, we are at the mercy of the power company.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[neillewis]

The BBC has it...

"The government used to take responsibility for ensuring that each area had enough spare capacity to act as a safeguard in times of difficulty.

"But, since the deregulation of the industry in the 1980s, the rules have been much less strict. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3153237.stm

I'm sure there are some economists who'd tell you this just shows how effiicient the grid's being run.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Refusing in this sense probably means:

Arguing against building a power plant in the face of information that would lead one to think they were required.

If there was no information to say they were required, no one ever refused to build one, they just never saw the need and it never made debate.


I would define refuse as "2 a : to show or express unwillingness to do or comply with"

Using this definition, it is not neccessary to have information showing plants were required, it is simply enough to show that there was stated unwillingness to build any. In this case, we would need to know if any proposals were considered by the companies themselves, and then rejected. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or inclination to see if that holds true. However, if even one company made a decision *not* to build a plant, based on financial or any other grounds, that would constitute refusal...but not by the state itself, by the people who would foot the bill. If there was no question as to whether to build or not, then there was no refusal to do so, in my opinion, even though the literal definition only calls for expression of unwillingness, which a simple "We are not going to build any new plants" in a press release from a power company would satisfy.
However, the poster never did reveal any sources of this 'lie' beyond his own imagination, so I must conclude that it was made up by the original poster, and not by conservatives. Also please note that I really don't care if conservatives *or* liberals are caught in a lie, I'd just like to know for sure that they were before making fun of them for it.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[good soldier svejk]

Regulate food? Like in the former USSR and Eastern Bloc countries?

Or like the United States?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

Limbaugh _has_ said in the past that California (government) was to blame for the lack of local supply that was partially responsible for the high prices. He has _also_ said that California shouldn't have agreed to subsidize retail electricity for the end-user; but that would have been political suicide given the astronomical spikes which occurred (and which have now been shown not to be natural market forces at work; but rather, an illegal manipulation of the market by Enron et al).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[utmecheng]

so i cant spell - burden.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[crawling_chaos]

No, they want to spend billions building new plants so this does not occur.

Nice rant, but more plants wouldn't have helped this problem. It was a distribution fault that rippled through the system, not an undercapacity problem. We probably need more power plants, but we definitely need more lines. Problem is that absolutely no one wants steel high voltage towers running through their neighborhoods.

And before you rage about NIMBY, I haven't seen you volunteer for a steel tower in your back yard yet. Lead, and perhaps others will follow.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...technically open markets are more efficient than government controlled markets.

However, California's electric market wasn't an open market. Also, the rules for the market were written by companies like Enron who had put wrinkles in the rules to allow them to manipulate the market.

Basically, the problem with California's "deregulation" was that three fold. First, it only allowed wholesale power to be bought and sold at the market price. The prices charged to customers were still set by the Californian Goverment. Second, the rules forced power companies to buy power on a "spot" market. In most power markets, the spot market is used to make up for short term defficiencies and not for all power consumption. This meant the power companies couldn't have long-term, stable price contracts with power generators, they had to buy power at whatever price was available at that time of day. Finally, a whole power market was created from scratch without any oversight. There was no way to catch obvious price manipulation in the market.

If any group is to blame, it is California's Legislators for allowing themselves to be coerced by Enron into creating an uncontrolled power.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[(54)T-Dub]

how did we both get modded as trolls??? thank god for meta-mod

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[drakaan]

You don't honestly believe that George Bush Jr. is the first, last, or only president (republican or democrat) to give government positions to people that he knows, do you? Let me introduce you to politics. Do some research, it's a fascinating subject.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[monopole]

What we have here is a failure to recognize a chain of causality. The pre-deregulation utility business had no incentive to withhold power or engage in complicated fiscal tricks. The rise of Enron was directly dependent upon market deregulation. The specific structure of the California deregulation, particularly the existence of a spot market, no long term contracts, and a small number of players, led to a strong incentive towards a scarce market. By withholding power Enron and others could realize huge profits, other utilities had no incentive to provide power at a cheaper price resulting in blackouts.
Throughout the California Blackout story, the cause of the blackouts was always presented as an inherent lack of capacity caused by NIMBYs, but once Enron and several other utilities collapsed there has been plenty of power available here, despite any major group of powerplants comming online. If we belived the stories, we should be in an appreciably more dire situation now whith increased demand.
From personal experience, after the State bought the powerlines here we have had a distinct drop in the number of power failures from poor maintainence.
The market provides what it has incentives to provide. Regulation provides the ground rules and the nature of the incentives. Regulation also minimizes fraud. If a company is forced to compete in terms of reliability and consistency of service the market will deliver.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[gid-goo]

How the hell are you associating donations under $1000 with lower income bracket donations? What a load. The Repubs are great at mobilizing the base. Everyone knows that. It's common knowledge. That doesn't mean that those folks are lower income.

Listen man, you're living in the past. This isn't the 70's. Fiscal conservatism is no longer the hallmark of a republican administration. The Bush administration has increased government spending more than any administration in the last 20 years. And that's the CATO Institute. A hotbed of liberalism I know.
As far as Condie becoming vice prez, it's a miracle she isn't "spending more time with her family." She put the president in a very difficult position. In a country where the media wasn't so "liberal" her repeated lying would have actually been an issue. Here's a Washington Post article asking some interesting questions. As far as being black and a woman. Leave it to a republican to accuse the left being racist and misogynist. And democrats are inherently anti-papist. RNC talking points are great and it's good to see you got the memo but that dog won't hunt.

The question all of us have to ask ourselves is: do we want jobs and more money, a balanced budget, a smaller deficit, our soldiers not getting pay cuts while in a war zone? Vote for the Democratic party. You want 4 more years of lying? Vote for a Repub or a Green.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[rwiedower]

When I think "damned resilient" the idea of a power crisis spreading across the grid within 15 minutes doesn't come to mind...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[hesiod]

> a journalist asking a major political candidiate questions about his past is bad now?

Bullshit. It's a journalist bringing up his FATHER'S past, which has nothing to do with him.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[hesiod]

> he had Kurt Waldheim as guest of honour

So, then, since I am a libertarian, it is a conflict of interests for me to invite republicans or democrats to my wedding? The political position of my friends has nothing to do with my own political position, so what is your point?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Eraser_]

Don't be so swift to judge. I too could put up a UPS box next to my USPS box and spend $3.50 on every letter I send. They could deliver it to my special UPS brown box which is next to the USPS regulation mailbox. There wouldn't be a damned thing USPS could do about that, because I'm a private citizen engaging in a private transaction with my legal tender.

Now, I choose to use USPS because I can send things across the country in 2-3 days for .37. Mind you I rarely use them to send anything, as I pay all but one bill online, and that one I walk into the bank. It's hard to compete with the government on sheer cost, but if I need garauntees, and I mean real ones, not delivery confirmation or tracking, which if lost, is just too bad heres your $3.50 back minus a .40 fee for processing your request, I use UPS or FedEx. A good old fashioned private company which I can complain to, get free stuff from, or sue if I so deem to do so.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Matrix272]

How the hell are you associating donations under $1000 with lower income bracket donations?

Granted, it doesn't necessarily mean lower incomes, but it means that more people contributed to Bush than Gore in 2000. I just figured that for all the whining about poor people these days, that most of those
Listen man, you're living in the past. This isn't the 70's. Fiscal conservatism is no longer the hallmark of a republican administration. The Bush administration has increased government spending more than any administration in the last 20 years.

Yes, I know. I'm not happy about that either. But hey, at least he's giving me back more of the money I earn, rather than giving the money I work for to someone else. That's a step in the right direction.

As far as Condie becoming vice prez, it's a miracle she isn't "spending more time with her family." She put the president in a very difficult position. In a country where the media wasn't so "liberal" her repeated lying would have actually been an issue.

She's a lot more dependable and honest than Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton. It's not even cool to make fun of Bill Clinton for his honesty anymore because it's such a joke. Oh, and BTW, Iraq is so much better off today than they were 5 years ago, it's not even an issue. The Democrats always want to whine about what we were wrong about... what about what we were RIGHT about? Saddam was a monster, and the Iraqi people are glad he's gone. Professors in Iraq have gone from making $5 to $300 per month. There's more electricity available today than there was 5 years ago... but that's not enough, is it? It's always about what we're failing at, not what we're succeeding at. You've got such a depressing point of view on the world, it makes ME want to kill myself.

Leave it to a republican to accuse the left being racist and misogynist.

Republicans have nominated Estrada to a federal court bench. Republicans have selected Colin Powell to Secretary of State. Republicans have also selected Condeleezza Rice to National Security Advisor. Democrats have ... the president on 24 (the TV show). I think the racist thing speaks for itself. Where's the black Democrat presidential candidate (who's taken seriously)?

The question all of us have to ask ourselves is: do we want jobs and more money, a balanced budget, a smaller deficit, our soldiers not getting pay cuts while in a war zone?

Do you mean more government jobs that pay unreasonably high pensions (thanks Gray Davis!)? Balanced budget for the imperialist federal government? What effect has the deficit EVER had on your life? Who gives a crap if it has the highest dollar amount ever? What difference does it make to the quality of lives for Americans?

By the way, I'm not a Republican or a Green. I'm a Libertarian.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jabber01]

Did you know that there are many (as many as half??) New Yorkers who have never been outside of New York City??

A city-wide outage is one thing. A regional one, that affects several major cities, in multiple countries no less, is quite another.

New York is huge, but it is just one city. There's a whole planet outside The City, just as there is a whole planet outside the USA.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Peaceful_Patriot]

Perhaps there are industries which are so important to the well being of society that they sould not be left to the private sector to run. Private companies have one all important goal: to make a profit. Perhaps the larger good of society (like building and upgrading old power plants) is more important than profit and these are constantly at odds.
I think Health Care, electricity, water, and a few other essentials should not be administered by private corporations. They must constantly weigh the common good against the bottom line. In private insustry, the bottom line will always win.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[submergent vegetatio]

The solution to every domestic energy issue is not to put up windmills

Actually, the solution to every domestic energy issue is not just to put up windmills but to also invest in solar, alcohol & gas/electric hybrids for our cars, methane from animal waste, bio-desiel for tractors and semis, along with higher fleet milage requirements, better regional designs for our homes and offices and personal conservation (Turn that light off and let's not put up 5,000 lights on our house for a month at Christmas!).

Already you can buy E85 trucks and cars. Runs on 85% alcohol/ 15% fuel mix. Renewable. Reduced emissions. Can you imagine if every car and truck in the US was an E85 vehicle? Talk about taking the power back from the oil exporting nations. Of course with global warming the droughts from the west will spread to the corn belt and we won't be able to grow any corn to make alcohol.

Better yet how about riding a bike or taking mass transit. Perhaps we could now start designing new communities with less emphasis on the autombile and more on the person.

These are all things that can be done NOW!

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jabber01]

That's understandable. But the rarity of the outage has to be factored into the "resiliency". Every summer we get local outages due to locally spiking load. The system absorbs this just fine, and has for 40 years.

Now, I'm not saying we should just leave it as is. Not at all. As soon as we know what the trigger here was, we correct for it. But, all in all, the system works remarkably well.

This is a minor crisis in terms of consequence and probability of recurrence, and calling for an overhaul of the infrastructure is myopic. This event is not indicative of a fundamental flow in the design of the multigrid. It just shows up that the compensatory hand-off between grids can, at peak load, cascade upstream to the closest, biggest anchor power plant.

Without a drastic resegmenting of the multigrid, this can not be fixed in a way that will not make small, local blackouts much more fequent and long lasting. The alternative is to keep the current hand-off system in place, but to add capacity to push the maximum managable peak load out of the realm of possibility. Obviously, then the question in either case becomes "who's to pay for it?"

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stonecypher]

This post hurts me. It hurts me very badly. I keep trying to swing my hand over my hair in the traditional "over his head" movement, but the miss is so wide that I keep either hitting the ceiling fan or throwing my shoulder out of socket.

(Score: 3, Insightful) my ass.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Excellent post, with many many good points. However, I must say that the two-party system we have generally leaves the majority of US citizens with no voice. If you choose to support the Democrats, you are asking for more social legislation and even larger government and even more taxes, however if you support the Republicans, you are asking for even MORE social legislation, draconian anti-competitiveness measures, and an attempted reshaping of society into an image the Republicans are comfortable with. Either way, freedom advocates lose. Neither party is interested in representing the people it claims to, and neither party fields candidates I can agree with. Their stranglehold on the election process, however, is likely to continue for the forseeable future. I wonder how many people know that the founding fathers themselves wanted a more open election process?

It is sobering to realize that the approx. 40% of people who don't pay taxes in this country are also the people who receive most government handouts, and are thus not likely to *ever* pay taxes. If that number continues to go up, as most liberals want it to, there will come a time when the remaining taxpayers *cannot* support the burden of the non-taxpayers and will either flee the country, or will become non-taxpayers themselves, and either way this country will be fucked. People can't seem to see past their petty squabbles and personal dislikes to turn this situation around, however, and most liberals *and* conservatives I have personally known don't believe such a thing will ever happen. Our leaders continue to fight for their own personal power and influence and to ignore the true problems facing our country. The problem is, money has to come from *somewhere*, and unless something is done, we're going to first turn most of our citizens into subsistence level government dependants, and then into dead people as the government collapses under its own bloated weight and there is no longer a welfare bureau or anyone handing out or honoring food stamps. I know many will label this part of my post FUD, yet the mere fact that something may cause fear, uncertainty, or doubt is no reason to believe it does not exist. Complacency has long been a camouflage for rot, and it will be the death of our society if we aren't careful.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[spacecowboy420]

I do not think ALL conservatives are bible thumpers, it just seems that conservatives like to invoke "God" when answering a question.

For instance;
"Why are you a conservative?"
"We need to preserve morality. The bible says that homsexuality (etc..) is against God's law. Our founding fathers found this land on Christian principles blah, blah, blah"

Dr Laura sites Leviticus when admonishing homosexuality, although Leviticus also calls for the death of those that have 2 different crops in the same field or where their clothing is made of 2 types of material.

Conservatives generally seem to have their hearts in the right place - self responsibility, morality etc. But the basis for the argument isn't because it provides social stability or peace, but rather that it is the will of God. God is illogical as presented by those in organized religion - morality in America is declining because there really is not a good reason to be moral (you'll go to hell), if morality was presented on a logical level, illustrating the benefits (social stability and harmony between peoples) instead of the consequences (you'll go to hell), people could embrace morality not as the good thing to do, but as the logical thing to do. Thus we would all be "conservative" in a way.

As an aside, I do not think extreme liberals (Peta, Green Peace) are any different than those on the opposite end of the spectrum.

The voices at each end of the spectrum are the loudest and likely the most erroneous, the answer is closer to the middle (although the middle is indecisive).

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

The grim reality is, the government is always to blame when something like this happens. This is because our government has taken upon itself to try and be everything to everyone and do everything. The california government would surely have taken the credit, had their ill-considered plan worked. When it did not, they bear the brunt of the blame. California never should have subsidized electricity. You say it would have been political suicide not to, but now it has turned into political suicide PLUS major problems with power. You can not tell me that no one in the california government knew what was going on. They simply did not speak up out of fear or self-interest. This makes the california government share the blame. Enron has already paid quite a heavy price for its illegal practices. They *do* bear their portion of the responsibility, of course, but the california government cannot avoid taking its share of responsibility. Now we're facing a similar situation in Texas, with the only exception being that we have our own power grid, which is a variable that I am not informed enough to be able to take into account. I'm just afraid that we're going to have more blackouts here, and our state debt will skyrocket, and that our government will try to push the blame on someone else, although it wouldn't be enron. If (as has been stated) *no one* in CA thought that additional plants would be neccessary, when history has shown that they were, where would *you* say the fault lies? Isn't there some sort of governmental body that is assigned to make those kinds of decisions?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Liora]

I agree with your specifics, but I disagree with your preface in that I think this might still be a result of deregulation. But, let me make a disclaimer. I don't know the illness, I only can give you symptoms. And, while the cure to the illness is to fix things and then take precautions in the future not to get sick, deregulation has made it unlikely that in the event the power system gets "sick" the symptoms will be treated. I am not going to speculate about the nature of the illness.

The major symptom the Northeast saw yesterday was voltage collapse. The usual treatment for this is amputation of the area (each area disconnects from the problem area, turning it into an island), allowing the rest of the grid to stay healthy. Then when the problem area gets their stuff back up and running, they can be reconnected. (Although, since NYC can't support its own supply, the actual getting back online for them might have been problematic, which might explain the reaction of the nearby grids...) This did not happen. What did happen was that much of the rest of that part of the Atlantic Interconnect got sick as well.

How does that have to do with deregulation? It doesn't, directly. Indirectly, when different ISO's (Independent System Operators) are running contingency analysis, they talk to each other and to the regulatory bodies over them (in the Northeast it is a coordinating council) and talk about the various "what if" situations. Each of these groups use different models and have different ideas of what is important, and therefore come to different conclusions. Sometimes what happens is that one group says to another "if this happens, this is a mess; thus to avoid this you need to do this..." to which the standard response is "no, you're looking at that wrong; that's not our problem." Deregulation is good. Standardization is needed.

How does that have to do with the recent problem directly? I have no idea.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> I too could put up a UPS box next to my USPS box and spend $3.50 on
> every letter I send.

Actually you can't. There are laws against anyone else carrying or delivering a letter. There are many private transactions you aren't free to engage in with your legal tender and this is one of them. Others can deliver a package though and there have been legal battles over the line between letter and package as the USPS fights over their turf. They KNOW what will happen should they ever be forced to compete. That .37 stamp is subsidized by the spammers and bills. Those bulk mailers send them presorted mail that requires little effort to process and pay higher prices than what the open market would charge, so they live in fear of the day that they find a way to get their mail delivered by someone else. Come that day they would have to charge market rates for 1st Class mail and suddenly their rates wouldn't look attractive. Hide and watch what happens in another few years when most bills are done online.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[foobario]

True, it has nothing to do with deregulation. It *might*, on the other hand, have something to do with the way we use twenty times as much electricity per capita as any other developed country on the planet. We've redefined what were previously known as 'luxuries', which we now consider 'needs'.

Every empire, right before it crumbles, goes through a phase where resources are squandered thoughtlessly, where excess becomes the norm. This country has become so pathetic that if the McDonalds and 7-11s all closed, half the population would die. Personally I think this outage is great... I say bring more on... I'll get the marshmallows and watch the motherfucking country burn.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[pavera]

thats fine, clinton had 8 whole years to stop it, and he didn't.. you sound like SCO "well, now we're not happy that this happened even though for the last 4 years we activly supported it"

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

> Oh yeah? Look what happened when they deregulated payphones. Price
> doubled.

That is the free market. Pay or do without. If enough did without the price would fall. But you are neglecting another large factor in pay phone rates. Volume dropped due to cell phones. Eventually most pay phones will disappear as they can't pay for themselves at any price. Especially since vandalism continues to increase.

But I also remember that ugly period right after deregulation when most pay phones were in the hands of fly by night scam artists. The Free Market can have problems, but that is no reason to run back into the loving arms of Great White Father in Washington.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[jmorris42]

And without deregulation THE cell company would THE phone company because without deregulation nobody else would have been allowed to interconnect with the monopoly's land lines. With deregulation we have a multitude of cell carriers.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

I won't just say you're wrong, I'll just say you're amazingly ignorant.

I'll just say you're actually a talking plant. Does that make it true?

As far as "proving" anything, very funny. I could spend an hour or so digging up objective evidence to back up all those assertions and show where yours are quite mistaken, but I'm fairly confident it wouldn't change your mind a bit.

Far from spending an hour to refute all of them, you refused to spend even 1 minute to try and refute *one* of them. Nice job! If you want to change my mind, personal attacks certainly aren't going to do it. If your goal was *really* to change my mind, you should have at least *attempted* to provide something besides 'I'm right and you're wrong and I don't care what you say.'

You'd cast doubt on the sources

You'd have to provide some first.

or find some dodgy counter-claim from Fox News or just plain not get it or not care, and it would never end.

Change Fox News to CNN and I could say the same about you. That's what a debate is. Claim and counter-claim. No, you're not going to simply say 'I *could* prove you wrong but I choose not to but believe me I could!' and have me believe that, because if I were to base my opinions on such flimsy evidence, I'd be exactly the sheep those in power want me to. As I said before, if you want to convince me, show me some proof. If you can't do that, why bother saying you can?

No, if you're interested in any of those things, why don't you try playing devil's advocate against yourself and do a little Google research? I do that from time to time. It's good exercise.

What makes you think I don't? Nice to know you're qualified to assert what I do or do not do, unrelated to what I've said.

And for the record, I am a fiscally conservative Libertarian who hates the Democrats as well as the Republicans. The Dems are guilty of going along with all of the bullshit of the past few years, but they were not the creative "brains" behind it, and this administration has had more leeway to impose its whim than any in my lifetime.

I know you meant 'any administration in the U.S.', but I must point out to you that taken from a world-wide perspective, there are several regimes out there with absolute control, such as Libya, China, North Korea, Singapore....those administrations have MUCH more power to impose their will on their people than ours does.

the Shrub is the worst president in at least 100 years.

That's a fairly bold statement. Care to back it up? Of course not. All you will say is you don't like him, you don't like the war, etc etc etc, quoting word for word from the 'bush = everything bad' book that's been distributed to everyone who doesn't like him. See, if you reread my post, I'm not anywhere saying that Bush is a great guy, or a great president, and I didn't vote for him, either. I'm just pointing out that by making Bush the focus of all your ire, you're missing out on quite a bit.

Try it out - pick some arbitrary measure and compare.

Ok. Arbitrary measure: tax increases.
George Bush sr. - largest tax increase in history
Bill Clinton - largest tax increase in history, followed by a NEW largest tax increase in history.
George W. Bush - cut taxes, included a $400 handout to those making under 30k/year and with at least one kid

well, that's one arbitrary measure by which he beats his father and his predecessor. Oops, I wasn't sposed to do that, was I?

Do I like the president? No. But I didn't like Bill Clinton, either, and I still resented the conservative's attempts to make everything on earth his fault. Why should I do less for George W. Bush? I don't have to like our current president to understand that he is not responsible for everything, and not even for everything that the government does. I also love my country enough to know that even 8 years under a bad president is better than 1 year under a tyrannical

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Gumshoe]

I sound like SCO because Clinton didn't stop the deregulation process. You are aware of how stupid that sounds I hope. Here's a clue: I was correcting your fact not making excuses or defending anyone. Areshole.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[mt2mb4me]

well, you are a bit incorrect with that, I know at least in Ohio, that all electric companys MUST buy there power from the lowest bidder. if i can sell coal for a penny cheaper they have to go with it, that is why the people i know that use alternative power sources acctualy hook back to the electric company and get a check for the power that they made but didn't use

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[sdcharle]

Dr Laura sites Leviticus when admonishing homosexuality, although Leviticus also calls for the death of those that have 2 different crops in the same field or where their clothing is made of 2 types of material.

I'm a live and let live guy myself, but really, how can you look at someone with clothing made of 2 types of material and not think that is GROSS?!?!?!

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[charon_on_acheron]

"The problem is, money has to come from *somewhere*, and unless something is done, we're going to first turn most of our citizens into subsistence level government dependants, and then into dead people as the government collapses under its own bloated weight and there is no longer a welfare bureau or anyone handing out or honoring food stamps. I know many will label this part of my post FUD, "

Actually, I have the exact same view of the future of our country. Eventually we will have a massive collapse, and possibley another civil war, and many millions are going to die. And their is no acceptable solution that we can achieve before that time. It's not so much the legendary slippery slope, as it is a vortex funnel. We keep going in circles , but noone can see that the endpoint is a dropoff into a black pit. But since my predictions in high school that Japan's economy would collapse within 30 years were validated in 10 years, my current prediction that the US will collapse into this civil war within the century may be validated by 2030. Scary thought, but I don't see another outcome. As you say, you can't get most people to believe it can happen, much less will happen soon.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[CommieLib]

So which ones are we, mouth-breathers or plutocrats?

You're really going to have to invest some more thought into your knee-jerk elitism.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Your basic premise is absolutely correct, but I'd quibble on the particulars of which party stands for what.

Why? They change about every 30 years anyhow. The key is that neither party really wants change, they only want to edge each other out in the power grab. Neither party cares about you. Neither party is dedicated to making your life better, unless you are a major PAC or other political contributor. What does it matter what each party is supposedly 'for' when the actions of both show very clearly that they care for nothing beyond grabbing and consolidating power and influence? The answer to this country's problems does not lie in either the Republican or the Democratic party.

And yes, your second part about the dire welfare problem, as it stands, is FUD. There are some serious logical and factual problems with your premise and your assumptions. Keep working on it.

I'm getting really sick of replies like this. Can you not read my tagline? Or do you just choose to ignore it? If you bother telling me that I have serious factual and logical errors, why do you not bother to say what they are? I'm sick and fucking tired of people saying that I can't possibly be right while offering NO evidence to the contrary. Mind you, you could very well be correct. I could very well have errors in my thinking. However, just saying I do doesn't point them out. I 'keep working' on *all* my beliefs, but in order to change what I believe, something which contradicts it yet has internal consistency and logic behind it must be offered. Fewer people are footing the bill for this country, part of which includes subsidies for a larger and larger part of those who are NOT footing the bill. Please tell me how this is a sustainable trend. Don't say 'It just is' and don't say 'There are a number of reasons, none of which I'm going to state.' If you can't be bothered to do that, then don't bother to reply at all. ('you' not directly referring to parent poster in this instance, but to anyone who disagrees with me)

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[heli0]

"Nice rant, but more plants wouldn't have helped this problem"

If there were two more nuclear plants in NY, they would not have to import power from Canada at all.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Johnny5000]

"You want 4 more years of lying? Vote for a Repub or a Green."

Are you saying Greens are liars like Republicans, or are you saying that a vote for Greens is a vote for Republicans?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[kelnos]

do you have a source for this info, or should we just take your word for it?

yeah, i know, i could look around myself, but i'm lazy.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

You want 4 more years of lying? Vote for a Repub or a Green.

What sort of lamer accuses the Greens of lying. They haven't even been given a chance yet you accuse them of lying. If anything they are the cleanest of the bunch. Too bad you don't realize that the Democrats are the same as the Republicans but with a left-leaning stance.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Ben Hutchings]

Imagine how cool it would be to have every cell provider in the US use the same towers!

There are actually shared towers in some places in the UK, though they aren't the norm. Not every network needs cells in the same places, as they use different protocols and/or frequencies (hence different propagation characteristics) and have different customer bases (hence different call density distribution).

Imagine being able to separate your cable TV connection from your cable TV content provider.

I just want to pick and choose channels.

Imagine being able to buy power from your favorite [green source du jour] - even across the country.

Here in the UK you can choose your electricity and natural gas suppliers. They provide customer service and billing. Obviously the electricity and gas continues to be physically supplied by the local utility, but the chosen "supplier" pays producers to put it into the network. I don't know quite how that works in the absence of real-time metering.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

Whatever problems California's government is undergoing now, the fact is that had they simply passed through all of the cost of electricity on the spot market to the end-user, people would have DIED before the market 'fixed the problem'. Relatively few governments, even Californian forms of such, are willing to take that risk.

There's a certain percentage of electric demand which is elastic, and a certain percentage which is inelastic; pretending that a simple libertarian anarchic solution would have solved everything is pretty damn juvenile.

By the way, don't bring Texas into it; I live here too; and the only thing preventing us from undergoing the same stuff that California went through is that most of our large utilities have not been forced to divest as they were.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Whatever problems California's government is undergoing now, the fact is that had they simply passed through all of the cost of electricity on the spot market to the end-user, people would have DIED before the market 'fixed the problem'.

Um. Meaning what? People aren't dying in CA now? People haven't always had air conditioning, you know. People haven't always had electricity. Somehow they managed for thousands of years without it. People die. People get hurt. That's harsh, but reality often is. This misguided notion that somehow we can preserve all life and avoid all unpleasantness is pervasive and attractive, but ultimately bullshit. There is no such thing as a life without risk. You also apparently don't care about people who are too poor to afford electricity, or air conditioning. They die every year, here in TX as well as in CA and other states. Are the deaths of those with more money more tragic?

Who said the market was supposed to fix the problem? I never did. I never suggested what the solution could be, I just questioned your assertions.

There's a certain percentage of electric demand which is elastic, and a certain percentage which is inelastic; pretending that a simple libertarian anarchic solution would have solved everything is pretty damn juvenile.

Who pretended that? I never said anything about solutions, libertarian or otherwise. Not to mention the fact that 'libertarian' and 'anarchic' are not analogous, not even close.
Artificially propping up industries is no more helpful than artificially limiting them. Government interference can be good, in small doses, but lethal in large ones. California is experiencing this, and while I doubt it, I hope they will learn from it. As you've said, Texas has not yet forced its power companies to divest. Maybe that will save us, at any rate I hope it will. I also hope that having our own grid will do something to help, as well, as I just heard on the news this morning that we haven't ever pushed it beyond 70% capacity.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

Um. Meaning what?

Meaning people would have died who otherwise would have lived. Sudden short-term spikes in the price of power can't be easily dealt with since so much of the components of electrical demand can't (quickly) be changed other than by drastic measures such as turning off the air conditioning.

Sorry to rain on your libertarian parade, but anybody in a democratic republic who would allow somebody like Enron to kill old people doesn't deserve anybody's vote.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

Meaning people would have died who otherwise would have lived. Sudden short-term spikes in the price of power can't be easily dealt with since so much of the components of electrical demand can't (quickly) be changed other than by drastic measures such as turning off the air conditioning.

Again, what about the people who don't even HAVE a/c? Again, you apparently don't care about them. Why are their lives worthless, while those who have a/c but can't use it temporarily are not? You think all old people have a/c? You think everyone makes it to their 'appointed time' if the government steps in?

Sorry to rain on your libertarian parade, but anybody in a democratic republic who would allow somebody like Enron to kill old people doesn't deserve anybody's vote.

Again you bring libertarianism into it. Then you callously suggest through implication that libertarians would allow Enron to break the law and thus cause people's deaths. Nice spin. Whatever Enron did, i guarnatee you it wasn't libertarians in power who did nothing to stop it. I can also guarantee you that those in power who looked the other way weren't all Republican, they were just all bought. You are in a democratic republic, and you 'allowed Enron to kill old people'....does that mean you don't deserve a vote? Or does it just pain you too much to admit that too much government interference only makes things worse for more people? How are people in CA going to feel when their state government goes bankrupt? Is that a better long-term solution than just fixing problems within the energy industry? Bailouts don't work. They are stopgap measures at best. No matter what we do, people will die before their 'appointed time'. No amount of government interference (save forcing everyone to live like veal calves) is ever going to eradicate untimely death. Is it better, in your estimation, to make life worse for everyone in order to protect a few? At what point does that become invalid, if any? Is our government's responsibility to make sure everyone is completely safe and happy? Is that what you believe our government was designed for?
Why is it considered 'cruel' or 'cold' to believe that natural selection is a stronger force than national government?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Degrees]

Actually, if you are California state prison guard, you got a 17% raise (over three years). Pensioners also got increases, as well as the administation employees. Lastly, employees only remotely related to law enforcement were reclassified as peace officers, and thus get to cash in on the larger pension plan for those people who put their life on the line maintaining the peace. These raises were made final just prior to the last election - and Davis made sure those people knew who gave them the money.

FWIW, those debts has been building up over four years.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[DeputySpade]

Funny thing is, a heat wave usually only lasts a week or two and my power bill is on a 30 day cycle. If it's hot and my choice is turn the air of and die or turn it on and pay the bill, I'm going to turn it on a couple hours a day to keep the temps evened out a bit and pay the price over the next couple of months. Anybody who has an air conditioner and dies from a heat wave is a moron.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

Read up on the Chicago heat wave in the mid 90s, son.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[love2hateMS]

The Clean Air Act regulates what power companies must do when maintaining and upgrading their equipment. I'm not an expert, so I'm only regurgitating what I have heard, but the cost is supposedly enormous. Environmentalists have blocked new power lines from being built to improve the grid in many areas. They even sued to have an underwater power line kept offline that connected NY to CT. It has never been used until today when I believe they got a temporary approval to finally turn it on to help the current crisis.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Surlyboi]

Republicans have nominated Estrada to a federal court bench. Republicans have selected Colin Powell to Secretary of State. Republicans have also selected Condeleezza Rice to National Security Advisor. Democrats have ... the president on 24 (the TV show). I think the racist thing speaks for itself. Where's the black Democrat presidential candidate (who's taken seriously)?

You have got to be fucking kidding me, the
placement of a few token minorities in key
positions, (which can be easily marginalized, as
was the case with Powell when he started making
proclamations the rest of the regime didn't agree
with, BTW) does not a forward-thinking non-racist
party make. Hell, if you think of it, Clinton's
probably blacker than "Condy" will ever be, at
least, attitudewise. I doubt I'll ever see Miz
Rice up here in Harlem, Bubba's got an office not
far from my house.

If the Republican party is so minority-friendly,
why do they have to trot out a few token blacks or
hispanics at every Republican national convention
to sow how progressive they are? If they're so
minority friendly, why are they against the quota
system in schools that allows minorities a shot at
getting in, but not against the lesser known but
much more effective system of "knowing the right
people" that's gotten a lot of whites into the
better colleges when they had neither the grades
or the aptitude to get into those schools?

The Dems are far from perfect and sometimes, yeah,
they're worse than the republicans, but it's not
for the reasons you've come up with.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[nathanh]

This post hurts me. It hurts me very badly. I keep trying to swing my hand over my hair in the traditional "over his head" movement, but the miss is so wide that I keep either hitting the ceiling fan or throwing my shoulder out of socket.

I suppose it's never occurred to you that you're the one who "doesn't get it".

(Score: 3, Insightful) my ass.

Your ass is neither insightful nor worthy of moderation.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

So that what you're saying is, if I read your post correctly, that no matter what justifications *exist* for going to war with Saddam, and no matter how many of those other than the two you mentioned got press before the war started, you picked those two reasons, decided they weren't valid, and thus decried the entire war. The suffering of the Iraqi people didn't factor into your equation, neither did the undisputed fact that Saddam Hussein personally caused both of the world's largest oil spills, on purpose. You forget that Saddam has gone on record attempting to buy nuclear materials from France, and also forgot that French scientists were hired by Saddam for nuclear research. Either you've forgotten that stuff, or you just don't care. You're entitled to not care about that stuff, but please allow others of us *to* care. The reasons you mentioned were the ones the *public* grabbed onto most quickly, but in reality public opinion rarely influences high level policy decisions, no matter who is in office. They weren't the only reasons given, nor are they the only valid reasons for dismantling the Iraqi regime. Saddam went on record as an opponent of the U.S. LONG before 2001. Should you ask whether we should go around liberating other countries from oppressive regimes, my answer is an unequivocal yes. No one else will do it, they're all just as content with a global status quo of 'civilized countries over here, hellhole dictatorships over there' as you are. Why did I (not randomly) compare us to other countries? Not for the reason you supposed. Rather than gloating about our supremacy, I was suggesting (apparently a bit too subtly) that whatever problems we have here, there are many countries where our problems would seem a relief. Does that mean we shouldn't try to make our country better? Of course not. But perhaps you could try to appreciate what we *do* have, rather than being so obviously full of vitriol over what we do not.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Liora]

Here are some facts about the North American power system and power systems in general, that you are apparently unaware of. North America has the biggest grid in the world. Actually, it has three different grids (five if you include Quebec and Mexico), which are only connected to each other through DC lines, although those lines really don't carry much power.

There are at least four world-wide makers of software that can do power systems analysis. All of the ones I know about were developed by firms or professors based in the United States. Your friends do not do it by hand, indeed they cannot solve a system with more than a few buses without the aid of a computer. If you do not believe me, ask them.

Here is what power companies worldwide do, and what your friends likely helped with in Europe:

They have to create a model of the system. North America has the largest grid, and therefore their model is likely the most complicated. This consists of counting the nodes and applying the rules that power engineers learn in their schooling (and mathematicians learn if they feel like it) to them and the lines, transformers, loads, generators, shunts, etc., that are connected. This is math. This involves equations. This is part of what your friends must have done for Europe. I assure you the same has been done in the US. The rest of what I am about to explain is done in Europe as well, and given that, any European state could have the same problem as the US did yesterday.

After the model is created, contingency lists must be made. These are lists of all the disasters that could happen (line outages, blown transformers, you name it, and combinations of these things). Software that can solve the "If this happens, what happens to the power flow?" question is used on each of these contingency lists, and then the power engineers have to figure out what the best thing to do to avoid problems is given each contingency, often using the same software.

Here is what you apparently don't know about. In Europe and in the US, control systems then have to be programmed to do the proper thing given a contingency. These are "elementary computer control systems based on simple feedback," as you described them. Europe uses them too. When a given transmission line goes out, the proper solution to avoid voltage collapse has to be done very quickly, faster than a human (even a mathematician) can do it. New faces are put on control systems constantly, but the underlying principles are the same.

When you said "As a result you simply cannot take out the grid like this in any European country unless the country has grown complacent and has stopped updating the models to account for change in power usage patterns," you were incorrect. Yesterday's problem had nothing to do with loadflow. It was about a single Canadian generating station that effectively went offline, after which several US stations went offline as well to prevent ruining their generators (the correct contingency solutions). Something similar could easily happen in any European country.

Finally, it is of note that even given the problems of yesterday, the United States has the most reliable power system in the world, with its average customer reporting the least amount of time without power per year than anywhere else.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[naasking]

As a result you simply cannot take out the grid like this in any European country unless the country has grown complacent and has stopped updating the models to account for change in power usage patterns.

Which is exactly the case here. Nothing wrong with our models (speaking as an electrical engineer); everything to do with complacency and politics.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

While I appreciate your patronizing me, I have always found that those who answer the way you have throughout this thread have no real idea of why they believe what they believe. You can sit in your world, and I'll stay in the real one. You have no idea what I have or have not done. You obviously think that anyone with different beliefs than you is wrong, and stupid. I don't share that belief. Attack me personally all you wish, as I'm neither 12 nor an idiot, and I'm perfectly capable of handling it. In my experience, those with nothing left to attack always do that. I'm sure you're very happy, obviously having as you do so much undirected (or misdirected) anger and hatred in you. In exchange for your condescension, I'll offer you my pity. I truly do feel sorry for you.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[untaken_name]

I wasn't referring only to welfare, as that's only a part of it (although not a particularly efficient one)

But let's tackle a macro-scale assumption first: in the event that the economic equation is truly as you say it is, why would they allow the entire global economic order to collapse instead of simply reducing benefits and/or cutting costs?

I've been wondering exactly that for years. If you find out the answer, let me know.

Americans are not particularly slaves to a welfare state.

Not particularly, and not yet. However, the time is coming.

Why wouldn't politicians, being nothing if not self-interested, vote to save their own jobs and curtail benefits and maybe lose a few votes, instead of losing everything in a total economic collapse?

My best guess would be that they truly don't believe it will happen. D.C. is very insular. No matter what opinion polls the politicians read, I doubt they truly care, or they *would* be looking beyond simple self-interest. They're caught in somewhat of a vicious circle, because in order to get votes, they must increase spending, but in order to gain votes, they must cut taxes, and so far President Bush is listening. He's increased spending and cut taxes, only one of which he should have done. Which one, of course, depending on your political bias. Social security has been plundered for years, and I seriously doubt that upon retirement, I will see any portion of what I've been paying into it for my entire working life. The republicrats and demopublicans have both been guilty of gross mismanagement and in my opinion, when the revolution comes, it'll be because of social programs the government can no longer provide that people believe are their rights as an American.
Human history is chock full of empires that never thought they would end....composed of leaders who never saw the end coming until it was too late. I fail to see why we should be any different. Human failings, and in particular the feeling of invincibility, have often been the undoing of civilizations.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stanwirth]

rather than having two different contractors, both with a profit motive for not solving the problem, you would have had basically lazy government employees that would have had it in their best interest to solve the source of the problem

That's the difference between having private maintenance contracts per issue rather than an SLA. Sounds like the city got taken for a sucker.

I'd be interested to know what you think would've happened if they had a maintenance contract with a service level agreement, and the possibility to hire another group if this one didn't work out (and teeth to the contract so that if the SLA isn't met, no/little money is paid).

There's not much difference between government workers and contract workers when they're both given a cushy exclusive contract in their favor.

First of all, it wasn't the City contracting the work, it was the private lines company

So there are two significant differences. The first is public oversight and accountability -- if this were a government contract, rather than a private contract, it's much easier for a NZ citizen to go into the next meeting at which these contracts are reviewed, and raise the issue. When it's a private company, they're free to do whatever the heck they like within the regulatory framework. So instead of saying "hey, these guys just aren't doing a good enough job for us", we have to figure out what kinds of modifications to the regulations need to be made in order to get the private lines company to manage its contractors more effectively. It's one step removed, and much slower.

The second is the use of contractors, period -- but we can't even start to have any say over whether or not contractors are used to maintain the lines when the transmission company that hires them is run for private profit, rather than the public good. The transmission companies' profits are not hurt when poor service is provided, so all they have to do (and in fact do) when complaints come through regarding the quality of the transmission, is complain back that they wouldn't be able to make a profit if they spent any more on maintenance -- while who knows what kinds of kickbacks the transmission company execs are getting in exchange for farming out tons of ineffective work at top dollar to a variety of contracting outfits who have no incentive to work together to actually solve problems.

Which brings us back to the lack of public oversight. Again, it's much easier to dig into the books of your local governement than it is to dig into the books of a private lines company to figure out whether there's any payola going on-- and payola is a much bigger offense for a public official (add breach of public trust to the fraud and embezzlement issues) than it is for a contracts manager in a private company.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stanwirth]

New Zealand has seen how the privatisation of public services gives you the worst of both the private and public sectors.

Ultimately, the basis for this is that the private sector had to absorb the fallout from the government. Blaming this on privatization is short-sighted.

In a way, you're right -- at some point the NZ government had a choice on its hands -- raise the money to upgrade the telephone, electrical and transportation systems, or sell 'em off and let some other poor sucker take the blame. Spending money on bringing some of these services into the second half of the 20th century would have meant raising taxes or raising rates -- both of them likely to make a politician unpopular. Whereas taking the decision to sell off these knackered assets meant they had a series of windfall surplusses with which to fund cushy patronage jobs in the regulatory bodies created in the process--which added another level of bureuaucracy to the equation, in the course of privatisation, further sheilding the providors of these public services from any and all forms of public oversight. So the blame, yes, your right, the blame lies with the people who took the decision to privatize public services rather than upgrade them.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[stanwirth]

Privatisation (and liberalisation) have been hugely beneficial for NZ - but the benefits are now taken for granted.

Tell that to the pensioner who can no longer afford his electricity and phone bill. Tell that to the single mother of six small children shivering in the cold in a garage all winter that, prior to the privatisation of the public housing system, would have been able to rent a state house at a rate they could afford (you know the ones they sold off). Tell that to the unemployed baker out in Huia who can no longer get a bus into town to work because that route is not profitable enough. These people are my neighbors.

Privatisation only helped people who were already perfectly capable of helping themselves. Me, for instance. But just because it benefitted me doesn't mean I'm going to stand up and say it was the right thing to do. It wasn't.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MourningBlade]

My understanding is that with private industry you don't tell them how to run their business ("no contractors" etc), you just allow (or even encourage) competition. If contractors aren't "doing it" for you --- ie your service is suffering --- you switch.

It sounds like, check me on this, that the system is "managed" by a private company that has no competition. That would be privatization, as you said. That does suck, yes, as it's really more like fascism...without even the advantages. I was hoping for something more like a competitive marketplace.

Is that how your system works?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Daetrin]

Except it isn't a plausible theory. Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care. They just don't, and no amount of hating "big corporations" is going to change that and for you to even be floating it as a theory speaks volumes.

Depends on what it is they care about. If the accountants are in charge they'll okay necessary maintenance, obviously if the system stops working regularly they're going to lose customers (or face government inquiries.) However if the engineers say they want to install backup hardware to deal with certain contingencies, the accountants might ask them how likely such a problem is. The engineers will say there's a 5% chance a year that the problem will happen or some such. The accountants will ask when the last time it happened was, and the engineers will say 1960-something.

Cearly, if the accountants are most interested in improving short term profits they might decide that the small risk doesn't merit the cost of protecting against it. We've seen the same mindset happen in other industries, most spectacularly in the space program and Enron, so i'm wondering why you think it wouldn't be plausible in this case?

True enough, and they will examine what went wrong and fix it, the way engineers have always done when something fails. But also remember the complexity of working with a distributed system where the product being controlled is roaring along the wires at damned close to the speed of the control signals. Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already.

"Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson described the United States as a "superpower with a Third World grid.""

You were saying? I don't know if it's really as bad as he claims, but i'd be more inclined to believe that than that it's one of the "one of the wonders of the modern world already" which seems to be a bit of arogant hubris. If i had to guess with no other information available, i'd have to say that the former U.S. energy secretary was politicaly motivated for some reason or wanted to make the news, and that the truth is somewhere inbetween. But until you provide some facts to the contrary, his wild statements have a lot more authority behind them than your wild statement.

If you are going to fly a candidate's flag in your .sig you had better be prepared for mockery when you pick one so worthy of such sentiment. Hell, only the presence of Sharpton prevents Dean from winning the "Candidate most menacing to our form of government." award for this cycle.

Perhaps, but if someone who disagrees offers logical arguments against my position i'd be willing to discuss the issue with them. If they instead respond with something along the lines of, "you're an irrational loser and you suck!" i'm going to consider them to be a hypocritical troll. Guess which way you started of portraying yourself?

So do you have a reason for claiming Dean is in second place for "Candidate most menacing to our form of government."? Or do you only know how to flame?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Oort Cloud]

I know your post was a intended as sarcasm but I just wanted to point out something, how come Americans use the word "liberal" as though it meant supremely biased people, when if you look it up in the dictionary, the word liberal means "free of bigotry", and "tolerant of the ideas and behaviour of others". Why so is it usually used as and insult by most Republican supporting Americans in the U.S. as an insult? Being outside of the U.S., I am a little confused.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MyHair]

no single minor event should be able to shut off electricity for 50 million people for 2 days across several juristictions.

And how do you know it was a minor event? Perhaps if they hadn't shut down then the generators would've been damaged enough to cause weeks or months of downtime for tens of millions of people.

I find it odd that they're still apparently bickering about it, though. I would've thought they knew what happened by now.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ealar dlanvuli]

You should mod his rebuttal up, since you modded mine up.

His is much better than my off-the-cuff rebuttal on definition.

Mods please mod parent up.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Daetrin]

Complex systems don't run for years by people who don't care.

Our electrical grid is one of the wonders of the modern world already

Oh, and since you seem to have a modicum of respect for Bush (at least comapred to some of the alternatives,)

President Bush (news - web sites), during a tour of a California national park, said part of the problem was "an antiquated system" to distribute electricity nationally.

"It's a wake-up call," Bush said. "The grid needs to be modernized, the delivery systems need to be modernized."

Unless you mean that the wonder is that it's still working at all, despite the lack of upgrades?

I can think of only a few reasons for that state of affairs, maliciousness on the part of the power companies, which seems very unlikely, accountants getting unlucky at the cost-benefit analysis game in an attempt to make more money (what i cynically refered to as them "not caring") or unluckyness at the same game, but due to a shortage of capital, in which case this might have something to do with it?

"On Thursday, Bush said that he has supported the idea of improving the transmission grid "all along." However, the Bush administration has past fought efforts to revamp the nation's electrical delivery systems that were not part of broader energy legislation.

Republican allies of the Bush administration, including House Majority Whip Tom Delay, R-Texas, derailed just such a proposal from Democrats in June 2001. The measure, proposed during California's energy crisis, would have provided $350 million in federal loans and loan guarantees for the industry to improve power transmission systems around the country."

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MacGod]

I don't know if the overload was due to deregulation, but one of the purposes of regulation is to ensure that the power company can satisfy demand, even relatively unlikely peak demand. It's possible that deregulation led to them running leaner with less margin of error for a big spike in demand.
Add to that an unexpected increase in air-conditioner usage and there you go -- overload and outages. That's one possibility. I suppose we'll find out the facts soon enough, though.

I don't think that's it. While we're still waiting for the investigation, it doesn't appear that this was a case of excessive use. After all, this summer has been much cooler than last, when no such problems occurred.

Rather, it appears that this was triggered by some sort of accident or anomolous event.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[MacGod]

The problem is that power generation to a large degree and power distribution to a much larger degree, is a "natural monopoly". Due to the inherent start-up costs of power distribution (running mile after tireless mile of wires, and thousands of transformers etc), it would be nigh impossible for a new company to hope to compete with established private power distribution networks.

Your analogy of cellphones is essentially good, however is flawed because the startup costs are signifigantly lower (erect one cell phone tower, cover a few hundred square miles, and possibly millions of customers.

A free-market economy can be very effective in certain situations, but has a tough time in the case of natural monopolies

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Jodka]

Let's face it: the only thing power companies compete on under deregulation is price. They have the same product, the same reliability, etc. This means the only viable business model is to cut every corner you can.

Wrong.

Competition creates an incentive to produce as efficiently as possibe, not to produce at the lowest cost possible. The goal is to maximize the ratio of output/input, not to minimize the abolute level of input, as you say, "cutting every corner that you can." In fact, one should cut wasteful corners and invest in productive corners.

So, to provide an example in direct contradiction to your own statement: Suppose that new turbine blades increase the effeciency of a generator, and that the boost is more than sufficient to recover the cost of the new blades. Would "cutting the corner" on a new turbine blade investment be more profitable or less profitable ?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[maxume]

Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.

As far as U.S. Politics go, you quoted the wrong section of the definition. For quite a while, liberal meant 'social experimenter, government can't be perfect, lets try shit' Now it pretty much just means 'socialist'. Which is rabidly extremist, but somewhat accurate. The federal government has moved so far in what have been liberal directions that the liberals have become the new conservatives. In the immortal words of Hamburgler, ramble ramble.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[astar]

[source: North American Electric Reliability Council press briefing, press releases Aug. 15; files]
"WE DESIGNED THE SYSTEM FOR THIS NOT TO HAPPEN." At a phone briefing this morning, which had more than 700 reporters on the line, NERC CEO Michael Gent said he was "embarrased" by the widespread black-out yesterday, because NERC was created after the massive 1965 East Coast black-out to prevent such an occurrance from repeating itself. But it is clear that the system NERC's rules were created for no longer exists.
A reporter asked Gent how the system NERC designed has changed under deregulation. "When the industry deregulated," he said, "the owners of transmission and generation were separated. You no longer have transmission to match the generation." Power producers "built for convenience to their system load, without concern for the transmission," he said. This has led to the overloading of power lines and reduced reliability.
{EIR} asked about the impact of the "economy transfers" of bulk power over the system since deregulation, where companies "wheel" cheaper power for hundreds of miles, which the system was never designed for. "They have added congestion," to the system, Gent replied. "We thought we were on top of these added transfers," but they will be looked at during NERC's investigation of the black-out.
In 1965, an outage on a 230-kilovolt transmission line in Canada led to a series of failures that in minutes resulted in power swings that produced a cascaded outage, blacking out 30 million people down the East Coast for up to 13 hours. NERC was formed in response.
In July 1977, when a transmission tower north of New York City was struck by lightning, the system collapsed. While 9 million people in New York City were left in the dark for up to 26 hours, the problem was isolated, and no other systems were affected. The reliability rules NERC had put into effect, worked. "We never have anticipated a cascading outage, since 1965," Gent stated today.
But, that was then, and this is post-dereg. [mgf]

[as above]
NERC INVESTIGATING TEAM WILL WORK TOWARD REPORT NEXT WEEK. Michael Gent announced that he was forming a task force of "forensic experts" to investigate the causes and circumstances of the black-out. He said at the press briefing that while it would take months to have a final report, "we should know next week what happened." [mgf]

[as above]
NOT TERRORISM, BUT COLLAPSE OF INFRASTRUCTURE. During the NERC briefing, Gent explained that while they haven't pinned down the initiating event for the black-out, they do know that the problem was in the transmission loop around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This Loop connects up-state New York west around Erie to Ohio, north to Detroit, and through Canada back east to New York. This Great Lakes area has been a well-known problem for years, Gent said, and cables under Lake Erie were planned to relieve the congestion, but never built.
On the question of terrorism, Gent said that there was no evidence of any physical attack on any infrastructure. As far as cyber terrorism, he said that they have logs of all communications and computer activities at all critical facilities. If there were a "cyber intrusion," he said, the person would leave tracks. They wouldn't necessarily who did it, but they would know it took place.
Leading to the black-out, the destabilization of the transmission system took only 9 seconds. About 50 million people were affected, as some Canadian and 9 U.S. nuclear plants went off line, as well as more than 80 fossil fuel plants.
Gent said that power was being restored faster than he'd anticipated. According to NERC, at 24 hours after the incident, about 20,000MW of capacity was still down, out of more than 61,000MW lost during the outage, which was about 10% of all the capacity east of the Mississippi River. [mgf]

[source: EIR files]
AMPLE WARNING WAS GIVEN THAT THE GRID WAS AT RISK. For more than a decade, NERC has been sounding ala

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Eraser_]

Illegal yes, but I dunno about you, when I ask UPS for a complimentry kit of UPS sending goodies, I get a whole lot of suspiciously "letter" sized unpadded envelopes. They even say "letter" on them.

And last I checked I too can overturn the USPS's monopoly, being a person registered to vote. Great thing about this country, I can use civil disobedience and voting to get what I want, see also prohibition.

And yes, I've looked into those "presorted ready to go" offerings from the post office, it's really quite a great way to go if you are looking to reach a large audience.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Pfhor]

Just because he is anti bush does not mean he is pro clinton either. There are those crazy third party members, anarchists and other such dissidents who opposed both clinton and bush. But some may prefer clinton over bush, lesser of two evils and what not. I doubt Gore would have appointed the Governer of Utah (one of the most polluted states in the Union, next to Texas i believe) to be the head of the EPA.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Oort Cloud]

Heh, this is funny, here in Canada the left wing parties are so far left that the right wing parties here are more left then your left wing party. Although have more then two official parties, it actually allows us more range and gives people a chance to pick a middle of the two farthest sides.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[ces]

Here are some facts about the North American power system and power systems in general, that you are apparently unaware of. North America has the biggest grid in the world. Actually, it has three different grids (five if you include Quebec and Mexico), which are only connected to each other through DC lines, although those lines really don't carry much power.

Not to disagree with you since you obviously know more about the subject than I do. But I thought Hydro Quebec sold quite a bit of power to the US? At least that is what I'd heard was the justification for all of those massive hydro projects they always seem to be building.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[DancingSword]

How about a "rolling bond", then:

Companies in competition in a market put-up bond, that they can retrieve after 7 years, at the beginning ( however measured, fiscal or calendar ) of this year.
Next-year, they put-up bond that they can retrieve 7 years from then, and so-on.
( based-on what, though? .. company-division-size? to contribute-to diversity and eradicate single-point-of-failure, or to suppress smaller companies and maximize the "bottom-line" for the incumbent+established special-interest-group? region-market-ownership? to cause the dominant market-players to pay more than the smaller-players? probably I'd prefer that one, but I cannot imagine it being implemented to reduce single-point-of-failure and reduce hierarchy, perhaps I'm too old...

This makes certain that they've invested recently, and that their investment means-something to them
( rather than being a big once-only write-off )...

Actually, though, I think regulated-competition is better than regulated monopoly or short-term-capital-predation ( which even competes against the context in-which its long-term existence supposedly is to be ... ), but implementing regulated-competition without simultaneously implementing open-sourcing of the regulations and the audits and the compliance is bogus, or meaningless...

"Let The Market Decide" can only work if the market is informed, and it is against gettable-profit to allow informed market, so choose whether short-term capital-profit or enduring surviving is more significant, and choose The Rules based on that: if enduring surviving is more significant, then cause the market to have good/valid, current information, freely, and don't allow the market to be 0wned by marketing BS, organized suppression ( corporate special-interest-group, political special-interest-group, ANY sig ), etc...

Contrarily, if A Quick Buck means more than enduring survival ( perhaps because you prefer the predator-lifestyle, and figure that with the knives/guns/Hummers/fuel you've stockpiled away YOU can control others -- in civil collapse ), then contribute to the brittleness, the kind-of-regulation that is going to break so you can make the world exist only as you permit:
. . . the two modes are mutually-exclusive, and I'd simply prefer a bit of honesty in people's commitment, no matter what that commitment be, so we can deal truly with each-other...

And as-for an example, published years-ago, of how others have already clued-in to the fractal-nature of The Answer, dig Christopher Alexander's -- A Pattern Language ( Daily Pattern: you get to read the book, in random-pattern-order, in 254 days, or so ).

Ach, final thought, ere:
I realized, partly because of all this ( we were downed, downtown Here[tm], here, for oh, a day or so ), that the Vertically Integrated Rules-Based Monopoly can work fine UNLESS something breaks, then much/all breaks.. the Horizontally Meshed Adaptive Diversity is costlier, when everything is going right, but it doesn't catastrophically fail the way the hierarcy/rule/conservative system does
( no I do not mean to say that the lateral/fractal/parallel system is "liberal": belonging-for-its-own-sake is "liberal", the structure I'm thinking-of, by not-merely-permitting everyone-autonomy, but requiring it simply happens to be perpendicular to conservation-of-privilege/position/rights among the established interests/entities, that's all... given enough dimensions, there are multiple "perpendiculars" to any given choice... )

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[maxume]

Here in Michigan, we have a (former Canadian) democratic governor that cut spending on all the programs that the previous republican administration set up. It doesn't nearly make any sense. But apparently Mi won't run that huge of a deficit, and things will get better...

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[op00to]

Note I said "Like any other industry". I didn't say that environmental regulators don't affect operation of the power grid.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[plague3106]

So why do you now blame deregulation?

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[spurious cowherd]

yes. The official report

http://blackout.gmu.edu/archive/pdf/fpc_65.pdf

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Liora]

They do. There's a giant DC line that comes down and deposits itself (I think) in Connecticut.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[Liora]

Well... since you replied AC you probably won't get this reply, but anyway...

Everything that happened in a span of about nine seconds. Even if the Ohio lines were the start, the reaction of generators (rightly so, to avoid ruining their equipment) across the whole area was to go offline. Pre-Ohio information, Sir Adam Beck, in Canada is the first one to have been seen to go offline, so they initially thought it began with that. I wouldn't be surprised if they learn that the Ohio lines went down and then the next thing that happened was the Canadian plant went offline, and then did some others.

As for the reliability of the North American grid, I don't have any stats off the top of my head and I can't remember where I heard or read solid information on that. But... if you read what people write in the IEEE PES journal, and if you talk to customers and power engineers in places other than the US, it becomes pretty clear that those that reside in the US or Canada are among the lucky few with regard to electric reliability.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[DeputySpade]

No need. I was there. I live in Chicago, son.

A bunch of old people refused to turn on their air conditioners because they didn't want to spend the money. They didn't take into consideration the fact that they were old and had health problems. Heat that normally wouldn't have affected them years ago ended up killing them. If you know you're old and sick, and you have an air conditioner, and you don't use it, who's fault is that? Not ComEd's.

The people who allowed themselves to be killed by a heatwave in Chicago in the mid ninties when they could have avoided it are exactly the reason why I hold my position. And don't go droning on about the people who didn't have air conditioners because that's not what the post was about.

Re:Nothing to do with deregulation

[doinky]

Son, if you can't learn the lesson from Chicago (that electricity cost can directly lead to people dying) and not understand why that lesson applies to the issues in California, then you're beyond hope. Go jerk off to Ayn Rand.

Huh?

[Henry V .009]

The rolling blackouts in California were rationing exercises. This, however, is an unplanned disaster.

Re:Huh?

[mjmalone]

Not to mention that the power needs in california were caused by witholding of power by Enron, not by deregulation.

Re:Huh?

[kzinti]

The rolling blackouts in California were rationing exercises. This, however, is an unplanned disaster.

Excellent point. Somebody mod this guy up.

On ABC news tonight Richard Clarke, the President's Advisor for Cyber Security, asserted that the power outage was due to a failure in the SCADA systems that monitor and control the distribution system. That's an interesting claim, especially coming from a politician and so soon after the fact. It will be interesting to see if the full analysis bears out his claim.

Re:Huh?

[HiThere]

Davis did blow it. He backed Enron, but they left him to swing.. I almost think it was mainly done to set it up, not that he didn't play the role of a sucker quite well.

It was, however, manipulation by Enron that caused the problem...which it couldn't have done without the deregulation that they got Davis to go along with. (Could he have stopped it? I don't know. But he had good reason to know where it would lead. ... The only reason I'm sorry he's getting kicked out is that he's being replaced by someone worse.)

Re:Huh?

[sql*kitten]

Not to mention that the power needs in california were caused by witholding of power by Enron, not by deregulation.

Not quite. What happened was that the CA government deregulated the market between distributor and generator, but not between distributor and consumer. Therefore, as the price at which the distributor bought power fluctuated, it could not vary the price it charged. This made power artificially cheap for the consumer, and being CA, the locals use a lot of power to run aircon, swimming pools, etc. Demand outstripped supply. In a true market, the consumer price would have gone up and the locals would have thought of ways to be less wasteful of power. That didn't happen until the half-regulated market collapsed.

Why did the price of the generators go up? Simply because CA doesn't allow power stations to be built - there was a built-in shortage in the system. As soon as that was reached, the distributor had to buy from elsewhere on the open market.

The solution would have been for the CA government to a) permit private industry to construct sufficient capacity and b) fully deregulate. But they didn't; I suspect because they simply wanted to give deregulation per se a bad name.

Re:Huh?

[wonderdog]

You make some good points, and then fade into the mantra of no new power plants, ostensibly because of the dreaded liberal agenda. Back in reality, the power companies deliberately turned down generators to create the power shortage, working the broken deregulation laws to their max benefit-- illegally.

Before the right-wing idealogues jump all over me for supporting "my buddy Davis," I'm not a fan of his. In the case of the power crisis, Davis did the equivalent of leaving the door to his house open. However, it was Enron and other power co's who walked in and robbed it.

history repeats itself

[REden]

This certainly sounds like the 1996 Great Northest Blackout.

http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html

Robert

Re:history repeats itself

[hal9000]

--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!

Like implementing a Ruby or Python interpreter? :-)

Re:history repeats itself

[anti-drew]

Which we all know was caused by UFOs. Have the utilities thoroughly considered the potential impact that aliens might be having on our power infrastructure?

I mean, without giggling?

It would much more responsible...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Fraud a significant contributing factor

[Anonymous Coward]

"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"

Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/national /main546097.shtml

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[rgmoore]

Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved.

Realistically, though, the deregulation and fraud were closely tied together. Under the old, regulated system, there wouldn't have been the opportunity to commit the fraud in the first place. The exact form of the deregulation, specifically the way that long-term contracts weren't allowed, was also important. Had the California Legislature done a better job on the deregulation then the fraud probably wouldn't have taken place.

That doesn't excuse the power industry, of course. The opportunity to commit fraud profitably is not an excuse for doing so. The power industry was also deeply involved in writing the deregulation legislation, so they're also partly responsible for setting up the damaging conditions in the first place. (Note that this is an example of one problem of legislative term limits; the legislators involved were inexperienced, which tends to give more influence to lobbiests and beaurocrats.)

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[Arandir]

The exact form of the deregulation, specifically the way that long-term contracts weren't allowed, was also important.

How can rules regulating how contracts be formed be considered "deregulation". Am I using a different dictionary than everyone else?

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[leviramsey]

California deregulated enough to cause the problems, but not enough to actually allow an efficient market to develop. It's also questionable whether it's possible to get a sufficiently efficient market in electricity.

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[jmorris42]

> How can rules regulating how contracts be formed be considered
> "deregulation".

When Democrats are in control, their warped views on what a Free Market is gets enshrined into law. And it doesn't help when Republicans can't decide whether they want to be rebadged Democrats or mercantilists instead of Free Market capitalists, but that is the situation they had in CA.

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[HiThere]

There is no good way to do deregulation of a market without significant competition. If there's no competition in a market the proper action is for the state to nationalize it. Well, they should first look for some way to create a competitive market, which means more than five reasonable choices for the average customer. And they can't be conspiring together to set prices or availability, either. If they are, then I count them as a single monopoly (as that is the way that they are acting as a market force).

Now the cost of entry into the power generation business is prohibitive. So it's not likely that you're going to find a competitive market. And, if you examine the situation, you don't find a competitive market. So it should be a state owned monopoly (well, possibly city or county owned, but government owned).

Similarly for phone lines. There's only one provider, so it must be owned by the govt. (A utility is a false way of pretending that you aren't doing the owning, and of continuing to let companies skim off the benefit of being a monopoly. Bad move.)

Note that the govt. should not be permitted to prevent competition, if the technologies change. And the services should be made to pay for themselves via service charges. Since technologies sometimes cause old monopolies to become obsolescent, this would allow new companies to form...so long as they didn't become monopolies. (As long as no company owns more than 20% of any market, there should be no problem.)

Monopolies are an evil. I don't see any (decent) way to avoid one of them: the monopoly on the use of force...that's nearly the definition of a government. But allowing more than one is silly.

N.B.: If private industry is inherently more efficient than govt., then new companies should spring up and grab 20% of the market...but I wouldn't hold my breath. When there's a high cost of entry, then that doesn't happen. And it doesn't matter whether the monopoly is govt or private.

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[fm6]

And fraud is not a sign of poor execution?

Re:Fraud a significant contributing factor

[Arandir]

There was no deregulation, merely a change in the form of regulation, some of which actually turned out to be more regulation. See this article for one analysis.

DAMN!

[DAldredge]

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?

Re:DAMN!

[TedCheshireAcad]

You must be new here.

Wild speculation is our business.

*Sees 4-digit UID* oh...wait

Re:DAMN!

[kzinti]

You must be new here. Wild speculation is our business.

Yeah, but not just ANY wild speculation. We can achieve wild speculation based on crazy assumptions, tortured logic, and all in the lack of a single relevant datum! Geeze... don't sell us short!

Re:DAMN!

[Fluid Truth]

I think it was actually an attempt to get everything in one place. Since careful moderation and link checking was requested, I suggest that they know that the answer is not out now, but that when it is, it will likely be posted here. Mod them up. There will also be a ton of wild speculation. Do not mod them up lightly.

Re:DAMN!

[N1XIM]

Who the frig really believes that they'll ACTUALLY tell us what happened when they know? C'mon people, somebody had to have done something really imcompetent at a really high level here for a blackout of this magnitude to actually happen--assuming that it wasn't caused by some sort of solar flare or something. They ain't gonna tell us jack shit.

Re:DAMN!

[Pave Low]

Jamie is trolling, it would appear. He asks a loaded question- "Is Deregulation The Reason", without any basis in fact. This is sort of asking like, "Red Hat Stock down, Is Microsoft the culprit?".

How and why jamie decided deregulation could be the main reason for this for this blackout is a mystery. What facts have come out so far would lead him to this conclusion? None.

Slashdot continually is reaching new depths in racing to the bototm with this story.

Re:DAMN!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

people that RUN THE FSCKING GRID do not know what went wrong

I worked in the power control/data aquisition field for a while and can assure you that in a complex grid it is very difficult to pin-point failures.

Consider that there are normally many redundant lines and generation points. If a generation point goes offline, then the load through the lines changes. If a line's capcacity is exceeded it trips. This increses the load through other lines and you can get run-away instability. All this shit goes down in a second or so, so figuring out where things went wrong is not easy. Figuring the *trigger* might be easy (eg. generation point failed), but at what point does the redundancy fail (ie does the system itself fails)?

To keep on top of this, most grids run constant 'what if' analysis of their network. ie. if line x or generator y trips what will happen? if load increases at point x what will happen? The analysis helps to ensure that sufficient redundancy is switched in to cover certain failures to a certain risk level.

Unfortuantely with cost cutting etc, building of new lines and upgrading often gets delayed. Thus, the opportunities for redundancy are decreased and the risk levels are increased.

BTW: It is also a hell of a task to restart a grid.

Re:DAMN!

[jamie]

Here's how the situation looks right now (as far as I'm aware -- new facts will surely arrive in days to come):

Five years after the implementation of the deregulation that took Niagara Mohawk out of the power-generation business and got them into the power-distribution business, a few routine lightning bolts take out their power-distribution grid in much of the Northeast United States and part of Canada.

I find that interesting. I assume others will too, and I wouldn't be surprised if people are working on stories right now, researching the effects that deregulation had on the corporation and on the power distribution business in general.

If you don't find that interesting or have already decided that there's nothing there, that's fine; nobody's going to make you browse Google and nobody's going to make you post a comment to Slashdot. But I imagine some of our readers will find this interesting too and their research may turn up information that few people are currently aware of.

Or it may not; they may find that there is no correlation.

Or there may be no relevant data publicly available. I don't know.

As usual, on Slashdot, if you don't care, you're free to move on to the next story.

Re:DAMN!

[GigsVT]

X follows Y, therefore X caused Y!

Re:DAMN!

[MegaFur]

Wild speculation is our business.

That would be an excellent slogan for slashdot.

Re:DAMN!

[hal9000]

/. Everyone's favorite armchair.

Re:DAMN!

[Phroggy]

Kids these days, with their fancy 4-digit UIDs. Why, back in my day, wild speculation was all we had, and we were grateful. Doesn't anyone show any respect anymore?

hehehehe

Re:DAMN!

[bstadil]

At least they didn't claim it was Microsoft straight away. By the way TheInquirer thinks it was LovSan / Slammer

Re:DAMN!

[Darby]

The people that RUN THE FSCKING GRID do not know what went wrong and /. is posting articles asking if X caused it???

And TedCheshireAcad said:
You must be new here.
Wild speculation is our business.

Which is hilarious considering your .sig:

--
That's right - save the knee-jerk reactions for when Red Hat changes a desktop theme. Lunenburg

I think you've been around a bit.

Re:DAMN!

[Grog6]

Obviously, The power grid was ATTACKED by TERRORISTS!!!
Or, at least, when the super secret interrogations are over, it will seem so.
I'm sure the rich bastards who profiteered this disaster are all on W's contributor list; Someone WILL end up being blamed; It's just unlikely the real culprit will be outed.

Re:DAMN!

[justins98]

Okay since you worked in the industry you might be able to answer this question:

Why isn't the system set up so that when a major generator goes down and the other generators can't support the additional load, some part of the grid is immediately blacked out to reduce the load? That way only a small portion of your customers get blacked out instead of an entire region of the country.

Re:DAMN!

[efflux]

Wild speculation is our business.
This is always said with such disdain. I would propose that inteligence itself may be a function of one's ability to speculate coupled with a subsequent discretionary ivestigation of that speculation. Furthermore, I don't think that the mere voicing of an idea is promoting an idea (nor claiming expertise), but is often simply "testing the waters".

Kudos to slashdot for throwing out thousands of ideas on any subject for examination and scrutiny without fear of reprobation by cynics and naysayers. Reprobations directed not at their ideas, but their person. May investigative thinking continue to thrive, even in the face of intellectual bullying.

Re:DAMN!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

It's hard to look back on those days. The wayback machine wasn't online then...

Re:DAMN!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Sure I can answer that question. Shitty old SCADA technology combined with higher risks.

Shitty SCADA technology: the responsiveness of the control and monitoring systems is often very slow. Many seconds, by the time the data arrives at the control centres, the lines have tripped automatically. When shit happens you get many events (data overload) and knowing which ones to respond to is difficult. [Example: Three mile island: Each event gets logged to a printer. So many events were triggered that the printer was hacklogged three hours within a minute].

The mighty buck: to save money, the networks are run with less redundancy and at higher risk levels. This means that you lose control (time/space to respond) and the consequences of a failure are more ugly.

Re:DAMN!

[TedCheshireAcad]

My lord, three digits.

I am humbled, good sir.

Re:DAMN!

[MegaFur]

But whenever you throw out a new, radical idea, there's a process. The first part is the "ooh, wow! gee whiz" phase. After that, you have to start working out if the idea really makes sense. You can either do this in a kindly, friendly manner or a more abrasive, vitriolic one, but either way you have to scrutinize the idea fairly skeptically. Otherwise, you might find yourself in the city council discussing whether or not to build a landing strip for the aliens. [There's an episode of Investigative Reports which says that a certain town in Mexico was considering doing that at one point. I'm not sure if they eventually built it or not.]

"Wild speculation" isn't such a bad thing, in and of itself, but the question is: what comes next? We needs must have some careful, detailed analysis next. If the idea manages to survive that, then maybe it's worth pursuing further.

Of course, many people (myself included) are too busy or lazy to carry thorugh into that next phase, so they just end it after the first phase. The slashdot editors also often seem a little lazy since typos and misleading, sensationalist, or just plain wrong headlines often appear on this "news" site.

This is why I, and others, frequently make fun of slashdot, and I suspect that I and they will continue to do so. In my case, it doesn't necessarily mean I actually hate slashdot. It can be a lot of fun. Occasionally, I learn something too. It's just, there's no way I can trust it a whole lot or consider it a truly reliable source of information.

You could say that slashdot's greatest strength (environment where anyone can express any random view w/o fear of recrimination, etc) is also it's greatest weakness (total lack of accountability). Of course, neither of these claims is completely true. Firstly, there is recrimination on slashdot--people that don't agree with you can mod you down--not nice but it can happen. Secondly, there's not quite a total lack of accountability. It's only almost totally lacking.

Re:DAMN!

[HiThere]

Be aware that there can be multiple layers of "causes". At one level the cause may be "the insulation on some wires failed and a short developed across the coils of a transformer".

OK. But why?

OK. But after the last New York blackout, there were many promisses that new switches were going to be emplaced that would automatically shutdown connections to large areas that were failing. This doesn't seem to have happened. Did the switches fail, or were they never installed.

OK. But I heard that there was this computer model of the entire electrical system that was being built, which would be able to examine it's sensors an from a log of failures would be able to instantly report on what the cause had been, and where it had occured. Did the model fail? Is there some reason it isn't being used?

Ok. But...

Some of these could be answered immediately (by those with knowledge), some require on site investigation. Some are obvious without any statement, e.g., clearly the super power grid model isn't being used, or they could immediately pinpoint the problem. But why? (Probably it takes a super-computer to run it, and they can't afford to have it running most of the time...if it actually works, that is.)

Re:DAMN!

[shdragon]

(In his BEST Ali-G voice)

Respect!

Biggie ups yourselves.

Re:DAMN!

[PsiPsiStar]

Its possible that they knew, but the answer was embarrasing. There's a huge gulf between reality and what the newspapers print. Ask anyone who's been to a protest against the WTO...

Re:DAMN!

[BuilderBob]

Nobody is insane (well, in general). This is exactly what the Pentagon's betting-on-terrorism was meant to do.

You ask 100 people who don't have all the information about the event and you take the consensus opinion as the result.

10 may know that Canada had blackouts first because they were talking to their family in Toronto. 15 may know there is no fire in the New York power station. 40 may have seen the News regarding the event, 10 will be working on the problem directly etc.. (sadly, 1 will be a first post, 1 will be a tinyurl version of goat...x, 15 will be AC postings who think it's a left wing conspiracy and 15 will think it's a right wing conspiracy and point out the numbers don't add up).

It worked quite well on 9/11 when News outlets (Fox ..ahem) reported Lear jets flying into the WTC and car fires outside the Pentagon. Slashdot disseminated an aggregated view that there were 4 planes, one hit the pentagon....etc. I think the news of the 4th plane was reported here much quicker than it got to the newdesks of the BBC/SkyNews in the UK. Some of it was noise, some not.

It works like the futures market, with any luck the answer the Slashdot beast comes out with in 12 hours will be an approximate version of the report out next month :)

Re:DAMN!

[kinnell]

Are you insane?

As I am posting this, there are approximately 600 comments to this article. This is already way above the average, I reckon, which means click through revenue from the advertisments on this page are also above average. So no, nobody is insane.

Re:DAMN!

[josecanuc]

I don't know... I find that the comments are now more interesting than the stories.

In the early days, yes, the stories were mostly interesting or relavent. These days there's too much stuff that I personally don't care about. That's not a problem really; it's not my website! ;-)

But dessert comes with the comments. I had no idea there were so many folks out there who don't have a clue, yet insist they do. It's one thing to be ignorant and be aware of it, or even to be ignorant and not care about it, but I see so many posts in ignorance where the poster insists they know the subject!

The "good old days" were more interesting, but less comical.

We will have to wait and see a bit

[Zachary Kessin]

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.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[Dastardly]

The california problems were cronic problems that went on over a long period of time.

What no one seems to talk about is the 1100MW nuclear reactor that could not produce power during the time due to refueling and then a busted turbine. That is what put the production on the hairy edge of demand, and then by gaming the system other producers were able to extend their profits.

Dastardly

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[notestein]

Which is why we need more capacity in production as well as transmission.

Those that are against this (enviro-nuts, nimbys) will be the death of us all.

Less "You can't disprove all the irrational arbitrary assertions of fantasy danger that I make so you can't do it."

More reason, science, transmission lines, and nuclear power plants.

All of life is about risk. None of us get out alive. I hate to break it to you but there is no life after death either.

So stop letting stupid fearful people make the rest of us suffer. Let's enjoy life with plentiful power, wonder drugs, air conditioning, and cable.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[Snorpus]

It is at least arguable that under a regulated environment, with a guaranteed minimum profit margin, electrical suppliers would have an incentive to over-design the supply system to withstand "worst-case" (and above) demands.

In a de-regulated environment, the companies design for average (or slightly above average) demand, and if demand exceeds that, oh, well.

It's not as if their customers have a boat-load of alternatives, when the entire friggin' GRID goes out.

Having said that, I'd be a lot more pissed if I didn't live in Western PA, which seems to have missed the blackout, and if I cooled my house with AC, instead of trees, fans, and windows.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[silas_moeckel]

Ah the real problem peo;le keep on saying welll we were at nearly peak demand and then somethng broke causing a cascade failure well gee some of us are engineers and how do we stop deband based cascade failures overengineer the problem.

On a small scale I see this all the time in datacenters circuts running at 80% or above asking for a breaker to trip and this is at seady load. Throw a hard problem at them like running distributed.net throw a pile of dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null and generaly tax the machines out and often you will see that circut run at 120% and trip out, bang a bunch fo low end servers offline. Reset the breaker and if they are set to autopower on watch it happen again sometimes. The first rule of engineering for reliability s never tax out any segment. If your cheap stay N+1 redundant it's not that expensive if your serivces are critical stay N*2 redundant. Our power needs are becomming more and more critical our power grig needs to become more reliable this means more power generation and transmission at the bank end.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[leviramsey]

However, power companies have been pushing for new plant construction, but environmental regulations and local approvals are next to impossible to get. As a result the only construction that occurs is to replace obsolete capacity, let alone to increase capacity to match increased demand.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[LinuxHam]

The california problems were cronic problems

cronic? Yeah, I guess the power failures did happen at regular intervals.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[Kevin DeGraaf]

1100MW nuclear reactor

Would that be one point one jigga-watts?!?

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[HiThere]

The strange coincidence was that at the peak of a hot season the power companies decided to pull several of their major generators "for maintenance" right before the failuers. Not just one. Several. And some of them had this maintenance scheduled far in advance for the period when the had to know the demand would peak. It wasn't just the one of them.

Sorry. That one was malicious manipulation by insiders.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[rootmonkey]

What the hell is a jigga-watt?!?

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[heh2k]

Sorry. That one was malicious manipulation by insiders.

for what purpose?

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[bigpat]

"this is a one time deal due to equipment failure."

equipment failure doesn't explain why 50 million people were without electricity. This is a failure of the entire system. Problems in any grid system need to be isolated not propagated over a larege portion of the continent. This is more akin to a design flaw, or a overall management failure.

On this one I vote that this is a design flaw, there were far too many people saying that this was the way it was supposed to work coming out right after this happened... If cascading failures are a design feature, then the design is flawed.

I would go further to suggest that the grid system in general is a bad idea inherently, people need to build generating capacity near the people that use it, not transmit it over thousands of miles of lines in an interconnected system that runs near capacity. This should be similar to how the Internet operates, if the Internet backbones are running over 50% capacity that is a problem, since you are not providing redundancy if that is the case. Same thing here, the immediate problem is that the rest of the system was probably operating near capacity which means that there is no redundancy. In this case the solution is either to isolate parts of the system or add capacity. Or this is going to happen again soon.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[Kevin DeGraaf]

What the hell is a jigga-watt?!?

Did you see the href over to IMDB's page on "Back to the Future"? If not, you're retarded.

If you indeed followed the hyperlink, there are two possibilities.

(1) You've seen the BttF trilogy, in which case you're retarded for not catching the significance of "jigga-watt" (the professor's mispronunciation of gigawatt)

(2) You've not seen the BttF trilogy, in which case you're retarded for replying in the manner you did without sufficient background knowledge -- the URL was an obvious clue-in to a geek joke.

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[Dastardly]

The strange coincidence was that at the peak of a hot season the power companies decided to pull several of their major generators "for maintenance" right before the failuers.

At any one time the power that could have been produced by generators in maintenance didn't come close to what that one reactor could generate. Putting those generators in maintenance would not have been a problem had that reactor been running. Every game that was played was dependent on the supply just barely meeting demand. The conditions where taking Natural Gas generators down for maintenance could drive prices up significantly would not have occurred had the San Onofre reactor been running.

Dastardly

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[rootmonkey]

Um you are retarded for

1) not realizing that was MJ Fox's response to the Doc....

2) please see number 1

Re:We will have to wait and see a bit

[HiThere]

Extra cash. Millions and millions of dollars of extra cash. I may be underestimating.

It is also playing a significant part in the recall of Gov. Davis. Outside of playing along with Enron he hasn't been that bad a governor, given the current economic climate. But that.... it's pretty hard to forgive, even if he was set up as a patsy.

There *will* be a test

[dfay]

"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!

Re:There *will* be a test

[Darby]

Will there be partial credit for flamebait or troll comments?

Flamebait, only if a fish hooks your bait and burns its mouth.

Trolls, similar to flamebait given you have to hook somebody and troll them along the line. Crapflooding or stupid shit like that that gets modded "troll" only because there isn't an "asshat" moderation recieves minus half a point.

Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated!

[raehl]

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.

Fraud was a contribution factor in California...

[DaveJay]

"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"

Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/national /main546097.shtml [cbsnews.com]

Re:I say...

[danormsby]

I'm going to steal wind up radios before those new fangled Opterons. At least I'll be able to use them!

Smoking Gun

[ultraexactzz]

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.

rumours?

[forgetmenot]

Yes. Let's turn slashdot into a rumour-mill.
Oh wait...

Re:rumours?

[ectoraige]

Yes lets...

The Canadian PM is reported to be blaming lightning in Niagra as the primary cause.

Maybe they can generate some power off the blushes of the engineers...

let's be polite...

[Anonymous Coward]

i think that we should hold on this discussion topic until those from the north east coast can join in. everyone please stop posting.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[Xerithane]

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.

Like the Nevada power outage?

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).

Sorry, this is national news. The Nevada power outtage was national news. And CNN has been reporting the Al Qaeda capture for several hours.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[SubjunctiveSam]

Your problem is tv. I get my (non-nerd news) from news.bbc.co.uk and my subscription to the Wall Street Journal. If you give it a try, I think you'll find that you're disgusted a lot less by the BBC than you are with CNN. It's really not very UK-centric either. It's very world-centric, if you know what I mean, and I think does a better job of covering American news than CNN does.

The real question

[Pompatus]

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!!! :)

Re:The real question

[photon317]

Are you sure all of New Orleans has blackouts for 10-20 minutes once a week? I doubt it being such a major city. More than likely you locally experience blackouts in a much smaller area of New Orleans, and you should be bitching out your power company and/or your complex if you're in an apartment of some kind.

In a downtown apartment in houston, I get on average about one "minor event" every two weeks, a minor event being a brownout for 30 seconds max, or maybe a really quick 1 second blip that's hard to define as black or brownout. Actual power loss for any appreciable amount of time happens maybe once every few months at the most, generally due to a large storm or other natural phenomena. Again, this is my local stuff at my apartment, these things are usually very localized, I haven't heard of any decent-scale blackout in Houston in recent memory other than during storms bad enough to be considered natural disasters or close to it.

Re:The real question

[Poeir]

Go outside? But there's this weird kind of light. It doesn't seem to make any kind of buzzing sound at all. I don't trust it.

Re:The real question

[NOLAChief]

Not sure where in the city you are but here in Uptown it's been my experience that the power stays stable (aside from the occasional alarm clock killing blip) unless there's a really major storm.

On another note, CNN is now reporting that a lightning strike hit a power plant in the Niagra Falls area, so this entire story might get a -1, Offtopic.

Re:The real question

[Pompatus]

Consider yourself lucky :) I used to live across from (and I had to look this up to spell it) Le Bon Temps. I think that was the individual building. It's a bit better in the CBD, which is strange considering how much worse the flooding is in this part of town.

But my main point was power outages are normal occurances. WAAAY too much media attention assosiated with this.

Re:The real question

[autocracy]

Having lived in the south for a while, their electric reliability isn't very good compared to (at least) the New England area. Most outages we have here are caused by damages to distribution lines (trees falling down, mostly) that take out either small or large areas depending on how critical they are. Resetting clocks in houses I've lived in up here has been a rare event, and most of the time I've lost power it's either winter or somebody with a motor vehicle missed the road. Once in a great European 2003 style heat-wave everybody finds their A/C units and hooks them up. Still incredibly rare (on the scale of years).

Re:The real question

[pudge]

I realize that it's impressive that such a wide area recieved a blackout, but really, is this such a big deal?

Thousands of people trapped in elevators and trains, potential for large-scale looting, economic impact well into the millions? Um, yeah, it's a big deal.

Re:The real question

[Heisenbug]

It sounds like it's the people who were in the subways, and on the streets, who had a problem with this. Oh, and the ones in the elevators. I bet they would have been glad to go outside ...

When power fails regularly, it's a very different thing from when it fails for the first time in years. New Orleans would be a disaster area if it got hit by the kind of earthquake that's common-place in California. (Last I checked, most of your city is below sea level, isn't it?)

Re:The real question

[CoolMoDee]

wow..that is quite offten. I live in southern california (just south of la), wasn't effected by the rolling blackouts a few years ago and havn't lost power in over *checks server uptime* 307 days. I think I would go insane if I lived where the power went out every 2 -3 minutes just because the ups beeping at me.

Re:The real question

[andrewmc]

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.

In a way I hope it isn't. My spamassassin box got only 20% of the crap it normally gets last night. Coincidence? ;-)

Re:The real question

[analog_line]

Have you eer been to the Northeast? New York in particular? We live on electricity up here. It's worse than crack, refined sugar, and nicotine combined. It's like oxygen. No power, and life stops dead in it's tracks. No power and the elderly will start falling over dead within an hour in the heat of a New York summer. Go outside? In New York City? In the heat of summer? Are you MAD? I mean yeah, people are doing it because they HAVE to, but once the power comes back on, you bet your ass they're going to be inside where it's safe, and likely a hell of a lot cooler.

In the Northeast, if we started regularly losing power for 10-20 minutes once or twice a week, political careers would be ended in quick succession until someone fixed the problem, that or the region's economy would start crumbling because businesses couldn't keep reliable power happening, and people would get sick of dealing with regular power outages.

Re:The real question

[CTho9305]

That's what really bugs me about that (New Mexico?) governor's comments about our "third-world" power system. Losing power at most a few times per year is NOT third world... whoever this guy was, he clearly doesn't know what third-world means.

I guess we also run third-world computers, since they go down a few times per year too ;).

Re:The real question

[evilviper]

Thousands of people trapped in elevators and trains, potential for large-scale looting, economic impact well into the millions? Um, yeah, it's a big deal.

That doesn't say anything about the power... Not really... All it says is how poorly everything was designed. How much (well, stupid) faith is placed in the notoriously unreliable electric utilites.

Any decent-sized building should have it's own generator, no exceptions. It doesn't have to meet peek demands, but enough to get things done, and keep a few lights on.

Any application that is time-critical needs to be on battery backup that will completely support it for something like 30 minutes.

That's the way things are supposed to be, and just about anyone can tell you that. Problem is, nobody does it, and nobody is demanding that the people they pay do their jobs where backup power is concerned.

Re:The real question

[pudge]

That's the way things are supposed to be, and just about anyone can tell you that.

Yes, but just about anyone who actually knows what they are talking about will tell you something different.

Re:The real question

[evilviper]

Yes, but just about anyone who actually knows what they are talking about will tell you something different.

Way to go... Thank you for adding absolutely nothing to the conversation.

Re:The real question

[pudge]

Yes, I suppose I could have stated the obvious truth it is not possible to have the sort of backup systems you are talking about, because of the huge costs involved. But you said ANYONE could tell me that is how it should be, so who am I to argue with anyone? I don't live in the fantasy world you live in, where cost is irrelevant and only benefit matters, so I am unqualified to add much to such a conversation as that.

Re:The real question

[evilviper]

the obvious truth it is not possible to have the sort of backup systems you are talking about, because of the huge costs involved.

Huge costs? Come on now... I have a generator of my own (in fact, several if you also count the ability to connect an inverter to a car/truck).

It would be far cheaper (per-person) to buy a single large generator for a building, than each person having to buy their own. There is no maintenance cost involved, until the point that you first need to use it, in which case, just about everyone would be so happy to have it, that they wouldn't have a problem with a little work to keep it going.

As for battery backups, they aren't needed everywhere, but just in a few critical areas, meaning any place a person's well-being is affected... I don't see any excuse for backup batteries not being installed in elevators, and for emergency lighting. For elevators, even a $20 car battery would be enough to power a elevator for a couple seconds while it goes to the nearest floor, and opens the doors. Backup lighting would need to be on considerable longer, but it's not difficult to handle at all, since emergency lighting is rather common, and just requires someone to sink the initial installation costs.

I don't live in the fantasy world you live in, where cost is irrelevant and only benefit matters

It's no fantasy... Risk to life and limb seems to be a good enough benefit to me to cover the initial costs. Hey, with the cost of apartments in NY, people wouldn't even notice an extra few cents on their monthly bill to pay for the inital equipment.

If you think this involves incredible ammounts of money, you aren't getting that idea from anything I said.

Re:The real question

[pudge]

Huge costs?

Yes.

It would be far cheaper (per-person) to buy a single large generator for a building

At a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a moderately sized building, millions for a large one. Are you going to pay for it?

There is no maintenance cost involved, until the point that you first need to use it

Ridiculous. Of course there are maintenance costs involved. You need to check it regularly, have it cleaned, keep it powered.

If you think this involves incredible ammounts of money, you aren't getting that idea from anything I said.

Then you have no idea what you are talking about, which isn't surprising.

Re:The real question

[pudge]

At a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a moderately sized building, millions for a large one.

You are managing to be vague enough that I really can't even rebut. How many people are in a "moderately-sized" or "large" building? For building generators, you can find units that cost as little as a few hundred dollars per person.

Why would you need to rebut anything? You've just conceded the point. A building for 333 - 3333 people (assuming your minimum of $300 per person) would cost "hundreds of thousands of dollars." Above that is "millions." Thanks.

And to just round this out, let's note that there's about 8 million people in New York City. Just to cover HOUSING, that would be a cost of $2.4 billion. That doesn't even include office space.

Over the corse of a few months, you could pay that off without even noticing, and that price will pay for a unit that will be around for a long long time.

Again, are you going to pay for it?

You do not need to check it, have it cleaned, or keep it powered.

Right, because if it has no power, it will work just fine! Oh, you mean you forgot that keeping it powered costs money? Huh. And yeah, if you are going to spend millions on a backup system, you wouldn't want to regularly check it out; that would be just nutty! Because things NEVER go wrong with backup systems! What was I thinking?

Re:The real question

[pudge]

No, you made it sound like it's going to be thousands of dollars per-person.

No, I used your figure of $300 per person. Please learn to read and do math.

The fact is that it doesn't need to be powered until it is needed.

Right, because when the power goes out, it will power itself through cold fusion! You don't need to keep it powered beforehand! What was I thinking?

If it's just sitting around, not operating, about the only thing that would go wrong is that some belts might break, and it only takes a few minutes to fix that when you need the generator.

Wrong answer. It needs to be checked out regularly to make sure nothing is wrong with it. That is necessarily the case.

Can't Believe It

[isa-kuruption]

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.

Re:Can't Believe It

[Mikey-San]

Perhaps you should read the posts before you point fingers.

Deregulation is a serious issue when it comes to you-need-them-or-your-life-is-hell utilities like, for example, electricity.

"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."

No one's explicitly blaming anyone or anything here, but I know it was one of the first things that shot to MY mind when I heard about the mass outages. Look again at the story title's last four words:

"Is There a Story?"

That's what this discussion is about. Not blame off the top, but /is/ deregulation to blame? I see nothing wrong with this question.

New Zealand

[SimonInOz]

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?)

Re:New Zealand

[blake182]

A friend of mine wrote up a rather entertaining summary of the Great Auckland blackout. Hope they don't mind the Slashdotting. http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/mercury .txt

Re:New Zealand

[jonbrewer]

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.

I think this would be a slight overstatement. I'd never heard of this until you mentioned it, but decided to do a little research:

The BBC said: "At its height, the blackout affected more than 8,500 businesses employing almost 74,000 people, and some 6,230 apartment dwellers."

So while the center of Auckland lost power, it certainly wasn't like two million people were living without power for a month.

It was, however, the equivalent of losing power to a few square blocks of Manhattan or downtown Chicago.

Re:New Zealand

[rediguana]

They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.

Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report. They did have multiple lines going into Central Auckland (see this section of the report, pages 34-39). It is true that maintainence had been cut back. One failed, and placed increasing loads on the remaining two (if I recall correctly) lines. After about a week of increasing load, these two lines failed as well. So yes, one failed and it caused two others to fail later. But to say they were totally inept and had only one line for central Auckland is just wrong. And it was only the central city. Auckland is a very spread out city, and greater Auckland in fact covers four cities. It was only the Central Business District that was affected.

Aucklands failure was human in origin however. It sounds like todays failure in Niagara was of natural origin (lightning strike), and could perhaps be compared to the Canadian powercuts caused by the ice storms of 1998.

Cheers Gav

Re:New Zealand

[ptudor]

I quote from the official Inquiry:

Mercury Energy's network planners made judgements based on the information provided by the cable asset managers. If the network planners had been aware of the actual loading capability of the underground cables the network planning and contingency planning approaches may have been different. This may have avoided the loss of supply to the CBD. This is considered to be one of the central issues to the failure in supply.

So apparently a primary cause is design flaw. How is privatization responsible for an incorrect installation? I agree weeks without downtown power is a disaster, but this looks like a problem years in the making.

I do remember Challenger, but I think NASA was and still is largely a government bureaucracy devoid of a mandate or reasonable mission. You can't blame privatization when the government still holds the monopoly seventeen years later.

Re:New Zealand

[ukoda]

Yes it was a botch up and made visits to the city interesting. One thing overlooked is that there was a large engineering project underway to replace the cables at the time but was not due for completion for a couple of years. It was a new tunnel designed to carry new cables and allow future upgrades and maintenance. In that respect they were unlucky it didn't quite goes the distance but I think the key thing is that serious money was being spent to upgrade the supply before the failure.

Re:New Zealand

[automatix]

After doing some research on this for an undergrad paper, it turns out that it was a combination of bad luck and accounting/management.

The major 110kV CBD feeder lines had their lifetimes "reassessed" and it was decided that there were still plenty of years left in them. So they took their time replacing them (it was underway when the crisis started), but it turns out their lifetimes were more like the original specifications (funny that).

One major 110kV line failed while one was down for maintenance, which lead to the failure of another two 110kV lines a few days later due to overloading. It didn't help when some monkey roadworker dug thru one of the smaller 40kV feeders that were helping prop up the cbd either.

Then it got fun - rolling morning/afternoon blackouts, companies moving to offices out in the suburbs, temporary overhead lines erected running 20km to one of the other distribution yards, generators everywhere...

Deregulation hadn't been completed at that stage - the new lines/distribution company in Auckland which came in to being a year or so after the crisis is taking their job very seriously and has done a lot to improve uptime and redundancy.

Rob :)

Re:New Zealand

[RodgerDodger]

In a major(-ish - hey, I live in Sydney) city

Just for the record: Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million, according to this site.

The US has only one city larger, and that's the Big Apple (with LA coming second, at about 3.8 million); there are 9 US cities with a population exceeding one million.

The population of the greater Auckland region is just above 1 million. So yes, it's a major city (and yes, I know that administratively it's actually 4 cities)

Re:New Zealand

[stanwirth]

SIMON: They cut back on maintanance and instead of three main feeds, they had one. It blew up.

GAV: Sorry but you're wrong. Go read the final report.

Give it up, Gav. You're playing the same game of misdirection-at-the-details the government played.

The bottom line is, even taking your technical details into account, corners were cut on maintenance, and as a result, most of the 1.5 million people in Auckland either had no power at work, or no power at home -- or both . Rather than fixing the problem within a week, after a week it got much worse . Many companies went out of business -- so even if you weren't working in head office downtown, and didn't live in the blackout area -- if you worked for one of these businesses, you were still affected.

Furthermore, you can't compare Auckland to a city of 1.5 mil in the US, and you certainly can't compare the Auckland CBD to a city of 300K -- Pittsburgh?. Auckland is the New York of New Zealand, and the Auckland CBD is the MANHATTAN of New Zealand--not the Rochester or Pittsburgh. In terms of economic impact on the whole country , the Auckland CBD is where the national offices of most corporations and banks are located.

After the blackout, both Coca Cola corporation and IBM decided to move the bulk of their Australasian operations to Sydney. Now how does that affect everybody purchasing IBM gear who now have to get on the horn to OZ every time a new APAR is annouced? All the New Zealand IBM employees? All of the New Zealand employees of Coca-Cola? These weren't the only two major corps to flee. And then there were all the small shops in the CBD that went out of business. It was like a ghost town.

Another thing that makes it just cynical and callous in the extreme to dismiss this as "only" between 300,000 and 1.5 million people were affected is that -- this is between a tenth and nearly a half of all the people in the country!!! So it's comparable, in terms of the percentage of citizens affected -- to most of the US eastern seaboard going out. for months .

Re:New Zealand

[ColaMan]

It was, however, the equivalent of losing power to a few square blocks of Manhattan or downtown Chicago.

Yeah, for *five weeks*. Not good. If you lived or worked there, and was told you couldn't use the power there for 5 weeks, you'd be pretty pissed off. This was the central business district remember, and Auckland is a large city by NZ standards. Find the ratio of 74,000 people powerless to the total Auckland population and apply to Manhattan and see how it'd go.

Anyway it was one big fuckup, that's for sure.

Re:New Zealand

[Minna Kirai]

Just for the record: Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million, according to this site.

I don't believe that chart. It compares apples and orange trees.

According to this Sydney page, the population of Sydney is 72,500. That's the city itself. The Sydney Metropolitan Area is the one with 4 million people.

Compare that to the NYC area, which has more than 19 million people (same as all of Australia). The Met areas of LA, Seattle, Chicago, DC, and other US cities dwarf Sydney as well. Why, even tiny Boston and desolate Dallas have 3+ million in their areas.

A nation that wants to seem more important on the world stage can play games with city limits, pumping up the size number for a "city" by lumping in the neighboring areas. From a practical standpoint, though, US metropoli are larger than anything you'll find Down Under.

Re:New Zealand

[RodgerDodger]

*cough* The "City of Sydney" is a very small district, centered on the CBD. That's one electoral district for the Sydney City Council. It's analogous to the "City of London".

You may have noticed a little further down the page where it said that 293000 people worked in the "City of Sydney"; that should have helped give you a clue.

The data from the site I quoted earlier is sourced from the UN. BTW, on the same site is the listing from the US Census bureau. Top 9 cities:

1. New York (8 million)
2. LA (3.7 mil)
3. Chi-town (2.9 mil)
4. Houston (1.9 mil)
5. Philly (1.5 mil)
6. Phoenix (1.3 mil)
7. San Diego (1.2 mil)
8. Dallas (1.2 mil)
9. San Antonio (1.1 mil)

Seattle ranked in at 563,374. DC was a bit larger at 572,059. Boston was 589,141.

That 19 million figure for NY you have, BTW, is for New York State, not NYC (again, according to the US Census...). If you want to check your facts and figures, you're welcome to play again, though.

BTW, Sydney doesn't "lump in the neigboring areas". There's at least one city next to Sydney (Paramatta), which shows up separatly on our census figures, and it's been more or less swallowed up by the urban sprawl.

Australia has fewer cities than the US; that doesn't make them smaller. While the US has 9 cities with population above 1 million, Australia (with less than 10% of the population of the US) has 5 (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth);

Re:New Zealand

[jfern]

I think the population of metro areas is more relevant. The NY metro area has something like 25 million people. Sometimes the central city is only a small fraction of the total population. I believe the SF bay area has 7.5 million people, but SF has something around 700,000. San Jose actually has slightly more people, but it would be really silly to call it the central city.

Re:New Zealand

[HidingMyName]

I'm not sure of numbers, a quick google turned up U.S. Metropolitan Area Population Estimates, you can check their ranked list. I'm not sure how they draw the boundaries, for example, there are people in eastern PA who commute to NYC and people in Albany NY who also commute to NYC (it is 2 1/2 to 3 hours by car, in Albany you can use a train, it is about the same distance). Many major western hemisphere cities were omitted (Mexico City in particular is huge, and Canada has some major cities too).

Re:New Zealand

[evilviper]

Sydney is the 31st largest city in the world, with a population just above 4 million,

You know, that is completely meaningless.

One "City" equals "Arbitrarily large, politically appointed region".

How about if the United States just starts combining cities into groups of 4 million, eventually making Sydney around the 70th largest city in the world.

Population per city means nothing... Population per area is all that matters.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm off to propose cutting Alaska in half, so Texas will be the third largest state in the US.

Re:New Zealand

[Minna Kirai]

That 19 million figure for NY you have, BTW, is for New York State, not NYC (again, according to the US Census...).

Nope. It's the New York "Metropolitan Area". What you'd call "one city" if you judged borders by building density. Since NYC is on the border to New Jersey, the Metro area includes people out of NY state. Thus the Met-area by itself is as populous as NYS.

If you want to check your facts and figures, you're welcome to play again, though.

I already checked, as the authoritative tone of my post was supposed to indicate. I didn't want to insult by implying you were unable to operate google yourself. But now I have no choice, and will provide links, and even paste in the relevant factoids.

• 
  The World's 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas
  1 Tokyo-Yokohama Japan 33,190,000
  2 New York United States 20,270,000
  4 Mexico City Mexico 19,620,000
  8 Los Angeles United States 16,200,000
  27 Chicago United States 8,960,000
  29 Washington-Baltimore United States 7,430,000
  34 San Francisco United States 6,940,000
  37 Philadelphia United States 6,010,000
  39 Detroit-Windsor United States-Canada 5,810,000
  42 Boston United States 5,690,000
  49 Dallas-Fort Worth United States 5,010,000
  50 Madrid Spain 4,950,000

And what position does Sydney have on that list? None. No Australian city even places. (Adding Paramatta's 150,000 into the Sydney total still won't bump it ahead of Madrid)

For verification, here's a separate list of metro areas in the US only.

excuses?

[Cyno]

What excuses do you want to give me for this type of "accident"?

When do you think we'll be seeing the next one?

Kudos to Jamie for using Google cache for NM site

[caferace]

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. ;)

Re:Fraud was a contribution factor in California..

[DaveJay]

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! ;)

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[twistedcubic]

Care to give details/references?

There's a difference

[sxltrex]

There's a difference between designed rolling blackouts and catastrophic cascade events that cause blackouts (California had one of these as well, years before the rolling blackouts). Neither is directly caused by deregulation.

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.

Re:I say...

[TedCheshireAcad]

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.

This happened in 1965 too

[young-earth]

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.

Can't survive without electricity? WTF?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everyone needs electricity," says Toth. "You can't be without it.

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.

Re:Can't survive without electricity? WTF?!

[je56]

You're kind of pointing out the wrong thing. He didn't quite mean that along the lines of "No one knows how to get out and live in the wilderness!" or "We'll all die without electricity!" but more like "It fuels our society," which it does.

How the power grid works...

[Zachary Kessin]

In case people are wondering how the power grid works, here is an article on howstuffworks.com on how
The power grid works

Re:How the power grid works...

[simstick]

There was an expert on CNN saying that this was a succes as far as the saftey of the grid was concered. It knocked out 20% of the Eastern US grid.
The country also has the Western grid and the Texas area grid.

As I'm in the 80% part I have to agree with him.

Other problems with the power grid?

[karpenl]

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.

The problem is it WASN'T deregulated

[digrieze]

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.

Re:The problem is it WASN'T deregulated

[soft_guy]

Wouldn't a brick wall be terrible for scrambling eggs? You'd have small bits of clay in the eggs. Yuck.

I'll take my eggs over-easy and turned with a spachela instead of a brick wall.

Re:The problem is it WASN'T deregulated

[enronman]

The grid means the WIRES, we have PLENTY of power plants. They just arn't in the right locations, and there are not enough lines to move the power around sufficently to stop something like what we've seen tonight.

Re:The problem is it WASN'T deregulated

[Baumi]

Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.

Interesting: Apparently this whole thing came about because of excess power consumption (among a combination of other factors). Yet you're trying to put the blame on those people who advocate reducing power consumption and conserving energy.

we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power.

IIRC, no other country needs as much energy per capita as the USA. European countries have a similar standard of living without the energy consumption.

Jens

Re:The problem is it WASN'T deregulated

[McNihil]

Well fine, let Wilhelm III Gates take care of your power needs. Don't come whining later.

Re:I know what happened!!!

[Un pobre guey]

Running Windows, unpatched with the Blaster worm causes power outages!!!!!

Don't laugh too hard, you may be right.

Who needs terrorists when we can fuck ourselves up far more thoroughly.

Re:Politics for nerds, stuff that doesnt matter

[Stalus]

Not much technology runs without power of some sort.

Breath, Jamie, it's gonna be ok

[snopes]

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.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

I am sick of the NYC bias we see in the media.

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. Tough. New York is the financial capital of this nation and incidentally of the world, too. What's there? Hmmm, ignoring the 8 million residents and 5 million daily commuters, we also have the New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ, and one of the Fed Reserve Banks, and, oh yeah, the United Nations. These make it news.

If a power outage had roiled through London and an equivalent land area, it would also be news. Losing power in the desert -- not so much news.

Is Jamie the real Linda Richman?

[Percy_Blakeney]

Am I the only one who thought this "story" sounded a bit too much like SNL's Coffee Talk?

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: New York power outage, deregulation disaster or the work of SCO terrorists... discuss!"

Sorry!!!

[Chester K]

Sorry everyone, this one was my fault... I accidentally plugged my toaster oven in the same outlet as my microwave. :(

There is no such animal

[b-baggins]

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.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[commodoresloat]

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.

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?

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[Dastardly]

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

Blaim Canada

[ratfynk]

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.

Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35

[Ummite]

Last theory from Canadian governement is a thunderstorm near the border of canada-us, US-side, that cause the blackout.

Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35

[ruprechtjones]

Both sides of the border confirmed that lightning struck the Niagra plant. It's all ready to be switched back on, but they're spreading the message (well, trying to) for everybody to turn appliances and lights OFF before they crank back up the power.

Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35

[Sherloqq]

I live 10km away and I was driving home thru Niagara Falls when this happened. There was NO THUNDERSTORM. NO LIGHTNING. Not even a CLOUD IN THE SKY.

But you probably know that by now.

Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35

[ruprechtjones]

Yup, since I wrote that, there have been at least two other pinpoints blamed. I guess in general, it's easy to blame the (forty-year) old lines in the Loop. Blame blame blame, that's the 'merican media game.

Power drains required for Nuclear plants...

[Erik_]

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.

Yes, in some ways

[jhines]

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.

regarding deregulation

[cr@ckwhore]

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.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[erikdotla]

The reason Fox News' website wasn't reporting on the outage is (most likely) the fact (possibility) that thier website operations are based in NY. This was noticed by someone on Fark.

However, power has obviously been restored - check foxnews.com for a the biggest GIF with the word "BLACKOUT" on it you have ever seen.

New Orleans

[commodoresloat]

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.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[helix400]

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.

A few years back, the Western US's power grid went down. If I remember correctly, the blackout covered 11 states, 2 Canadian provinces, and parts of Mexico. It got news coverage, top story on NBC news I think, but nothing like how they're covering it now. However, that situation was a bit different, because in most areas, the power was only off for a few minutes, while others had their power off for hours.

But I'm sure that if the major news network HQ's were located out west, it would have been breaking news major headline stuff. "We're reporting live from outside our window, where you can see...it's...umm...daylight...but the power is OUT! There is potential for problems!"

Re:Un-fucking-believable.

[erikdotla]

Why isn't your block working now?

Speculation is pointless...

[YrWrstNtmr]

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.

East has pockets with power

[IamGarageGuy 2]

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.

Re:East has pockets with power

[N1XIM]

Dang it, most of the East has power. For once they even said it on the news (while ignoring the fact that most of the people watching in the Boston TV market--for one example--just don't much give a shit what happens in NYC--even when it is important). Sure, we need to know that part of the grid went down--but here in NH, where I am now--about 22Mi from the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant--I don't think that anything is likely to happen if it didn't happen already.

Where is the source problem?

[superyooser]

We do not know where the blackout began!

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.

Re:Where is the source problem?

[taustin]

Actually, quite a bit is known already, if you know who to ask. A power station at Niagra shut down due ot overload, most likely from the heat wave and resulting use of air conditioners. A relay that regulated under-frequency failed to seperate a power station in Manhattan, which caused a cascade throughout the grid (and, while it may not have "caught fire," most certainly was not intended to belch clouds of black smoke, even if it failed).

It's a simple matter of a heat wave causing too much power to be used, and multiple equipment failures causing a cascade.

Bad, but not mysterious.

Re:Un-fucking-believable.

[erikdotla]

Oh, "AD" servers.

Well, even so: Why do you block the ads yet still read the site? If you're reading it, it must provide some value to you - even if that value is just something to anger you and fill a void in your life whereby you need something to complain about every day - so you should be supporting their revenue model instead of stealing their content.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[hondo77]

At least it's a break from hearing about the recall in California (and I live here).

CA rolling blackouts not due to deregulation

[geekee]

"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.

Re:CA rolling blackouts not due to deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

You are deeply misinformed. California's power outages weren't due to genuine insufficient power supply, but instead due to a set of games Enron played with the system there to reduce supply and make the state desperate enough to pay vastly inflated prices for energy. this page gives a short list of the various tricks used, taken directly from Enron memos. To make the various plans ("Death Star", "Fat Boy", and "Richochet") even more profitable, Enron ordered its powerplant owning subsidiaries to take several of their plants offline for wholly unnecessary "maintenance", rendering power in California scarce.

Search on google for "death star" enron for more information on this -- there's a LOT of sources on it. Except in the event of Enron-style malfeasance California had more than enough power plants to provide continual service, and even if they had built more Enron would have taken just enough of them offline to make the state desperate.

IMO it's an absolute travesty how little national attention the Enron "Death Star" plan received, even after Ken Lay and friends channeled all the profits to their private accounts and let the empty shell of Enron fall over. As far as I can tell, the only places it got reported at all were local California and Texas newspapers.

Yes! Let's speculate wildly!!!

[Picass0]

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!!!

Deregulation a contributor to that fraud...

[poptones]

And so it goes. Widespread deregulation of public infrastructure is going to be remembered as a phenomenal mistake. People with way too fucking much money and power are driving this phenom, and only a fool believes they're doing it out of some touchy feely public compassion.

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...

Re:Deregulation a contributor to that fraud...

[leviramsey]

That's part and parcel with capitalism: companies go out of business.

Indeed, it is that capacity for creative destruction that gives capitalism it's power and its benefits. For instance, Southwest and JetBlue are both doing fabulously well relative to their fellow airlines. Neither could have gotten to this point without deregulation (Southwest would have still been a small regional airline and JetBlue wasn't even a glimmer in someone's eye). Why are they successful? They identified what the core of the business is (getting people from point A to point B) and, in their own ways, came up with a better way to do it than anybody else (in Southwest's case, not heavily unionizing, picking one aircraft and using it for everything, and cutting non-essential services to their customers while cutting the prices). It's not surprising that their competitors, with byzantine, adversarial labor relations, too much overhead, and extremely complex networks couldn't compete.

But then they start to show glimmers of possible failure (which everyone could see coming), and, because they're job machines and have wealthy shareholders, both parties fall over themselves to bail them out.

The best thing to do is to let them fail. What then happens? You get a shitload of planes, hangars, and airport berths on the market. Some of those are obsolete (indeed, Southwest has the newest fleet in the airline industry; their average plane is about 7 years old, versus 25 years for a few airlines), but a lot are saleable. The demand for air travel hasn't gone away; investors will be lining up to buy the planes to start new airlines and coming up with new ways of doing business.

A similar thing is happening with telecom. Investors are snapping up the fiber from bankrupt telcos at fractions of the original cost and using those networks to offer remote backup services and enable (eventually) new broadband technologies. New businesses, with smarter management, are taking over assets of those who failed and improving things.

Re:Deregulation a contributor to that fraud...

[pmz]

The best thing to do is to let them fail.

Mod parent up, please. The government's ability to cover up the truth and prop up untenable situations causes much much more damage than just letting things take their course.

Re:Deregulation a contributor to that fraud...

[cpeterso]

The best thing to do is to let them fail.

yes, someone PLEASE let Amtrak (finally) fail.

Dang - You beat me to it!

[flatulus]

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.

Re:Dang - You beat me to it!

[OneFix]

Actually what I found interesting was that I belive it was on Connections that they said according to the power companies effected, it couldn't happen again because of the design of the new circuits and the new distribution method...

If this proves to be the case, then a quote seems in order...

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." -George Santayana

SCO, the RIAA, and MSBlast are the culprits!

[xanderwilson]

Hey, you asked us for crying out loud!

In all seriousness though, the power grid isn't running Windows, is it?

Alex.

Alternate power

[bigjnsa500]

After this incident I think all of us need to consider some kind of other power source than electricity. For about 10k you can get enough panels to power a small house. For another 5-10k, you'll have enough power to sell *back* to your local power company. You can easily get your money back in 1-2 years.

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.

Re:Alternate power

[lostindenver]

Where did you get your equipment? I have been looking in Colorado and have found nothing under 30k to run my house.

Re:Alternate power

[bigjnsa500]

A company here in San Antonio that sells power cells. I didn't delve into it until I saw a episode on DIY TV about solar cells, what to buy, how to install it. It was very, very good. I am sure you can get the transcript if you goto the DIY website.

Re:Alternate power

[GigsVT]

$800 for 10 watts, and you say you can power a house on 10,000 dollars?

Yeah, maybe if your house has a single light bulb, and that's it.

Re:Alternate power

[aliens]

Unless I'm mistaken solar cells have to be replaced rather often. Also I dunno bout you but shelling out $20K in the first place isn't a ho hum decsion. Then paying $XXXX amount to replace the cells?

Let's see $20K which is a good deal of savings over a couple of years. Buy the solar cells or invest it wisely? hmmmmmmm.

Poor implementation

[boatboy]

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...

They've behave better because they'd have to.

[raehl]

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.

Re:They've behave better because they'd have to.

[Elwood P Dowd]

Fraud. They still committed fraud, no matter what new regulations they were exploiting.

So much for private entreprise.

[Pig Hogger]

40 years ago, Quebec nationalized all power-procuction and put it under Hydro-Quebec's umbrella. The State-owned corporation has never since failed to yield enormous profits (all going to the Quebec government - that's so much we won't have to pay in taxes), yet is providing the cheapest electricity in the world.

Private-entreprise zealots quickly lose steam whenever you point Hydro-Quebec at them as a shining example of profitable State ownership.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[eddie can read]

Private-entreprise zealots quickly lose steam whenever you point Hydro-Quebec at them as a shining example of profitable State ownership.

If it's so efficient and so profitable, then it doesn't need to be a monopoly. So it would be fine to end the monopoly and let HQ compete fairly against fully deregulated competitors. I notice that's not happening, and consequently suspect your account is...incomplete.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quebec has huge amount of cheap hydro power.
Quebec produces more power than it consumes, it is near a large energy consumer US east coast.

Quebec goverment does not permit anyone to build powerlines to transmit Newfoundland's labador hydor power to the US across Quebec, instead they buy the power at cost and sell it to the US.

Quebec's goverment ripping of Newfoundland and having lots of natural resources is not the shinning example you think it is.

Kamil

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Sir Spank-o-tron]

Why bother deregulating ?
Really, what is to be gained ?

Isn't cheap power the goal ?

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[eddie can read]

Why bother deregulating ?
Really, what is to be gained ?

Isn't cheap power the goal ?

Markets are famous for making things cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, so deregulation on the face of it is a good idea if what you want is cheap power. An example of this is computers. The rapid advance in computer technology is driven private enterprise, e.g., Intel and AMD and Dell and HP and Motorola and Apple, and all the rest. All these companies locked in perpetual competition is what keeps us zipping into the future.

That's not proof that deregulation will work, but it's certainly something to try.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[s.fontinalis]

It's not necesarily incomplete. In fact it's very conceivable that even if competition were allowed, no competition would occur. Hydro plants are a substantial capital investment, with a comparatively minimal return (especially when you can't write off part of the program as "job creation").

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[eddie can read]

Hydro plants are a substantial capital investment, with a comparatively minimal return

So the bit about the Quebecois hydro plant being amazingly profitable was warm-ish air...

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Phil-14]

So all we have to do now is to nationalize our power industry, and we'd suddenly have the per-capita hydroelectric capacity that Quebec has?

Quebec has enourmous hydroelectric resources and a very sparse population. Saudi Arabia has the same sort of situation regarding oil. However, in neither case did the natural resources come about because of nationalization.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quebec does have one of the best electrical systems around - even discounting the ice storm :). Electricity is not simply a commodity like milk or eggs because it is highly inelastic, it has significant barriers to entry and it has very significany economies of scale.

1) Inelastic - demand does not flucuate tremendously due to price. While higher prices due lead to decreased demands and energy conservation, electricity is almost a need - unlike eggs which competes against food - for heating, cooling, lighting and computers. So having electricity out of government hands can lead to tremendous gouging - look at all the examples of unsuccessful degregulation attempts.

2) Barriers to entry - additional competitors face tremendous barriers to entry. Plants and transmission lines are incredibly expensive and governments are the only ones that can build and invest in the system without an immediate payback demanded by investors. Plus, in a truly free electicity market, switching providers would be incredibly expensive because each provider would have their own lines to your house. That is why in most deregulation systems the supply of electricity is deregulated but tranmission is still a government monopoly.

3) Economies of scale - Hydro-Quebec, being the only supplier, can exploit huge economies of scale to provide electricity at a cheaper price. Multiple electricity generators would split the market and increase the average unit cost simply due to a smaller economy of scale. Sometimes - like public transit - monopolies are better (even government ones)

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Phil-14]

Following up to myself, I found the following statistics: California has 14,000 MW of hydroelectric capacity, 30 million people, and no new suitable sites. Quebec has 7 million people, 34,000 MW of hydroelectric capacity, and many unused sites (they're thinking of building more). I really doubt these numbers are the result of nationalization.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[God! Awful 2]

Quebec's goverment ripping of Newfoundland and having lots of natural resources is not the shinning example you think it is.

Well, Newfoundland did agree to a rather dumb 25 year (or was it 50 years) power contract with Quebec. A perfect illustration of how electing an incompetent government (that means you, Dubya) can have very profound long-term consequences.

-a

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[khallow]

i wander why stupid people would like to have some private enterprises taking profit from something where the state takes it. as if they dont realize the state are themselves. and these stupid people are the ones that raise their little flags in the name of "democracy". maybe i've got the answer yet: they are stupid.

There's a few reasons why. First, the State isn't its constituents. That's just a convenient myth bandied about by the State bureaucracies. It would be more accurate to say that in Democracies the bureaucracies of the State are managed utlimately by the citizens of the State. Usually, State bureaucracies have captives sources of revenue completely unrelated to what they do (ie, taxes), hence it doesn't matter to the bureaucracy how poorly things are done until either it effects tax revenue or the citizens get upset enough to start managing the bureaucracy.

OTOH, a private company must work much harder than a bureaucracy to get the job done. That's because it's revenue and profits are directly tied to how well it does its job.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Phleg]

One example does not a rule make.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Scudsucker]

No, a business can't do any of those things...except when it has the blessings of the gvt, which they frequently do.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[basingwerk]

In January, 1998, due to ice on the lines, Hydro-Quebec failed to deliver power to the Greater-Montreal region, leaving 4 million people without power in the dead of winter. The outage lasted for a minimum of four days (central Montreal) up to several months in the Eastern Townships. The cost to business, property and lives was enormous. Although I would agree that Hydro-Quebec are a profitable state owned business, they do not shine all the time.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Pig Hogger]

So? The outage was even worse in eastern Ontario, northern New-York and Vermont!

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[syphax]

1) Inelastic - demand does not flucuate tremendously due to price. While higher prices due lead to decreased demands and energy conservation, electricity is almost a need - unlike eggs which competes against food - for heating, cooling, lighting and computers.

Sort of- but significant (residential, at least) consumers like heating and clothes drying can be served by sources other than electricity. Also, I'd argue that the average US household could reduce electricity use 20% with minimal investment (and a reasonable return on investment). Why don't they? Beats the crap out of me. Probably not enough 'mind-share'.

2) Barriers to entry - additional competitors face tremendous barriers to entry. Plants and transmission lines are incredibly expensive and governments are the only ones that can build and invest in the system without an immediate payback demanded by investors. Plus, in a truly free electicity market, switching providers would be incredibly expensive because each provider would have their own lines to your house. That is why in most deregulation systems the supply of electricity is deregulated but tranmission is still a government monopoly.

Transmission lines, probably yes, plants, no. And its possible for different generators to sell you electricity over one set of lines. My town (which hsa a municipal electrical company) just changed who it buys electricity from; the wires are the same. There's the electrical side (complex) and the financial side (also compex).

Deregulation seems like a good thing in theory, but in practice it kind of worries me.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[Anonymous Coward]

Incidentally, living in Ottawa-Hull (Ontario-Quebec), power was fine on the Quebec side and that's where everybody went to buy gas, have dinner, see a movie last night, myself included!

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[csbruce]

I live in Ontario and work in Quebec, and one thing that I have noticed that the Quebec power is a lot less reliable in general. We have lots of power outages at the office and this causes lots of problems with our computers. At home in Ontario, until yesterday, I think there were two minor outages in the last six years. I was unaffected by the Ice Storm at home.

Re:So much for private entreprise.

[basingwerk]

So? And your point is... ?

Deregulation? It was those UFOs

[tdgoodman]

It wasn't deregulation back in '65, it was those damn UFOs

as of now

[bigjnsa500]

Last report from Possum Lake was they have plenty of beer and duct tape to repair the faulty generators.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[geekee]

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.

Bad Timing?

[asmussen]

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...

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[Compenguin]

But at the same time Canada's capital and largest city both lost power and there has been virtually no coverage of that.

It's all the Sims' fault!!!

[slouie]

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?

Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[EmagGeek]

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.

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[iramkumar]

Occum's Razor?? Dude close that porn window...

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[jafiwam]

Good information.

It makes me wonder though, why they could not have built in logic on the system to check the difference in capacity across the exit/entry points on a real time basis.

That way, they could have a decision point "enough power to help" or "not enough power to help" tell the switch what to do in the event of a shutdown on the other side.

They are after all, already down, no sense in blowing oneself as well. The net result would be more frequent but smaller failures, depending on the tolerances involved it might not be a perceptible (by the public) difference.

Obviously, there would be tuning and more than a few CPU cycles involved to make the decisions, but it seems like they are using transistor ideas and not fuzzy logic ideas to get the problem solved.

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[shlashdot]

nonsense. If you live adjacent to a power plant that would be working just fine except for a sorry-arsed control system that can't limit the load to that plant, you would justifiably be miffed. Think about it. It's like chaining a bunch of boats together so they get there at the same time. If one of them sinks? oops we didn't think of putting a release on the chain...

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[The Famous Druid]

I agree with pretty-much everything you said, except for
There isn't anything or anyone to blame for this.

Until recently, I worked in the electricity biz, programming the control systems you mentioned, and I suspect the system failed in precisely the way you describe, but you haven't asked why it happened.

It happened because the system was running so close to capacity that when one component fails, the neighboring components are not able to take up the slack. This is very poor design, and in the good old days engineers built enough redundancy into the system to prevent it.

These days, of course, the bean-counters have far more control of the industry than the engineers, so they don't "waste" money on back-up systems, it's far cheaper (for the suppliers, not for their customers) to just let the system fail every now and then.

That's no way to run an essential service, and the politicians who allow it to happen need to be taken out behind the wood-shed and given an attitude re-alignment they'll never forget.

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[Harinath]

But, that's the whole point, ain't it.

For some reason, the other generators in the grid couldn't take up the slack of the loss of one generator. That should have been the minimum operating condition. The system should never ever have been allowed to enter that region of operation where there was no net.

The obvious reason is that the power companies were running the generators over capacity, or in an unco-ordinated manner. Deregulation enables, nay, virtually requires, this sad state of affairs.

Re:Calm down... don't forget Occum's Razor

[The Famous Druid]

They're the people who make the stuff.

Not running out is one of their responsibilities.

They're supposed to have enough capacity to cope with demand, even in hot weather, even with some of their plant out of commission.

That's the problem, they dont want to pay for equipment that's not being used most of the time. So they make the decision that it's cheaper to have blackouts than to pay for plant that gets used 3 or 4 days a year.

Re:This is poor journalism

[bigjnsa500]

Oh cmon!! Its natural for journalism to delve into a story for sheer *thrill*, THEN report the facts after the fact on page 18 in small print three days later.

Actually, better analogy...

[raehl]

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.

Smoking what?

[Daetrin]

No, it wasn't a smoking gun, it was a smoking power station on East 14th street, haven't you been paying attention?

Blame Canada!

[Ars-Gonzo]

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.

Re:Blame Canada!

[jqs]

Actually it looks like the problem began in Ohio...

Re:I say...

[TedCheshireAcad]

Thanks god idiots like you don't receive karma for those "jokes" anymore.

Yep. That's why I got modded up. Twice.

So Much For The Reliability Of Private Power

[berwyn]

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.

Re:So Much For The Reliability Of Private Power

[ScottForbes]

The most recent branch to be sold off was to Accenture, a Bahamas based (i.e. tax shelter) spin off of Enron.

Unless there's more than one company named Accenture, I think you're merging reports here: Accenture (nee Andersen Consulting) was a spin-off of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that cooked Enron's books. They had no connection to the scandal that downed their former parent, except to breathe a sigh of relief that they had changed their name a few months before.

Re:So Much For The Reliability Of Private Power

[awol]

And as off topic as this may be, I bet they are _REAL_ happy they made that decision. Kinda really convenient timing huh!

Lets get some facts straight

[gerardrj]

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?

Re:Lets get some facts straight

[bigjnsa500]

Lets all refresh our history lesson and remember this deregulation was passed by the Clinton administration.

Re:Lets get some facts straight

[gerardrj]

Okay, some more facts:

Presidents don't make or pass laws. Congress does. The President has the ability to PREVENT a law being passed by veto power, but even then Congress can override the veto and pass the bill in to law.

Despite what the media and public have spun the office in to, the Presidency is actually a rather weak and limited office. The fact is the most people like the idea of a dicatatorship or a monarchy, where only one person is in charge, so they impose this illusion on to the President. Even when he is an idiot (which is frequently the case).

Fact is, that Congress runs the country, they make the laws, they choose where the money comes from, they choose where the money goes, they choose who the President can appoint to certain positions.

Powers of the President according to the Constitution:
1.Commander in Chief
2.make Treaties
3.nominate Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court
4.fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate
5.time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union

That's it. Those are all the powers given the President in Article II.
There's nothing about making laws, declaring wars, or
If yo uread the text yourself you'll find that even those limited powers often rely on concurrence of Congress before being acted upon.

Re:Lets get some facts straight

[IM6100]

Good. You've established that this can't be pinned on the Bush Administration. We'd better spread the word, as I suspect the wires are buzzing on sites like Indymedia right now.

It's about votes....

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Why are so many US cities and states broke? Upping taxes to fix the problem is not a vote winner.

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.

Re:It's about votes....

[pmz]

Upping taxes to fix the problem is not a vote winner.

The more pervasive problem is that the voters are both lazy and greedy. They want the government to solve their problems, but, then, they don't want to pay for it (the outcome of this is obvious--shitty half-ass government projects).

People need to make commitments: either you pay for the public school system, for example, or you do away with public schools. Right now, the public schools are a heaping pile of trash and are more or less a babysitting service, and the people themselves are largely to blame. It would be better to leave schooling either to families or groups of families or to private businesses who provide education as a service. At least, then, the true cost of education would be obvious and not swept under the rug like it is now.

Re:It's about votes....

[Ben Hutchings]

US public schools are not, in general, poorly funded. See this report, particularly the international comparison of spending per student in table 4. The report concludes that "What distinguishes U.S. education from other nations is not how much or how little it spends. Thousands of schools district make the U.S. unique. Education costs and personnel compensation vary tremendously. School districts operate free of national education standards and national salary schedules. The U.S. has forged a structure of long school days, busing, and school lunch programs to support a system of large schools. Consequently, noninstructional spending is a larger portion of school costs."

Re:It's about votes....

[pmz]

There is still the problem of uncompensated greed. The following paragraph in the report reads: "Educators in the U.S. want high-quality free textbooks, special programs for handicapped and disadvantaged kids, guidance counselors, school nurses, school libraries and librarians to staff them." Everyone wants everyone to be accomodated without having to honestly recognize just how damn expensive it is to do so. It isn't a problem of decentralization nor of a lack of standards but one of the school systems (perhaps the elected school boards themselves) not having the courage to tell the voting public to piss off and grow up. So, they invent all these programs and special allowances to the point where everything is spread around so thin that even buying art supplies is a challenge (yet 500 video surveillence systems in Biloxi aren't a problem...).

Re:It's about votes....

[Ben Hutchings]

There is still the problem of uncompensated greed. The following paragraph in the report reads: "Educators in the U.S. want high-quality free textbooks, special programs for handicapped and disadvantaged kids, guidance counselors, school nurses, school libraries and librarians to staff them."

That's not greedy - those seem to me to be standard facilities for first-world schools, and I wouldn't expect to see them cut.

Also, busing, while expensive, is actually quite sensible in that it's more efficient and safer than having parents rushing around in cars and all converging on the school around the same time, as they tend to do in the UK. (It might be better still to have children walking and cycling to school, but that's not going to work for everyone, and parents who drive their children don't want them walking when there's so much traffic around the school...)

Now that I read a little more of the report (I haven't read it thoroughly - I only found it by searching for spending numbers) I see that there may be a staff problem. The spending of the other countries is converted to dollars using exchange rates. However, using this conversion general salaries are rather higher in the US. Teachers' salaries are hugely variable between school boards, but on average high school teachers don't seem to be paid so well compared to other professionals (though I'm finding it hard to interpret the figures in table 3). Maybe they need to offer more to get better teachers.

Looks like lightning

[Zachary Kessin]

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.

Re:Looks like lightning

[jgrr]

But how does a lightning strike at Niagara knock out power in at least 6 states? Why didn't the grid isolate the failure and provide some surplus power to areas normally served by that generator? Why did NYC, which has it's own power stations in the city, as well as a nuclear plant nearby, lose power (and why are the lights back on when I look across the river)?

Think of the karma!

[Black Parrot]

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!

Cause

[Titanium Angel]

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.

November, 1965

[AJWM]

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.

This is John Galt speaking...

[Gothmolly]

When we saw the lights of New York City go out, we knew our work was done.

A Few Years Ago?

[emc]

A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts ...

Jamie, you ignorant slut.

It was LAST YEAR.

Moment of silence

[abe ferlman]

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.

Re:Moment of silence

[Ig0r]

Juice is measured in coulombs (or amp-hours if you're a weenie).

Re:Moment of silence

[Martin Blank]

Pfft. If they were TRUE geeks, they would have had a backup generator to provide power, 24 hours of fuel, and contracts with at least two companies to provide additional fuel.

Not that I have any of this. :P

Re:Moment of silence

[AvitarX]

Are you sure I pay for kilowatt hours wich is really just a lot of watts.

1000(amp/sec)*3600 seconds

your are messuring it in Jules <spelled all bad>

1000(jules/sec)*3600 seconds

But an amp is a messurment of a quantity of electrons, which would be how much juise. The Jule is a messurement of the total energy, but I would think of the quantity of electrons as the juice, much like the power company seems to do the same.

Re:Moment of silence

[dreemkill]

hahaha! beautiful.

hey, at least i got to leave work early ;)

Re:Moment of silence

[erpbridge]

I live in the affected area (Northeast US) and have the same method of heating as 60% of this area: Home heating oil.

I've half considered trying to find a generator that would tap into my home heating oil tank for fuel. Hey, a 300 gallon tank, even half full at 150 gallons, would power a generator for at least a couple weeks, right? Also, it would power my furnace (which requires electric ignition to operate the spark plug.)

Of course, if power were out for a couple weeks, I'd have a little more to worry about than just generating my own.

Re:Moment of silence

[Ig0r]

An amp is a unit of rate (coulombs/second).
A coulomb is a quantity of electrons.

The life of a battery is measured in amp-hours (or some si-prefixed version of it, such as milliamp-hours).

Re:Moment of silence

[AntiOrganic]

True, but Verizon's entire fiber network was down in the Northeast. You'd be really lucky to get online even if your computer had power from a generator.

Re:Moment of silence

[AvitarX]

damn, I have been so wrong for the last 4 years (since I graduated) shame on me for spreading mis-information.

Re:Moment of silence

[grendel_x86]

The one good thing... there has been FAR LESS trolling since this started... im guessing the most trolling /.ers are from the North-East USA/ South-East Canada.

Re:Moment of silence

[JeffSh]

too bad i can't mod +1 Hypocrit

Re:Moment of silence

[clone22]

Real geeks use natural gas generators.

Re:Moment of silence

[eam]

Just buy yourself a diesel/electric locomotive. It should be able to turn that home heating oil into electricity for you.

Seriously, it is possible that your home heating oil is the same thing as diesel fuel. It all depends on what additives have been mixed in. I did a quick search and found this:

Diesel generators

If you can ignore the fact that they're trying to sell you something, you might notice that there are quite a few portable diesel generators which could possibly be powered using your home heating oil.

Re:Moment of silence

[SteveX]

Or at least, laptops, and a power inverter in the car to recharge..

Re:Moment of silence

[j-pimp]

Not true, my ISP, LI based unamed to protect the innocent, never lost connectivity. Our links to the world are AT&T, but our T1s to clients are verizion.

Re:Moment of silence

[SavingPrivateNawak]

Home heating oil and diesel are the same thing only tinted differently.
I have successfully used home oil in my car when strikes blocked refinery and stations (France...)
There was absolutely no problem and the car ran fine with this fuel

Re:Moment of silence

[rsax]

I know that your comment was meant to be humourous but on a more serious note, perhaps this event could serve as a wake up call to all the people who needlessly consume more than they have to (Yeah right, I can hope can't I?). I know so many geeks who run non-critical computers 24/7 which are chugging along just for the fact that they want to see those high uptime numbers. We all know *BSD/Linux is stable. You don't need to suck up power (pollute more by making fossil fuel power plants work extra hard) to prove something that's already obvious.

Re:Moment of silence

[Reece400]

last night, we ended up siphoning the gas out of our van to run our generator..

Reece,

Re:Moment of silence

[op00to]

Untrue, my Uni kept commodity internet connectivity (Central NJ) the entire time. That includes Verizon's fiber network.

Re:Moment of silence

[mnmn]

I have sad stories on my side. The 6+ routers, 7 Sun workstations serving oracle and websphere distributed had good uptimes. My firewall uses dynamic IP, but since it was up for months, all the domains I am serving were pointed to that IP. I'll now have to reset the domains to a new IP and wait an additional 24 hours.

Re:Moment of silence

[untaken_name]

You don't need to suck up power (pollute more by making fossil fuel power plants work extra hard) to prove something that's already obvious.

What if we use solar power to do it? How about hydroelectric? What makes it unneccessary? Your feelings? How are you qualified to judge what is unneccessary to someone else? Why are your environmental beliefs any more important that someone else's high uptime beliefs? You've already shown that you are no expert in matters of electricity generation, so why should your views on consumption prevail over an individual's beliefs on the value of uptime? What qualifies you to quantify the relative merits of each and decide which is more important? I'm not questioning your right to believe whatever you like, but why should others suddenly change their behavior because of what you believe? Would you change your behavior because of the religious beliefs of someone else? What constitutes 'needless' in your opinion? I know it may seem like I'm attacking you here, however I make no distinction between environmental and religious evangelism, and though I personally support anyone's right to do either, I've always wondered why the former is almost universally tolerated while the latter is almost universally reviled. I'm honestly curious.

(In case anyone is wondering, I also class vegetarian evangalism the same, along with any other evangelism that requires me to substantially change my lifestyle in return for miniscule or speculative rewards in some unspecified future time.)

Re:Moment of silence

[ThaReetLad]

rubbish. Juice is measured in pints or litres.

Re:Moment of silence

[dmarx]

My cable modem connection via Comcast was down from at least the time I got home from the movies (4:50) to 7:50. I don't know if this is related to the outage or not. My electricity and cable TV worked.

Re:Moment of silence

[gabriel-dialupusa]

And those real geek's networks go down. Natural gas is one of the first thing shut off in emergency situations.

Smart geeks use diesel. Cheap, readily available, doesn't get shut down by the fire marshall in an emergency.

Re:Moment of silence

[Bob Uhl]

Well of course--they're Yankees.

Re:Moment of silence

[ionpro]

Erm, coulumb/second * hour == coulumb * (the consant) hour/second, or coulumb * 3600. You can use either, bud.

Re:Moment of silence

[hesiod]

> If I could figure out a way to clear the dye out of the heating oil, I could run it in my Dodge RAM..

What, your Dodge won't run with the dye in it, but the backhoe will? Besides that dye, there is absolutely no difference between product A (Diesel #2 for cars) & B (Diesel #2 for other), yes they come at different prices? Screw PenDOT, that's bullshit. Of course, I have different reasons for hating PenDOT -- like all of Pittsburgh.

Re:Moment of silence

[mt2mb4me]

ohh i feel your pain, out companys only linux box, soley for the purpose of playing hold music died after 100 days of uninterrupted "your call is important to us..." it clung to the ups, then died, when i brought it back up the hard disk was dead :( (old system pII 300 /w 4.3 gig drive)

Re:Moment of silence

[Xandar01]

Take out the drive and give it a good beating... no not to try to resurrect the drive just because the damn "your call is important to us..." and the awful hold music.

Re:Moment of silence

[Johnny5000]

"Real geeks use natural gas generators."

Real geeks ARE natural gas generators.

Re:Moment of silence

[metalslinger]

Does ripping things out of the ground by their hair, skinning them, slicing them, then dipping them in a hideous ranch dip while they are still alive and possibly screaming sound more humane?

Well if it does I'd hate to be a carrot in your garden!

Re:Moment of silence

[untaken_name]

can i kill you and eat you then? How is eating animals any different? It's one thing to compete, it's another to kill for gain.

What's the difference between killing a cow (who wouldn't even be alive in the first place if we weren't going to eat him) and killing a vegetable (who also wouldn't be alive if we weren't going to eat it)? I've always wondered that. It's all killing something alive in order to stay alive, I guess vegetables just aren't as cute or something.
I also wouldn't really consider eating to be a 'gain', per se. I don't know anyone who doesn't have to do it every once in a while. Besides, I never said I'm against vegetarianism itself, just the evangelists of it, that try to preach their philosophy to me. You don't wanna eat animals, that's fine....but don't tell me I can't.

It went something like this...

[raehl]

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.

Re:It went something like this...

[Alaska Jack]

I'd like to add something to this. First, a disclaimer: Everything I know about power generation /distribution would fit in a thimble.

But I recently attended a lecture by Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith. A lot of it was over my head, but he seemed to scoff at the idea that the California blackouts were the result of deregulation. He said the same thing the parent of this reply did -- that it was the result of *partial* deregulation done *badly*; and that the result basically invited companies to come in and try to game the system.

He said price controls at the local level basically led to exactly what market theory predicted: shortages (just like rent control tends to lead to a shortage of housing).

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[Elwood P Dowd]

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.)

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[plague3106]

First off, if Seattle did lose power on a scale that the NE did, the the entire state of WA would be affected, as well as CA, the 4 corner states, and the others in the west.

The grid is divided into 3 sections; east, west, and texas (hehe...i know, sounds odd, but thats what i read on cnn).

De-regulation in Montana

[greenskyx]

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.

Re:De-regulation in Montana

[bigjnsa500]

As long as I can get my Moose Drool, my money will always go into the Montana economy ;)

Depends on who you are

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[Mooncaller]

Because it FUCKING true, but to many morons like you still believe the media spin.

Movie of burning power transformer

[sploxx]

Actually, I found this a long time ago and think it is somewhat related... a movie of an exploding power transformer:

http://205.243.100.155/frames/mpg/XfrmBlast1.mpg

(from www.teslamania.com)

Re:Movie of burning power transformer

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

Score: +1, Fire! Fire!

Re:Movie of burning power transformer

[Tiado]

That looks like the transformer that exploded in my city about six years ago, I remember seeing that footage before.

The real culprit

[bluegreenone]

Gray Davis must be held accountable for this blackout.

In the "shit happens" category

[mrscott]

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.

eh?

[CoolMoDee]

How would I know? INAGE! (Im Not A Grid Expert)

Fraud was the Major Factor

[berwyn]

The Califonia Power Crisis certainly wasn't do to a real power shortage, but a cerated one

http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/051502l yn ch.pdf

fuel cells to the rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:fuel cells to the rescue

[WindBourne]

While it is a nice thought, it will not happen anytime soon. Instead, the Boeing salt plant would make for a nice capacitor of sorts. By placing them at the entry/exit points of grids, they could be recharged by excess energy.
The nice thing is that these are near doable now.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[mamba-mamba]

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
--

California Did NOT Deregulate

[acvh]

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.

This is why we should all....

[np_bernstein]

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.

Sadly,

[dacap]

lack of knowledge rarely deters people either from voicing their opinions or arguing strongly for their position, no matter how insane or inane.

Supply vs demand works only when you enough supply

[tstoneman]

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.

Re:This is poor journalism

[bigjnsa500]

There ya go, NOW your thinking straight!

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[dacap]

Ah, yes. As in regulating retail price without regulating wholesale price. It's no wonder the power distribution companies when bankrupt!

Sort of...

[raehl]

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.

California never deregulated!

[kwiqsilver]

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.

Uh errrr ummmm.....

[3seas]

Maybe someone just turned off the water?

DAMN!-Sacrificial geeks.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 in California!

[Arandir]

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.

Challenger, was: Re:New Zealand

[N1XIM]

The decision to fly the Challenger was mostly made by Rocketdyne and Rockwell International execs who were convinced that everything was ok because of the incomplete information they asked for the engineers to supply. There was ample private idiocy to blame. The government was only to blame in that it (oh God) took the execs at their word that the system would still be safe at a launch temperature of about 56 deg. F (after a night at about 38 deg F). Private company bravado had a lot to do with it. My source of information: "A Gift of Fire," a book about that very type of screw-up.

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.)

Re:Challenger, was: Re:New Zealand

[bluGill]

The engineers (for the private companies) that I've talk to suggest that the design spec from Nasa specified operating in that weather, so when concern was expressed NASA responed with "You mean that you don't meat the design specifications?", with a lot of implications in that statement. No wonder Execs wanted to back off, they had promised it would work, and someone was threatening to hold them to that. They of course trusted the engineers to design it to work in that weather.

And even then there wouldn't have been a problem if the boosters were assembled (and in particular torqued) in the cold weather, but when assembled in warm conditions, and then put in cold ones, everything shrunk resulting in gaps that were not there origionally.

And I'm willing to bet there are even more factors that I'm not aware of.

But they DID regulate wholesale price...

[raehl]

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.

Re:Un-fucking-believable.

[jvonk]

Aha! However, no entity has a 'right' for their revenue model to be successul. If I were to block slashdot ads--and therefore they were denied income--it is not an ethical (or even moral) problem for anyone involved.

Since I am not under contract regarding their revenue model when I read slashdot, I am not bound to ensure they make money. This is the heart of entreprenurial success: the business owner has to ensure that their income model is practical and profitable.

Your perspective leads to the network pigopolists claiming that I am stealing if I watch a show and flip channels during a commercial. What if they made their commercials interesting to watch, instead?

In summary: "the success of their revenue model is their problem, not mine."

Lightning?!

[JavaJoint]

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)

House of cards

[Bozovision]

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.

NO, this started long ago...

[TheAwfulTruth]

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.

MWAH HA HA BLASTER STRIKES AGAIN!!!

[DCowern]

I wonder if the systems at the power plants had DCOM enabled.... :-)

LINUX FOR THE NUKES!!!

Re:MWAH HA HA BLASTER STRIKES AGAIN!!!

[ahillen]

I wonder if the systems at the power plants had DCOM enabled.... :-)

Well, if not the power plants, maybe the power grid. ;)
From http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03-00 1/ (German):

"National Grid USA is reference customer of Northern Dynamics. This company calls itself "Home of the OPC experts"... OPC stands for 'OLE for Process Control' and is based on Microsofts COM/DCOM model."

Micro Generation of electricity.

[qtp]

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.

You cannot regulate greed!

[ratfynk]

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!

Re:You cannot regulate greed!

[ratfynk]

The problem is why should I give up some of my power use if no one else is doing it. Me-tooism. In my case you are dead wrong we do spend more for energy efficient devices and we do use less, so blow it out your ass. We can get by using less and not feel it at all! We use an LG combo washer/dryer a 3 gallon flush shitter, and more energy efficient devices in general. I can quote you our enegy usage it is about 2/3 of the Canadian national average for KW/Hour per person per year. If the American industry, infrastructure, and public would take the same measures there would be no energy shortages period.

Enron and Power Deregulation

[tsikora]

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.

Re:Enron and Power Deregulation

[deanj]

And this all happened under the Clinton administration. It wasn't until Bush took over that Enron was exposed for what it was: a total sham that screwed everyone in sight....mush like Clinton himself.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[I8TheWorm]

Funny... it affected my HR DB which lives on Long Island. I write code for a company that has over 50 sites in 20 states.

But yeah... power outtages in NY should only be reported in NY....

I'm sorta lucky

[morgajel]

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.

Re:I'm sorta lucky

[morgajel]

oh, and it seems the parts around lansing are somewhere in between.
a friend in hartland mi lost power at her house, but the applebees where she works down the street is still getting power.

I Don't Know, But I Have A Plan

[istartedi]

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.

Re:I Don't Know, But I Have A Plan

[Fantastic Lad]

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".

Wow. The depth of your delusion is staggering.

Bagdhad was a major city with employment, civil services and the whole infrastructure one would expect from a modern city. --And YES, it was a modern city despite the lies propagated by the US media. I knew a kid from Syria who had travelled through much of the middle east. He fixed my own movie-based delusions, and I have since then sworn to do some actual reading before I open my big mouth to repeat propaganda.

The average Iraqi citizen doesn't have an AK-47. Saddam's enforcers, yes, but not the regular people with families and jobs and lives to lead. Owning a machine gun under Saddam's rule would have been fairly stupid. It would have gotten you thrown in prison. --Saddam knew, (as does Bush), that it's hard to repress a citizenry when they are armed.

Anyway, all of that modern infrastructure, (Power, telecommunications, water, sewage), was blasted out of existence by the invading American forces and it was replaced by. . . You guessed it; Nothing. Now there is only chaos, and over-stressed American GI's with jittery trigger fingers. People are now starving and fearful in their own city with no basic services. --Well, until the Isreali telco was awarded the contract to set up a cell phone network. (After, that is, Betelco, an Arab company, was told to dismantal the 5 million dollar start up service it had implemented two weeks ago without the approval of the US, (read: Zionist cronyism).

Life sucks for the residents of a country suffering under foriegn tyranny, as enforced by soldiers who have been taught to believe that Arab people are savages who run around shooting AK-47's into the air. It's easier to treat them like dogs when that kind of (very, very typical) propaganda is being used.

Here's a link from one an 'imbedded' reporter who has been emailing his reports home. An eye on the inside.

Seriously. You need to watch fewer movies and biased CNN reporting before you make such ignorant comments about a people who have been devastated simply because most Americans were too gullable to see Bush's lies for what they were.

Take care, and peace to you.

-FL

Re:I Don't Know, But I Have A Plan

[istartedi]

Saddam knew, (as does Bush), that it's hard to repress a citizenry when they are armed.

I suppose that's why he handed out weapons before the war. Of course he didn't hand them out to everybody--just the Sunni minority, but that's still an awful lot of people running around with weapons. Ammo is another matter, but I'm sure they could get it. You're not trying to tell me that ammo is unattainable there, are you? Next thing you're going to try and tell me that I can't get marijuana in the US.

Anyway, all of that modern infrastructure, (Power, telecommunications, water, sewage), was blasted out of existence by the invading American forces and it was replaced by. . . You guessed it; Nothing

Infrastructure during Gulf II was not targeted (unlike Gulf I where it was). Saddam loyalists shut off the power grid shortly before troops enterred Baghdad. Looters did the rest. Loyalists continue to play havoc with rebuilding efforts, yet despite their bombing of a critical oil pipeline into Turkey, the first oil still got through (!).

Would the infrastructure be better had we not invaded? Without a doubt. As with Mousallini, the "trains ran on time" under Saddam.

Now, a lot of what I said was bitter humor, poking at the ugly side of things to rile people up. Just as no cable channel presents the whole truth, no commentary presents the whole truth either. Indeed there are Iraqis who didn't loot. We've found unlikely allies in otherwise hostile clerics who urged people to return looted property. In other words, of course the Iraqis are not monolithic. 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. Unless of course you are suggesting that such videos and photos are faked, in which case I can safely forget about you and put you on the same shelf as the "moon landings were faked" people.

Someone mod this up the story is great

[jcrb]

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. )

Re:Lightning?! (Fire?!)

[JavaJoint]

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.

Isn't This a Repeat?

[ewhac]

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

The story.

[Raven42rac]

The story here is lightning. Big brother government can't save you from lightning.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[Arandir]

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...

Re:I say...

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

But some people might brave it for some Natural Light... being hammered might make the outage go quicker... although the beer might be warm.

I know what happened.

[DAldredge]

Oog the caveman did it.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[autonobartek]

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.

Bad Timing

[Blair16]

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...

Good article on Wired about power grid

[hanson_mark]

There is a good article in the Wired archive that talks about the power grid and how overloaded the New York section is, definitely worth a read:

The Energy Wed

Deregulation is a Sham

[bman08]

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.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[apraetor]

Well.. Trumbull, CT didn't lose power, and we've got one of NASDAQ's backup complexes here, so :P

--matt

Try the Cato Institute

[GlenRaphael]

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.)

The libertarian Cato Institute has been publishing articles along those lines as far back as you care to go. You can find them gloating a bit about it here.

I'll take a rain check on that kiss. :-)

BLACK OUT

[wickedclown213]

Power is back on in Ohio I live in lorain county west of cleveland

Hey I do Power for a living

[tjstork]

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.

Re:Do I hear a chorus of 'Blame Canada'???

[zpok]

An official statement from the President himself has confirmed that the blame this time does not lay with Canada, however unlikely this may sound.

"It's the Frenchies. But rest assured, we do everything that's in our power to do that what we have to do. Um. Bring Em On"

Liberals are not to blame

[kurtkilgor]

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.

Re:Liberals are not to blame

[k_187]

that important work becomes subject to the wihms of the populace.

Yes, damn the government for listening to its citizens.

There are a lot of reasons for this, greedy companies trying to do too much with what they've got, liberals/environmentalists/NIMBYists not allowing companies to expand what they've got to further be expolited. There's no panacea for this kind of stuff, both sides need to change. which is the real problem as neither side wil admit that they are wrong.

Re:Thunderstorm US side of the border 19:35 - NOT!

[Ummite]

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 can readily attest to this

[Hamster Lover]

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.

Re:I can readily attest to this

[God! Awful 2]

My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta,

"More than half"... I don't follow. Do you mean less than half?

Alberta always had it easy, since they are the energy suppliers (no sales tax, etc). The rate increase in Alberta was extreme, but the price went up in BC as well. I doubt that the price in Alberta could be double, unless perhaps you factor in the climate difference.

Gordon Campbell is just a short-sighted idiot. He is kind of like Dubya lite.

-a

Re:I can readily attest to this

[Hamster Lover]

Sorry, I was in rant mode. Yes, I meant less than half.

My KWh rate in Vancouver was around 4.5 cents/KWh when I left BC and my total electricity costs for a single bedroom apartment were around $23 a month. When I got here, the market rate was anywhere between 8-12 cents/KWh, depending on the season. I think the current rate is 14 cents/KWh, but I haven't checked my bill, I am afraid of sticker shock. Regardless of the KWh rate, we still pay the additional charges of tranmission cost, storage fees, consent fees, etc. that are not charged in regulated markets. There is no practical way to compare one companies electrical rates to another with the arbitrary nature of these additional charges. That is my main point, deregulation has brought more confusion than before.

In my opinion, it should be illegal to charge these additional fees; companies should be required to bill per unit or by monthly rate without the addition of a multitude of indeterminate charges. I really don't give a shit how much the "transmission fee" is, or the "storage rider" or whatever the fuck it's called this month. Charge me a market rate that reflects the cost of doing business and a measure of profit.

While I am at it, let's talk about NAFTA. If (or when) BC Hydro is privatized it is a one way street. Under NAFTA, a deregulated market must remain deregulated, there is no going back. If the electricty was required for the needs of Alberta or BC, tough luck, it still must be sold on the open market for anyone to buy.

I really pity those areas of the country that are considering deregulation. It simply amounts to more money out of your pocket and less respect and gratitude for the companies that provide my electricity.

Re:Lightning?! (Fire?!)

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

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

Deregulation?

[Sunlighter]

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.

Look on the bright(no pun intended) side!

[British]

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!".

Re:Look on the bright(no pun intended) side!

[evilviper]

Something not possible unless you drove out into the boonies where the light interference

So, the majority of the country, and even the entire world should be considered "the boonies"? I'd say the light pollution is still higher than pretty much any other less-than-big city around, what with backup generators, upses, emergency lights, you still have lots of ambient light.

and pollution is minimal.

48hour power outages aren't going to wipe away polution built up over decade after decade of poluting.

Re:Look on the bright(no pun intended) side!

[Julia Cameron]

>> Right now, numerous stargazers are pulling out their dusty telescopes for some clean astronomy.

After a long dark hike through deepest, darkest Queens, my teenage son finally found his way to a friend's house in Brooklyn Heights where he spent the night stargazing in her parents' garden. The kids rang to tell me the stars were out over Brooklyn.

Niagara Mohawk's Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Niagara Mohawk's Problems

[BigBadBri]

Yep - it's our National Grid that took over NiMo, got rid of some 800 jobs (mainly in engineering), and pocketed an extra $90 million per year in profit.

These are the people that have done the same to the UK grid, resulting in vastly increased downtime during the regular line failures caused by winter storms.

Last winter, we had to import French power engineers to get the lines fixed, and communities were without electricity for up to a week.

Still - it could be worse - Railtrack virtually banned preventative maintenance on our railways when rail was privatised, bumped up the contractor costs so that new rail builds were uneconomic, and eventually failed while walking away with the property portfolio worth around $9 billion. Imagine if they had taken over!

Dontcha just love deregulation?

Re:Do I hear a chorus of 'Blame Canada'???

[Anonymous Coward]

I was waiting for it too - as soon as it came on that a Canadian part of the grid was down, I was thinking, "They'll be blaming Canada any minute now." Sure enough, right on cue, it starts flying back and forth from CNN to MSNBC to FOX - Canada Canada Canada Foreigners it's all the damn furriners.

Turned out not to be true, but honest to god the USA needs to get a grip. Not everything bad that happens is the fault of other nations. It's getting impossible to even talk to Americans these days - the concept of the USA being less than heavenly perfection personified, coming down from above to light the way for backwards and brown peoples who should shut up and do as they are told is rampant - you can see the rage rising behind their eyes when you even suggest that the USA is not to be envied in all things.

The USA is becoming strange and unpleasant. If it were a high school student it would be a wealthy jock, well-dressed, undeniably smart and handsome but with an ugly, arrogant soul. "They only hate me because they're jealous."

I know America - I like America. All the same America as a whole needs to rediscover a bit of humility.

Cost of designing a solid power grid $500M

[ozzee]

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.

Catch 22

[Eisenfaust]

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.

Happened before

[Bob The Lizard]

(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.

lightning... and a question

[Aropax20]

Here's more on the lightning claim, from the Courier Mail (Brisbane) news wire:

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?

Looks like Interland is running the power grid

[BlackPanties]

wha? wha?
outage, what outage?

Coincidence?

[bogasity]

Major Microsoft worm starts on Monday... Major power outage on East Coast on Thursday. You make the call!

Lets Play the Happy Terrorist Asshole Game!

[Greyfox]

What did the terrorists learn today? They learned that with their next major attack, two or three well placed attacks could plunge the entire nation into darkness, exponentially increasing the chaos. Anyone even want to think of what would have happened if they'd taken out that power station on 9/11?

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.

Re:Lets Play the Happy Terrorist Asshole Game!

[hughk]

This has been known since the last major blackout, but it is easier to learn to fly a plane than to work out the critical areas of the grid, after all, it is clear that the power companies don't - and they have the plans!!!

My jibe about the power companies is because they should have been able to isolate the problem by forcing a blackout on a small proportion of their customers.

Re:Lets Play the Happy Terrorist Asshole Game!

[fishbowl]

What I learned is that the "terrorist" don't have their shit together enough to seize a golden opportunity like this! There was never a more opportune time for an attack. They missed the boat. Tells me the supposed "terrorist threat" isn't all it's cracked up to be, and we need to move on.

It doesn't work.

[EvilErik]

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"

an important question

[BlackPanties]

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...

Thanks for not disappointing

[Scratch-O-Matic]

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.

Re:Thanks for not disappointing

[Nogami_Saeko]

Oh, I quite like Bush. He's always good for material on Comedy Central or Leno.

And I love the "deer in headlights" look that he has when he has to do an unscripted press conference.

Great stuff!

Re:Thanks for not disappointing

[deanj]

Nah, Gore's still funnier. "I invented the Internet". "Love Story was about Tipper and me".
Gotta love that!

WOooooooo!

I don't know which is funnier, that he says it, or that he actually BELIEVES it.

Re:Thanks for not disappointing

[frost22]

I'm getting sick of this Bush-Haters balling up their fists and stamping their little feet at anything he does. They're just hell-bent on revenge at all costs. What sad little lives.

It doesn't occur to you that they just happen to have a point, does it ?

And you are deaf to any rationale about that whatsoever, aren't you ? Who needs arguments anyway ...

Nah, it's just all those little bush haters.

Re:Thanks for not disappointing

[Ben Hutchings]

He never claimed either of those, but certain people wanted to make him out to be a liar.

Failsafes

[black_widow]

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

Regulation / DeRegulation no difference

[TheSync]

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.

Re:Regulation / DeRegulation no difference

[IM6100]

Out here in 'flyover country' we're not interested in having your polluting power plants. Do you really need to string wires all the way out there? Can't you build some plants locally?

Power is down but (my) network is up...

[LinuxParanoid]

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

Re:Power is down but (my) network is up...

[jweage]

Well, AOL dial-in's work just fine in Detroit. (AOL's provided by my employer). I'm typing this on a notebook, a cheap power inverter and a 12 V. deep cycle marine battery. This works well for my amateur radio equipment too.

Josh

Re:Power is down but (my) network is up...

[ru$ty]

You do realize the phone company providing power over the wire so that analog phones will work and being able to power your "DSL modem" (I wish people would stop using terms like that) off a battery aren't terribly related?

When power went out here, both cable tv and cable internet kept working, I suspect because most cable companies understand that disruptions in service aren't appreciated by customers and legislators.

Re:I say...

[TedCheshireAcad]

I wouldn't be proud of it - that's pretty sad, reusing jokes on fucking slashdot. How pathetic.

Just like reusing trolls?

Question

[OzBeserk]

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.

hahahaha

[User 956]

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!

Cause: Overloaded grid and bad logic

[Jimithing DMB]

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

Re:Cause: Overloaded grid and bad logic

[shlashdot]

"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." You explained it a lot better than I did. :)

Re:Cause: Overloaded grid and bad logic

[EmagGeek]

Thanks for the backup on this one.

While I don't necessarily agree that regulation is the answer, it's a simple matter of ethics.

De-regulation wasn't really de-regulation. It was RE-regulation. The rules simply changed, and there became many more of them, one of which was that no new generating plants could be built. Why the hell they decided this was beyond me. Most of these generators were built "way back when" before the age of computers and ubiquitous use of air conditioning. PECO Energy became the most expensive electricity in the nation after PA "de-regulated" the electricity industry. I pay almost $0.16 per kWh, which is ridiculous by any standard. That money is used to pay for electricity that is practically given away to neighboring producers like PP&L and ConEd.

Anyway...

You'd be AMAZED at what percentage of all generated power is dissipated in either a computer or an air conditioner/chiller/etc. 100 million computers at 200 watts each is 20 BILLION watts. 20 GIGAwatts. That's the capacity of more than 20 average-sized nuclear reactors. Limerick here in PA has two reactors each capable of about 1.134 (I was really hoping it was 1.21, really I was!) gigawatts.

Here's a Link to a list of all U.S. Nuclear facilities and their statistics and capacities.

And here is a link to a list of all the reactor statuses showing they're loaded to the teeth - almost all of them at 100%.

The U.S. Department of Energy maintains lots of useful information about the power grids in the United States and how they are running. There are also publicly available status reports on each generation facility.

One graph on the DoE site showed that generation capacity hasn't increased at all since about 1992 (when Clinton took office, what a surprise... bastard killed the military AND our power infrastructure... but that's another thread)...

It's not surprising that this happened since we've been increasing generation rapidly due to the deployment of computers and other tech gadgets, but not increasing capacity to make up for it. It also doesn't help that there's no incentive other than cost for people to use Alternative Energy like solar or wind. Well, that's not totally true, there are actually Lots and Lots of Incentives in some states for end-user renewable energy, but it's still really expensive.

Re:Cause: Overloaded grid and bad logic

[randmairs]

With the growing use of stationery fuel cells to generate power, do you think there is a disincentive to invest in new capital intensive power plants? Thus leading to lack of maintenance and building improvements. Which will lead to more and more blackouts until the fuel cell power stations take up the slack.

Market Data tells a story.

[NotQuiteSonic]

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?

Ask yourself: Why regulated in the 1st place?

[release7]

When the industry was regulated, there were reasons why. Our grandfathers and grandmothers got screwed in the past by corporations who fucked with their electricity. Grandma and Grandpa got pissed and urged their politicians to do something about. Seeing an opportunity to get votes, the politicians tightened the reins of for-profit utility companies and regulated. All was well...

...unitl Grandma and Grandpa die off and it's forgotten just how greedy and unscrupulous corporate fucks can be. So then these assholes in the utility company, drooling over those bonuses they and their other corporate cronies will be getting, fetch their fancy lobbyists and sick them on the politicians who now, instead of hearing the complaints of Grandpa and Grandma, hear only the sound of kachings ringing out from their campaign contribution coffers.

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?)

Outage Pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres a pretty good photo album of all the news coverage today.

Available at:
http://hackingthemainframe.com/gallery/albun4 2

Management and Investment?

[Detritus]

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.

NY a nightmare....

[duffbeer703]

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.

Hummmm

[k_stamour]

If a "Power Grid" is discovered to have a single point of failure. Is it still a grid?

Capitalism is so inefficeint! (& would help to

[PaulBu]

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.

An invasion, perhaps?

[Tailhook]

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.

I work for a "greedy corporate power company" and

[duluoz1221]

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.

The 10,000 volt Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The real question

[xixax]

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!!! :)

Finish this sentence...

[JavaJoint]

"If Linux developers had designed the power grid, then..."

Re:Finish this sentence...

[geeklawyer]

"If Linux developers had designed the power grid, then..."
SCO would shut down the national power grid?
ooh...

insufficient margin

[Wansu]

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.

Re:insufficient margin

[evilviper]

There is less incentive to increase capacity.

Make power companies financially responsible for any failures... The system will fix itself overnight... Suddenly, the requests for funding from Congress will not be needed, as the work will already been done in no time flat.

To make a company act nicely, you just have to push some financial motivation that is far far worse than the alternative. eg. Make fines far larger than any potential savings they could hope for, and they will solve the problem.

Re:insufficient margin

[Opusnbill7]

Except that the "problem" in a certain company's system isn't always caused by that company. Often, the load or generation (or just plain engineering) issues can cause overload or stability issues in their neighbor's system. Is the company that "absorbs" the problem always supposed to pay to fix it, even if they didn't cause it? Sure, it might work as legislation, but how would you feel if you had to pay 2-3x the cost of electricity as your neighbors in the next city simply because your provider had to pay to fix your neighbor's issues?

Re:insufficient margin

[evilviper]

Is the company that "absorbs" the problem always supposed to pay to fix it, even if they didn't cause it?

There is really almost nothing that can't be protected against... If your neighboring power station is sending too much work load your way, your system should be able to refuse some of that load (specifically, by shutting off the power to select circuits). If the neighboring power plant is doing the exact opposite, and sending too much power your way, your system should easilly be able to block the necessary circuits.

I think you'll have to elaborate on what kinds of problems one power plant may have, that would seriously affect another, but that cannot be easilly prevented with the proper equipment installed, to give me more of an idea what you are thinking about.

Re:insufficient margin

[Beliskner]

The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity

Overcapacity and overengineering are Communist concepts. Surely you don't expect the US Government to use Communist mechanisms? Americans want fast and cheap. Leading up to the power failure, how many Americans gave a damn about the power grid?

Re:insufficient margin

[Wansu]

Overcapacity and overengineering are Communist concepts.

You have that backwards. Soviet engineering was generally characterized by corner-cutting and copycat work, hence the phrase "Russian Engineering" , meaning reverse engineering.

But the knowledge that a power system, large or small, should have over-capacity isn't about politics; it's about physics. Sure, you can buy a cheap 500VA power inverter that can run a TV in a mini-van but don't try running a drill with it or it'll smoke, trip it's breaker (if it was has one) or go into current limiting (if it is designed with such a protective circuit). The drill motor takes 2-3 times as much starting current as it does once it comes up to speed. If you want to run a drill out of a work van, you need one rated to handle the surge. This concept scales directly. The power system must also be able to handle surges. The alternative is to allow the system to overheat or to shut down the overloaded portions.

People may not have given a damn about our power system up until the blackout, but power outages are very persuasive. Cheaping out is not a viable option. Either we beef up the system to handle these surges or we don't. If we don't, people will use generators. They aren't going back to kerosene lanterns.

Perhaps the story is media deregulation?

[dividius]

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

This had to do with the design of the grid!

[Newer Guy]

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.

Re:YOU FAIL IT!

[Un pobre guey]

Damn, I guess I'm just not an IN SOVIET RUSSIA insider. Maybe I'll try to write a Linux Beowulf Cluster post.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

[ishmaelflood]

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.

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[CGP314]

I am sick of the NYC bias we see in the media

It's the biggest city in the US. It better show up on the news.

MOD PARENT UP

[linefeed0]

Parent of this post is actually insightful, much more so than the top post in this thread.

Sorry, New York is the capital of the universe

[jfern]

And besides they're saying this is the biggest blackout ever (not sure if that's true).

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[jfern]

Now that the whole county has the economy going to shit, upstate NY is no longer dead last in job growth. That's another plus.

Re:Deregulation?

[perlchild]

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.

Wouldn't it be better to allow freedom AND protect citizen's rights? Isn't that why we have a goverment?

To allow individuals to cooperate together, to get a better deal than alone, and protect those of us from each other's freedoms(kinda like an umpire?). You've pegged every disadvantage of the current situation exactly, but your solution could create just the reverse of what we have, with the exact opposite faults, and in end end, be as much of a problem as what we have(just different).

Suppose we got a system in which multiple providers could supply each and every citizen on the grid. Your connection to the grid and its maintenance would fall to a power transmission service provider. Their job is to supply connectivity. (Kinda like isps now, name chosen to emphasise this) You pay a certain amount to your ptsp every month, and get surcharged if you overuse. They in turn select from one or more power suppliers(hopefully many, like bandwidth suppliers now). You get a good deal, as in the case of a power supplier going down, your PTSP can negotiate the contract from a position of strength and get good SLAs and punitive clauses if power goes down. This also enables deals with out-of-state power suppliers, as the distribution of the power is cut from the transmission(again this is a similar model as the ISPs, as few 1000-subscribers can pay for transatlantic cable, but reaching that finland server can still provide a worthwhile download)

This also puts maintenance high on their list, as when they can't transmit power to your house, they can't bill you for it, and like bandwidth, power is not that easy to store... So a PTSP will want high-quality power-distribution equipment, just like an ISP wouldn't use an ethernet unmanaged hub for its backbone.

A PTSP would work on getting "cheap" power, within guidelines of existing equipment and standards(and have tho show their math/graphs fot it) if not to you then to the competition authorities... Just like ISPs have to show network statistics to their business clients. It changes the dynamics we have now, by allowing more accountability, and encouraging required maintenance(if not optional let's make this network "better" maintenance). I'd propose against any power producer owning stock in distribution of course, but then I'm from a place where the Gvmt still owns power, and it's one of the parts of the gvmt that aren't in the red...)

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[kevin lyda]

niagra mohawk is in upstate new york. you really want them focusing on upstate new york?

Classic economics 101 (Micro) topic

[mulp]

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.

Re:The South?

[scottgfx]

My family moved to the Fort Myers area in 1979. Back then, (For most of the 80's) during the summer months, the power would be interrupted just about every day. I remember visiting my brother at a video production house in Atlanta just a few years ago. They didn't have a UPS supply for the building, just a "power conditioner". Here in Florida, television stations have huge UPS systems and diesel generators, and they are in use on an almost daily basis!!! Kudos to the power companies though, Even though we have electrical storms throughout the summer, the power is not interrupted nearly as often.

What liberals??

[rEWDBOi]

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.

Re:What liberals??

[ThaReetLad]

If only I had mod points. I'd give them all to you in an instant.

Re:What liberals??

[charon_on_acheron]

What do you define a liberal as? Someone who needs government assistance to wipe their own ass, with government issued toilet paper, in a government owned toilet, and with a government finger shoving up their ass afterward checking for any hidden money that they didn't tax yet? And that person likes this? That sounds like your version of liberalism.

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.

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).

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. I don't care if someone wants to marry another person of the same sex, and it's none of my business what two or more consenting adults do in the privacy of their own house. I also don't care if people want to avoid reality for a few hours, or bet on the score of a football game, or watch movies of people having sex. Laws are not meant to be interpretations of the Bible. Laws are supposed to prevent people from causing harm to other people, not save their souls.

And finally, for those who want to throw the race card into the argument, there was a reason I specifically said people left Europe to live in the land of the free. While many Africans did the same, and were free men, the majority were brought over as slaves. I don't think that entails their entire decendant group to live off the government. Liberals in the US like to make this group think they deserve every drop of public assistance that the Democrats are willing to give them. But sucking from the public teat is just keeping them dependant on that teat, rather than helping them become successful in their own life. I would rather see the government helping these people find a solid job and live in good neighborhoods. Instead the liberals herd them into ghettos and housing projects that are unclean and dangerous.

Re:What liberals??

[metalslinger]

This post is completely true despite the following post claiming you have an appalling lack of a grasp on historical facts. On the contrary I think you summarized it well.

Now for a response to both. Europeans did come to the New World to escape religious oppression, taxes, and human rights (aka having the right to keep said relations out of stupid wars, etc..., for the safety of the family). While it is true that they were not sovereign under their own country at this point, they were ok with that because they were far enough away from the mainland that they could exercise a certain amount of freedom without fear of retribution: this is shown by the open speeches and print that became know as the newspaper that was released often. It wasn't until England started forcing these on the New World, had an appalling lack of care over the protection of said citizens, as is journalized by Benjamin Franklin and other historians and printers of the time, from the forces of the French, disallowing said people to form militias for the purpose of protection against the french, and pressing said people into the service of the English army (even if it meant the destruction of the persons farm, death of family and destruction of property), etc..., that The People Revolted! The following post (posted before but below this post hereby known as "the following post") does not take into account the actual history that lead to his version of history.

That aside I must argue against another part of what I have called "the following post". The fact is he is right that modern day liberals do argue against the statist "big" government and against monarchies. What he has failed to include though is the fact that they promote a different "big" government. What they propose is a large socialistic government in which the government provides all the peoples needs. They do this at the risk or privacy, freedom, etc...

I find this highly insulting in the fact that in order to bring this about they strip everyone of any constitutional rights under the guise of the constitution itself. They also need a massive amount of control and statism to pull this off. In essence we can have all these "benefits" if we forego all rights to use the benefits as we deem them to be used. It is a form of slavery that is even more subtle and deceptive than the monarchistic form of control; at least with a monarchy we can see who is in charge and know what we are facing: with this it is all hidden for our benefit. Not only that but it strips the power from the people and causes them to not even own the fruit of their labor(see Uniformed Commercial Code). This essentially means that our work is considered the governments, in return for benefits forced on us that we didn't want, So that the government can then borrow on our productivity to keep our dollar afloat in the international market. Of course the Republicans want the same but take a different approach to it. We are being made slaves for the sake of money, which we know doesn't return to us for our uses and is mostly wasted in efforts to force more benefits on us! What happened to government by the people, for the people?

Now for my final rant. I believe that you speak sir as a lover of liberty, not as a partisan lackey. Even if you do not enjoy the real benefits of freedom, it is obvious that you understand them. So I salute you.

Resemblance with dutch power outage

[NeedBeans]

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.

Litmus test- when deregulation is a bad idea

[PsiPsiStar]

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.

History Repeats...

[bigattichouse]

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.

Re:History Repeats...

[LemonYellow]

Obligatory link:

Great Northeast Blackout of '65

Basically, the reason for this blackout is that nobody learned from the experience 38 years ago.

expensive at 4.5c / kWh? I wish I paid that liitle

[Fareq]

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"

It's Coffee Talk with Linda Richman

[AchmedHabib]

I'm feeling a little verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves.. I'll give you a topic:
Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story?

Dude. Do some reading.

[Fantastic Lad]

The two links in my last post might be a good place to start. (You know; actually read before you respond. . ?)

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

A long term fix will be DC distribution

[NKJensen]

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.

Re:A long term fix will be DC distribution

[Paddyish]

But what about resistance? The original power distribution framework set up in this country (USA) was DC...but AC quickly overtook it because AC is not nearly as susceptible to line loss. It just makes more sense to use AC...unless you've got some room-temp superconducting power lines.

Re:A long term fix will be DC distribution

[NKJensen]

Resistance loss depend on the current.

Loss = R*I^2

So if you want to minimize resistive losses, you must increase voltage and decrease current.

If you want to transfer say 100 watts, that's possible with several combinations of voltage and current:

P=U*I

100W =
10V * 10A =
100V * 1A =
1000V * 0.1A

Since it's easy to pump up the voltage and thus decrease the current using a transformer, AC seems to be the best way to go. But ...

now we have power electronics! You can now convert the voltages as needed. E.g. the PSU in a PC often converts from several hundred volts to 12, 5 and -12 (perhaps also more low voltages) without any transformer in a "step-down" converter.

So you'll use high voltage (and therefore low current) for long distance power transfers and convert to low voltage and high current when you arrive near the consumer.

The resistance depends on the length, material and thickness of a power line.

For long distances, AC has more loss than DC because a power grid has inductive losses and capacitive losses. DC transfers do not have those losses.

Re:A long term fix will be DC distribution

[cgleba]

Ah, the classic Westinghouse-Edison argument. Edison wanted a distributed network of small DC generators for redundancy and safety while Westinghouse wanted centrally located AC power plants to achieve economies of scale.

In the US, the Westinghouse model won mostly because of the great distances between cities and towns that the DC-small-genrator model was *way* too inefficient (as line losses due to DC are massive compared to AC thus economies of scale can not be introduced).

What is really interesting is that Edison *really* wanted small DC generators on every block but the Westinghouse model was taking hold. In an attempt to scare the public about the "evils" of AC electricity, Edison invented the electric chair. Really messed up.

In the end, though, the major power grids in the US are interconnected with DC for frequency isolation. That is why the Northeast backout did not take out the entire continent.

As for the whole deregulation thing, the Edison model would have worked beutifully degregulated because it would have been smaller, more isolated (the left hand does not need to know what the right hand is doing) -- but who wants a generator on their street block (pollution, noise, etc)? The Westinghouse model is much better, but the problem is that it creates what economists call a natural monopoly -- the economies of scale are SO great that breaking it up in any way will cause price increases. . .but on the other hand a monopoly is too powerful so the only solution is a government run agency. The inefficiency of government is by far covered by the larger economies of scale. Moreover, since the system is "owned" by one company, the company is responsible for the whole system, including maintainence, and there is one person to point the finger at and the "blame game" never ensues where nothing gets fixed. Moreover, the company is only accountable to the people and not stock holders, so corner-cutting to give more profits to the stock holders does not happen.

Re:A long term fix will be DC distribution

[NKJensen]

The technology has changed since Edison. The "small" (that is low-voltage) generators Edison imagined are no longer needed. You can have the DC generators as big and with as high voltage as you like. And you can use even higher voltages for the distribution grid.

The argument about line losses are therefore no longer valid. Line losses are not due to DC, they are due to the high currents needed if the voltage must be low. AC circumvents this with simple transformers. It used to be impossible to shift voltages from one DC level to another. Not anymore.

Modern switch mode step up and step down techology is very efficient. That's why we can - and should - build a high voltage DC distribution grid with step-down converters before the delivery points to the customers.

The low voltage will protect the customers.

E.g. the electric chair isn't dangerous if the voltage is low.

Edison probably wanted to make a point about high voltages to support his low-voltage DC distribution idea.

Where are the coops?

[Ikkyu]

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.

Money on Transmission? Oh yes!

[Thenomain]

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.)

Re:Power Outage - More of the same

[aliens]

Let's see, hrm where are the major TV stations/radio stations based. Oh yeah, NYC. You want local news? Blame Clear Channel for eating up all of them and spitting out one station to all areas regardless.

New York Mayor George Pataki? Funny I thought he was the governor of NY State.

What are they going to report in Eerie PA? I give them 60s and they can cover it for the night.

You live in NY, expect news about NY. What else are they going to say about Lansing and Cleveland? Powers out there too, if we had some worthy news from there maybe we'd put it out, but I think you 5 million commuters are more concerned with what this means for you.

And guess what? You got tons of coverage when SU won the NCAA, and Funny Cide was the biggest thing to happen to horse racing ever most people said and the fact that he was a NY (not NYC) Gelding made it more intersting. So I really don't know what your point is.

I experienced the blackout...

[vudufixit]

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.

wrong set of enemies

[alizard]

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.

9 months' time?

[larien]

Okay, what's the bets that maternity hospitals in the area are scrambling to ban all leave for next May?

Re:9 months' time?

[Violet Null]

Blackout babies are an urban legend. Read up on it here.

Re:The rest of the world cares about this because?

[Get Behind the Mule]

Well guess what, we dont.

Well, let's see. The top story on all the TV news broadcasts in Germany last night was the power outage, and BBC World was giving non-stop, live coverage -- I could see Mayor Bloomberg's press conference live there. Right now on the German Internet news sites, it's the top two stories on Spiegel Online, the top story on Focus Online, the top story at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, and I think I could on like this all day. It was also the sole topic of discussion at lunch with my colleagues here in Hamburg today.

I would think that a blackout affecting an estimated fifty million people would be very big news no matter where in the world it occurred. There's also a bit of Schadenfreude in the fact that it has hit the world's only superpower, and a bit of fascination about New York experiencing yet another historic blackout.

And yes, it is a relevant subject on a technology site, since energy is a technological field, and since our computers run on ... you guessed it, electricity. If the same thing happens where we live, well then we'll have to stop using our computers. And where would we be then?!

I understand that many Slashdot readers are unaware of how US-centric it gets sometimes, but this time I don't think it's a problem.

I used to work for a power company

[DukeLinux]

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.

Re:The rest of the world cares about this because?

[Get Behind the Mule]

Deregulation is a possible policy choice for governments everywhere, and it's not a bad idea to try learn from the experience of others who have chosen a certain policy. Here in Germany just recently, the regulation of energy markets has been loosened to allow competition -- there are ads for power companies in all of the media now, none of which ever existed before. If deregulation contributed to this calamity in the US, then others, elsewhere in the world, might want to draw the conclusion that deregulation shouldn't be taken too far.

Deregulation is discussed in some of the web stories that I posted, it was covered on the German TV news and BBC World last night, and I spent half my lunch hour explaining what I knew about it to my colleagues. Your assertion that the rest of the world doesn't care is quite simply false. I think you're just being dogmatic.

Northeast Blackout

[TheEngineer]

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.

Re:Northeast Blackout

[hafidhahullah]

All of the energy industry "experts" have been spouting this same line on CNN/FOX/CNBC/MSNBC since yesterday evening. It's just not convincing. They keep saying "the grid is designed to have failsafes built in to prevent this kind of thing from happening!" When asked why the cascading failure that was engineered not to happen happened, then, they reply with a meowing tone, "We just don't know!?! We have no idea."

It is my distinct recollection that when the Republican congress was pushing through energy deregulation back in the '90s, one of their biggest arguments was that it was going to result in lower prices for all consumers. This certainly has not happened, either, in fact the opposite has resulted. Power rates have steadily escalated upward at a rate far outpacing inflation.

On a side note, is anybody taking bets on whether the result of all the multimillion dollar investigations on the cause of this outage will ultimately find that the grid's computers were crashing from the LoveSan/Winblaster worm? I could imagine this cascade happening while 60-70% of your controlling computers are spontaneously rebooting.

Central office different under regulation?

[tjstork]

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.

Yet their power grid works better..

[Pahalial]

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.

NIMBY, party of one. NIMBY, party of one.

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:Do I hear a chorus of 'Blame Canada'???

[MrPink2U]

by Anonymous Coward

enough said...

Re:Dude. Do some reading.

[deanj]

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.

Power

[gsparrow]

While I do think deregulation was bad, I don't think you can blam this on it.

blame the enviromental whackos

[HaveITall]

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.

Re:blame the enviromental whackos

[Tiado]

They want reliable and limitless energy, but they don't want transmission lines and generating plants to exist in their area. Sorry, but you guys can't have it both ways, either you allow transmission lines, substations, generating plants, etc. to be built, or reduce your fscking energy consumption. Okay?

A lot to do with deregulation

[csguy314]

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.

heise security blames windows worm for blackout

[damian]

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

Exactly - NIMBY syndrome

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Link between W32.Blaster and the Blackout

[presroi]

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...

Lack of Service Fines

[hughk]

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.

The REAL cause of the blackout!

[sboyko]

Microsoft got too many support calls and figured it was time to reboot the Eastern seaboard. ;)

Semantics

[DrivesMyApe]

I think there's nothing wrong with deregulation of the power industry, or any other industry for that matter. There is something wrong with unsrupulous profiteering, however. So perhaps the answer is to deregulate industry but regulate profiteering.

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.

Re:Semantics

[amadeusb4]

answer me this adam smith. how do you create competition in a market that's a natural monopoly?

Not deregulation Profit

[tkrabec]

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

Re:Not deregulation Profit

[amadeusb4]

why should i pay for all of these damn bonuses when power prices were already reasonable to begin with????? (pre deregulation that is)

show me the money that i saved and i'll jump on the deregulation bandwagon. so far, the only ones on the bandwagon are those issuing the bills.

Deregulation is a MYTH

[Moschaef]

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.

Re:Deregulation is a MYTH

[tetra103]

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.

No, but after 9/11, we sure have alot to complain about with security. Deregulation is a good thing in that it promotes competition and hence lower cost. Unfortunately, competition also promotes "lowest bidder" mentallity. Who knows, maybe somday we'll "off-shore" our power generators because we just don't want that sorta stuff in our backyards anymore. Detracts the view of the golf course ya know.

OT: Face it, we're all snotty Americans. Hypocritical to the last. We all feel we "deserve" that 2500sq ft home, two car garage and our own automobile when we hit 16yr. We all want the comfort of living in the USA, but if we ever go to war, many would do anything to duck the draft. Hell, we even elect draft dogers for presidents and for some reason, we're ok with that. I love America as much as the next guy, but the general mentallity of it's citizens (myself included) just sickens me. I think the first major overhaul the USA needs is a mentallity adjustment. Get away from the "me first" mentallity and "it's not my fault" court cases. Get back to love and respect thy fellow man/woman and then....just then....maybe the right decisions will start to flow.

Re:Counter Example

[Phleg]

Fortunately, the theorem was never that "state-owned enterprises will always fail and private ones will always succeed forever and ever amen".

Re:Do I hear a chorus of 'Blame Canada'???

[rsax]

I was waiting for it too - as soon as it came on that a Canadian part of the grid was down, I was thinking, "They'll be blaming Canada any minute now." Sure enough, right on cue, it starts flying back and forth from CNN to MSNBC to FOX - Canada Canada Canada Foreigners it's all the damn furriners.

Heh you took the words right out of my mouth. I've been trying to find another story on google without much luck. Remember when those terrorists on the FBI most wanted list supposedly crossed the border from Canada into the US? There was this huge man hunt, their pictures were plastered on the FBI website and on all the news channels. Turned out it was a complete hoax, some of the "terrorists" who should have been running rampant in the US were actually in Pakistan wondering why they're wanted in by the FBI. Basically everyone and their grandmothers blamed Canada on all the Amercian news channels along with U.S. politicians (Hillary Clinton especially). When it became apparent that someone just blew smoke up everyones' asses there was no acknowledgement that the FBI, news channels and politicians screwed up, no public apology (not one), nothing. Damn Canadians couldn't even let these terrorists through their border into our country and made us look like hyper-paranoid fools in the end. Blame them for this too.

Mod parent up

[hughk]

You are right to flag the importance of the area. Unless a person has knowledge of Australasia, I don't think they have any idea of the importance of Auckland. All Wellington has is the government and WETA.

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.

The story of Enron and deregulation

[anarcat]

Interesting insight from an investigator of corporate racketers. Though I doubt any slashdotter can *really* read this one to the end. :)

Interesting excerpt:

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.

Re-Regulation.. not Deregulation

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Deregulation, Grid Failures, etc

[geekman2000]

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

N SOVIET RUSSIA.. the power worked

[hughk]

Actually, it did quite well - the power cuts only came when the energy costs went up after privatisation. It was more profitable to sell the Gas to Germany, than to run generators locally. The problems is that the power stations were CHP, providing district heating too. When they were cut, then everyone got cold.

In Soviet Ukraine, that was another story (Chernobyll).

I know EXACTLY what they'll do about this -read on

[Denver_80203]

"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

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[pmz]

...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.

Listen to someone who's here...

[lorenlal]

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.

Re:Listen to someone who's here...

[macdaddy357]

I've had electricity from two providers, Cinergy, a publicly traded corporation, charges way too much , and can't be bothered with crap like "customer service." When I lived further out in the country, I had Owen Electric cooperative. The electricity cost less, the service was more reliable, and friendlier, and to top it all off, their goal was to break even, so when they turned a profit, it was given back to members. I got a check every year. Cinergy sees me as a money tree they can shake at will.

Legislation

[hughk]

Your telephone wire is protected by regulations that force the phone company to maintain a basic service. As the ADSL modem and voice wires are combined at the exchange end, they might as well run the routers off the same generators as the ADSL line termination cards. At your end, it is down to you to find power for anything beyond a basic telephone.

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.

Re:The rest of the world cares about this because?

[milesbparty]

Here's the comment I was looking for...

When this story came out yesterday, I posted the following comment.

I guess I just had to wait a day.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[QuackQuack]

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

Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.

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.

If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.

De-regulation and Competition

[sterno]

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.

Spinning Reserve

[aaarrrgggh]

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.

Re:This had to do with the design of the grid!

[PingPongBoy]

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.

If it's like gas deregulation...then no

[Sabalon]

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.

dcom worm to blame?

[IowaFarmer41]

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 know what caused it..

[Mr Coffee Cup]

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.

Re:I know what caused it..

[Mr Coffee Cup]

Ohh no worries about the points..

It did brownout seconds after we started the AC compressor.. we looked at each other and said Uhh-Ohh, and shut it down. Lights went really bright right after, and the jokes began to fly as soon as we saw the news.

Not joking, i phoned my house to see if the boxes were all still up.. i have no idea how long 3kva of batteries can power all this junk, but prolly not long enough to get home and shut the whole mess down. Luckily i'm on a county loop right off the plant, and the boxes were happily humming.

A bit about Niagara Mohawk:

NIMO (as the locals here call it with varying looks of disgust) owns all the transmission lines. The Niagara Power Project (U.S side of the river) is run by the Power Authority.. (New York State). NIMO purchases power from the Authority and others, and does the T&D. (transmission / distribution)

The Niagara hydroelectric plants (if you include the Canadian plant, which is also tied into the grid) produce an enormous amount of very inexpensive power. Unfortunately, our bills reflect the costs of maintaining infastructure. (we have perhaps the highest cost/kwh in the country) This is largely due to the majority of power produced here being exported to Ohio, Toronto, and NYC (points east). The Niagara area and New York in general have very high taxes, which has caused a lot of the high amperage heavy industry to move elsewhere. As consumer base decreased, NIMO exported more and more power outside the area.

Enter deregulation. Deregulation allows, among other things, consumers to purchase power from other providers, and requires NIMO to buy any excess power from providers. (i forget the cost in kwh now, but i remember thinking at the time that it looked rather high). As more and more providers come online, NIMO's base is eroded unless they can export the "surplus" power to another area. Hence, the grid sees traffic it might not otherwise see. A phase to phase fault at 500kv on some lonely tower could cause this sort of thing under present conditions, or at least i wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be the case.

Anyways, it will probably take some sort of re-regulation and a fair amount of time to correct. In the meantime, it's sort of like taxes.. we pay the bill and hope for the best.

Re:I know what caused it..

[Tiado]

Ah, so You're the one who drew just enough power to overload the grid.

</joke>

Re:This had to do with the design of the grid!

[kindbud]

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.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[ldspartan]

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."

Alright, what the fuck. I hear this argument often, and it doesn't make any sense to me.

Now, to get my bias out of the way, I drive a 98 Ford Explorer. Before that, I drove a 95 Ford Taurus sedan. The Explorer gets 20mpg _max_ on the highway, and 18mpg in conditions where the Taurus would have gotten 22mpg. Other Explorer engine/drivetrain/model/year combinations get different mileage.

For the purposese of this post, one assumes that there are legitimate uses of SUVs, and that everyone who drives one isn't just using it as a glorified minivan. I'm not going to justify my individual ownership of an SUV here, nor am I going to make an effort to prove that there are legitimate uses.

I will grant you that the internal combustion engine is an old design. The basics of it haven't changed since it was first invented. That doesn't mean, however, that it hasn't been continually improved. Things like computer control, fuel injection, synthetic lubricating oils, exhaust gas recirculation and a host of other technologies I don't fully understand have made gasoline engines more efficient now than ever before.

Now, my Taurus weighed about 3000 pounds. My Explorer weighs a bit over 4000. There are reasons for this: the Taurus was a unibody design, the Explorer is body-on-frame. That makes it heavier, but much much stronger. This, in turn, allows it to carry heavier loads. I can carry a half ton of gear in my explorer and still be within manufacturers specifications. I can also tow a 3500lb trailer and not be doing anything bad to the car. Neither of these were even remotely possible with my Taurus, although it was an excellent car.

To do these things, you require a larger, more powerful engine. The reason for this is it requires more energy to accelerate something as its weight increases. This is nothing more complex than introductory highschool physics. Fuel economy is not a magic thing. There's a specific amount of energy in a gallon of gas, and accelerating (and overcoming the rolling friction of) a vehicle requires a specific amount of energy. You can't just say "If SUVs had better engines, they'd get the same fuel economy as compacts" (I know you didn't actual say that). It simply requires more energy to move something thats heavier.

You might complain that hybrid gas/electric engines are extra-efficient due to regenerative breaking and so forth, and that automakers should be using them in SUVs. The answer to this is that they are. Ford is releasing a hybrid version of the Escape this coming model year, and I've seen a (really nice!) full-size GMC pickup testbed that was a hybrid. The technology is on its way, but the issue is that it doesn't help that much. No matter how you slice it, moving something big and heavy is harder than moving something small and lithe. And some people need big heavy cars.

--
lds

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[denshi]

Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition. The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right. Just because Blair practices pragmatism doesn't mean left-wing/socialist ideology has gone away.

Please reread his comment, particularly noting his phrase "at this point". He never said left-wing ideology has 'gone away'.

If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.

Average gas mileage is lower today than is was in the early 1980s. Car makers are absolutely standing in the way of higher fuel efficiency, and they have been lobbying for decades to oppose it.

A *New* Possible Cause.

[DarnComputers]

Here's my theory on what happened.

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.htm l

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/t echnology /soho_impact_030623.html

So, solar wind could have been the culprit for the blackout catastrophe.

Re:A *New* Possible Cause.

[DarnComputers]

http://www.gyre.org/r.php?id=3305
Try that link for the second reference...Sorry That was my first post.

Singeltons should be government owned

[ClarkEvans]

and places where there can be competition should be privately owned.

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 /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.

Movie of BURNING TRANSFORMER

[doktr thunder]

NOOOOOOOOOO not starscream ANYONE but STARSCREAM

Re:Do I hear a chorus of 'Blame Canada'???

[kobaque]

actually, from the news we could get in west michigan... we were told a. it was NOT terrorism and b. It was NOT canada... in that order. They noted that Canadian officials said "the american side of niagra falls was struck by lightning". don't think that there are mobs down here yelling 'hang the canuks' for forcing the use of candles for a romantic dinner.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[evilviper]

How about a little blame for the companies that abuse them?

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?

Typical of idiots

[dh003i]

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.

complete deregulation + competition

[dh003i]

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.

Re:This had to do with the design of the grid!

[Avian visitor]

The generators normally sit there running at a boring 3600 RPM (60hz*60 seconds).

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.

wow, you're stupid

[dh003i]

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.

W32.Blaster caused power outage?

[rdorsch]

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.

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. 08.03-00 1/

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[shilly]

No-one doubts what you say. The $64m question is, how many SUV owners really do honestly *need* that big, heavy vehicle? After all, no-one is required to demonstrate that they have a need for an SUV before they are allowed to buy one. So it is entirely possible that many millions of people have bought one for reasons of desire rather than necessity. I think that this is exactly what has happened--lots of people now want to drive SUVs. Only a small subset actually need to drive SUVs (and only a much smaller subset need to drive SUVs on a regular basis). Driving around all these SUVs is causing a rise in external costs: guzzling more oil and spewing more pollution than would be the case otherwise, for example.
I'm not demanding that the state should prevent someone from buying an SUV unless they can demonstrate need. I doubt many people are. But I would like to see the state *discouraging* the purchase of SUVs--through increasing the costs of ownership. And if that sticks in people's craws--tough.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[Zeinfeld]

Blair is a CENTRIST politician who belongs to a party with a leftist tradition.

He is way, way to the left of Ted Kennedy. But yes, I'll agree he is a centrist. The problem is that in the US the whole political spectrum is far off to the right.

If by 'centrist' you mean pragmatic, non-ideological then OK I think you are making the same point as me.

The far-left is just as ideologically driven as the far-right.

Yes, but the far left is an even bigger joke than the Librarian Party. There are still some hard left ideologues in the Labour party but they have almost no influence. Even the Tories have given up claiming that Tony Benn or Dennis Skinner represent the true Labour party.

I am certainly NOT claiming that the left has not been ideological in the past. Quite the opposite. The lack of ideology on the left is precisely because of the electoral disasters that the ideology led to. It took twenty years for the left to recover from the 1970s. My fear is that it will take the Republican party at least as long to recover from Bush. There will be hard right ideologues driving for crusades against gays and huge tax cuts long after the big political issue has become the deficit and benefits to seniors. They will continue to push for hard right ideology long after the country has rejected it.

If you've been paying attention, there are more and more hybrid cars and SUVs hitting the market, some can get up to 60MPH, so what you are saying needs to happen is happening, it just takes time.

I would hope that a hybrid could do 60 mph, there is no reason why it should not do 90 which should be enough for anyone. I suspect you mean mpg.

There would be a lot more cars of that sort if the gas guzzler penalties applied to cars also applied to SUVs.

see previous post on last article about this

[Magius_AR]

for obligatory SimCity budget joke.

Mod to +5 funny.

Thank you for your time.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[Zeinfeld]

I will grant you that the internal combustion engine is an old design. The basics of it haven't changed since it was first invented. That doesn't mean, however, that it hasn't been continually improved.

The problem is that those improvements have only been applied to SUVs in a limited fashion. Some changes like fuel injection have been forced on the manufacturers by the need to achieve emissions standards. But they have not had the same incentive to reduce consumption.

Some of the difference is explained by poor aerodynomics and greater weight - but not that much. There are huge differences in consumption between SUVs. My neighbor gets 8mpg from her SUV. I get 22mpg from my high performance sports car with a larger engine that gives over twice the power. Even more ridiculous my 4 litre sports car with a top speed of 155mph (artificially limited to save the tires) has better measured gas milage than the average US car.

It is not a question of driving arround in a bad car, or a hybrid or anything like that. There is plenty of room for improvement.

The reason the car manufacturers do not change is simple, old plants. They build SUVs at the oldest and most outdated plants because they are the least demanding. Body on frame is cheap to manufacture - contrary to your claim monocoque build is considerably stronger for a given weight of material. That is why the luxury SUVs like the Range Rover have switched to it. Same goes for engines, the car makers like SUVs because it allows them to keep their obsolete powertrain manufacturing plants in operation. They can't make car engines there without new investment, but they can churn out obsolete engine designs to go in SUVs.

Environmentalists

[jbrandv]

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.

A "fair and balanced" analysis

[useosx]

Greg Palast takes a look at why the lights went out.

Re:A "fair and balanced" analysis

[JWW]

I love how Bush 1 did all of this just so his son could benifit at some point in the future (like he new what would happen. And GW Bush is evil for wanting deregulation, but Clinton "found his soul" and put in price caps.

I'm not saying I'm for deregulation, in fact I am quite against it, but to get the "Fair and Balanced" label, perhaps a little more blame should be placed at Clinton's feet as well.

Deregulation has been a nightmare. Right now power is supplied where I live by a rural electric cooperative, reliably and at a low cost. 45 miles south of me the private electric company that handles most of the power for the largest city in the state (Sioux Falls, SD), routinely has multi-hour blackouts because of their poor infrastructure.

The federal government should take over total control of the power grid and the infrastructure that supports it. And before complaining how bad that would be, imagine how bad the highways would be if they were built and maintained by private companies.

Re:A "fair and balanced" analysis

[volkris]

Ha.
There IS no power deregulation.

All of these people are screaming about how it's failed when the instances they point to were not deregulated in the first place.

Who's rabid here?

[JimmytheGeek]

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.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[Superfarstucker]

bullshit... show me numbers/statistics that support your awfully brave statement "average gas mileage is lower today than it was in the early 1980's"

history your weak subject?

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

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

Would they offer the coverage?

[JimmytheGeek]

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.

Re:Would they offer the coverage?

[jmorris42]

> How about a remote village in Alaska? Not much interest, especially
> at a flat rate.

And why do you feel like you not only should be subsidizing Alaskan postage rates but that you feel justified in supporting government force to make me do it too? Different parts of the country have different costs of living. We don't mandate one uniform price for housing, food, or most of the other required items. I live in rural Louisiana and I bet you would kill for my mortage. If I paid more to get shipments from newegg I'd still be ahead of the game. But I'm living in a town still close enough to civilization to get DSL. My boss lives a few miles out of town and will probably be on dialup forever. Is that the phone company's fault that the population density out there is so low a DSLAM would never pay for itself? Should thee and me pay more so the phone company can lose money out there?

Had the fedgov not handed the phone monopoly huge sacks of subsidy checks some godawful remote areas never would have had phones. You would bemoan that lack, I would welcome it. Because those folks WOULD want phone service and without the heavy helping hand of the State they would have had it, albeit at a higher price and probably via wireless. Which means we would have had widescale wireless deployment in the 60's, speeding technological development of wireless tech by decades.

The better I see, less I like Shrub

[JimmytheGeek]

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?

Re:Moment of silence - funny but

[fleck_99_99]

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.)

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[ldspartan]

The problem is that those improvements have only been applied to SUVs in a limited fashion. Some changes like fuel injection have been forced on the manufacturers by the need to achieve emissions standards. But they have not had the same incentive to reduce consumption.

I'd argue that fuel injection is required for computer control of the power train, which is good for a variety of reasons (On board diagnostics is a non-emissions related one that springs to mind). Other than (US-specific) weaker emssions controls on SUVs (since they are light trucks, after all), what do you base your comment on?

Some of the difference is explained by poor aerodynomics and greater weight - but not that much. There are huge differences in consumption between SUVs. My neighbor gets 8mpg from her SUV. I get 22mpg from my high performance sports car with a larger engine that gives over twice the power. Even more ridiculous my 4 litre sports car with a top speed of 155mph (artificially limited to save the tires) has better measured gas milage than the average US car.

Some engine / powertrain combinations get awful gas mileage. The Dodge Durango, in its base configuration, gets 8mpg I believe. In my humble opinion, people who buy a car that is that inefficient are dumb. Whats important is that the whole class of vehicles isn't like that - the buyer has a choice. Would you be as upset if you neighbor owned a BMW Z8 and got 14mpg in the city (and only a little more on the highway)?

The reason the car manufacturers do not change is simple, old plants. They build SUVs at the oldest and most outdated plants because they are the least demanding. Body on frame is cheap to manufacture - contrary to your claim monocoque build is considerably stronger for a given weight of material. That is why the luxury SUVs like the Range Rover have switched to it. Same goes for engines, the car makers like SUVs because it allows them to keep their obsolete powertrain manufacturing plants in operation. They can't make car engines there without new investment, but they can churn out obsolete engine designs to go in SUVs.

I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes. For instance, if you get stuck in a monocoque vehicle, like a (recent) Jeep Cherokee, and need to be pulled out by another vehicle, you need to attach the tow strap to specific hard points on the vehicles body. There's usually one of these in front, and one in back. If you try to tow/pull a monocoque vehicle by any other point on the body, the body is likely to develop a crack and the car is totalled. OTOH, with a ladder frame vehicle, you're free to hook up anywhere on the frame and tug as hard as you'd like without any real risk of hurting the vehicle.

As for why luxury SUVs are monocoque in construction, there are a lot of better reasons than strength. Monocoque is generally stiffer, since a monocoque body/frame is more box like than a ladder frame, which is pretty flat. Its also lighter (for similiarly sized vehicles) than a body and a frame, which has advantages other than fuel economy: a light car accelerates and decelerates more easily, which provides safety (through decreased breaking distance) and sportiness. Lets not forget that dubious safety features like 'crumple zones' only apply to monocoque vehicles.

There are lots of reasons for making monocoque non-luxury SUVs as well (which is done, often. The Ford Escape, and all the Jeeps that are bigger than the Liberty spring to mind). If you examine things a bit more, you're likely to find that SUVs that are actually designed for legitimate use are body-on-frame and based on pickup truck chassis, while the SUVs designed to be "cool minivans" are monocoque.

What engine change

In CA it was the ratepayers getting fisted

[JimmytheGeek]

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.

Re:In CA it was the ratepayers getting fisted

[pmz]

Cheney and Bush's response to the gang-rape of CA ratepayers was to hold the victim down.

Cheney and Bush should never have been elected in the first place. All voters, from the Libertarians to the Socialists (Democrats and Republicans, inclusive), should have been able to see through the thin veil covering the conflicts of interest present. Also, the prior administration isn't all roses and cotton candy in this matter, either.

I can't quite understand the willingness to trust the assholes who colluded to create the CA power crises.

The assholes, like Enron, who conspired to do their deeds did so in the fertile soil of a f*cked up artifically propped-up system of kludgey poo excreted from the lovely beast we call government. The assholes simply saw the opportunity and went after it like a dog in heat. Sure, the assholes should be punished (punished severely, that is), but their ability to find new opportunities in seriously flawed system is actually quite commendable.

Lots siphoned out for profit and corp. waste

[JimmytheGeek]

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.

WRONG!!!

[JimmytheGeek]

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.

Deregulation won't fix the problem

[Lurkingfear]

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.

Re:Damnit, look - California was NEVER deregulated

[pmz]

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.

Re:Deregulation?

[Sunlighter]

Wouldn't it be better to allow freedom AND protect citizen's rights? Isn't that why we have a goverment? To allow individuals to cooperate together, to get a better deal than alone, and protect those of us from each other's freedoms (kinda like an umpire?)

People don't need to be protected from each other's freedoms, but they do need to have their own freedoms protected. That's why government is necessary. I suppose I should have paused to distinguish freedom (which to me is synonymous with individual rights -- life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness) from anarchy (which tends to disintegrate into might-makes-right).

The PTSP idea is a good one and would probably work. But there's no need for any competition authorities; the police would probably be sufficient, enforcing laws against fraud and extortion and stuff.

Re:Moment of silence - funny but

[abe ferlman]

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.

Conspiracy theorists. .

[Fantastic Lad]

CIA didn't try and plant any WMDs...that's just BS, and you know it.

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

Wrong, wrong and wrong!

[Newer Guy]

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.....

Re:Wrong, wrong and wrong!

[Avian visitor]

I don't really know how it is done in USA, but in Europe the frequency is very carefully controlled by Quartz oscillators. A lot of clocks here use the frequency of the grid to keep time so it has to be accurate. Also a lot of measuring equipment only works correctly at 50 Hz

About regulating the speed of a huge turbine: Virtually all big power plants use synchronous generators. That means that they do not need to be mechanically regulated. The generator will do that for you (and with great accuracy).

A "common source" of sync is a "base" group of the most powerful powerplants. Together they can make very minute corrections to the grid frequency.

Payment, incentives.

[rew]

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

[MacGod]

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.

Re:The right is the ideologically driven party

[Zeinfeld]

Some engine / powertrain combinations get awful gas mileage. The Dodge Durango, in its base configuration, gets 8mpg I believe. In my humble opinion, people who buy a car that is that inefficient are dumb. Whats important is that the whole class of vehicles isn't like that - the buyer has a choice. Would you be as upset if you neighbor owned a BMW Z8 and got 14mpg in the city (and only a little more on the highway)?

Exactly the point I was making. There is no reason why every SUV could not be as efficient as the foreign imports. BMW have to achieve better milage because the market in Europe insists they do. There are not many Europeans lining up to buy US built SUVs that do 8 mpg...

I don't know what particular interpretation of "stronger" you're using (not sarcasm, I mean it). While I agree that monocoque can be made as safe in accidents as body-on-frame, I doubt its stronger so far as usefulness goes.

Tubes are stronger than beams. That is why the WTC was built as a tube.

You do have to be a bit careful about mounting points, but it is the same with a girder.

What engine changes are you talking about, btw? I'll grant you that some SUVs are powered by relatively old engine technology (pushrod vs. overhead cam), but most aren't.

I have owned 30 years old cars with overhead cams. The real issue is the design of the head. A lot of SUVs have an ungodly number of valves, but the engine design is typically 1950s. A lot of GM vehicles still us a Buick engine block that was designed just after WWII.

Adding valves to an old engine does little to improve efficiency. But having 4 of five valves per chamber allows a new engine designer a lot more flexibility and scope to get the best power out.

Cable Modem

[mobileskimo]

"DSL modem" (I wish people would stop using terms like that)

Why?

The power outage=dim bulbs in the whitehouse....

[ncstockguy]

On the contrary, the outage has much to do with deregulation... this story covers it rather clearly..
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?ar tid=257&row =0

isn't that exactly what I said?

[dh003i]

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.

Re:I don't care

[SkunkPussy]

This is not flamebait at all - this is a valid comment on the us-centricity of slashdot when people read it from all over the world.

when 9/11 happened and a front page news story was posted on slashdot about it, this was relevant to probably everybody in the world, because this was the most spectacular "terrorist" attack that has ever occurred, potentially threatening everybody in the west at least.

several states and a province of canada losing electricity is of no interest to and has absolutely no relevance to anybody outside of the US/Canada.

In addition there was a small attack on deregulation of power in USA as a possible cause.

If there was a story on slashdot saying "UK trains in disarray after massive signal failure", this would also be a non-story.

As I said, the comment was not flamebait, merely expressing with brevity the concepts and ideas in this post.

In response. . .

[Fantastic Lad]

Sorry. I keyed out a long and thoughtful response to yours, (which, by the way, raised some good and valid points). But then the virus took down my computer and I just didn't have the energy to re-do it, and dig around for all the links again. But I have come back a couple of days later to do what I can to answer your thoughts.

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