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One Worldwide Power Grid

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thinking-through-tat-one-again dept.

randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!

13 of 464 comments (clear)

  1. The Internet model by Empiric · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd imagine that the market forces in play here are a lot like the ones in play in the 80's for phone service. If given a monopoly, a company will fight to maintain exclusive control over its geographical domain, to the detriment of consumers.

    The evolution of the internet is in stark contrast to this, where bandwidth can be bought from any one of many vendors (despite efforts of existing local telco's and cable providers to restrict the market by controlling the wiring).

    The (U.S., at least) government needs to take the same steps as they took with AT open up the market for energy distribution. Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines, and this will grow much like WiFi is, starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there. Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had; with market forces in play a company is going to be very careful about making sure their customers don't lose power--the damage to a competing company's reputation from something like the recent blackout would be terrible for them to contemplate.

    I'll look forward to the day I can have a box on the side of my house into which I can plug whatever sources of electricity I choose, and I expect that the costs of this commodity will then drop dramatically, much like telephone service did.

    --
    ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
    1. Re:The Internet model by jdhutchins · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Telephone companies basically still have a monopoly. But the bottom line is that there's only one twisted-pair wire going to your house. Someone has to maintain it. Other phone companies can sell phone service over the teleco's wires, but that hasn't caught on. If you have different companies trying to serve the same people in the same area, you're going to have mass confusion. The system wasn't set up to work that way, and getting it to work that way will take lots of money. The government has to do a decent job of regulating the monopolies.

      Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)

    2. Re:The Internet model by ZPO · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't think having a single "grid" covering a larger area is itself a problem. The problem arises when you don't have an appropriate set of safeguards in place to protect that grid from itself and an effective SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) network in place to monitor it all.

      The technology is there to do it safely and reliably. It just costs money. Right now the major utilities have no profit motive to deploy technologies to harden and protect the power distribution and transmission systems.

      In most states you can now sell power back to the utilities. A local generation plant (solar, hydro, wind, etc) can be connected to the power system via a utility intertie rated device.

      This can as simple as a utility intertie rated inverter as part of you home solar system. Unfortunately for everyone else on your block, as soon as commercial input fails your system will stop providing power out to the utility side. This is to protect power company personnel during line repairs.

    3. Re:The Internet model by lightsaber1 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Other technology infrastructure types have shown that market forces result in greater availability, not less.

      you mean like phone service? since they've privatized phone service in Ontario I have yet to see any improvements on rural lines. It costs WAY too much to lay lines over such a large area, and there aren't enough people to provide the necessary returns. The same would be true for electricity.

      Electricity generation and distribution has been privatized in Ontario (albeit only one company "owns" the infrastructure: Hydro One) and as I understand it many of the states affected by this blackout have a similar system in place. Hydro One has not increased generation capacity significantly in recent years, and it has several nuclear plants down for maintenance right now...I have no idea what's going on in the US system.

      Note that this did not help (though I won't suggest it hurt just yet). I think once the Ohio system went down we basically saw a simple case of overload on the rest of the system, which took things down. The overload was partially due to a lot of use -- it was a HOT day, but also due to a lack of generation.

      What *should* have happened is bits of the grid should have been shut off, but instead the plants went down, causing a cascading effect. Note that this is all conjecture on my part as I don't have all the facts I'm sure.

      Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value

      Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.

      Also, what about water, etc? Seems to me that like water, electricity has become a basic necessity. Yes, it is possible to live without, but probably over 99% of people use electricity on a daily basis and cannot function without it. Roads, education, and (in Canada) health care all fall into this category too. The role of the government in a democracy is, among other things, to provide the basic necessities so they are available to everyone at a fair price. For a government to not have regulations and some control over the electricity distribution system would simply be negligence imho.

  2. Northeast? by Vic · · Score: 5, Funny

    From my perspective (Canadian) it's more accurate to say it was in the south-east. :)

    1. Re:Northeast? by Xzzy · · Score: 5, Funny

      As a Canadian, you should have learned by age 2 that America is incapable of reporting on anything from other than it's own perspective. ;)

    2. Re:Northeast? by Dannon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hear this complaint a lot about American news sources, that they are "incapable of reporting from non-American perspectives". But I would put it to you that no news source can honestly claim to report news from a perspective too far removed from that of the reporters.

      For example, if I want to read a straight-up unadulterated Iraqi viewpoint of the war, or the outage, or anything, I'm not going to go to Fox News, I'm going to go to an Iraqi news source. British? I'll go to the BBC, or the Telegraph, or something like that. Canadian? Well, there's a-plenty of Canadian news sources on the web.

      Likewise, if I want to read American perspectives on anything, I'm not going to be reading the BBC.

      In fact, I'd propose that when a news source goes too far out of their way to show "the other side", they risk covering up important truths altogether. Look at how CNN deliberately squelched stories that might make the Hussein regime look bad, all to keep their "access" to Baghdad.

      It is as it is. Reporting facts is one thing, reporting "perspectives" is another. It ain't an American thing, it's a human thing.

      --
      Good judgment comes from experience.
      Experience comes from bad judgment.
    3. Re:Northeast? by freeweed · · Score: 5, Funny

      if I want to read a straight-up unadulterated Iraqi viewpoint of the war, or the outage, or anything, I'm not going to go to Fox News, I'm going to go to an Iraqi news source.

      Yeah, because we all know just how well informed the Iraqi Information Minister is. I'm still pretty sure the Americans haven't been into Baghdad yet.

      --
      Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
  3. One Power Grid... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    One Grid to rule them all,
    One Grid to find them,
    One Grid to bring them all,
    And in the Darkness bind them...

  4. I think this is very dangerous. by Krapangor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A world wide power grid mean that the whole world is connected with one power grid.
    However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
    I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.

    --
    Owner of a Mensa membership card.
  5. greed by L0rax23 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Once the grid is fully functional, the only excuse for power shortages will be greed.

    Good thing we don't hafta worry about greed!

  6. An oldie, but a damn fine goodie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    In A.D. 2001
    Dubya was beginning

    Davis: What happen?
    SoCal Edison: Somebody set up us the blackout.

    PG&E: We get bankruptcy.
    Davis: What !

    PG&E: Electricity turn off.
    Davis: It's you !!

    BC Hydro: How are you gentlemen !!
    BC Hydro: All your power are belong to us.
    BC Hydro: You are on the way to Stone Age.

    Davis: What you say !!
    BC Hydro: You have no chance to Chapter 11 make your payment.

    PG&E: Governor !!

    Davis: Take off every 'regulation' !!

    Davis: You know what you doing.

    Davis: Move 'regulation'.

    Davis: For great darkness.

  7. Re:BAD idea.... by donutello · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The world is a parasitic circle jerk system, everyone screws the next little guy down the ladder and those at the bottom of the ladder are slaves for those above them. Those at the top are the oppressors and the tyrants.

    You should seek professional help for your paranoia.

    Human society is a system where people collaborate to achieve more than they could by themselves. So instead of having to learn how to hunt and cook and make shoes and build a home and make clothes, people can specialize in a single skill, perform it more efficiently and achieve more collectively. Money is what you use to facilitate this trade.

    --
    Mmmm.. Donuts