Slashdot Mirror
Blackout Week Continues
RedCard writes "Back in April of 1999, Wired magazine published an issue featuring a black-on-black cover with the title Lights Out. In it, they detailed what could've happened had the Y2K bug not fizzled. There's the cover story detailing the Y2K worries, a guide to the biggest blackouts of all time (before last week, that is), survival stories from New Zealand, and finally a look at the myth of order - how our power system is as chaotic as any complex software system. By the way, whatever happened to those backups put in place for Y2K that were supposed to prevent one grid from taking out a zillion others? Where'd my tax money go? Enjoy!" Dennis Kucinich has also written an informative piece about the energy utility that seems to have been responsible for the recent blackout.
Maybe this was a Y2K bug. (If it blew up when it was supposed to it wouldn't be a bug, now would it.)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Okay, okay, I'm convinced!
Time to order a UPS...
Will this do?
The unofficial
Wow. Were they all psychics? Did they, back in '99, see the end of the dotcoms too?
Money for nothing, pix for free
a) Relax, everyone's in the same boat as you, open a beer while it's cool and put on some music.
b) Head over to the neighbour's house and rob them at gunpoint before they jump to conclusion (b) as well.
Happily most people tend to stay firmly in camp (a), even when blackouts are extensive and pervasive. I know this from much time spent in places like Luanda and Kinshasa, where blackouts are the norm and power & water is exceptional.
The default state of humanity in such circumstances, I'm glad to report, is generally "party on!!!"
Civilisation is not quite as fragile as we sometimes assume. Perhaps the US could use some more blackouts.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
by Greg Palast
I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.
To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.
And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."
It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal.
But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.
And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.
The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull created the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned power "trading" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.
Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.
Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.
But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of el
Hey wait a minute. I remember companies spending millions on backup generators and such. Even news bits about some companies finding it cheaper to generate their own power. Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I recall reading that Wired article and thinking "man, these guys are really reaching." I guess its time to start looking into non-electric cooking systems. Gas? Wood? Coal?
Maybe the real key to energy conservation is not relying on it in the first place.
Few publications ran stories about the troubles surrounding the Ohio plant around 2002. Here's the story from Miami Herald dated March 26, 2002 predicting such failures.
Then there are people who are opposed to nuclear power plants, (although their views are a bit more extreme), the source at the bottom article is quoted from NY Times and DOE.
......they 'll be the worlds worst blackouts when they have lasted as long as the Iraqi peoples 'powerless' miseries.
cL0h
Could it be that your tax dollars were spent for a system that is based on RPC ?
Could it be that firewalling port 135 prevented the security system from cutting the nets form each other ?
What was said about Auckland, New Zealand in the article was a pretty fair assesment.
Being as I live in Auckland, I was there for the power crisis. Yes, businesses folded, yes, most CBD businesses lost money, but those that folded were most likely going to fold anyhow, and money can be made back.
It hurt the people the most though. Some were fortunate (like the BNZ bank staff), and their companies moved the staff arround to keep them working, but a lot of people couldn't work during those 5 weeks. And 1 month without a pay cheque hurts.
The same obviously applies to the States at the moment. Bussinesses aren't the one to be worring about, its the people.
The power company stiffed Auckland though. Mecury energy is still a force here, they do still run a lot of the power. But then again, lightning never strikes the same place twice... does it?
For the most part, the power grid in most countries performs amazingly well. You try designing a system that can handle an average 20 or 30 lightning strikes a day and still keep on pumping.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
What confuses me is how people are just taking this, from Bloomberg and the President down its "just one of those things" as if the rest of the first world has the same problems...
The other countries in the top 5 are Canada, Mexico and Malaysia. And in the US its always the North Eastern corner of the country. Doesn't this sort of indicate that this is NOT normal and that it is NOT reasonable ?
In the UK when there is a massive storm and some people are without power for a few days its a major issue, the idea of a major city being without power is unthinkable. Same across Europe and the rest of the first world. It isn't about area because down in the Southern US these things don't happen like they do in the NE. It is just plain incompetance and woeful bad practice.
If the French can run a decent power grid for 60 million people, why can't the US ? Why is America's most populus city part of a 3rd world power grid ? It can't be due to lack of consumpion, hence it can't be because the power companies aren't making money... so that leads us to power companies and goverment wilfully and knowingly allowing a sub-standard power grid to be in operation.
And just how much are people questioning the goverment about their over-sight right now ?
Summary: It is not normal in a 1st world country to have a grid failure, it is not normal for major cities to be without power. Some people some where are asleep on the job.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Check out, with Onkel Babelfish if your Deutsch is as bad as mine....
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03
By the way, whatever happened to those backups put in place for Y2K that were supposed to prevent one grid from taking out a zillion others? Where'd my tax money go?
I think enron was supposed to install them.
I heard that a bunch of lawyers in Congress are going to fix the problem. I feel so much more secure, don't you!
on more weapons than the rest of the world combined and deciding you wanted to be the worlds policeman, oh and Ken Lay and his chums pockets, i bet he didnt go without power egh ?
like the old saying goes:
"you made your bed, now lie in it"
I worry the least about getting the old bait-and-switch routine from him than I do from the ones that try to be all things to all people. Additionally, he seems to be reasonably clued AND inclined to fix things, which would be nice for a change.
I'll bet Spinal Tap is really mad that Wired ripped off their album cover idea.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
> how is this a troll? it's an honest criticism of slashdot's most idiotic editor. i love how slashdot can dish it, but can't take it themselves when the eyes are on them. talk about hypocrites.
Sounds like you're not much a fan of "let the market decide".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That one'll get you a bit less than 2 hours of time to save everything that needs to be saved. Then again, if you ain't at home, what are the odds you'll be back before your 2 hours is up?
I'd say it's more effective to keep your systems (at least the critical ones) in a state that more or less automatically recovers from forced shutdowns.
It's not like you'll be doing much surfing with everyone else's power being out, too =)
Just my 2 (Euro)cents
Sigs for Nerds. Sigs that Matter.
that's right. get used (again) to the failures of the Godless corepirate nazi execrable, as yOUR well being is not on their agenda.
the posterbouys for grand larcenIE would include any & all of the walking dead who peddle phonIE stock markup payper to millions of hardworking conservative folks, & then after stealing/spending/disappearing the real dough, pretend that nothing ever happened. sound familiar robbIE? these fauxking corepirate nazi larcens, want us to pretend along with them, whilst they continue to squander yOUR "investmeNTs", on their soul DOWt craving for excess/ego gratification. yuk
no matter their ceaseless efforts to block the truth from you, the tasks (planet/population rescue) will be completed.
the lights are coming up now.
you can pretend all you want. our advise is to be as far away from the walking dead contingent as possible, when the big flash occurs. you wouldn't want to get any of that evile on you.
as to the free unlimited energy plan, as the lights come up, more&more folks will stop being misled into sucking up more&more of the infant killing barrolls of crudeness, & learn that it's more than ok to use newclear power generated by natural (hydro, solar, etc...) methods. of course more information about not wasting anything/behaving less frivolously is bound to show up, here&there.
cyphering how many babies it costs for a barroll of crudeness, we've decided to cut back, a lot, on wasteful things like giving monIE to felons, to help them destroy the planet/population.
no matter. the #1 task is planet/population rescue. the lights are coming up. we're in crisis mode. you can help.
the unlimited power (such as has never been seen before) is freely available to all, with the possible exception of the aforementioned walking dead.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator. more breathing. vote with yOUR wallet. seek others of non-aggressive intentions/behaviours. that's the spirit, moving you.
pay no heed/monIE to the greed/fear based walking dead.
each harmed innocent carries with it a bad toll. it will be repaid by you/us. the Godless felons will not be available to make reparations.
pay attention. that's definitely affordable, plus you might develop skills which could prevent you from being misled any further by phonIE ?pr? ?firm? generated misinformation.
good work so far. there's still much to be done. see you there. tell 'em robbIE.
Now Bush will give his buds at Enron or whoever carte blanche to screw everybody on their electric bills to "modernize the grid". I'm certain that the screwing will take place, but I bet the money from the increases never manages to show up as moderization. After all, who can say if they really do the work or not. Wink wink.
The only people who would want to know technical details like that would be the terrorists.
I get a bill from my electric company, it's not paid for by my taxes. The reason things are in the state they're in is that end users like you and me want low electric bills. Problems like this don't get fixed for free.
1) satisfy RIAA ...
2) satisfy MPAA
3)
4) electricity
I live in rural Idaho, electric service is available here, but quite pricey. I decided two years ago to take matters into my own hands and get off the grid.
Idaho is a water rich state, and I was able to use some of the waterfalls on my property to supply some hydroelectric power. I also have a couple of fuel cells to power some smaller items in my home. Luckily, I don't need too much power (since I maintain a minimialist lifestyle for environmental reasons), although living nowadays does require some electricity. At least this way, I am not contributing to the pollution caused by conventional coal-fired or nuclear power plants!
Stop corporate
I live 15 minutes from work on a bike, so odds are pretty good I could make it if I wanted to. But there is an automatic shutdown feature for that one...
And btw it'd be for two computers both with 21" monitors, so probably 30 minutes at most.
The unofficial
Gloss on matt, iirc.
All things in moderation; including moderation
...Probably. But at what cost in time and money? Its not working in NY, its not work in California. How long before its cheaper and easier to make your own from fuel cells or some other crazy new wave power supply (probably too long). Cities will still need power though, and big companies, but I wouldn't be suppriesed if there wasn't much of a power grid in 30-40 years. But then again, thats along way off.
We're all STILL on a...power (as in zap-zap fizzle 120VAC) trip!
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
IIRC, power transmission has never been deregulated, only power generation. So, if you're about to jump on the "deregulation = evil" bandwagon, like Lessig, note that a lot of the problems (the majority, probably) in this current blackout happened on the transmission end of things, so deregulation's role was probably minor.
One of the major factors of the energy problem is NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). In many states, it is extremely difficult to build a new power plant or new distribution lines. Besides the costs of land and construction, there are many people who will do anything to prevent the construction of a facility in their neighborhood. They can delay construction for years or decades by going to court and lobbying the state and local governments. Environmental protection laws are often used to delay and block projects. It doesn't help that there are pseudo-scientific loons who blame overhead power lines for everything from hair loss to leukemia. They want the power but they don't want the infrastructure needed to generate and distribute the power.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Regarding why this seems to happen on a large scale almost exclusively in the US and Canada, take a look at how the power system is designed. 3-phase with earthed ground. This is simple and safe, and less prone to over/under-voltage, but not at all fault resistant.
:-/
Other countries use 3- or 5-phase 3-wire delta-delta based electricity with floating ground, meaning that even if lightning strikes a cable, or it falls down, there's still electricity.
Add to this the aging power grid facilities and cables in the US -- you don't stop using anything until it stops working, so modernising isn't the top priority. All in all, a recipe for failure.
The main problem, though, as others have pointed out, is the lack of regulation and profit maximising. If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
It's funny how the internet, which was DESIGNED to withstand problems like this (with bits instead of current) has become as fragile, for the exact same reasons. Instead of the web of interconnected hosts, there's now just a few major hubs that all traffic has to go through, with no real alternative routes. Again, in the name of profit. An ISP will rather buy two lines to the same (cheapest and best connected) company instead of two lines to different companies. Less administration and less costs. And even if they buy two lines, they sure as heck won't peer for free and bring packets from one to another even if the capacity is there, unused. That takes both administration and giving someone something for free -- even if it's simply wasted if unused, it's not the American way to give ANYTHING for free.
Let's hope we won't see an outage like this on the IP front. Wait, we did, somewhat -- it became painfully clear that many ISPs and backbone providers didn't have adequate power protection -- again to save a few bucks to pay out in dividends.
I hate to say this, but heavy-handed regulation is needed, both for the power grid and for IP carriers.
Regards,
--
*Art
"Its Army just a Hollywood production."
That wasn't a Hollywood production. That was CNN and Fox news.
"And just one blockout, knock out the whoole country and knock out his people"
A few states is hardly the whole country and the thought that this knocked out Americans shows that you are speaking more from imagination than reality.
I just found out that the 12 blackouts a week that I was having was because the little powerbox, that joins the wire from the power pole to my house, had shit itself. Diagnosis confirmed because my house was the only one powerless, and my mains switch and all fuses were still on (up). They (ETSA) were quite sure that the power box had died of old age, and that the plank that it was screwed to and that the wires ran through was all wet and rotten at the back had nothing to do with its untimely demise. The workers all seemed very cheerful though it was late on Sunday afternoon and raining. Maybe the double overtime rate had something to do with it?
Since deregulation of our power supply (Adelaide South Australia), blackouts have become a regular occurance, especially during really hot weather or windy weather. Can't we make airconditioners that run using heat, the same way as a kero fridge does? And obviously there isn't enough money to fund maintenance of the wires or pruning of trees. So everything is falling apart.
Not to mention, that this house has about one power point per bedroom, and just two in the office. In 30 years since this house was built, I've gone from one powerpoint in the bedroom for a reading light, to one each for the light, the stereo, the fan heater, the phone charger the AA battery charger, alarm clock, mozzie zapper, hair dryer etc. And don't get me started on the room full of computers. Etsa/AGL are charging double (instead of less as they promised) and I'm using triple.
What the APC guy wrote:
>I would suggest a new product we have available which is the BR1000I. This UPS is sufficient to support two PC's, two monitors and the 8 port hub. Because laser printers draw so much power, the laser printer will need to be plugged into the Surge Only outlet at the rear of the UPS, as it will not be able to be held up on battery power. >
>Recommended Retail Pricing for the BR1000I is $919.00. Below is a link to the spec page of the BR500I.[wadiwood: how did we get from BR1000I to BR500I?] >
> BR1000I
Maybe I should just get a diesel generator. Or imagine the sleek athletic bod I'd have if I hooked the computer to pedal power?
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Even the cheapest UPS systems I've seen have a USB or serial cable you can plug in to your computer to alert it to shut down at a low battery condition. apcupsd shutdown my server at home just fine.
This black on black voilence is terrible. /. /.
Anyway, I'm really feeling lonely here on
So few people, so few comments. It's so quiet and civilized. There must be a lof of loud, geeky americans sitting in the dark thinking about
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Wind up your gramophone. The sound quality might not be as good as some DVDs but it's less tiring than singing.
What is going on with Slashdot this week? How many links to Wired articles are you going to post that you disagree with?
:)
Most of the more technical people in the Slashdot crowd are aware that Wired is like the Sun, but about tech. It's not a real news source, and it's articles are written 90% for entertainment, 10% information. It's done that way to attract the largest crowd it can while still being a 'technical' source. Wired also has very fishy reviews. The bottom line appears to be, if you have ad space with them, your product will get mentioned anytime they can stick it in an article and it will always get a good review.
Back when I first started reading Wired, I would send corrections in for articles almost daily. These included links and details of why information they had posted was inaccurate and was worded very nicely, as not to offend anyone. Guess what? They never corrected anything. That's when it occured to me that they are more concerned with 'eyeballs' (old marketing term) than being an accurate information source.
Anyway, I beg of the Slashdot lords to please stop with the Wired links. If you don't agree with them or have a problem with an article, then don't post it on the site. It's pretty easy.
Now I'm going to sit here and watch my otherwise good karma go negative. Had to get it off my chest.
Here's the clickable German link and here's the translation:
The explanations for the blackout in the USA and Canada were rather incomplete: Lightning supposedly struck a powerplant at the Niagara falls. Following this, the electrical grid collapsed in numerous states.
Nationwide, the connections of a powerplant to the power grid are controlled by a central Grid-Center, to prevent these failures. Normally, it ensures that single regions are quickly disconnected in case of emergency [short circuit, lightning strike etc.] so that the other powerplants can continue as normal. But this time, any protections failed. Resulting from this, the load on the other plants increased, so that they in turn were disconnected as well due to overload, leaving parts of the US without power. Why the measures to prevent a complete failure not worked is still unclear.
Our investigations [Heinz Heise Verlag, publisher of security and IT-news] uncovered the following coincidence: The failed Niagara plant belongs to National Grid USA. This power company is mentioned as a reference customer by Northern Dynamics. This firm calls themselves the "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for communication with control- and measurement-systems.
OPC stands for "OLE for Process Control" and uses Microsoft's COM/DCOM-Model. This is exactly the technology with the security hole exploited by the W32.Blaster-worm. In a subnet with the worm active, (as enduser got to know at their desktop PCs rebooting regularly) the DCOM-interface fails on unpatched systems and therefore the OPC-system is unavailable, too.
OPC is used for the coupling of so-called SCADA-systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), that are employed by power plants. Process data is exchanged between a data center and one or more telemetric sensors. [...]
Because National Grid USA was unavailable for a statement, we can't help but ask the following questions:
- What is the exact usage of OPC at National Grid USA?
- Were there problems with OPC at the time of the blackout? If yes, do they are connected with the W32.Blaster-worm?
Further references mentioned by the "OPCExperts" Northern Dynamics are among others General Electric, Siemens, ABB and the european center for nuclear research (CERN). All this requires investigations.
Y2K bug was all a marketing scandal. Informed people knew well and good that nothing would happen. Bogus companies started selling things that millenium proof cars, which, dare I say have no Idea of the date, let alone know when to malfunction. A free floppy in the mail assured me my computer had the bug and told me to buy their product. I should have uncovered them because I'm sure their program diagnoses computers as sick every time, but I couldn't be bothered
Rant over.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
To know that their power and water is supposed be restored by USA contractors/military.
Consider yourselves lucky. Iraq and Afghanistan have crap power, and major cities in places you wouldn't expect have power failures too. Like NZ, Australia, UK and that strange country to your South West (California). And even a local blackout can cause much wider problems. Eg the bush fire problem in the Australian Capital Territory was rendered unmanageable when they lost power to the water supply and the emergency services building which meant that the water stopped in the suburbs affected by fire, and the fire control HQ went incommunicado!
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I live a few miles away from Davis Besse, one of FirstEnergy's nuclear plants. In Feb 2002, they shut it down for maintenance (and I believe refueling). They found that boric acid had almost completely eaten through the steel cap on top of the reactor. A few more months and bad things would have happened. It's a very controversial issue around the area (Ottawa County, Ohio) as most area residents don't want to see the plant restarted.
FirstEnergy was also recently found guilty of breaking pollution laws when they rebuilt a power plant and did not install modernized scrubbers. No ruling on what they will be fined has come out yet.
Here is an AP article with a bit more info, and an article detailing the hole in the reactor vessel. TONS more info available via 'davis besse' on google.
"survuival stories"
Unless your life depends on electrical power via dialisys or an iron lung or life support...
the "survival" idea is plain pitiful.
The hunam being does not need electricity to survive let alone live comfortably.
every time something like this happens it suprises me how the large number of sob stories as to how perilous these people lives were without power...
"OMG, I couldn't call becky on the cordless phone... I felt so alone... like I was disconnected in a prison..."
makes me wish for a major catostraphy to drop us back 300 years to simply weed out these idiots.
The generation, not the transmission, of power has been deregulated. This was a transmission problem. If people were allowed to make money by improving the grid, they would.
By the way, whatever happened to those backups put in place for Y2K that were supposed to prevent one grid from taking out a zillion others?
Someone or something did its job here in Philly. The lights stayed on in Boston and the south. Surely we could power the grid forever with all the hot air coming out of mouths that know nothing. We need facts before we make sensible decisions. All I hear is politics.
First of all, anyone who is using "Kucinich" and "clued-in" without a "NOT" in the middle deserves the proverbial grain-of-salt-treatment.
Add to that that your gushing memo is anonymous, and we can only assume that you're one of the twelve people that Kucinich has sucked into his reality-distortion vortex, along with Willie Nelson.
Nobody cared about the power engineers and techs who work 24-hours a day. Until last week of course.
Now politicians are visiting power stations and saying what terrific hardworking guys they are. Of course, they are.
Makes me a bit sad the Y2k bugs didn't fully
bring everything down. Instead most everything worked and everyone got made at the programmers.
Ideas for the blackout problem:
- Tax subsidies / no interest loans for businesses
to get off the grid and build their own small scale power plants.
- Require gas stations of have a manual way of
pumping gas.
- Some electronic ignition gas ranges didn't work!
There should be an override for this.
- In fact no energy source should require another
and make it law
- I understand nuclear plants need the grid to
start up! This is too circular for words.
Require them to have a clear generator to
bootstrap.
- Everyone home should have a reverse plug
Where you can safely plugin a solar panel
etc. It should be easy to buy and install
them.
You spent it all on tax cuts for the rich and bombs for the poor.
That was classic intercourse!
Are you unemployed?
You spend the most AMAZING amount of time on Slashdot.
That was classic intercourse!
I've got some solar panels but there's no way I'd hook them to my computer, the power generated is very variable, which is one of the problems I'm trying to solve. They get used for recharging car batteries. And you gotta keep them super clean and rotate them with the sun. And they weigh a tonne. And they don't work too well on the winter stormy days.
and there's no way they'd support the power guzzling A/C.
Wind power might be better. Hmm only in winter. I've heard of some sort of trick that uses thermal differences in the earth to generate electricity but I'm not too sure how it works. It ought to work really well on hot days.
Hmm maybe a solar driven steam engine? With a nice parabolic focus for the sunlight instead of photo electric cells.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I read an article at theDetroit Free Press site just now (http://www.freep.com/news/metro/main18_20030818.h tm) which, although it doesn't explicitly say so (and perhaps the writers haven't themselves realized the implication), implies to me that, again, blame for this American-style failure seems to lay squarely at the feet of management.
;-)
The article claims that, "as other high-voltage lines succumbed in northern Ohio, an alarm that was supposed to warn an Ohio utility of the line failures -- and perhaps stop them from spreading -- remained silent."
Elsewhere in the same article, they say, "A FirstEnergy [FirstEnergy being the company owning the first line to fail. -pjt] official said Sunday that she could not explain why the alarm system was not working. But, spokeswoman Kristen Baird said, the lack of a working alarm was irrelevent because company controllers were monitoring the line failures and working to correct them."
Ever notice how, whether it is NASA or an energy utility (whose media faces are always nameless and blameless), they always claim they cannot (or will not) identify the problem, which usually winds up being a failure of the human element, in this age of drones and automatons who refuse to act independently (OR, I'll hasten to add, are PREVENTED from acting, by other management types).
Why the hell have the blinkenlightzen when the managers watching said blinkenlightzen are incapable of independent action when the blinkenlightzen fail and all other indicators are telling them FEAR! FIRE! FLOOD!
Just my $.02. Time for me to get back to serving MY corporate masters, now.
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
try stronger alcohol to get the full effect.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Yes, this sounds like a rant but there are a lot of specific accusations in the parent. It would be interesting to seem them disproved. If they can't be, it raises a lot of legitimate questions.
See my journal, I write things there
The real issue were multinationals deciding that they didn't need to be in a place with major power problems and quietly relocating to Australia.
See my journal, I write things there
When I worked on Y2K, we considered the possibility of incorrect dates (many systems, especially embedded ones, don't really use the date, only a periodic interrupt or time deltas, but utilize a clock with a date setting to issue them - no one sets those dates). If such a system has a Y2K bug - it could strike anytime.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
While Congressman Kucinich praises Cleveland Public Power (CPP), he fails to mention that it still has no generating capacity. It depends on First Energy and others to supply it with power. (That's part of the reason why Cleveland water department didn't have power to pump its water when the grid failed.) CPP also pays no taxes. Sure, CPP can provide cheaper electricity than investor-owned utilities. However, it's no more reliable and the taxes it doesn't pay have to come from somewhere. And do you really think a government-run utility is necessarily more efficient than an investor-owened one?
Ok, I work at a power company (no BS), and there are a few facts I'd like to get out there.
As to the former Cleveland Mayor's article: Nice write-up, but those issues have nothing to do with the cause of this blackout. It's a technical, not political thing. And if you think Gov't workers would do it better, go visit your local Bureau of Motor. Side note: You seem to be implying organized crime ties to power. Power used to be tied in with big labor unions. No shit there were mob ties. Those same ties with labor barely exist today. Unions are limited to lineworkers, on of the smallest departments of a power company.
Deregulation: As others have pointed out, this applies only to Generation. It was a transmission problem. Not related.
The cause: No one knows yet. Including the power companies. But thanks to the 24news cycle, people think they have an idea.
Something to consider: In the 'new structure of power companies', a lot of transmission is controlled by power pools, like PJM and MISO. They are like an electrical version of the stock market. This system is new and carries risks. The effect of these pools on the blackout has yet to be investigated.
Keep an open mind about these things...
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
Worst Blackout Ever!
- Comic Book Guy
We had a power failure in Northeast Louisiana last night. From KNOE TV8's website:
Officials say that about 55-thousand Entergy Corporation customers in this city and surrounding areas were without power for a short period Sunday night after a transformer blew out.
Cyril Guerrera, a spokesman for Entergy ouisiana, says a substation transformer near Sterlington blew up at 7:50 p-m, causing outages throughout Ouachita Parish and surrounding areas until about 10:15 p-m. The lights were back on about an hour later in West Monroe, according to some reports. Sergeant Susan Herring of the Monroe Police Department says that by 9:15 p.m. there were reports of power coming back on in parts of Monroe. Herring says there were reports of some minor traffic accidents caused by the outage.
When this power failure hit, the areas surrounding the blackout area had a brown out due to all the substations trying to recover as much as the blacked out area as possible. We were with about 10 volts of electricity (guestimating) for about a minute here.
According to Entergy, the power recovery process for such an event worked exactly how it was suppose to.
Perhaps this is too conspiratorial in thought.. but perhaps this issue of no power is a government 'test' to evaluate our response to a potentially larger 'event'. And whats up with the fuel shortage in AZ? Is our government THAT desperate to 'try' different scenarios on us?
Now where is my tin foil cap..
Sure, such a thing would cost money, but so does the time of firemen and the legal costs of suits bought be people who have been trapped in your elevator. Perhaps any building needing a licence from the fire department should also need power-cut proof elevators!
...is a documentary about all the nuts who sold their houses and moved to deserted islands in 1999 so they could avoid the rampaging hordes of starving urban gangs when civilization collapsed after Y2K.
Surely someone has interviewed them?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I actually listen to NPR on a semi-regular basis; although I find myself saying "what a crock of sh!t" and turning it off every so often, I find some of their subject matter fairly unique.
I first strive to understand someone else's point of view; if I disagree with them, yay. But at least I make an attempt to understand where they are coming from. I find myself disagreeing with ditto-heads slightly less often than the whiny greens, but don't doubt that I am first and foremost a moderate.
Pardon me, but how is this offtopic? -3 for trying to point out that the linked article is from a well-known biased source, by a local? Huh??
I really question the hype around the "Blackout of '03." Let's see: everything west of the Mississippi was in tact. Everything south of the Mason-Dixon was fine. For the most part, East of the Mississippi and North of the M-D was fine, too (most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Main, Vermont, etc.).
The outage was basically contained to Onterio, New York, and portions of other states. Since New York was affected, and lots of news outlets are based in New York, it got a lot of press and seemed particularlly dramtic. However, as most of the grid as a whole stayed up, it strikes me that this "Third World Power System" (as one govenor put it) did its job, and contained the problem.
(Given how electricity-dependent the US is, quite a feat!)
Talk amongst yourselves, I will give you a topic: if this outage happened in the South or West, with either the same geographic area or same population affected, but not in the self-proclaimed "Greatest City in the World," would it have gotten the media attention. Discuss.
Is it worth pointing out that here in the UK we have something like 10 times the population density? We also have a strong environmental lobby and some activist organisation. Yet we somehow manage to get the land needed to keep our power grid reasonably solid.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
rantmode_on
We had some storms roll through our area in June and some folks in our aarea were out of power for 4 days! 4 DAYS! New York and several other cities are out for MAYBE 24 hours and it's a disaster?? Must we dwell on it? Can't we wait for the final report? This happened THURSDAY and we're STILL hearing about it....
rantmode_off
Now I agree, it was kind of a big deal. Yeah, someone probably screwed up. What good are we as a country if we act like we can't live without power for a day? Every hear of batteries? Ever hear of ice? I mean stores throwing our hundreds of pounds of meat because they did not have the foresight of having a generator? (most stores do around my house). Also, having a back up generator is no good if you don't test it. So make sure you test that cutover....TODAY! And do it every six months. Make sure that generator can fire up when you need it. In any case, yeah, someone screwed up. SHould we dedicate entire shows on it? Nah.
Gorkman
The industries are very heverly requlated in the UK, and now we pay tax on fuel.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
"Depressingly, petrol for my cars costs about 0.73 ($1.16) per Litre."
That's more than twice what we pay here in Canada, which is still more expensive than the US. Some things to note though that might not make it twice as expensive in reality:
* Car engines in Europe often more efficient
* Car engines in Europe are often smaller
* Cars in Europe are often lighter/smaller
* Distances travelled in Europe on average are probably less. Most cities are closer together, especially in the crowded countries like the UK. How many people do you know who commute more than 100km each way by car every day? A lot of people do that to get to Toronto. We think nothing of driving 250km *every* weekend to get to the family cottage on Lake Huron.
* People are more inclined to walk to things in Britain as they are closer, e.g. pub, corner shop, etc. I never lived more than 2 miles from 90% of the things in my life when I was in the UK for the first 21 years of my life.
That's true - Quebec's neighbor's were, at one time, leery of it's hydro system. Now, after huge upgrades in the last 10 years, Quebec's power is mostly (90%) hydro-electric and completely modernized. They sell huge amounts of surplus power to Ontario and the States at a tidy profit.
That's why the blackout stopped dead at the Quebec border, and that's why they pay a measly 6 cents ($CAD)per KWH on average.
This really has nothing to do with regulation or deregulation. This argument is simply put forward by those who trust government but not the private sector.
Electric deregulation is relatively new in the US, its been in effect for less than a decade, yet, as you can see these mass power outages have been happening long before then. The current outage was similar in many ways to the 1965 blackout, which occured well before the era of Deregulation.
The real problem is the condition of the power grid is invisible to most people, company execs and politicians. As long as the power flows, they don't see a problem, not until things go terribly wrong, like this, do they wake up and say, "Gee, I guess we need to fix this". But unless these outages become more frequent, the fixes probably won't go far enough.
The theory that deregulation is the culprit goes something like this: Companies neglect infrastructure investments and instead pad their bottom line. Well the electrical transmission system in the US is not truly deregulated. Do you get to choose who DELIVERS (as opposed to generates) your electricity? No? Didn't think so.
Look at the cell phone situation (which is not regulated), Verizon has seemingly invested more in its coverage than the other companies, which seems echoed in customer surveys, (and personally have never experienced signal loss with Verizon, unlike other big carriers). Verizon uses this for competative advantage (all those commercials with the "Can you hear me now, good" guy). Under the "deregulation" theory, Verizon would sell off that excess capacity, and use the money saved to boost earnings.
Contrast that to the US highway infrastructure, which is controlled the various governments. Because the government is behind it, the highways should be well designed and maintained, and not neglected, right? No, it's all politics. Highway funds aren't distributed based on need, but based on what Senators and Congresspeople have the most clout. Where I currently live, we have two very powerful Senators, Kennedy and Kerry. Massachusetts got billions for the Big Dig, a short highway segment through Boston.
Where I used to live, in PA, much needed road projects didn't get funded, or took many years, 30 years in one case, to get a four-mile extension to a highway built. But we didn't have very powerful politicians fighting for us there, either.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
My employer is still shut down to comply with a request from the provincial government to cut power usage by 50% while generation continues slowly coming online. I guess it's better than having us doing round after round of fscks if rolling blackouts hit. I'm not looking forward to cleaning up the mess of all the scripts I was running at the time of the original blackout but it's frustrating to be of no use to anyone right now. My relatives in the country are amused at all the fuss - they were without power for weeks in the dead of winter during the ice storm of '89, so a day or two in the summer is pretty laughable to them :)
SARS, Mad Cow, power failures ... what's CNN got lined up for us next week, an earthquake?
See0 6bb63 00c98ed9%40%5B62.202.133.213%5D
% 242mj% 2405%242%40news.t-online.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=v015305
which summarizes the argument:
"The Niagara powerplant (where the outage started) belongs to the
National Grid USA (http://www.nationalgridus.com), a customer of
Northern Dynamics (http://www.opcexperts.com). The powerplant's
control system uses OPC ("OLE for Process Control") based on
Micro$oft's COM/DCOM model. This includes exactly the security loophole
that the W32.Blaster worm exploits. The frequent reboots caused
by the worm are blocking the DCOM communication and thus OPC on
unpatched systems, as in the powerplants' SCADA systems (Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition)."
See also
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bhos6t
which has a longer translation of the argument.
In California's case, generating companies conspired to shut down for maintainence at the same time to produce shortages that they could then soak the public for. Instead of agreeing to rotate the shutdowns to minimize the effect to the end user, they shutdown multilple plants simultaneously.
Ummm, why would you put a monitor on a UPS, let alone two of them?
I know the impact of this blackout was exacerbated by the fact that we are so much more dependant on electricity for the tiniest things than the Iraqis are. As well we are not used to ever having blackouts that last more than a few minutes. Points:
:-)
- I had no way to cook. I don't own a camp stove, and even if I did, I probably would not save fuel for it. Stores closed immediately so I couldn't have even run out to buy fuel.
- I had no candles. I'm a dumbass
- As I said stores closed, because they couldn't process payment without registers, and/or had no emergency lighting. As a result there were many supplies of food/equipment/candles/batteries that were *immediately* unavailable.
- Many transit systems are heavily electric (subways and streetcars). People were stranded miles from home.
Whereas Iraqis, aside from being more used to the heat, have probably been accustomed to doing without power for years. It doesn't hurt that they probably don't view air conditioning as a fundamental human right either.
Freedom: "I won't!"
The main problem, though, as others have pointed out, is the lack of regulation and profit maximising. If money can be saved on not having automated failovers, and only peering with the most profitable and less expensive peers instead of all available peers, you will get systems that's less resilient.
The wrong kind of automation can do you harm. Did you miss the NYT assertion of failed monitoring equipment?
"FirstEnergy released a statement last night saying that "its computerized system for monitoring and controlling its transmission and generation system was operating, but the alarm screen function was not." A company official confirmed that this meant that an alarm system that was supposed to alert controllers did not do so. It was not clear whether the system, besides flashing messages on control-room computer screens, also included an audible alarm. The official would not provide additional details, and no one from the Midwest energy consortium could be reached for comment."
Wanna bet a nickel that some kind of NT based mointoring system that costs loads of money is at fault? It's hard to believe the operators were so screwed. No annuciators? A screen not working? What were these folks smoking besides their grid? The poor sorry official who leaked that is going to be fired, if caught.
All said though, I put the blame on NIMBY and byzantine regulations. New York and Ohio can point fingers at each other all day long but neither would have a problem if both had adequate generating capacity. When you think it's OK to put your dirty work somewhere else and thereby screw others to meet your needs, this is what you get. When you demand things but are not willing to bear the full cost, you get less than you want.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Has no one else considered the possibility that the national infrastructure story on Slashdot a month ago:
/ 12 54254&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=153&tid= 99
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/07/09
may have been used to examine the system and test out a weak spot?
You might call me out for wearing my tin foil hat on this one, but consider the scenario - Student compiles national infrastructure map from public information showing that the national fibreoptic grid (and perhaps electricity?) is routed through several choke points. Student gets told his thesis may be classified due to sensitive information.
Meanwhile, "insert terrorist-du-jour here" decides to compile the same information, getting the same analysis of the US infrastructure. He decides to test the theory out - bang, the lights go out over half the US. Proof of concept is a stunning success, better than he had hoped for (like the Sept 11 attacks). Now he has the knowledge that his attack worked, plus the knowledge that next time he wants to attack in a major way, all he has to do is follow standard military doctrine of cutting the enemy's power before launching his attack.
Result - major chaos and no response infrastructure because the power's out as well.
Now, imagine for a moment that the blackout WAS caused by nefarious people. Do you think the government is going to admit they got hit and were vulnerable? HELL NO!! They will feed a nice cover story which will result in plausible deniability, so that the public does not get alarmed. Media stations bite, hook, line and sinker. Investigative committees are launched. The REAL cause is already known, but kept classified to prevent loss of faith in the government (after all, elections are coming up and people have a nasty habit of REMEMBERING such lapses in security).
Paranoid scenario? Possibly. But equally possible is the likelihood of the above being factual.
Food for thought.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
Click on the above reference link -- it shows an interesting graphic showing the KiloWatt hour cost of electricity in Europe -- it looks like they are charging roughly the same or *less* than in the U.S. (as of 1997, though).
Then click on the "Return to Electricity DeregulationText" link. The article is a nice, even-handed evaluation of electricity deregulation.
The assumption is that deregulation lowers prices for the consumer. It would be interesting to look at all the places that have deregulated their electicity utilities, and see whether or not the prices actually went down.
well maybe we are really ""cool"" in terms of electricity, but they (north americans) probably can sue their companies if they do something that for example breaks theis computers.
if im sitting here and my computer "explodes" because some of them (bad electricicy company guys) are playing with something in my backyard i wont see any money for it. They will only pay you the damages when they break something so important that half the block is full of broken stuff and pissed a lot AND is a "politically interesting" neiborhood(u know what i mean). They would come asking if "sumthing burned lately" and they offer to pay it(and u can use this to change your hardware ehehehe). I saw this happen once but its not the rule. The rule at least here in spain is that they break it and u pay it. 98% is this.
Well i think their situation is far better, maybe they dont have electricity for 24h one single day every 25 years but at least they surely can sue their companies if something is broken(well its the usa, they can sue everybody). Here maybe we have electricity but in case something breaks we cant do any fucking thing about it.
well at least here in spain... i supose its not the same up north.
Maybe because he wants to be able to see what he was working on when the power goes out so he can save his work and shut the machine down before the UPS shuts things off.
Not to mention the already linked Kucinich piece./ 16KUTT.h tml?pagewanted=print&position=
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/16/opinion
August 16, 2003
An Industry Trapped by a Theory
By ROBERT KUTTNER
n the search for the source of Thursday's blackout, the underlying cause has been all but ignored: deregulation. In principle, deregulation of the power industry was supposed to use the discipline of free markets to generate just the right amount of electricity at the right price. But electric power, it turns out, is not like ordinary commodities.
Electricity can't be stored in large quantities, and the system needs a lot of spare generating and transmission capacity for periods of peak demand like hot days in August. The power system also requires a great deal of planning and coordination, and it needs incentives for somebody to maintain and upgrade transmission lines.
Deregulation has failed on all these grounds. Yet it has few critics. Evidently, even calamities like the Enron scandal and now the most serious blackout in American history are not enough to shake faith in the theory.
Ten years ago, most public utilities were regulated monopolies. They were guaranteed a fair rate of return, based on their capital investment and costs. So the government compensated them for building spare generating capacity and maintaining transmission lines. Regulators, of course, sometimes made mistakes and the industry oversold technologies like nuclear power. Even so, in the half-century before deregulation, productivity in the electric power industry increased at about triple the rate of the economy as a whole.
However, the wave of deregulation that culminated in the late 1990's broke up the integrated utilities like Con Ed that once generated power in its own plants, transmitted it and sold it retail. It ushered in a new breed of entrepreneurial generating and trading companies. However, the prices the local utility companies could charge consumers remained partly regulated. The theory was that local utilities, no longer producing their own power, could negotiate among competing suppliers for the best price and pass the savings along to the consumer.
But deregulation hasn't worked, for three basic reasons. First, there is a fairly fixed demand for electricity and generating capacity is tight, so companies that produce it enjoy a good deal of power to manipulate prices. The Enron scandal, which soaked Californians for tens of billions of dollars, was only the most extreme example. California authorities calculated that a generating company needed to control just 3 percent of the state's supply to set a monopoly price.
Second, the idea of creating large national markets to buy and sell electricity makes more sense as economic theory than as physics, because it consumes power to transmit power. "It's only efficient to transmit electricity for a few hundred miles at most," says Dr. Richard Rosen, a physicist at the Tellus Institute, a nonprofit research group.
Third, under deregulation the local utilities no longer have an economic incentive to invest in keeping up transmission lines. Antiquated power lines are operating too close to their capacity. The more power that is shipped long distances in the new deregulated markets, the more power those lines must carry.
In addition, in the old days of regulation, a utility like Con Ed would be required to regularly submit a resource plan to a state's public service commission. The two organizations would forecast demand and decide how much money should be invested in power plants and transmission lines. Rates would be adjusted to cover costs. Under deregulation, however, nobody plays that crucial planning role.
Much of the Southeast, by contrast, has retained traditional regulation -- and cheap, reliable electricity.
When the blackout hit on Thursday, many of us first thought of terrorists. What hit us may be equally dangerous. We are hostage to a delusional view of economics that allowed much of the Northeast to go dark without an enemy lifting a finger.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and author of "Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets."
I'm living in Toronto, and about 30 minutes into the blackout, when I started to hear from my friends just how much of Ontario was without power, I started to wonder if in the morning the power would come back on and President George W. would come on the television with an announcement...
Hello Cah-Nah-Dah, I am now your supreme ruler. My closest advisors tell me that you are located somewhere North of me. After spending two hours learning how to pronounce your nation's name, I now own you!!
Turns out I was wrong. Maybe I should cut down on the caffeine a little.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ow, they're singing again. Lousy neighbors, wish I was deaf.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
The Latest Bogus Fossil-Nuke Blackout: This Grid Should Not Exist
by Harvey Wasserman
This is the fourth---and worst---completely unnecessary major blackout of the Northeast in forty years, dating back to 1965.
It's scope---from Detroit to Ottawa to New York and New Jersey---is absolutely awesome, especially since it's due to total stupidity and corruption.
This does not count the blackouts that raged through California in 2000-2001. Those were "blackmails," set by Enron and the other Bush gas cronies to rip $60 billion out of the state, leading to, among other things, the impending ouster of Gov. Gray Davis.
When the lights went out, Davis kissed the feet of Southern California Edison's John Bryson, who engineered a deregulation bill that gouged $30 billion out of the ratepayers for the state's failed nukes. That opened the gates for the gas pirates to steal yet another $60 billion. Davis got caught in the backdraft.
The culprits in this latest northeastern disaster are basically the same---the barons of fossil and nuclear power and their cronies in the electric utility business.
Their "weapon" is an ancient electric grid that's obsolete if not obscene. It is a massively fragile Rube Goldberg device that dangerously and inefficiently carts around electricity from expensive, polluting and extremely unsafe central generating plants to buildings that waste massive amounts of energy and generate none.
That the grid will crash again and again and yet again is absolutely certain. The only question is who are the real terrorists: errant crazies who blow things up, or entrenched interests that refuse to change?
The technology now exists to transcend this mess. In the mid 1990s California's green energy advocates proposed a 600-megawatt mosaic of solar, wind and other renewable generators that would have entirely prevented the fake deregulatory crisis of 2000-1. It was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, but then killed by Southern California Edison and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Today, the Bush Administration wants to further subsidize its fossil/utility friends with a bad energy bill, and by pouring billions into "upgrading" the electric grid. The only thing certain is that every cent of that money will be wasted.
In 1952 a Blue Ribbon report to Harry Truman predicted that the future of America's energy rested with the sun. It predicted 13 million solar-powered homes here by 1975, and the promise of decentralized, off-grid self-sufficiency.
Instead, Dwight Eisenhower took us into the pit of the "Peaceful Atom". A trillion dollars later, we have a half-century of crashing grids and dangerous nukes that are vulnerable to terrorism and must shut down precisely when they're most needed, as they did during this latest blackout. The latest Bush energy bill only makes the situation worse, with more nuke subsidies and a powerful push for fossil fuels, especially coal.
The whole system demands a green deconstruction. Solar technologies are ready to make energy self-sufficiency a tangible reality. Photovoltaic cells on rooftops and embedded in windows can produce grid-free electricity, with battery or fuel-cell backups. Geothermal power can heat and cool with nothing but the power of the earth's crust. Methane digestion can turn waste into usable gas. Basement generators can use biomass fuels like ethanol and soy diesel for off-grid self-sufficiency.
These systems need not provide 100% of a building's energy, but can gradually make them increasingly self-sufficient. Meanwhile more efficient heating, lighting and cooling systems can reduce demand. Windows that actually open and close can balance usage, building by building.
Bush's "upgrading the grid" means a new money pit for the same old unsafe nukes, polluting coal burners and gas turbines whose prices are set to skyrocket... all looped together by danger
Cato had a good column on this notion that deregulation was responsible. Lets get real here folks. The lights went out because a collection of relays somewhere that were supposed to isolate a load imbalance didn't flip when they should have, not because we dont have enough bureaucrats in Washington.
---Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.Liberty is a well armed lamb contesting the vote.
While I find it highly unlikely THIS latest blackout is a terrorist attack, I think the idea that a terrorist attack would result in a "substation or twelve" being destroyed with little or no effect to be inaccurate.
,competent, terrorists it would almost make such an attack "easy." Obviously, to maximize effect, you would be operating spread out across the country, and not all in one particular city.
It seems to me that any halfway competent terrorist wouldn't waste their time with sub-stations and/or power plants. If you could get a few terrorists working together in concert I daresay you could take out a SIZEABLE chunk of the US power grid. If you could manage to get a DOZEN
As a terrorist I would target the larger, higher voltage, transmission lines. And not just "at random." Due to the outdated, crappy, infastructure of our power grid, you simply wouldn't be able to "re-route" the power around downed lines as they alternate lines are, almost always, already operating at maximum capacity. And, a great many portions of our country (including most metro areas) rely upon power being trucked in from "elsewhere." Unless I am completely mistaken in everything I know about the power grid, this would have the "added benefit" of shutting down power plants as their generating capacity suddenly had nowhere to go.
Taking out transmission lines is far easier then attacking power plants as the lines are, in general, unguarded and often pass through areas where NOBODY is going to see you walk up to them and place your shaped-charged, C4, dynamite, home-brewed concoction, whatever against the legs of the tower. If you really want to get outlandish (and I think this next scenario is where things start to break down for the terrorist as it adds complications that increase the chance of them being caught dramatically) you could even do things like "timed charges" to multiply your effect, so that each terrorist could leave a charge at one location and move on to his next and at "12:00 PM on October 12th" everything blows. The problem with this is that it might only be viable in the more remote locations where power lines pass through unpopulated areas. Otherwise it would be too easy for some passerby or routine line inspection to uncover your package and blow your whole scheme. So, I wouldn't think leaving packages like this for any length of time would be a viable option. Perhaps disguising/hiding/burying these charges might buy you a little time, but I don't think you'd want to count on it.
The information as to where the lines are, what their voltages are, what they supply, etc is not hard to come by. Furthermore, (since this is SLASHDOT) there are computer programs (publicly available for a few thousand dollars) that accurately reflect the power-grid of the U.S. as a whole and allow you to visualize the effect of what occurs if power plant or line is downed for maintenance/weather reasons and how other lines will compensate accordingly. Granted, they are not hyper-accurate down to the street level, but in doing so allow you to run them on a home PC and not a supercomputer. Granted, it would not suprise me if many of these programs are on government watch lists, and the Justice Department has purchased these programs itself for local and national planning. If I was the terrorist I would "assume the worst" and plan as if any purchase of one of these pieces of software would bring some scrutiny.
I suppose you could make this situation worse by destroying a small section of the Alaska pipeline, or other major oil/gas pipelines as well. Not that this pipeline attack would, LOGICALLY, make a huge difference in the long term, but, in the short-term, might increase public fear and effects on the market as it seemed to be a much broader based attack.
You could multiply the effect of any such attack by timing it correctly as well. Perhaps wait until the hot months of summer to strike the American Southwest, or wait until winter to strike the Northeast.
I imagin
You right-wingers crack me up. You think YOU are the majority? Hah! The only reason you come out of the woodwork to defend your greedy leaders (who incidentally don't give a damn about you) is because you are so afraid your side will eventually be found out and called on the table for it. *IF* the next election is honest, and *IF* the candidates are decent, then *MAYBE* we'll actually get a government that is there for us and not the corporations. Rememeber this; you're company cares not one iota about you, but people like me and Dennis Kucinich do. You've just been too brainwashed to notice.
Un-news
First of all, I hate right-wing corporatist buttheads as much as you do. I also have equal loathing for full-blown wackaloon greeny socialists. I'm all about moderation.
-LookSharp (I would post under my account, but I'm already down 4 karma points on thsi thread for being offtopic.)
A portable wind-up Simon Cowell doll.
From Rich Galen's Mullings today:
The North American Energy Reliability Council which tracks such things has determined that, including last week, there have been seven grid failures since the big one on November 9, 1965. None lasted for more than a day.
Let's go to the blackboard...
The number of days between November 8, 1965 and August 14, 2003 is 13,793.
The number of days in which some portion of the national power grid failed during that period is 7.
Dividing 13,793 by 7 we get 0.000507504
Moving the decimal two places to the right (and rounding up) we get a failure rate of 51 THOUSANTHS of one percent.
Stating it the other way, the power grid (which was described by former Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson as being like one in a "third world country") has been up 99.949 percent of the time over the past 37 years.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Moderation is fine as long as it doesn't water down what people like me are trying to do for the rest of the world: give people what they need with no strings attached.
Un-news
You might be old enough to remember a time when your local utility company ran BOTH the generation portion and the transmission portion of the system. Part of the deregulation regime was precisely to separate the two so that the utility company who sells to you ran mostly the transmission portion and it buys power (in theory) from several generation companies. Remember Co-Generation? This actually caused quite a lot of headache for the utility company as they now have to interface with a variety of hardware NOT under their control.
If we can get away from the politcal grand-standing and free-market ideologies, we might gain some insights by weighting the track record of the impact of deregulation on the whole SYSTEM of power generation and use: the plusses and minuses.
I don't believe such matters have black/white answers. I hope you will have the patience to come to a deeper understanding first.
Electrical power and landline telephone are categorized as 'natural monopolies' because the costs to run multiple electrical lines or phone lines to each home and each office is prohibitive and very inefficient.
The Cell phone businesses are perfect for competition as the cost of adding antennaes is relatively cheap. One also increases useful bandwidth with more companies.
The roads are entirely public project - private companies are basicaly contractors to the state and federal governments. What a surprise that politics play a role here!
The 3 cases you discuss are entirely different fruits! Any conclusion one can draw in one area cannot be meaningfully applied to the others.
Dude, I've read your journal. Most of the articles.
Whatever it is you're "trying to do," I don't want any part of it.
You're either a mildly clever troll, who has just scored by getting me to respond; or you're a complete nutjob.
PS - Hope you and the wife's yeast infections are all cleared up!
Apart from the reasons given by others to your question, it is worth remembering how constrained political parties are in the UK regarding campaign money.
The corruptive power of campaign donations is far less damaging in the UK because political parties can't advertise on the mass media, this paired with strong regulation about who and how much money can be given to political parties makes more difficult for big companies to influence goverment decissions. This leaves politicians with only one main master: their electorate.
And at least in this instance it seems to work: privatization and deregulation of electricity and gas, telecoms is working wonders for the consumer. I came to the UK a few years ago and my bills for these items keep getting lower (you have to shop around, but that is your role as an informed consumer, isn't it?)
Not everything is rosy: the privatization of the rail industry has been a complete and utter disaster, with the benefit of hindsight one can't imagine a worst way of doing things (no competition, granted monopolies, disjoint competing responsibilities).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have been using only gas to cook as far as I can remember, I have lived in several countries so it seems odd you mention this as an "alternative".
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I can also smoke weed and write cheap Sci-Fi.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In Mexico we used to have regular power cuts, lets say one hour once a week. I can work that out but I am pretty sure that is less than the fabolous 99.949 you have so dutifuly calculated.
Well, in Mexico City there has never been during at least the last 40 years a single incident like the one just experienced in the US (blackout for several days).
SO I think this Mr Richardson is right on the money. Some third world countries would be ashamed of something like what happened last weekend.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your power goes down once a week.
Ours goes down once every 37 years.
Do you see the difference?
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Hello, pot? This is kettle. You're black.
Are you aware that you have 3,083 comments, and UID above 500,000?
um...actually it IS shark week.....
I'm paying about $0.25 a kw/h. My electric bill has tripled since 1999. Part of the way this was done was in the "baseline amount". You still get a really tiny amount of electricity real cheap, but over that, you're paying a lot.
I can generate 1000 watts for 24 hours for about 3 gallons of gas with my honda generator. That's $6 for 24kwh, or $0.25 a kw/hour. Surely, I should be able to get electricity substantially cheaper from a professionally run utility?
All those generators that businesses put in to provide power during blackouts are designed (and licensed / permitted / zoned) as backup units, not to be run fulltime.
Aside from the fact that most of them don't have enough fuel to run for more than 48 hours, and it's hard to get fuel delivered during a big blackout like the NE one.
This was a question we always asked our colo vendors who boasted 48 hours of generator fuel. What happens if it is a big earthquake with widespread outages? "We'll get it trucked in." What if the roads are blocked? Level 3 told us - we have a dock on the side of the building and will have a barge in here making fuel deliveries. When I asked about how they'd get the drawbridge up which blocks access to their dock, they were flustered and started talking about long hoses.
But the fact is, all those generators are designed to run for short periods of time - usually less than a few hours. They're not designed/planned for longterm widespread outages.
THe smart installations will have "excerciser timer" which fire up the unit once a week for 10 minutes or so, as well as remote monitoring for low oil levels and such. But that costs extra, so lots of places didn't bother with that part.