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.
Nice try. Most power transfer mechanisms rely on the venerable E-TAGing system. Most are highly customized, and written in C. AFAIK, none of them use Windows RPC code.
Conspiracy theories are only good when they are believable. Do some more research next time.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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.
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.
As you profess to be a resident of Toronto, I seriously doubt that your "taxes are subsidising excessive users" in San Diego, CA, USA.
On the other hand, I am a resident of California and a customer of San Diego Gas and Electric and I can assure you that electric utilities have been deregulated and that our bills did, in many cases, triple.
When regulated, those utilities were guaranteed a profit of a few percent on their operations by the regulators. Operations meaning not just the generation and distribution of power, but also the expansion and maintenance of their systems. Whatever they spent, they were guranteed to make a profit. They spent money on maintenance and upgrades because those expenditures actually increased their profitability.
That gurantee of profitability gave utility companies stellar credit ratings which allowed them to borrow money for expansion at low rates.
The net result was excellent maintenance, aggressive upgrade programs, and plenty of employees to handle problems.
Free-market capitalists saw most of this benefit to consumers as irrelevant. What they saw was that a few percent of guaranteed profit wasn't enough. So they set out to increase that profit by freeing themselves of regulation. They promised that deregulation would cause companies to compete to sell me electricity and that competition would drive prices down and, by some never explained voodoo, to drive profits up.
It didn't work. Companies did not compete to sell me electricity cheaply. They conspired to withhold electricity in order to create the appearance of shortages and then sold power at extortionate rates. The problem for the utilities is that the deregulation wasn't complete. The State retained control over the maximum amount that could be charged for electricity. Who knew this would ever be a problem as we'd all been told that prices would only go down.
Utilities, which are now mainly distribution companies having sold their generators to outsiders, got stuck in the middle. Too bad for them. They all lobbied to get deregulated and they got screwed by their free-market buddies.
I'll tell you why -
01) the UK deregulation was in favour of the consumer rather than the supplier
02) the generating companies have switched as much of the generation to natural gas 'stations as quickly as possible. This is much cheaper than our old coal fired stations, but will leave us increasingly dependent on Russian gas in the future.
03) UK electricity used to be really expensive.
As an aside, my electricity bills are now AMAZINGLY low - I pay less than 25 ($40) for 3 months of domestic power from British Gas, but getting my meter moved took me over a month of chasing people around on the 'phone. What does my power use consist of? 2 x Powermacs on 24/7 (a dual G4 and a 500 G3), a 28" widescreen Panasonic TV, around 20 x 60W lamps, an electric oven, a really nice Samsung washing machine with 1600rpm spin, 2 x power amps with 500W power supplies, an 850W microwave oven and a multitude of other low Wattage electronics like DVD players and whatnot.
In fact, power costs in the UK are SO low that they act as a positive disincentive to look into more environmentally sustainable alternatives.
That was classic intercourse!
One amendment to your description: the price cap in California was meant to be a temporary price *floor*, and was enacted at the request of the energy industry lobby, not at the request of consumer groups. Energy producers asked that a fixed price be secured for a limited time in order to pay for the costs of deregulation. It was, in a sense, a contract with the state of California to provide energy at a certain rate.