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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.
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!