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.
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
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.
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
No. I know a few power schedulers who could tell you how bad deregulation has hit them. It means that more power is travelling farther on 40+ year old systems.
:)
PS: Everyone in the northwest who is giddy about not getting hit by the blackout shouldn't feel too smug. The same thing could happen here. In fact, the chances of it happening on the California ISO are high.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
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 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
...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.
I definitely recommend cooking with a gas oven.
;) ). And a fine heat regulation, which takes effect immediately. No long cooling periods, you always see which cooking place is on, which one off. No long scrubbing and cleaning of burnt in food at the cooking plates.
:)
Gas provides what you want from an oven: Instant heat, when you want it, and instant off, whenever necessary (for instance, if you are cooking milk
Yes, gas is poisonous, and it can create an explosive mixture, if not watched closely. But all gas ovens I used recently had a bi metal switch, which closed the camshaft from the incoming pipe whenever the oven was cool, e.g. whenever no flame was burning. So the only way to poison yourself with gas was blocking the camshaft.
There is still something to say: People not used to the instand heat of a gas oven often overestimate the time necessary for a pot to heat. If you are cooking with gas, always stay at the oven. Otherwise the food may burn during your absent
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.
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.
Expect environmental regs to be cited as an obstacle to new expansion of generation and transmission capabilities as this issue goes forward.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
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!
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?
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
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
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