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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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!