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Electricity Apocalypse Soon?
mindriot writes "Heise's awarded online magazine Telepolis has published a nice article (English / German) discussing the ongoing series of power blackouts (after the U.S. blackout, London, Scandinavia, and other incidents, the most recent victim being Italy). 'The blackouts bare the Achilles Heel of our "information society" ,' the article states, and sees the recent events as a precursor to a possible massive on-line blackout. As society becomes more and more dependent on information and power networks, the failure of a single wire or the interruption of a satellite uplink can become a major issue and form a great vulnerability. As the article explains, market liberalization, globalization and plain ignorance could endanger our infrastructure to a very discomforting extent." Free markets cause power blackouts?
We use Morse Code by candle light. What's your problem?
The Mothership
Time to start hording lemons, pennies, and dimes!
The blackouts bare the Achilles Heel of our our "information society"
You better believe it! As soon as the power goes out and I can't post on slashdot or update my blog my social life is over!
Still, what's the good of a home generator, Mr Anderson, if you're unable to find an ISP that works?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
No, but greed, incompetence, short term thinking, and the outsourcing of everything does. Having no real authorities to answer to surely helps as well.
:)
As a bonus it will get more expensive also, aren't we lucky
IMHO the privatizing of utilities such as electricity is *not* a matter of consumers' interests and not even a matter of producers' interests really. It's ideology. Religion if you like.
Just like everywhere else...
The Mothership
What a lot of people don't think about when considering "clean" alternative energy sources is the environmental impact of the manufacturing OF the clean energy sources.
stuff
Reducing power consumption might be a good idea as well :)
I was going to say something witty about having to choose between the latest x86 processor and central heating, until I remembered that in my office at least that's already the case.
These blackouts were a series of coincidences. There is no need to worry; actually this is a good opportunity for those who want to invest in the energy sector. Enron anyone?
Well, earlier today, we heard that free markets cause all kinds of terrible things in the tech industry, now we hear that it will cut the power. What's it going to do next, knock up my girlfriend and making the world spin backwards?
No, no. No bias at all. Right?
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
"Free markets cause power blackouts?"
The free market tries to make money out of the infrastructure this means low maintenance, low investment. It's a recipe for blackouts.
Can't say we weren't warned though.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Did the NYC blackout ruin everything? no, they fixed it, will patch the system and move on.
Was it regrettable? yes
Did it endanger our infrastructure? please.
People only 100 miles away from the blackout's edge lived their days normally.
As for "the interruption of a satellite" becoming a major issue, I fail to see how this is becomming a problem. It happened about a week ago didn't it? I'm still here. I could still buy food that morning.
In fact, this article is just flat out wrong. As our global infrastructure develops we will become MORE resistant to isolated incidents of damage, not less. Information structures route around damage, they don't amplify it. The blackouts were a special case of aging and obsolete equipment pushed beyond its tolerances. Now that problems have emerged, they will be addressed in a cycle of refit that has existed since the dawn of civilization.
This article is bullshit fearmongering in an attempt to capitalize on recent events to drum up readership.
All these recent failures have been the fault of transmission systems, not the fault of generation systems. Electrical grids are carrying ever-increasing amounts of power around, but haven't been upgraded for many years; it was inevitable that we would start to see problems with the grid becoming overloaded.
The problem is simply one of NIMBY. We need to build more transmission lines, but nobody wants the lines in *their* backyard. It's going to give them brain cancer; give their children leukemia; impede their views; reduce the value of their homes; destroy the last known habitat of the seven-toed porcupine.
Sometimes I really wonder if democracy is a good idea.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
(if you haven't read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky, do so now ;) )
It's really funny how the end-of-civilisation scenarios mentioned in the book become reality. In particular, this is a case of his over-efficiency scenario: as the automation and control systems become more efficient, the margin for error gets narrower, until even a minor glitch can escalate to affect a large proportion of the planet. This happens in part because no single person fully understands the structure of the control mechanisms, so the catastrophic scenarios can't be predicted.
(the other scenario I remembered was ubiquitous law enforcement. Things like RFID tags, smart dust, and ubiquitous surveilance are all becoming possible)
That said, I don't think we're going to have the end of the world. But there will have to be some fundamental changes in the way we design and use the technology.
--
I refuse to use
Damn, blackout, what can I do? I know I'll play some games, oh no wait, hrmm, I'll work on that code, oh, hrmmm, hrmmm, I'll read my mail, doh .. holy crap there is nothing to do :O
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Free markets cause power blackouts?
Of course. Free markets seek to maximize profits. In a sector where the barriers to entry are quite high, companies are much more able to increase price by lowering demand. It's one thing if the product in question is a luxury item, it's entirely another if it's an absolute necessity.
To put it more simply, they can charge us more money for the same amount of electricity if electricity is seen as something scarce. If electricity is seen as something that there is an abundance of, then they can't charge us as much.
Speaking of "Free Markets" in the sense of electricity isn't quite the same as speaking of free markets in terms of something like, say, cabbage. In my city of 0.5 million people, there are at least 0.4 million people capable of producing and selling cabbage. So, if the price of cabbage went up dramatically, you'd see people planting cabbage and selling it at lower prices. The barriers to entry (seed, land, water) are very common and cheap. Competition works for the consumers.
Now, if Scottish Power, which owns the local electric monopoly (company) were allowed to do what they wish with prices, of course they'd jack them up. But purchasing a large generator, becoming a public utility, going through the red-tape, putting up bonds, etc. is a long, expensive, and difficult process. In other words, the barriers to entry are much higher, so far, far fewer people would be able to provide an alternative to Scottish Power. That means, of course, that while it's not a true monopoly, Scottish power would have the ability to squeeze more money out of us for no other reason that "We can, so we will."
When options and alternatives are available, competition from free markets works. However, until sufficient options and alternatives exist to create competition, a deregulated market is essentially a government-created monopoly. ("You have no competitors, and provide an essential service? Well, then, feel free to rake the serfs over the coals at your leisure.")
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The London blackout was rather misleadingly reported piece in the news in general, including the English news.
It was a power failure on a significant part of the London Underground (the underground train system).
The article furthers this misconception by compairing the London blackout the the blacking out of the US Eastern seaboard, which borders on the sensational. At no point does it tell you what actually blacked out.
Blackouts like the one that occured in Italy, and I *think*, but could well be wrong,the one in the US involve the logistics of brokering power between neighbouring countries. The London Underground blackout has nothing to do with this, it was a failure of part of a utility service, and was contained within that utility.
It annoyed the hell out of me that even here in London they reported a "London Blackout!" over the top of footage of a brightly lit evening street focusing on an entrance to a tube station (lit) with a flashing emergency sign (powered by electric not hampster power).
There are lessons that might be learnt in the ways countries broker power between each other, but we have to be careful not to roll everything into this... stuff breaks. Always has, always will. Stuff breaking isn't a new phenomena of the modern age, it's been breaking for a long time.
'Cuz I can download pr0n on my bongos!
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no >sub<tag). That means that casting each foundation will release 2,800 tonnes of CO2 (again, imagine the "2" subscripted), a total of 84,000 tonnes of CO2. That doesn't include the exhaust gases from the machinery used to dig the founds. And that's only for the founds, never mind the cast concrete masts that will be built.
Nuclear power isn't actually that dirty, you know. If fast breeder reactors were researched a little more, we'd have good, relatively clean, power stations. Although, at the moment, combined cycle gas turbines take the prize.
It strikes me that national power systems often have dangerous reliance on a small number of big power-providers - large coal/gas/oil/nuclear stations, with electricity imported/transported down a few very large critical power lines. Alternative energy may provide a solution, because by its nature it needs a higher level of redundancy and a more intelligent and distributed power supply model. And its good for the planet too.. Wind energy has really started to prove its use here in the UK, and is set to take off in the USA too. In the UK we should have 20% of national power from the Wind by 2020, and we have the offshore sites to get 100% eventually if we wanted. Add to that Solar, Tidal, etc.. Because of the very nature of these resources local/national distribution must be better, and include mechanisms to regulate in the case of a drop in power..
Oh, and what do you do when you have excess production? Turn the electricity into Hydrogen for your cars!
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
The problem with the London blackout was a lack of redundant generating/distributing structure. Ironically, Transport for London had only very recently had a large ceremony in which they switched off the generator that had been powering the Tube, DLR, etc. These train networks were switched over to the national grid. Because of this, when two small (and easily repairable) failures in the distribution network occurred and the Grid provision to London and the south-east was interrupted, the trains and stations were rendered inactive. Only recently they would have been able to carry on unaffected thanks to their own generator, which the Mayor of London (Red Ken Livingstone) had insisted should continue suplying TfL.
So is a free market to blame? The problem here was a lack of redundant equipment, which was definitely a cost-saving exercise. But whether the costs are reduced in order to increase profit, or in order to reduce the tax burden, is insignificant in context. So no, in the case of the London blackout a free market wasn't the cause of the problems.
A true free market should respond to consumer needs. So - if it costs 10x more to provide failure free power and consumers don't want to pay 10x, they will not get it. Similarly, companies that are power dependant would pay more and get more reliability.
A shared infrastructure may make it hard to deliver differing levels of reliability - which is where a central body (government usually) comes in and specifies the requirements.
In most cases, the government has simply demanded low cost electricity provision. In this case, the companies have succesfully reduced the costs by actions such as stripping out excess generating capacity (in the UK at least)
If the government had required high reliability power supply (by imposing huge fines for any blackouts) then the companies would have optimised to a more reliable (and more costly) network with greater redundancy of network and generation capacity.
A market is powerful - but it will normally give you what you ask for and no more!
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Is it just me or is there something really weird about all the blackouts this year?
Why is it that many of these countries have not had significant blackouts for years, decades even, and then they all have signigicant blackouts within the same six month period?
Personally I find it really hard to believe that, for instance, a falling tree branch somewhere in the mountains managed to down just the right powerline to cause a blackout in the whole of Italy. It just doesn't ring true to me. This is critical infrastructure for christsakes! Governments know where the weaknesses are and have all kinds of plans in place to prevent this type of thing happening in case of war. (My father used to be on some of the comittees that put these plans together in the UK. They know where the weaknesses in infrastructure are.)
So I find it really difficult to believe that there have been small incidents that just so happened to have hit the critical spot to take out large sections of the powergrids in a number of different countries all within a few months. Somethings going on here. What is it? I can only speculate:
1) These are actually well planned terrorist attacks which are hushed up because politically Bush/Blair etc. need to be seen to be "winning the war on terrorism", and so we the general public don't get to know about them. (Notice that the blackouts affected NY, London and Italy - all of which supported the Iraq war?)
2) There is some kind of power (pun not intended) game going on between different governments.
3) The utility companies are doing this on purpose in order to get more tax dollars invested in their industries.
(Some people are going to respond that I am paranoid and need a tinfoil hat. You might be right. But personally I think the current mentality of completely dismissing offhand anything that suggests governments or corporations can act in an underhand manner on a coordinated scale is unhealthy - these things should get discussed, otherwise people in power will start to think they can get away with crazy things just because nobody would believe they would do it!)
Remember the "Summer of the Shark Attacks" ?? i.e. Summer 2001....
We tend to focus too much on the news of the moment. If we have a bunch of blackouts, all that will happen is we'll work real hard and turn the power back on.
Although the sequence of blackouts is an odd coincidence. Mebbe somebody's playing a trick.
Every eocnomic and/or industrial revolution in the history of our planet has come about as a result of an increase in the ability to provide energy. That energy can be in the way of food (provide more workers), or it can be mechanical energy to perform tasks WITHOUT the workers. In either case, an increase of energy production and availability has spurred the revolution.
So, if a country wanted to greatly increase it's industry and economy, it's not entirely unreasonable that looking for ways to provide as much power as possible at the lowest rates would be a great way to start out.
Here's some more to think about: In prtty much all of those revolutions, the changes came from the bottom up, so to speak - the workers/merchants were the ones doing the innovating, and freedom to do so was a critically important ingredient for the recipe to work.
In previous times, it wasn't very easy to get a monopoly on energy without stifling growth - once you completely controlled the food or other source of energy, the motivation to innovate was greatly stifled - people don't care about producing excesses of food if they know you'll just take it away. And if you didn't take control (left the market free), then there was plenty of competition in the markets of food, lumber, and other sources of energy.
Today, however, things are different. Our energy sources (oil, electricity, natural gas, etc.), which allow us to use much greater amounts of energy, are also very easily monopolized because of distribution. If you own the oil/natural gas pipes, the electrical lines, or the phone lines, then it's awfully tough for someone to cut in on your profiteering racket. To do so takes a governmental mandate, and as we've seen in the telecom industry, at times even THAT isn't enough.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The power output of these windmill has to be conditioned, also. That would mean large battery cells, I would think. What about the environmental impact caused by the battery- they are usually made up of some noxious substances
and once we solve the overdependence on electricity, we can solve our overdependence on clean water, and air, and food, manufactured goods, raw materials, cheap labor, children in sweatshops, working poor, janitors, cars, fossil fuels, shoes, houses, silicon, land, ozone, the sun, and all that other stuff we are so dependent on.
because god knows, dying in the electricity apocalypse would suck, but i'd rather go there than in the sewage apocolypse.
thank you, good night.
Free markets cause power blackouts?
That was a rhetorical question, wasn't it? The picture is clear on all utilities: Privatisation has almost always had the same effect:
* In the short run, prices plummet and more alternatives appear.
* In the long run, after a low number of de-facto monopolists remain, prices rise and reliability and service go down
Exceptions I know about are:
* Some 2nd world countries that were forced to privatisation by the WTO, where the first step was skipped (water in south america, great topic)
* A few 1st world countries who - so far - managed to keep competition going, usually by the dreaded government intervention against emerging monopolies.
The problem is simple: As a government company, a utilities' purpose is to supply something to the people, be it water, power or phone service.
As a commercial entity, its purpose is to make money for its stockholders. If regular blackouts increase your profits, we will see more of them. If firing half your service people, reducing maintainance costs and saving the R&D money for future developments rises the stock prices, that is what we will see to happen.
Oh, sorry, have seen happening.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
OTOH, I raise issue with your discussion of the CO2 emissions involved in erecting wind farms. I've been reading up about the construction of wind farms (they plan to build one in Portland Harbour - I live in Weymouth[*]) and accept the ~84Gg CO2 figure you give. Remember though, that wind farms only need to be built once during their career. Think of how much CO2 a coal-fired station - which has an efficiency of about 29%[@] puts out over its whole career, including constructing the huge concrete cooling towers. Wind still wins.
Also, wind farms are generally nicer-looking. Down in the West Country (and over in Holland, FWIW) they're minor tourist attractions.
[*]They're using a few big masts instead of a lot of small ones; the test station is 30m (~100ft) tall.
[@]Nuclear power stations are less efficient than this - about 23% - because of the complexity of handling the fuel after it's been used.
The society has enough spare resources to survive pretty harmlessly even quite long blackouts. And they don't mean serious problem. Simply - everything goes "on hook", it's a perfect excuse for not having your work done - and a real one. Simply - "time of stasis", all activities get stopped until the power is back on. Downtime gets forgiven, contracts get postponed, meetings made highly optional. It doesn't mean any real harm. Just a stop. (note, your competition gets stopped just as well :)
And about the blackout activities... In Poland, in times of worst crisis, blackouts were very common. Connecting this fact with limited availablity of condoms, this explains the sudden peak in nation's birth rate with 9 month shift from that period...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Exactly. There are plans afoot to build an array of wind turbines near my house, in the North-West of Scotland. We certainly have enough wind - AMEC (the contractors) put up a weather monitoring post, about 40' high. It blew over four times.
:-)
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no sub tag). That means that casting each foundation will release 2,800 tonnes of CO2 (again, imagine the "2" subscripted), a total of 84,000 tonnes of CO2. That doesn't include the exhaust gases from the machinery used to dig the founds. And that's only for the founds, never mind the cast concrete masts that will be built.
An important thing to note is that with wind turbines, there can be other problems too. Such as the fact that, for example, the beat frequencies from the wind farm's turbines can travel for hundreds of miles. (I heard of one such case in Washington state, but can't find a reference right now).
Nuclear isn't bad. Fusion, however, would be better
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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Look up some of the chemicals that are used to produce solar cells. Just imagine how many people have bought solar cells that end up being thrown into landfills/etc, not to mention what the maker's have put there.
stuff
Actually, the real problem is that generation systems are poorly utilized, or they are intermittent in nature.
What is needed is the ability to store energy during off times. A good example is useing Boeings idea of a heated salt-based sterling engine to store and generate electricity.
In fact, I would love to see small companies started up that has the sole approach of storing electricity generated at off-hours, which is normally charged at lesser rate. They would then release during the daytime at the higher rate. The difference being the business.
By starting businesses doing just this, we could stabilize the alternative energy and increase the power plants utilization.
Also, these would be able to be used in times of emergencies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Do not use MS at nuke plants.
Do not allow Bush's friends at Enron to run plants.
A number of regular contributors to Heise's Telepolis web magazine seem to come from the what I like to call "I always knew it" camp. Alarmism, conspiracies, mindless misinterpretations of current research results, and lack of knowledge about economics are a mark of their writing. Usually, you can recognize them after a couple of paragraphs; after that, the articles retain some entertainment value, but only seldom offer food for thought or original analysis.
A large part of Telepolis' articles, however, is excellent journalism with important subjects that most print publications would not touch with a ten-foot pole.
-- H. Wilker
The fact that free market has been demonstrated to be succesful in most areas of economy is a generalization. The free market, just like any other economical method, is subject to human mistakes and misexpectations, even in a global scale (e.g. the Y2K issues). The free market only gives an advantage to the ones who make less mistakes and do more accurate predictions.
... my co-worker at the opposite table sais "Pah, blackouts can't happen in germany. We have a very narrow and redundant power grid." [translated]
Now imagine his face ten seconds later, when all monitores became black, all lights went off, and the UPS switched to battery supply. The local power company needed 2.5 hours to get the power back ...
(This is real life, not a joke.)
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Use Solar Roof Tiles
Orbiting solar collectors beaming the energy down by microwave.
Never played Sim City?
The problem is that these days, every power plant is interconnected to the 'grid'. All it takes is ONE poorly maintained utility to make the whole thing cascade fail like dominoes falling. That's what happened in August. One utility (a shit one in Ohio, who can't even keep their nuke plant properly maintained) threw the whole grid out of whack. Problem is, the whole system is VOLUNTARY. Except for power syncronization, there are really no reliability standards set by anyone. Thus, the grid becomes like a chain - only as strong as its weakest link.
How about if everyone generates their own power (Internal combustion units, fuel calls, wind, solar, or some combo thereof) and the big power plants' job is to back those units up when they run out of fuel or break down. A distributed power network like this is the way to go to avoid blackouts. It also makes power disruptions by terrorists pretty much a non-issue.
There must be some way to convert the hot air generated by slashdot users into something useful.
I for one welcome our new electricity overlords.
- "They misunderestimated me."
Alright, then what do you propose?
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Weather or not you like it, using nuclear energy is the only form of "clean" energy that is economically feasible. Sorry to say, but I don't think that we'll be seeing the area a size of New York covered in expensive solar panels (which contain dozens of toxic chemicals, cost a lot, and produce a lot of pollution when produced), or half of Texas covered in wind generators.
Nuclear energy != bad.
Certainly, you have some nuclear waste, but newer nuclear plants, or those in research, would actually produce much less waste then convential nuclear plants (especially breeder plants that can essentially reuse much of their waste). Not to mention, nuclear power plants are not dangerous when constructed and maintained properly. Remember Three Miles Islands? Most people harp on that as a reason why we should not have nuclear energy. Even when half of the core melted, very little radiation was actually released. That's why they build gigantic containment structures around the core. Chernoyble != western power plants.
If you want to read more, you can check out the ten deceptions of nuclear energy site (http://www.thenewagesite.com/jjdewey/deceptions/
Anyway, the real problem here isn't how much energy we produce, which means this post is kind of off topic. It's more about how the grid is intereliant, and if one thing fucks up, then everything does.
-Ethernal
The same happened in Italy to a slightly larger scale. Now everyone recalls back in August when the balck-out stroke NY, one of the eggheads of GRTN (main Italian power distributor) came up announcing: "...a similar occurrence could simply never happen in Italy..."
-d
The real problem is in the design of networks. Information networks are designed to be fault-tolerant (famously but erroneously attributed to a desire to withstand nuclear attacks) -- multiple connections and a "mesh" network mean that if nodes break, traffic is routed elsewhere and the network continues to function. This works great, and there's no problem with it. But the problem is, humans don't build networks this way, and economics is against doing so.
If you're buying a network connection, you buy it from the best provider available, which naturally means network connections become concentrated to a few suppliers, who in turn find economies of scale and provide lower prices, thus attracting more customers. Thus the economics of building networks naturally produces networks that have a few or even single points of failure: we noticed this on September 11th, when the knockout of the huge links through New York noticeably slowed transatlantic traffic, even to sites other than CNN and the other news sites that were being toasted by demand at that point. Centralisation is something that we naturally do because it's economically efficient, but centralisation leads to problems for networks.
In the energy sector, things are even less flexible, because energy connections are a lot more expensive to set up and difficult to maintain than information links. The US powercut was caused by the cascading failure of a daisy-chain of power stations around the great lakes. Nobody would build an information network that way any more, but it's still the natural way to build a power network. Italy's powercut was caused by a huge reliance on foreign power, supplied by JUST TWO LINKS to France -- one fell over, instantly overloading the second and knocking it out too.
Yes, we are critically reliant on these fragile networks. And yes, economic realities tend to cause these problems, but not because of privatization: it's simply because humans naturally tend to build poor networks, because those are cheaper -- no matter who pays the bills. To solve the problem, we need to pay more attention to networking theory when building all of our networks, and provide regulatory incentives to build better networks of both kinds.
Or one day, a critical failure will cause a cascading catastrophe, and it will be nobody's fault. We built the network to fail that way.
Film at eleven.
IMHO, the net is a lot more resilient than the power grid. Jumping from powerouts to net meltdown is like claiming that an increase in car traffic makes train accidents more likely.
OTOH, I agree that having basic infrastructure like roads, power, and water on private hands is a recipe for disaster. Monopolization and short-term interests combine to cause real problems.
Remember that there's a vital difference between state monopolies and private monopolies: State monopolies have their primary focus on ensuring stability. Private monopolies have their primary focus on making money. Which do you want cleaning your water?
-Lars
If we reduce our power consumption, the terrorists will have won.
Or something to that effect.
And what else than power outages do you expect when everybody upgrades to new 200W or 400W processors requiring water cooling or air-conditioning which also requires power? Add to this all life-quality-improving gadgets which are becoming more and more available like dishwashers, automatic vacuum-cleaners (I vacuum more often with my new sub-eta-sensomatic-automatic vacuum cleaner), etc...
You can defy gravity... for a short time
This shows that a developed country can, if it's careful, structure its electricity network in a more durable manner.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
At least in the electricity market this is clearly a problem.
It has long been accepted and promoted by internationally minded people within the electrical utilities that power could be shared internationally in a global HVDC grid that would be both technically and economically superior to the primitive, isolated systems that predominate today.
The obstacles have nothing to do with technical or efficiency problems. Quite the contrary, the proposed system would be technically superior in the sense of being less prone to blackouts and without a doubt would lower electricity prices globally.
The problems arise when some countries have a slavish, not conicidentally religous fervor for "free markets" while others take a progressive attitude. This leads to a form of international competition that is not productive at all in the sense of the over-used market metaphor. This is highly destructive competion of the cold war sort in which destruction of the "enemy" at all costs displaces the goal of efficiency.
Nuclear power stations are built from concrete too, y'know.
If so many power generation facilities weren't so damn toxic, it wouldn't be such a problem.
Meanwhile, I'd be willing to invest in solar panels and/or wind generation if it was a bit easier (but not necessarily cheaper) to hook into the grid. And if everyone generated even a bit of their own power then many of these problems would go away.
The answer would seem to be local combined heating and power plants. These would burn organic matter segregated from domestic waste {in a pyrolysing process to reduce emissions of nasties}, and some of the surplus heat could be used for heating homes.
However, Joe Moron, who is convinced that it's fine to dig up fossil fuels out of the ground to use for generating electricity {increasing atmospheric CO2 levels}, OK to dump energy-rich organic matter in landfill where it will decay into methane {which is a better heat trap than CO2 -- better in the sense it traps more heat, not better environmentally}, and harmless to burn god knows what on bonfires in back gardens, somehow thinks that if we were to burn less fossil fuel, use burnable rubbish {much of which is plant-based, i.e. derived from CO2 that has been abstracted from the atmosphere; even the carbon in animals originally came from plants at some stage along the way} instead of some of it, in a high-tech pyrolysing furnace that combines as near as damn is to swearing all the fuel with oxygen, and save on logistics by not having to transport waste materials so far, then that would somehow be worse for the environment.
Just an observation, I can't figure it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I would like to see some good stats on the economics of some of these 'clean' alternative sources. Italy, they told us the night after the great blackout, has spent billions on geothermal, wind and solar energy which still produces less than 1% of the energy used. (17% is imported from France, since Itlaians rejected nuclear in a referendum years ago). Certainly some of that money was squandered or stolen. On Lampedusa this summer I wandered round a site where hundreds of solar panels faced the sun, doing nothing. Cables dangled loose and the structures and outbuildings were rusty havens for lizards. It was supposed to be used for water desalination. Next door large diesels roared all day and night...
Well, may be. In Soviet Union there have been no blackouts. The worst was when a block of houses, or a city district were cut off from the grid. I don't think there ever was a significant blackout in a major city. The reason? The best power distribution network in the world. A lot of redundancy as well as capacity to transmit power across the whole country. It was built to power the European part of the country with cheap hydro energy from Siberia and reliability was a cool side-effect.
The energy industry was underinvested for more than 15 years now, but we still had no major blackouts (other than customers disconnected for not paying their bills). The United Energy System is being reformed now to make it attractive for investors. I don't know if the positive effect of much needed investment will be offset by poor reliability, but I hope that remaining government regulation and "traditions" of the industry will help us avoid freemarket-style blackouts.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
http://www.heulwen.freeserve.co.uk/pstation.htm
Bin Laden is at it again, or do you actually believe that worldwide blackouts like this happen on a regular basis?
In fact the nearest thing I've seen to a "battery" for generation was in Scotland, where they have a system that can use excess power to pump water uphill, then use it for hydroelectric generation when required. You do need very special geography, but the ingredients - concrete and water - aren't very noxious.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
There are hydro plants that do this. They use off peak electric to pump water up hill then use that water to generate electricity at peak times.
..d
There is one in Snowdonia that does this.
--- Four bases should be enough for any genetic code
You expect me to believe these were all a series of coincidences? Ok maybe the first blackout in the US and Canada, but we have been having blackouts all over the world for months now. What next? When the Blackout hits Austrlia thats just the trees too? How about Japan? Its Terrorists, I'm as sure about this being terrorists as I'm sure 911 wasnt just a few accidents and planes just happened to ram into the same building over and over.
oh my fucking god, you are so intoxicated with pro nuclear arguments it's painfull to read. Keep your finger crossed X-ray boy, it's all safe & clean. It's the west for christ's sake.
While free market and competition are usually good things, in some circumstances they result in suboptimal solutions. However, power distribution business is apt to emergence of monopolies, so while blackouts are extremely disturbing, in the end free market is perhaps more important there than reliability of supply.
Technically, the Soviet power grid was very close to optimal design: decentralised network encompassing the whole country, efficient, built with ability to sustain major damage (large-scale war) in mind. However, with the fall of Soviet Union all infrastructure has ended with a handful of individuals, who now have a perfect monopoly and use it to enforce prices they want. The end result is often similar: public schools and hospitals are getting cut off because they can't afford electricity.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
That is nice, but these take space, water, and size. The approach that I am mentioning would decentralize the system making it more impervious to hits via either economic conidtions (think california who was manipulated), terrorism( 9/11 ), or a failing system (think about the recent grid outage which appears to be traced to several monitoring systems being off-line due to constant rebooting ).
The approach that I am suggesting would allow small companies to be created that would own these, creating a true competitive environment. This would actually encourage alternatives as well as better useage of current resources. Think about the nukes that are basically dumping energy at night.
BTW, that does not mean that the water idea is bad, just too big and expensive.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
the greek word that "apocalypse" came from actually means "to reveal something that was hidden", not destruction or such.
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
I think it's expected that nuclear fuel will last longer (on the order of centuries as opposed to decades for coal or oil - look out GWB! :-).
Decades for oil, but not for coal. Last estimates I saw was that there was 400 years worth of coal - probably more than uranium. But coal produces the most CO2 of any fossil, is hard to clean of sulphur, is polluting and dangerous to mine.
But on the nulear issue - I am sure we can create safe powerstations. But they will still volumes of entensly radioactive wast which whil have to be kept safe for ~a million years. Until we have the technology in place and tested to do this, rather than promises that it will be developed before it is needed, nuclear camnnot, IMO, be considered.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Cruachan Pumped Store Hydro-Electric power. My father worked on that, back in the 1960s. Wonderful scheme.
Most of the noxious chemicals are used in the manufactuering of the cells, not actually contained in the cell. What you pulled up was experimental, and not likely to make it into commercial (but might have special uses such as space). Gallium arsinide was being used by Cray prior to his death. They were finding huge problems with production.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thank you Mr Edison. We'll call you if we need you.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Humm, seems to me that the root of the problem is that the general public, business, and industry is dependant on "the grid"(like duh). What I mean is each of us is dependant on power generation and delivery systems which are out of our individule control.(ok, so)...
Please keep in mind that had we spoke in person you would not have had the opportunity to observe my poor spelling, it's my message and not my grammer that you aught pay attention to.
To demonstrate, smaller co-op type wind farms would place more of the power generation in closer proximity to the loads. Reducing vulnerability to falures at the generation sources and transmission grid(s). They would provide jobs in construction and maintainance, and stabalize prices for power from a near-constant, free, renewable, and clean source.
Rather than investing in more Dirty Coal fireing plants that rob us all of our non-renewable natural resources; Instead of pushing the envelope with contriversal nuclear power, how about simply start utilizing our existing fision reactor, The Sun, in more direct methods? Such as Solar, which is about as direct as you can get at ~20% effeciency. Wind is probably the best solution powered near-directly by the sun aswell. Hydro-electric is already being extensively utilized, relying on the evaporative powers of the sun to circulate water to the highest peaks. If you think about it, coal and oil resources are also powered by the sun, which grew the plants that eventually turned into "fosil"-fuels. I wonder just how effecient this very-non-direct use of sunlight is. My guess, about 0.02% or less. Even Solar power starts to look a whole lot better put this way.
Or how about smarter tansportation that would actually Help correct this and many other problems that we are currently facing (Oil dependency, pollution, corruption, wars)... This T-Zero and other Electric Vehicles could aid grid overloading, utilize nightly power over-production provide clean reliable and FUN daily transportation producing zero emmissions and using zero oil. period. Check out their White Papers. and What's New area (especially the ev-based vehicle-to-grid demonstration project)! I know it's a little pricy, how about the GM EV1 with an MSRP of less than $40K, in low volume production (Oh ya, if it had ever been for sale). There we go, More Jobs again... And Imagin how the cost would come down if we built 100,000 of them here at home.
And for all of you that are going to diss on electric cars, keep in mind that you know nothing about them. They have power and range, and are very effecient at 80% to 90% from the outlet. Batteries are recyclable and safe.
Hybrids are not Electric cars. Gas cars are brute force machines, their ICE's only push, Friction breaks slow them down. Hybrids are the "Missing Links". They Push just the same, but are capable of "Recycling Kinetic Energy", however all power originates from the gassoline. EV's are the Answer, The Push even harder, Regenerate Better, use about 1/4 the energy, and produce Zero Emissions. Infinite MPG.
To Bring this full circle, I can make my own electricity, and more of us should. It shines down on us each day and blows above our homes durring each of our lifetimes. Build something usefull to our children, not more problems.
L8r
Ryan
Generally agreed (I expect you know that there's an HVDC link from the UK to France, and they're building two more to Holland & Norway); however in the case of Italy it was precisely because they were over-reliant on their international feed that the whole country went dark. A tree fell over on the Swiss-French border, hit the line going from France into Italy, Italy lost 20% of its incoming power, and went tits-up...
It always seems to be tree branches falling. Look for the guy with an axe (or chainsaw).
In the UK, government and industry watchdogs have actually issued a warning that large parts of the UK could face sustained power shortages this winter.
As the various regional grids and producers were privatised they downsized, to a hideous extent. The old-style (and much missed) nationalised electricity boards had to keep a certain amount of spare capacity online as well as having mechanisms in place for neighbouring regions to help each other out.
Those extra stations have been closed down to keep the shareholders happy and now they're all in competition with each other there's rock all cooperation between them.
The UK is running within a fraction of it's total capacity now. When it was nationalised we had a robust and fault tolerant system (unions notwithstanding), now we have a house of cards.
It's the same across most of the western world. How's your retirement fund doing ??
Each Day, America converts PSCCO,US DOE,EIA
360,000,000 gallons of gasoline into
7,500,000,000 lbs carbon dioxide,
369,000,000 lbs carbon monoxide,
47,000,000 lbs hydrocarbons,
24,000,000 lbs nitrogen oxides,
1,000,000 lbs particulate matter,
7,500,000,000 miles are driven @ 20.83 mpg
for passenger vehicles only, not including the
higher emissions of heavy transport or diesel.
L8r
Ryan
Link:
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/e ast/06/ 17/tokyo.scandal/
We recently had a good example of this in Japan. The local energy concern (Tepco) covered up serious faults in it's nuclear plants over a period of 10 years or so. All 17 of it's nuclear reactors which supply Tokyo were taken offline for safety inspections and old fossil fuel ones were brought back online (yay environment, just think of how many old ones have to come back to replace 40% of the lost nuclear capability).
In any case, there was a big push for energy conservation because they were afraid of blackouts and the resulting economic chaos that would plague and already troubled fiscal situation (10 year depression). We had disaster recovery plans at my firm if it went bad and there was a web site for how likely a blackout was, that's how bad it was.
So why did they hide multiple cracks in the reactors, or rig a measuring instrument to give falsified data or any of the other things in the big list of infractions? I really can't see any reason other than to protect the bottom line.
There's this idea that corporations do this because they are all evil, or greedy or wicked. Sometimes this is true (Enron). It also seems likely that when this sort of common manager first finds out about stuff like this, they are stunned by the potential impact it could have on the company and, more importantly, their jobs. The are frightened by it, go into denial and look for a cheap and easy solution for a problem that, surely (hoping...), is no big deal. Everything's fixed, and they go back to their old life. Happens again in another plant, but hey, we fixed it last time so no problem. After a while it just becomes normal. Our little corporate secret. Nothing to see here, wink wink.
This is not to say that they are not also motivated by the enormous fiscal pressure to increase profits at the behest of the investors. It's never said that way of course. It's usually, "I'm really getting a lot of pressure to improve productivity and reduce operating costs by 4%". And when you're being whipped to reduce operational expenditures, it becomes pretty hard to suggest that you shutdown a reactor for 8 months while a multi-million dollar repair job is getting done. It's the right thing to do, but also the hard one (isn't that typical).
This pressure, it seems to me, derives in large part from the stupidly unreasonable, but pervasive idea that investors have that their stocks ought to go up in value every year. Forever. It's *not* OK to get big and profitable and stay that way year after year, but you have to keep becoming more profitable. Well you can only squeeze so much until you start squeezing things and doing things that you probably shouldn't. It's funny, we (society, not necessarily you the reader) bitch alot about corporate evils and so forth, but if our stock doesn't go up, we're all pissed about it and put more pressure on the companies (or our fund manager who does it for us with a lot more clout), who guess what, resort to more and more extreme measures to give us what we want.
One might say, "But I don't have enough shares to put pressure on anyone". Sure you do, many institutional traders know that if they don't perform well, you and several million others just like you (not to mention those pesky rich people) will pull out if they think they can do better elsewhere. Why stay in this fund which does 2% when that other guy's fund get 7%? So the institutional investor wants to keep his job and puts big pressure on the company to perform well and be more profitable, using the big collection of little moneys he got from ordinary investors.
Add globalization into the mix and you have a really fun situation, with lots of powerful, hyper-competitive global companies duking it out for every last dollar, because all of them are under this huge pressure to perform (in that impossible ever growing way). And since all of them are somewhat lean to begin with, is it any wonder they start
The problem is politicians don't understand free markets. If you want a company to do something, you have to motivate them with their balance sheet. Regulation, inspections, requirements, whatever don't work because they will always find a way to cut corners. That's their job, save money, increase profits. Duh.
For electricity, if you real want to deregulate, do it right. First, if you want reliability, make the companies financially responsible for outages. If it hits them in the bottom line, they will invest the infrastructure, procedures, etc. to make sure the lights stay on.
Second, you have to make sure it's not at all a monopoly. If it even smells like a monopoly, then you should remain regulated. It's pretty hard to make electricty a non-monopoly when there's only one line coming to my house. This means we really only have one distributor. Ever. As long as we have one, leave it regulated, state-owned, etc. and let the suppliers compete. This is coming from the biggest capitalist you are likely to meet. But without competition, capitalism doesn't work.
The answer is a hydrogen fuel cell generator in every home. Each private home will have it's own power source and we shall be independant of the power grid. And no diesel fog! Check it out here.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
True: energy consumption is growing while many new machines use less energy than they used to do. (Modern PCs are an exception, in that new models require far more energy than their ancestors.)
The main point, however, is not the machines themselves, but the way we use them. 20 years ago, the majority of the western hemisphere hardly new what to use a micro for. Today many households have two or more PC's, with at least one switched on (or "suspended") night and day. Most people don't know a TV isn't switched off when it's switched off.
"It's the Y2K bug!"
Oh, wait no, no, that's not it, oh wait, "It's the coming of the apocalypse 2001, It says so in the bible!"
Doh.... Oooh oooh, I got it, "It's the end of the world! It's the coming of the Electricity Apocalypse!"
Some people need to take a pill, and let the professionals take care of the problem. The coming of the apocalypse stories are getting especially lame now that 2000 has come/gone.
Do you suppose the "Afterglow Lightbulb", although already invented, has been placed on the shelf with the "100 mpg carburetor" of a few years ago?
Hm, you're certainly right, with all you say.
However, you just throw some figures around you without any comparision to the other technologies and then draw a false conclusion!
Even with just considering CO2 resulting from casting (a working, that is including additonal facilities neccesary to operate!) powerplants, you don't get it right.
What about the outer wall arround the reactor of a nuclear power plant? (typically 2 meters thick) And the foundation of a nuclear powerplant, hell the foundation of a new built nuclear power plant should withstand a possible reactor meltdown! (typically 7 meters thick)
What about the foundation of any power plant, everyone needs one!?
And don't forget, a nuclear reactor is worth nothing, without fuel. There must be mine for uranium/plutonium, the ore has to be converted into metal, the metal is not usable, it has to be enriched and finaly the exhausted fuel rods are enclosed in glass and disposed for about a thousand years. These containers for the final disposit almost certainly will leak some day and then the fuel rods will be enclosed again.
Quit a lot of transportation, lot's of additanal plants to cast.
Of course, the absolute numbers don't say much, but even compared to the total energy output for the whole lifetime.
I am pretty sure, that wind turbines use less concrete/kW to cast, than most other power plants. The same with exhaust gases emitted while building these plants.
And there is absolut no doubt, that fuel extraction, storage and transportation alone emitts by far more exhaust gases, than casting such a plant.
Someone mentioned batteries, hm
Let's compare them to the waste other powerplants produce.
The whole nuclear powerplant is radioaktive waste after its lifetime!
And what about the solid matter from filtering exhaust gases in coil/oil/gas fueld powerplants?
Most parts of batteries can be recycled, wheras the most of the waste from nuclear/oil/coil/gas fueled powerplants can not.
Besides that the total amount of waste (just solid matter) of a wind turbine produces is less.
Come on, be serious, wind turbines are superior to any "classical" powerplant in almost every respect!
IMHO, Yes indeed! Just look at what the private sector has done for the railway system in the UK as opposed to the rest of Europe and Japan: the UK system may have cost less directly over the past 50 years, but it's a complete mess and will take decades to fix. And for decades already, their economy has suffered terribly as a result (thus indirectly raising the cost to their society anyhow).
In stark contrast, Japan and Europe have the best rail systems in the world. It may be so that they spent a lot more money to achieve this up front, but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to show that their economy's have also benefitted immeasurably (thus indirectly lowering the cost to their societies).
Governments, may be less efficient than private enterprise at tackling such problems in financial terms, but at least you can count on them to get the job done. Also, governments are at least capable of making investments in the future (when it becomes painfully obvious that they should), while private enterprises with thin profit margins usually seem more concerned with cutting their costs in order to stay ahead of the competition. Oh, and if their is no competition, things can get even worse than when a government is in control.
As I see it, governments should be in control of key infrastructures: the railways, gas, water electricity, sewage systems, roads, air-traffic control, etc. If you put private enterprise in charge of any of these, corners will be cut and any country as a whole will pay the price at one point or another; it's simply a risk that shouldn't be taken. I say it's better to pay higher taxes than lower bills that can leave you with even less in return.
What causes blackouts is a complete unwillingness to build new power plants. When was the last California power plant opened? How many new plants have opened in Italy recently? Nuclear plants? Nope.
I consider myself an environmentalist, yet imho, the Green anti-nuclear stance is not a good one.
...blackouts are the result of green political propaganda.
... but is paying someone just to get over the problem of stocking it.
In 1987, following the wave of commotion that swept the country due to the Chernobyl meltdown, the "green" political party, the "Verdi", managed to convince the majority of the population that it was better not to have nuclear power plants here in Italy.
If you travel around Italy you'll see funny signs on approaching a town or city: "This is a denuclearized city".
This is actually the epitome of hypocrisy, because that town or city actually relies on nuclear energy, since it is imported from France, which has over 50 nuclear power plants (many of which located near or on the alpine zone of France, very near to Italy). Thus, that town is producing nuclear waste
I'm very concerned about environmental problems, but green "fundamentilists" have even blocked a recent proposal of an wind-powered plant in sourthern Italy. The reason: it blocks the view of the marvellous landscape!
Anyway, the main problem is that oil is too cheap: the majority of our energy plants runs on oil, which is a terrible waste of one of the most precious substances known to mankind. The only solution is to raise the cost of oilperbarrel: a solution that would most consumers don't even want to think about.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
"Any system that depends on reliability is unreliable." -- Nogg's Postulate
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
Carbon dioxide is actually a fairly innocuous substance, particularly as it dissolves easily in water and can be readily absorbed by the process of photosynthesis.
Don't get me wrong, putting CO2 into the atmosphere that wasn't there before is assuredly not a good thing. But CO2 is nowhere near as black as it's painted. Yes, it helps trap heat in the atmosphere, but so does pretty much any gas, and CO2 is not the tightest heat trap. Mole for mole, methane is a far worse heat trap. It is the first stage in the fossil fuel formation process {gas -> oil -> coal -> diamond}. Unfortunately, it tends to escape before heat and pressure can continue their work.
Most of the nasties in the atmosphere actually come from volcanos. And when I say most, I mean significantly more than anything human beings have put there.
The lack of new power generating facilities is also a factor. Ideally, power generation would be geographically close to its load. Due to NIMBY, it doesn't get built or it gets built "somewhere else", exporting the pollution and problems to someone else's backyard. This has led to increasing amounts of power being transported across the grid, from regions with surplus capacity to regions with permanent deficits in power generation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
My view of the current trend of research in Europe is that it aims towards disperse production, particularly in the spread of microproduction in distribution networks.
The idea is to move primary sources of energy (gas, wind, even diesel) towards the final consumer, replacing part of the high cost production and transport of energy, and allowing the final consumer to produce a significant part of its consumption, either by using a more primary source of energy (ex. for heating) or by localy producing electricity. This would also allow small parts of the network to operate disconnected from the system during a contingency.
I usualy make the comment that producing electricity burning coal or fuel at relativily low eficiency, transporting it for a long distance and then use it, again with low eficiency, to generate heat is hardly rational and environmental...
Modern developments like fuel cells, microturbines and modern wind generators, combined with a maturing use of power electronics, seem to be the way to go in increasing the reliability of the system. This, together with the use of equipments like flywheels and battery storage, starts making possible the operation of contingency created network islands until it is solved.
But this neads a change of the habits of the consumers and of the system operators. Also, the distribution network needs changes to accomodate this trend. But I believe there is a future in this approach, and that it works well with the current trend of liberalization and de-regulation of the market.
Perhaps the solution to the growing blackouts is not an "update" of the network, but a change of paradigm.
Joao Luis
All those assholes who say "Not in my backyard", should have thier power turned off FIRST!
Allow more power plants to be built.
Cut back on the paperwork, and conflicting regulations. Nuclear power plants can be very cost effective when reasonable procedures are required. They become way too expensive when californication standards are required.
Say it loud "More Nukes Less KOOKS!"
I plug my APC UPS into itself.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Sorry, you're wrong about that. Every time you turn the power off and on you subject the circuitry to surge currents and thermal cycling. This increases the failure rate of components and connections. With properly designed equipment, it isn't much of a problem. With aging or poorly designed equipment, there is a noticable increase in equipment failure rates.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
In the last quarter century we have seen an endless barrage of FUD against the nuclear power industry. The fact is, there are very few human activities that are so clean and safe as nuclear power. In over forty years, just ONE fatal accident, with thirty fatal victims, plus nine other accounted for deaths over a period of more than fifteen years. How many people died in the construction of windmills in the last fifteen years? How many drowned in hydro power reservoirs?
However, we still hear about those "hundreds of thousands" of deaths Chornobyl was supposed to cause. Where are the thousands of leukemia victims that were predicted initially? Yes, it was a terrible accident, that should never have happened and should never happen again. But it caused less than one ten thousandth of the fatalities that were initially predicted by the "experts". Talk about overreacting!
Of course,there is still the problem of disposing nuclear waste. But this is mainly a political problem. There are several safe ways of storing nuclear waste for millions of years. My favorite is burial in the bottom of the ocean. There are places where the bottom of the ocean has been geologically stable for the last hundreds of millions of years, and there is no reason to suppose this will change. Burying the waste several hundreds of meters in a rock that is under thousands of meters of water. How much safer can you get?
You missed the next step. When fuel costs were high causing operation at a loss is the time to shut down for maitnance. When the fuel price comes down or demand finaly fixes the artificialy low product price, then the plants can be restarted/built/funded/etc. to get generation up to demand. Lack of online capacity and undersize distribution for long haul (to make up for missing local production) caused instability of the system. It's simple for you to figure out yourself. You can buy a generator, maintain it and fuel it. You can't produce power as reliably cheaper than you can buy it off the grid. If the price was artificialy too high, and fuel prices were low, than more people would generate their own power localy. On a bigger scale, nobody wants to do the investment into a large gen plant only to face high fuel prices and low prices for the juice. That is a quick recipe for a capacity shortage California style.
The truth shall set you free!
Have a look at "Energy amplifier" a new type of nuclear reactor invented by Carlo rubia.
m l
Basicly a sub-critical reactor with a particleacellerator as gas-pedal.
It can use other fuels than todays reactors and the waste will have a much better halflife.
here is the EU's report on the amplifier.
http://itumagill.fzk.de/ADS/pooley.ht
It's called heat.
e ne rgy/sol_thermal/powertower.html#storage
The technique's being used effectively by the Solar II experimental station in California.
http://rhlx01.rz.fht-esslingen.de/projects/alt_
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I hate to say "I told you so" to all those "free market solves everything" kooks, but I TOLD YOU SO!
Any time you introduce profit motive into something that SHOULD be run by "the people" you sacrifice quality. Greed ruins everything.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons, as there are a lot of kooks out there!
Also, take a look at the replies you have received: profanity - usually a person without a point resorts to profanity. ; )
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I suspect that the nature of the generation market means that the transmission grid is now under greater stress transporting cheaper power from far-flung places, as opposed to using more localised sources.
Check out dieoff.org and have a look at the future.
Better start saving for that supersize dynamo...
Even in the worst case senario the beer will continue to flow
I find it interesting the the article fails to cite increased usage as a strain factor on our electrical networks. Are we really consuming the same amount of electricity as we were twenty or thirty years ago?
Ironically, if we could just see widespread residential and commercial deployment of high-efficiency commodity electronics, lighting, and environmentals, the supply peak draw problem would probably be reduced. Of course, then, the utilities might reduce supply capacity to the edge of overload for economic reasons...
My dad has a small wind turbine. Ever seen it's output graph? Solar is more reliable. It's easier to predict when the batteries will get recharged. Some places may have more reliable wind, but for most folks in most places, wind isn't reliable. It's like hydro. There are a few spots with lots of relable amounts of water falling, but for most places, it's not in sufficient ammounts most of the time. Somehow I don't expect to find a large hydro plant in Iraq or a large wind farm near Miami Florida.
The truth shall set you free!
Let me see if I got this straight. The electrical grid is now so large that it has become subject to problems of sensitve dependence on initial conditions, and you want to increase the size and complexity of the electrical grid.
What will you say when instead of whole nations being blacked out at a time it's whole continents?
Since the problem is expotenial in nature increasing the number of nodes and lines will ensure more large scale blackouts. Also places that do not invest sufficiently in upkeep will hold the rest of the system hostage.
I can see the upshot of this proposal now, wars being fought over grid upkeep and administration.
Here's a counter proposal, decrease the size of electrical grids. It will encourage upkeep because the locals will KNOW who to blame, and local problems will stay local.
Do you really want your electrical grid in Italy held hostage by a tree in France?
No, but they're unable to prevent them.
...another article at TP which fits as a follow-up. "The Virtual power station" (German only, Babelfish to the rescue) describes a possible solution. Since more and more power (at least in Europe) is planned to be coming from smaller plants (photovoltaic/wind energy etc.), there need to be more flexible methods of directing and diverting power, routing around failures and preventing overloads. Since the Great Vision is to connect any hoousehold appliance to the Internet, your fridge could, instead of automatically ordering food on-line, receive feedback about the state of the power network and more flexible rates per kWh -- and appliances could adjust their power consumption according to availability. All that is needed, according to that article: "intelligent, decentralized energy management."
The power companies use a large blackout as reason to beg for government money to upgrade. They don't seem to have enough incentive to make the improvements on their own. What if they had to pay the customers for each hour/day/whatever they go without power? They'd argue that fines large enough to be a real incentive would bankrupt them. Speculation here, but let them go bankrupt. Take ALL the company stock and re-issue it while at the same time banning ALL the top management from running any company in the same business. That sounds harsh, but we're talking about critical infrastructure. I'm just thinking off the cuff here, just food for thought.
for my local electrical system during a recent year is:
117 - lightning
94 - squirrels
67 - wind related
54 - trees
17 - birds
Terrorists, and other conspiracy theories, couldn't add to significantly to that number. In 1997 we had a 14 inch snowstorm on Oct 14th that broke down over 50,000 trees and caused a lot of localize outages. Things like this happen. That's why your power company usually publishes a yearly bulletin indicating the percentage of 'uptime' for that year. It's usually well over 99%.
This doesn't change the fact that the world's stores of fossil fuel are finite and approaching exhaustion. People in their 50's will see the end of fossile fuel usage in their lifetime, if not sooner. Fission and fusion reactors both suffer from the problems of long term radioactive isotope disposal. (Yes, I know that fission is supposed to be 'clean', but it's not. Anything to operates at the temperatures that a fusion reactor will operate at will product radioactive isotopes in the support equipment, which will have to be disposed of.) The only viable long term solution is a grid of Solar Power Towers generating Hydrogen for transporation and Electricity for the grid.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
that's right. localization is in order again. hydro/solar/information etc... who gets left DOWt?
no big thing, unless you're entwined in the ongoing corepirate nazi life0cide, here. either way, get ready to see the light.
Grids are touted as being safe(er) than dedicated lines but it doesn't get mentioned that they seem to be more vulnerable to problems that have the capacity to spread. They certainly aren't a magic solution.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I'd turn off the power of people who refuse to conserve first. Building more power plants is as pointless as building bigger highways, they are a stopgap measure unless society is willing to set limits on it's behavior.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Stop talking out of your arse. To all intents and purposes, coal is carbon. One mole of carbon produces one mole of carbon dioxide and the same amount of energy, wherever the carbon was had from. And it's the oxidation of carbon that makes the greatest contribution to the energy that comes from burning organic fuels.
Greatest contribution, yes. But not total contribution. If you burn CH4, for each mole of C02 produced, you will produce 2 moles of H20. I don't know what the ratio of the energy from H20 is to that from C02, but it sure as hell non sero. So, for constant C02 output, you get greater energy output from burning CH4 than from burning C. Or turning tround, for constanc energy output, you get less CO2 output - which is what I said.
I did look around the web, and found figures that suggested that the energy yield of coal and natual gas are approxuimately the same per ton. Since coal is 100% c, and methan is only 75%C by weight, methane will release 1/3 less C02 per unit energy generated.
Undoubtedly, CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas, mole for mole, than CO2. But we burn the CH4, not release it. And CH4 oxidises naturally in the atmosphere with a half-life of about 30 days, so that it never builds up (though, of course, it does end up as CO2)Most of the nasties in the atmosphere actually come from volcanos. And when I say most, I mean significantly more than anything human beings have put there.
. The half-life of CO2, due to dissolving or photosynthesis, is not well known, but is certainly in the centurues.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
...market.
Electricity markets are a case in point. Their parameters, and the optimum profit-maximizing behavior of their participants, are determined by law and regulation.
The markets behave accordingly.
There's an ocean of difference between good law and regulation and bad, but calling one kind "free" and the other not is really an ideological statement, if not a religious one.
The kind of regulation that is in vogue these days (the so-called free thing) provides powerful economic rewards for behavior that can really thrash the hardware sometimes. Hence more blackouts.
How about a tax on electrical power distribution? It would be proportional to the distance between the generating facility and the consumer. This would make it cost effective to invest in local generating capacity.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Here in Norway, we used to have the world's cheapest electricity. Then the electrical market was "freed" and connected with the rest of the Nordic countries through Nord Pool. Last winter our electricity prices grew something like ten-fold!
Free markets cause power blackouts?
Not in and of themselves, but it s arguable that blackouts will be more prevalent under free market conditions than if the power supply and grid are regulated.
The demand for eletricity is relatively inelastic. Regardless of price, we need to turn on the lights, run our refrigerators and cook our meals. Electricity is an unusual commodity insofar as once it is generated, it cannot be stored for future use. We have to use it or lose it.
If the electricity market is operating under free market conditions, the power generator will be interested in producing only as much electricity as can be sold (as excess goes to immediately to waste) and wants to sell this power at the highest possible price.
There is no virtue in over-supply as that serves to drive the prices down. If anything, the power generators will attempt to create artificial shortages in order to use the laws of supply and demand to their advantage. Hence the concept of "gaming" which we saw in California in which the power generating companies would temporarily take functional generating capacity offline in an attempt to drive up the price of power. The demand was relatively constant, and when the prices rose sufficiently high, the offline generators would be plugged back into the grid and the power companies would make a premium.
Under ideal free market conditions, other investors would notice that the existing power companies were making out like bandits and invest in additional power generation utilities in hopes of getting a piece of that action. The demand curve is relatively constant, so as the supply increased, the price charged to consumers would ultimately decrease to something more reasonable. The reality is that it takes several years in order to go through the regulatory process to get approval to build a power generator. Rightly so, as it would not be appropriate to build nuclear generating plants just anywhwere, nor would it be acceptable to build dams for hydro-electric generators ad-hoc. So, it is simply not the case that other sources of power generation would show up in the short term to increase the supply (resulting in lower prices) in the short term. For all intents and purposes, electricity generation is a monopoly where there is little opportunity for competitors to enter the market place, and no incentive for existing manufacturers to increase the supply of electricity beyond a certain minimal level.
Western society has progressed to the point where electrical power is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity that is vital to our existence and economy. From that perspective it makes sense that power generation (and transmission) should be at the very least a heavily regulated monopoly where the existing operators are permitted a reasonable profit but are required to meet certain levels of service.
Personally, I would prefer to see power generation and transmission run as not-for-profit ventures and the consumers should be charged on a cost-recovery basis.I do not think that for-profit enterprises would voluntarily invest in redundancy or the necessary capacity planning for the future. It is difficult to make a business case and calculate ROI for a project that may take 20 years to complete. It the private sector, many companies and investors are focused on the next quarter, and there is apparently no interest in the long-term for those day-traders.
That's my $.02 and I experienced the blackout in North America earlier this summer first-hand, for whatever that is worth...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
These blackouts are systematic in that they are coordinated attempts by terrorists to grade the level of security around such installations.
The most disarmed feature of my line of reasoning is that the least secure is in the United States.
Again, this is not coincidence. Blackouts do not occur all over the world in such a way. This has nothing to do with Microsoft's crap software, nor does it have anything to do with the perils of privatization or overconsumption.
Make no mistake: this is a deliberate, planned attack on the US/Europe.
Economicaly feasable is a very tricky thing.
Regarding nuclear power the "cost" to produce power (stated by electricity producers) does not include all costs involved!
Actually you argue on wrong numbers.
The current cost for deposing nuclear waste is definatly not the actual cost. Since the waste has to be deposed for thousands of years, the cost in future is not realy predictable. Companies deposing (any) waste are calculating on their _current_ costs. Their current cost is based on how expensive it is today, to acquire land used for a disposal site (besides wages and other costs.) They do not even care, if their company would be bankrupted in a 100 years. If such companies closees/bankrupts, noone cares about the disposal site, no other company would take them over, since there wont be any revenue. The onlyone who might care possibly is the government. Diposing nuclear waste is economical feasable since they take a very huge loan from future generations, that will pay costs for diposing nuclear waste of their ancestors.
Nuclear power is economicaly feasable, because of huge loans, noone ever intends to pay back that!
And that's not all. How expensive was Chernoyble!? Who paid that desaster? You are right, Chernoyble can't be compared to western nuclear power plants.
Harrisburg was totaly different to Chernobyl, they just have lost control over their reactor and had _great luck_, that it did not meltdown!
To have had great luck does not mean, that it is better! Actually it prooves, that there is not a big difference! Chernobyl ~ Harrisburg ~ Western nuclear power plants!
Without trolling
And don't forget, if a company gets in financial trouibles, they start to reduce costs and increase their production. Security is likly shortened first
But anyway, the MCA in Chernobyl did not only cost the sovjets a lot of money. Think about the worldwide fallout. At least in Europe an unimaginable amount of agricultural products los, increased cost to feed animals without contaminatated gras
Another huge figure, not included in these "economicaly feasable" calculations.
And there are more of these cost! What about increased costs for health care, resulting from radiation?
People living close to nuclear plants suffer from increased rates of cancer, leucemia and all the like.
Weather you like it or not, nobody can figure out the total cost involved with nuclear power and thus noone can proove that nuclear power is economical feasable. Moreover, there are serious doubts, even when not considering an MCA.
Anyway I the topic of the article was not energy production.
The topic was, that heavyly interreliant systems tend to chainreaktions, that can lead to a total breakdown of large parts or even the whole system.
Weather it is the internet, electricity grid, a space shuttle(!) or
Do you really try to tell people, that the same electricity producers (and controlling governments) can ensure us, that they are able to avoid an MCA (and associated costs) in a nuclear power plant, even if they have just prooven withing a few weeks, that they are unable to avoid such chainreactions in their power grids, that are less complex than a nuclear power plant!?
I'll tell you, it is economically feasable (for electricity producers) to save money on the stability of the power grid, because noone of them has to pay the financal loss resulting from a total breakdown.
I'll tell you, it is economically feasable (for electricity producers) to save money on the s
I find it amazing how old technology is in this field. Here in denmark, infrastructure is still resonably well maintained. We deliver power to Sweden and when the swedes kicked the bucket, the line to Sweden was broken and we found ourselves producing TOO MUCH electricity. That was enough to blackout Copenhagen. I also noticed all the windmills here stopped, even though wind was strong enough. The only reason mainland Denmark was spared, is because there is no connection with it! (They are hooked up to Germany.) Regulating the flow of power still has a loooong way to go.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
It has long been accepted and promoted by internationally minded people within the electrical utilities that power could be shared internationally in a global HVDC grid that would be both technically and economically superior to the primitive, isolated systems that predominate today.
One of the misconceptions about electricity is that it flows instantaneously and without delay from point A to point B. Don't forget that there are many transformers in between A and B, and for each transformer, you have to wait for the magnetic field to expand/contract as the demand changes.
There may also be several paths from A to B via separate transmission lines, or through distant switching stations, then the problem then becomes one of balancing one circuit's load against the other with the transformers acting as "springs" that make your job harder. Adjust one line and maybe the circuits settle down into equilibrium (BOUNCY Bouncy bouncy). But maybe they enter a harmonic (bouncy Bouncy BOUNCY) and the circuits begin to resonate destructively.
Add in the changes in demand during the day, plus seasonal changes, and the difficulty in keeping all the lines running at 60Hz (50Hz for you Europeans) so that clocks run correctly and motors spin at the correct RPM, it's a tough job, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with it.
Stringing additional line across national boundaries has it's own dangers. Suppose your electricity is supplied from two countries away. But last week, the People's Liberation Front took over the intervening country of Moronica and cut you off. What do you do now? Your industries are at a standstill. Your ports are closed because no one can load the container ships. Your electrified railway is parked in between the stations, and your population is sitting outside while the daylight lasts. Having enough electricity to supply your own country's needs is a national priority.
Chip H.
That's the problem. All of your energy saving techniques make life more miserable. Computers -should- always be on. Flourescent lights are miserable and cause headaches and probably some form of cancer. Flat panels are ok but I think the resolution and color treatment of a CRT is still better. Efficient appliances clean less, keep food less fresh, and cook worse. It takes energy to boil water, takes energy to have decent light, takes energy to do anything.
The real answer is to build nuclear power plants. You can argue windmills and solar all you want, but there is not enough surface area to have environmentally correct energy, and, it probably takes more nasty chemicals to make solar panels and windmills anyway.
Nuclear power plants are safe. Even if you factor in one Chernobyl meltdown per year, you will wind up with far less environmental impact than you would by burning coal. So called clean natural gas is in fact running out because there are too many gas turbines for the national production. Have a look at Henry Hub (the benchmark natural gas contract), and see where it's headed. Coal will never be clean. Fusion is, yet again, 20 years away. That leaves nuclear.
We should be building nuclear plants like crazy, and then use them to power fuel cell based cars. Then, we would not need any imported fuel at all, greenhouse gasses would be stopped in their tracks, and America would be a net exporter of energy.
Build nukes and breath free.
ps. if we had all nukes, we would not be in Iraq.
This is my sig.
My local power company is offering a deal to those considering a backup generator. (generally for their comptuer room) Allow them to install a box that forces it to start up automaticly and disconnect the comptuers from the grid, and they will sell power for much cheaper. They win because when there isn't enough capacity some customers are swtiched off. The customer wins twice, once because they get cheaper power, second because that generation equipment is tested regularly so they know it works (if it doesn't they stay on the grid but pay more for power).
Nothing new there, big industry often installs gas/oil boilers, running gas normally at a reduced rate. When the gas company calls they switch to oil. Been going on for years, electric companies are just starting to catch on.
The point is, it isn't just the CO2 that is a problem. H2O also is a greenhouse gas; and it has an additional, more directly noticeable effect. If you don't know what more H2O in the atmosphere leads to, fill up your kettle with water, jam the switch on and wait for a demo.
Not all the CH4 from landfill is burned. Burning it would be a lot more valuable if something useful was done with the heat generated instead of merely using it to warm the atmosphere.
The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is hardly relevant anyway. The amount should be fairly constant. Increased CO2 levels actually speed up the growth of plants - this is why talking to plants helps them grow, because of the carbon dioxide in your breath.
I think that an important point it that transmission and generation need to be treated differently (and separately). I'm all in favour of a free market in generation (with government regulation). But I think that governments should continue to run the transmission.
The reasoning is simple: competition is good, monopolies are bad; if you can introduce competition, then do so; if you can't, then a government run monopoly is preferable to a private monopoly.
Power generation can clearly be run as a competative free market. Not free from government regulation, mind you; but there's no need for governments to run power plants. And the regulation has to work both ways, including fighting against the NIMBY instincts of land owners.
But for power transmission, on the other hand, it's very hard to have real competition. The barriers to entry (the start up capital of running lots of wires) are too high (generally. there are a few exceptions). So in that case, the government should run the distribution network (whether it's paid for out of general taxation or a user fee is another issue).
The worst thing you can do is have the government contract out a monopoly to the private sector. This produces the worst of both worlds and allows people to negatively caricature free markets, even though it isn't a free market, just a private company operating a monopoly.
There, problem solved. We've got free markets and we've got public ownership. Everyone's happy. Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.
We are finally starting to see real progress in the area of hydrogen development. If we could get fuell cells cheap enough, I believe a distibuted power system would be the way to go. I for one would love to get out from under the power companies. here is a link to the story. Being new to this I dont know how to embed the link so here you go. http://www2.ccnmatthews.com/scripts/ccn-release.pl ?/current/0924138n.html
Ah, yes, the North Koreas, Cubas, and other dictatorial countries of the world are the envy of us all because they have such great power systems!
the failure of a single wire or the interruption of a satellite uplink can become a major issue and form a great vulnerability.
Not if the market dictates that businesses should build in redundancy and scalability to their networks.
Of course free markets have rules- fraud is illegal. Excessive monopolies are illegal. But excessive, targeted laws cause businesses and systems to fail. Think of a developer's analogy: You have a project, with a set of general requirements. If your customer or boss begins dictating too much, such as "The entire financial system must be written in a single DOS batch file," your project is likely to fail. At the very least, you will not be innovative in your solution. Now consider a system in which you and your co-developers "compete" to come up with the best solution given a set of use-cases. Which do you think will be more successful?
Okay, I'll bite:
1. How many wind turbines does it take to equal a single nuke? Lots. Sure, a nuke will use more concrete, but you have to consider that you'd need about 50 or so turbines (~1.8 MW at Bruce Power) to equal, say, one CANDU reactor (~900 MW at Darlington). Let's not get into how much space it takes to create a wind farm of this magnitude.
2. Not all reactor designs require the same amount of fuel processing.
3. You point out that you are fairly sure about costs. How about some fucking numbers?
4. You state that "Most parts of batteries can be recycled". Such as? The electrolyte, which is often rather nasty, is probably toast. Ditto for the electrodes.
5. Yes, Nuclear waste is radioactive for a long long time - but how much is actually produced annually? This is something no one seems to want to give a straight answer on. It's not like we're sticking it in underground barrels and putting housing developments on top of it.
I'm not saying it's not a problem - it's just not as big a problem as many people seem to think (from what I understand)
The cold, hard facts of it all are as follows: power generation is, in some markets, desperately needed. The province of Ontario needs to bring online something like 5 GW of power within the next 15 years or so in order to keep up. This is something that can be done with a couple of Pickering-scale installations... or about 250-300 windmills that have to be ordered from Holland, sited, get local approval, and need actual wind in order to work.
I vote Nuclear.
Reliability and predictability of energy output depends on many things. It is a question of how to measure it.
The energy output graph of course looks far more random for wind turbines than for solar panels, therefore solar panels will "average" out in a shorter period of time than wind tubines. If you measure energy output reliability in short term, you're right, solar panels are more reliable.
But I wouldn't say one or the other is more reliable, I would say, solar panels have a more constant energy output.
As you said, nearly constant energy output strongly depends on the place. In the Netherlands for example, wind will probably be more reliable than solar.
I think wind, solar and water energy are all equally reliable, although not in the same place.
It's similar like cars
From the article... "All this is a precursor to a massive on-line blackout which will see the Internet handicapped by a privatisation process which had handed over a public commodity to large business interests who are foremost concerned with securing a profit rather than dealing with technical questions and details such as scaling the infrastructure to meet increase demand in terms of users and bandwidth."
Um, I'm trying to understand how power blackouts are going to lead to the death of freedom on the Internet. Unless the blackout affects all the servers that support the Internet.
-jls
Techno-pagan
Buy a GBA and stack up on batteries.
It is nice to have a blackout - even boss lets you go home earlier - I have more time for my girlfriend etc. I hope we have more of them
in the future....
If fast breeder reactors were researched a little more, we'd have good, relatively clean, power stations. Although, at the moment, combined cycle gas turbines take the prize.
Yeeeeeeah, suuuuure.... but carbon emissions are a GLOBAL problem, so you would need global implementation of the reactors. We should have breeder reactors ALL OVER THE PLANET so countries like Afghanistan, North Korea, Uganda, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Chechnya, and Libya can get their hands on weapons grade plutonium?
uuuuuh, don't think so chumly.
The future is: get rid of the grid. Make people responsible for their own energy production. Decentralised solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen, etc. If people are made to be responsible for their own production, you will see an order of magnitude increase in energy efficiency.
When it comes to energy policy and carbon production, you have to think thousands of years into the future, not just 20 or 30 or even 100.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is hardly relevant anyway. The amount should be fairly constant.
Boy, does this miss the point. If you have system with a steady input, it will after a time achieve a steady state - true.
But if you suddenly massively increase the input, it will achieve a new steady state. The time it takes to do this, and the level in the new state, will be related to the time it takes to absorb the the excess. A system with a quick re-absorbtion time will have a steady state only slightly above the original level; a system with a slow reabsorbtion time will have to rise to a much higher level before absorbtion balances the increased input. That is what we have done - introduced a sudden massive increase in CO2 production. It hasn't stabilised yet, and will not until a few half-lives have passed. But the stable level, for the new input state, will be higher than the preceding stable level.
It is a documented fact that CO2 levels are much higher than they were in prehistoric times - maybe twice as much. This is not in dispute by anybody reasonable. What is in dispute is whether this increased CO2 is causing global warming (maybe it isn't warming, maybe it is the sun, maybe it is cosmic rays...) - though the skeptics are shrinking in number - and whether global warming really matters (maybe it is cheaper to adjust to a warmer world than to spend a fortune cutting fown on something which may not be the problem).
H2O is indeed a greenhous gas. But, while our production of CO2 is of the same order as total natural production of CO2, and CO2 remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, our production of H2O is of the order of a millionth or less of natural producion (evaporation from land, sea, and ocean) and H2O is recycled (falls as rain etc) with a half-life again of the order of 30 days. So the total increase in atmospherice H2O die to burning fuel is tiny, whereas the total increase in atmospheric CO2 is (approx) a doubling.
And yes, increased CO2 levels do speed up plant growth. Which may be good - or not; a recent report said that the larger plants contained no more minerals and vitamins, just more bulk. Good for calories if you ase starving, not good for health if you are on junk food. I heard recently that land plants actually remove almost no CO2 directly. Growing plants absorb it, old plants emit a little, and dead plants rot back to the original amount of C02. The only net absorbers of CO2 are oceanic plankton, which tie up the CO2 in CaCO3 in their shells, which they dump on the depths of the ocean when they die, preventing rerelease.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
FEAR FEAR FEAR ...
Just like Y2K: Recognize problem. Fix problem. End of problem
(until several years before 2038, then repeat cycle)
It's all part of M$ efforts to prevent the spread of Linux. Ohh, little Billy & Steve twisted minds.
Readers of User Friendly (www.userfriendly.org) (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030930 ) will know that the real cause of the Italian blackout was Pitr stealing uranium to build the ultimate (i.e. nuclear) UPS [grin]. Oddly, this story of a nuclear UPS started before the blackouts (on September 23rd (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030923 )).
#include "conspiricy.h"
Fact: The magnetic field of the sun is relatively flat right now. In turn the field of earth is dropping.
Earth's magnetic flux is nothing new. It's happened dozens of times in history, as shown by ice core samples. The poles have shifted from south to north before, but we've never had the luxury of electricty when it happened. Electricity is reliant on magnectics, so how will earth's degraded field effect the flow? Could it cause increased instability in large scale grids? I've seen several interviews with the chief of power in Ohio that discussed an "unknown electrical phenomenon" causing the NY blackout. The amount of power lost in these events are so massive that when a grid tries to re-route the power it creates an osscilation effect. The grid shuts down to prevent the osscilation from spreading through the grid. After reading that interview I predicted that the blackouts would probably become a more common event. A few weeks later the UK blackout. Now the Italy blackout. Shortly after the Italy blackout I read that it was caused by an "unknown phenomenon", probably the same type of event. Your thoughts?
WURD!!
Shortsighted management does.
But, unfortunately, since shortsighted management is a hallmark of private entreprise...
By the way, what follows is NOT a troll. Here's one big solution to all these blackouts: BURY THE FUCKING LINES!!!!! Yeah, it'll cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Would you like to spend $100B now, or a $1 trillion over the course of the next 50 years from the cumulative effects of blackouts?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Uranium prices have dropped significantly since the 1970's, to the point where there are no commercially viable fuel reproccessing operations.
Moreover, it appears that there are nuclear solutions such as accelerator driven fusion which can use abundent Thorium as a source fuel.
Ever heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns?
When you have replaced all your filament bulbs with fluorescents, insulated everything you can, changed your boiler for a pilotless condensing one and you have the most fuel-efficient car you can buy, what else is there that you can do to save energy?
All energy conservation really achieves, is staving off the inevitable by passing the buck along a generation or two.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
as long as the power 'service' deal is like the software deal - that is, no hard guarenteed QoS with monetary consequences - then yes, you are going to have to live with a certain level of failure, that is, when push comes to shove, a business HAS to put staying solvent over customer service, just like Msft cannot afford to fix every bug before rushing a release out to market, the comsumer inconvenience of a problem doesn't figure into their calculations, esp. for a regulated or unregulated monopoly.
The shipwreck of humanity is largely built on false pretenses, a govt. can rack up huge debts and delay payments while realizing those lab in the sky dreams, whereas a business just lets things go to ruin but does balance the books and richly pays the principle owners.
The extreme form of capitalism is the absentee owner, whether of land or whatnot, has legal rights to a capital property, like a slum, collects as big a check possible from it, and hires the cheapest labor possible to manage it untill fully depreciated. You've all heard stories about slum dwellers who cannot get the owners to do basic repairs like fix the leaky roof - the cost of doing so would detract from the owners yacht fees and gambling expenses.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
What free markets? You think Joe Entrepreneur can just run on down to the bank, get a loan and start an electricity utility?
Yeah, free markets... sure thing...
What we need is privately owned power generation and transmission. This does not prevent regulation - indeed it's easier to regulate private enterprize than government organizations. It's very much in owners' interests that the grid be stable and dependable. The profit motive can be a powerful force for good. Regarding the necessity of power, this has been true for many, many decades, but this is not a case for public ownership. Food is also a necessity, but God help us if government were to run the food industry. Regulate yes, own no.
The blackout mess is a direct result of a central power grid. Back when en electricity was getting started there where many, many small generating stations all over. These provided enough power for a small number of customers. (A couple of plants or a small neighborhood) Since each one was operating independently large area blackout where basically impossible. But the power from these small plants was not terribly reliable and local blackouts where common. So the idea of building super power plants that could easily supply an entire city, county or even state was popularized. These giant plants needed to be hocked up to a giant grid in order to get power to where it is needed.
It has worked great for a long time now, but for whatever reason; (Ageing infrastructure due to regulations, unions, environmental groups, politics, price caps or whatever) the grid is not as reliable as it once was. Its still pretty good, but not the best. I expect to see a lot of people start to generate there own hydro. Factories, high-rise buildings, even neighborhoods will start to build there own Gas or Diesel plants (And I'm sure in time hydrogen, solar, geo-thermal, wind and happy thoughts will eventually supply power too).
There are many examples of large companies that are already doing this.
With several major blackouts in rapid succession, after an era of relatively reliable power, it seems like outside forces may be at work here. The question is: who would stand to gain from creating a public perception that electricity is unreliable?
Following up to my own post, I found that 0.85 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced, according to this, mostly in the conversion of limestone to lime. So the estimate of 1 tonne of CO2 for each tonne of concrete is not that far off. I also found that there are products that replace much of the cement with fly-ash from coal plants, which reduce the CO2 a lot.
It strikes me that national power systems often have dangerous reliance on a small number of big power-providers - large coal/gas/oil/nuclear stations, with electricity imported/transported down a few very large critical power lines.
This is true, and it's the essence of the problem. For the last 50-70 years, the power industry's trend has been toward bigger and bigger power plants, and fewer and fewer of them -- a more centralized model. No matter how well the grid is designed to deal with failures, such a centralized model is inherently less stable.
The internet, OTOH, is a highly decentralized "super grid," where any point of faliure is easily routed around, without incident. It was designed this way from the outset, to survive a nuclear war or other major disaster.
While this was the original idea of the power grid system, power generation has become too centralized for it to work anymore. Futhermore, as power plant technology has improved, the grid has not kept up. Originally, power plants had lower reliability. The grid was designed to deal with individual power plants being offline for repairs or maintenance. But nowadays, the plants themselves are extremely reliable. Most failures take place in the grid itself.
Thanks the USA and Russia : the problem was the lack of compliance to the Kyoto convention. The global warming caused an excess of power requirements and fewer energy generation.
Thank the US capitalists that destroy our environment to save some bucks.
When havink nuclear UPS.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Interesting post, but (I assume) your EV comparison is not quite apples-and-oranges. I.e., you are using the caloric content of petroleum to figure:
the average 20mpg car uses 1.76 kwh/mile
whereas you are using the energy in a battery to figure
Electric Vehicles use from 0.2 to 0.6 kwh/mile.
Since around 60-70% of our power is generated using fossil fuels, you should increase the energy use you have listed for electric vehicles to describe the caloric content of the fossil fuels needed to produce 0.2 to 0.6 kWh of electricity at the charging station for the electric vehicle. As a very rough guess, I would think it changes the figure to about 0.3 to 0.9 kWh of natural gas, and somewhat more if oil is used. So it is still noticably better than most cars, but not necessarily better than a hybrid or an efficient compact diesel car.
Also, I could be wrong, but I think that when you say the average car gets 20 MPG, you are including SUVs (etc.) as cars. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is good to be clear.
We need to create a distributed power system. Each home or business should have its own power supply. We have the ability (GE makes a home power supply). The utilities could just become the support infrastructure.
These were specifically designed for the purpose of meeting peak demand. Nuclear generators can take hours to days to get on line but the hydro storage plants come on line in seconds. Then using periods of low demand the water is pumped back.
However, remember that suitable Uranium, Plutonium or whatever your particular reactor uses are in short supply...
Remember, he was talking about fast breeder reactors. Those are the ones that turn (cheap and plentiful) U238 into (fissionable) P239. The only problem is that they're quite a lot more difficult to keep stable than an ordinary power generating reactor.
I like biting dogs
You asked for numbers, here we go
About the waste, (I'll refere to the german reactor Lingen II, a 1.3 GW nuclear plant)
This reactor need 33 tons enriched uraniumhexafluorid (UF 6) per year.
These 33 tons are produced out of 220 tons UF 6. (187 tons of highly radioktive waste to dispose)
To priduce these 220 tons of notmal UF 6 400 tons "yellow cake" (grounded uranimore) is needed. 180 tons of highly radiactive waste to dispose.
To produce 400 tons yellow cake 40000 tons uranium ore are nedded. 39600 tons waste to dispose, radioaktive but does not need to be disposed like the preivous materials.
For produce 40000 tons of uranium ore, 440000 tons rocks are digged out. another 400000 tons of radioaktive waste.
There are currently 438 nuclear power plants in use worldwide. I have no number on closed nuclear power plants worldwide, but in Germany alone there are 12 of them, wich alread have produced there immense ammount of waste.
(And I am not sure how many nuclear reactors are in military submarienes, carriers and the like or how many scientific reactors exist.)
These 438 reactors produce 192,544,800 tons of radioactive waste per year and another 160746 tons of _highly_ radioactive waste. The last has to be handled with care for some thousand years.
The temporary disposal site I am aware of here in germany for the highly radioactive material can store about 4000 tons in total (deep exhausted salt mines preferable). I would belive that final disposals are not larger either.
A single reactor fills up such a site withing 10 years of operation.
Asuming a lifteime of 30 years per reactor, 3 of these sites for the highly radioactive waste per reactor.
How many of these final disposal sites are there world wide? I don't know, but I know that germany there is not even one, besides the fact, that we would need about a 100 sites!
One could think that reprocessing this highly radioactive waste is a solution, but it is not!
Actually it produces even more highly radioactive waste, than mining produces.
Just the huge amount of "normal" radioaktive waste from mining is avoided, but at the cost of much more highly radioactive waste. Choose your poison.
An in germany dismanteled nuclear power plant (Wuergassen) has had a total mass of 225,000 tons, all inclusive. (80% of the total mass is concrete, 180,000 tons)
When dimantling that plant with huge effort 1.8% (4080 tons) were highly radioactive waste, 97% were disposed with normal radioactive waste and another 1,2% (2700 tons) could be recycled.
Previously there were mentioned 400 cubic metres concret, 7 tons each per wind turbine
Thats 2800 tons concrete per turbine and 140,000 for 50 of them. So even 50 turbines to match energy output as you suggested use the same (slightly less) concrete.
And that's without considering the other plants neccessary to produce the neccessary enriched uranium.
Overall Wind turbines use less concrete per MW, qed.
Online references are all in german
(Dismantling a nuclear power plant)
http://www.eon-kernkraft.com/Ressources/d
(Waste)
http://www.umwelt.org/robin-wood/germa
Not so in the US. No commercial wind powered generating facility has local storage devices like batteries or any other form. It's not economically feasable with the present technology. The grid acts as a type of storage in that the excess capacity(when the wind is blowing) is transferred to areas that need it and when the wind isn't blowing the grid supplies the local area power. Wind powered generating facilities are becoming a big business in the US and are spearheaded by private companies; i.e. they sell their output to the traditional electric utilities and the government requires the utilities to buy from the wind powered generators but at a cost that reflects the utilities' own generating costs from their tradititonal plants. Wind generators must therefore be cost competitive although there are lots of government regulations/incentives making it more economically attractive. Local storage schemes like batteries are just too expensive and unecessary since they're selling all their output on the grid already, i.e. there is nothing to store.
http://www.canada.com/national/story.asp?id=3BA2 09F4-C6C9-4DA5-962F-00C9BE324668
Right and wrong.
The incident in scandinavia (I live in copenhagen) started as a failure on a swedish nuclear power plant. This failure caused a transition station on the grid to fall out, and these two incidents caused the entire grid in southern sweeden and eastern denmark to go offline for 5-10 hours.
The starting incident was on a plant, but I guess it was the following overloading of the grid that caused the blackout. So in a sense you are both right and wrong.
As for USA, Italy etc... I don't know about these, so you might be right there.
If sections of the grid would automatically be closed down, isulationg the incident, it wouldn't spread to large areas. In a sense that would (apperently) require a better grid that we have today. So in that sense you are right.
When the blackout occured in USA, the danish power compagnies ensured that this could not happen here on the same scale, as the scandinavian power grid was more advanced than the one in USA. Of cause they got the grid online faster, but anyway, its quite ironic that this should happen shortly after.
-:) Oh no - not again.
www.rednebula.com
I am thoroughly ashamed that such educated people can hold the free market in such contempt! First of all, there is no free market in electricity, the term has been abused beyond recognition. To politicians, "free market" means "carefully regulated." It is hardly under-regulated in the US and abroad. Does anyone here really think that a power company could not be created with an infrastructure that is totally blackout-proof? The problem, of course, is that most of you wouldn't want to pay the higher price for that quality of service. There are trade-offs in every industry that have to be made in order to make service affordable and widely available. If you need dead-reliable electrical service, there are plenty of ways to achieve that using UPS systems and diesel generators. No one is stopping you! If Americans truly want hurricane reliable electricity, then they should be willing to pay for having the cables buried, redundant systems installed, and everything else that is necessary to ensure super-reliable service. There are many problems in the electrical power industry, and they will never all be solved. But to sit here and bash the free market (which is the usual tactic of all leftists whenever anything goes wrong) is not constructive. Command economies such as China and the USSR could not offer better electrical service (in fact, it was much, much WORSE), so shut the hell up already! And there, if you complain, you might have been taken away in the middle of the night. If you want better and more reliable electrical service, then let the market work without government involvement. The government didn't invent electricity and it had no hand in the original wiring of the USA. All that was accomplished by an unregulated marketplace. That we have problems now is mostly due to regulation, taxation and crazy environmental laws that make power companies jump through too many hoops. Bottom line: Don't be a fool, the marketplace is more than capable of supplying high quality electrical service if we are smart enough to let it work.
The problems arise when some countries have a slavish, not conicidentally religous fervor for "free markets" while others take a progressive attitude.
What's the problem? Those are the same, aren't they? Or are you redefining terms implicitly?
-Billy
I suspect that the nature of the generation market means that the transmission grid is now under greater stress transporting cheaper power from far-flung places, as opposed to using more localised sources.
which means it's a... wait for it.... transmission problem.
if the problem is that there is dramatically more power on the line now than 50 years ago, and the transmission lines are failing - it's a transmission problem by definition.
a generation problem only includes failures to generate enough electricity. If you have rolling brownouts or blackouts because there isn't enough power to meet demand, that's a generation problem.
But that isn't whats been happening. during the US/Canada blackout, all plants were online (excepting the nuke plants which were shut down by procedure when the grid was dead).
NIMBY is stressing transmission and leading to serious quantities of waste as energy is lost on the line.
people don't want fossil plants, they don't want nuke plants, heck even the proposed wind farm on the nantucket sound is being blocked by the very politicians that play to a 'green' constituency.
This attitude is creating problems we can no longer pretend don't exist. Before we only had to suffer the energy wasted from unnecessary transmission distances. Now we have to suffer the fragility of the entire distribution system.
the -solution- is indeed a generation solution. It's to educate and inform communities that local municipality-run utilities are the only way to go. dependence on basics like power and water from another locale is dangerous, expensive and wasteful.
while my lights were out last month, my buddy's never were. I was sleeping on his couch, enjoying the AC while 50 million people floundered in the heat and hoarded water, because his city had the foresight to have local municpal power generation.
the 'correct' solution is hardly likely however.
my recommendation for dealing with reality is: get as 'off the grid' as possible, because it will only get worse.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
In California, consumer prices for electricity were fixed by the state, while supplier prices were left to the market. When there was a shortage of energy, the energy companies in the middle were forced to sell electricity at a loss. Surprise: they cnnot keep that up for very long. That is not a free market
If you get crappy service, you take your business elsewhere, right? If you rent a car, but you find it breaks down all the time because the rental company skimps on maintenance, you go to a different company the next time. In the case of power or telephony, you can choose your carrier or supplier, but you cannot choose a company to deliver the service to your home: that takes place over the local loop... which has also been privatised but is effectively run as a monopoly. If that part of the service stinks, you are stuck. That is not a free market.
What happens in these circumstances is market failure; power grids and local telephony loops are difficult to provide as a truly competitive privatised service, while these same things can be run quite cheaply as a public utility. Even the worst of the free market zealots know that there are things that do not work well in a free market.
We see the same things happening in out country: the local loop, national power grid and national railways are being turned into private enterprise, not into companies operating in a free and competitive marketplace, but into monopolies. These companies raise prices, lower service levels and skip on maintenance, not because of the free market, but because of consumers have nowhere else to go. The telephone company is a good example: in areas where they still have a monopoly such as the local loop and voice telephony service, service has become crappy and prices are ridiculous. But in areas where there is some actual competition, like telephony equipment, long distance calls, GSM, and Internet, consumers see an ever-increasing range of services with prices that are a fraction of what they were under the state monopoly. The free market works, in many cases. Where it doesn't, look first for clues that the 'free market' in that case isn't so free after all.
Power blackouts were caused by inept attempts at privatisation, not by the free market. And no, they are not the same thing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
This article is a bit light on the hard facts. Although the author puts together a lot of information about the recent blackouts and past disasters, the article doesn't explain to me exactly what about our current system is out-of-date and how a company's profit motive prevents it from upgrading the system.
The original poster is absolutely right. The BANANA crowd is really one of the major problems in the US. People expect the utilities to perform miracles, yet no one can build anything new!
"Progressive" is leftist speak for communism. Any law or act that takes from those who produce and gives to the lazy is now deemed "progressive". It's part of the euphemisms used by the left to hide their agenda and control minds.
20 years ago Nuclear Fusion was 20 years away.
Today Nuclear Fusion is 20 years away.
20 years ago we would run out of Oil in 30 years.
Today we will run out of Oil in 50 years.
20 years ago we would have a moon base in 20 years.
Today we will have a moon base in 30 years.
Why can't we ever stick to our predictions:)
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
What we need are neighborhood power plants and home backup units. If not just home units. the newest home units are quite efficient. but then we'll have to worry about natural gas outages. what we need are power plants that run on household and human waste.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"Free markets cause power blackouts?"
When has electric power ever been on the free market. The "private companies" that generate and transmit power are govt. regulated monopolies with no incentive to improve things unless the govt. says they must. Nothing improves unless a politician cares. This is about as anti free market as it gets. At least their's competition in the telcom market since AT&T, Sprint, etc. have their own networks instead of relying on a single network forced on them by law.
Vote for Pedro
CaCO3 + heat ->CaO + CO2
Yes, but while it's hardening:
CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3.
Solar power is not a viable solution in most of the world (it's just not reliable enough, even with very expensive Solar panels running at the giddy heights of 20% efficiency). It's not even a viable solution in most parts of the USA (though it's a fine solution for those in states such as California, Texas, or Florida).
Technology changes. The efficency of solar power panels are always increasing. I belive that at some point it is going to be the solution to our power problems. The sun is the only source of renewable energy, although there are indirect ways of obtaining it( like wind, water). Maybe not 100% sure, but more like 66%.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Hear Hear!!
Anyone who is worh under $10 million and votes Republican is getting screwed, but unfortunately, the GOP runs the "liberal media"..
case in point: Bushies out a CIA agent, lie to start a war, give away no-bid contracts to a company that Cheney has some 400,000 options of stock in and nobody's outraged..
Free markets are not free markets when energy is involved, because you can't not buy power when the price goes up.
Deregulation is the scam with the best potential for underminig what remains of our democracy.
The current state of high cost agressive eviornmental legal injuctions and over-regulation means that power grid owners cannot expand the transmission capacity and reliability.
All of those 'not in my backyard' lawsuits mean that everyone loses reliable energy at a low price.
Research, think, conclude.
If you bother to do the work, you will find the knowledge. Most people don't know what they are talking about because they haven't spent the few thousand hours necessary digging, reading and cross referencing. You seem to be yet another one of these.
These power outages are a curious phenomenon which I suspect has something to do with cracks in the current physical paradigm. I could be wrong; there is no concensus yet to which I am privy.
But the 'terrorist' explanation has several flaws, one of the biggest being that the Bush administration, if it had been able, would have benefitted if it could have demonstrated that the cause really was terrorism. But it could not and so did not. Rather, the cause, if examined too closely, would have likely raised other questions which the Bush admin would much rather not see asked.
-FL
DC?
Thank you Mr Edison. We'll call you if we need you.
Yeah, I mean it's not as if there's any research being done in this, or any manufacturers of power systems building these things.
As if any serious energy company would even consider such a thing!
Any time that a company is given a monopoly over a certain resource, regulation is needed to make sure they use the public resource consistent with the public interest. Then again, I come from Manitoba, where Manitoba Hydro is a crown corporation (government held), makes heaps of money, and sells a lot of power to the US. We often have minor power failures (a few seconds each) during thunderstorms, but otherwise the power is stable. Power is dirt cheap (5.16 cents per kW.h over 175kW.h), and available Manitoba wide (even the far north town of Churchill). MB Hydro makes so much money for the gov't, I doubt we'd ever see it privatized or deregulated.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Since the article covers blackouts in general, and not just the one in the US, I sincerely wonder what your motivation was in posting that little gem.
My opinion is that you're another one of those people who believe in censoring things that don't fit in your (narrow) mindset, or do you think that everyone should be pro everything that the US government does no matter what it is?
Free markets cause power blackouts?
If you lived in California, you never would have asked that question.
A market where companies (Enron, Dynergy et al.) can conspire to create an artificial power crisis while their buddy runs interference for them at FERC (after they fly him around in their jet during his political campaign) causes blackouts.
The fact is that privatized energy concerns are not beholden to the people/groups that depend on that energy. They are beholden to their bottom line. And they require more money to operate because breaking even isn't good enough any more.
For utilities that are fundamental to the health of a society/economy (water/power) it is simply irresponsible to trust people who don't have to care about the people who depend on it. I'm not saying all utilities should be nationalized, that's oversimplifying. However, back when power in California was a regulated monopoly, the people and government in this state could dictate terms to PG & E. We can't do that now. When the power goes out, we have to just deal with it.
That might not be so big a deal, some think. "It would be healthy to tell stories by candlelight periodically". Those people don't have parents hooked up to electrically powered oxygen generators.
Being one of those people, with a parents life directly dependent on the power grid, I'm strongly opposed to privatized power. And like my Dad, our economy and security is just as dependent on power. These companies can just up and decide to practice blackout-extortion with us now, dictating terms to our country, when it clearly should be the other way around.
We've already seen what happens when these private power companies decide to ply a megawatt extortion racket on the worlds fifth largest economy (California). It's only a matter of time before they decide to do this on a national scale.
And I haven't even gotten into reliability, like in the Northeast or Italy. I've only talked about when these companies have deliberately decided to turn the power off, motivated by greed and politics. I'll let other people talk about reliability.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
"Free markets cause power blackouts? "
California. Enron. Bush White House covering by blaming environmentalists. Ideology triumphing sense. Market manipulation.
Remember California when Enron was playing with the energy spigots? It was a mildly regulated market, and they lied, cheated and stole, what, 7 billion bucks from the tax base? And the only guy to cry "thief" is being blamed for the theft, and shortly will be kicked out of office by the WH. And the thieves are laughing in Bermuda.
And that was a LITTLE BIT of manipulation. Imagine what they could have done if they hadn't been so greedy, and bled their victims dry a little bit less obviously over a longer period of time.
And they wanted to control the WATER DISTRIBUTION MARKET!! And other still do, all over the world. Oh, my aching wallet.
Free markets are never free. Adam Smith warned about inevitable monopolization of markets, and it is indeed true. Without regulation, you'd be glued to the ceiling by your Doc Martins for the rest of your life, with a big barrel underneath you for the change falling from your pocket.
Governments are in a sense altruistic, and businesses ARE NOT -- and at least you can vote a government out. Businesses are immortal beings with no moral sense, none whatsoever. Corporations exist to REMOVE responsiblity for personal choices made by the managers.
Free markets can cause a blackout. Take the '03 US blackout that darkened the midwest and the northeast: the energy company in charge of that failing equipment has cut costs for years now. Simple capitalism: spend less, make more. And the equipment ages and fails. Not to mention that there is no incentive for building new power distribution components, and certainly none for redundancy. If you have X number of lines, and they serve your needs and make profits NOW, why spend to improve when you can take the profit? And don't forget, the industry immediately had its hands out for guvmint moola to fix the grid after the blackout. They knew that if all hell broke loose, the taxpayers could be tapped to allay their repair and improvement costs. Free as in free, for them.
Infrastructure, like it or not, is really a government's province. It's the only entity that can spend money to improve power networks without worrying about this quarter's profits and the future stock price. It can repair by fiat.
Profit motivation is wonderful for improving efficiency, but it wants efficiency for RIGHT NOW, not ten years from now. The market is misdefined.
Getting everyone to switch to LCD monitors would save some serious amounts of electicity. The difference in power consumption between CRT's and LCD's is huge. Besides I'd like one. I just can't justify the extra cost yet. Self serving. I'm so ashamed. NOT!
I was going to reply with a rant about 'but europe recycles 97% of the spent fuel back into the fuel rods, so your numbers are way off'
Nope, I did the math, the numbers presented here are for the 3% that does get used.
This means that the US (cause we do not recycle it) has 33 times the problem that these figures represent. (!!!!!)
There is no concensus yet to which I am privy at this point, but the whispers, (and my suspicions,) say that the power outages are linked to the increasing number of breakdowns, bleedthroughs, and the general de-stabilizing of the current physical paradigm. This has been an increasing issue over the last couple of decades. There are whole patches of the Earth's surface which exist now entirely on other planes of existence, and those spots are expanding. Military controlled tracts of land.
Anyway, the big outage in '65 was accompanied by several significant UFO reports over the power installation at ground zero. This kind of activity is often 'observed'.
Expect more as things continue to accelerate. All of this stuff is a reflection of the human experiential cycle. (That is, as humans heat up their activities through war and such, the rest of the Earth and solar system likewise heats up. We are all mirrors of each other.)
One of the more interesting aspects is the cluster of comet debris the Earth is just now entering. Every 3600 years we go through a cloud of rocks, and every 360,000 years, that cluster is replenished thanks to a big object, (a ball of hydrogen which never got quite big enough to ignite, but which plays binary to the sun), passes through the Kuiper belt which knocks new debris down to the Earth's orbital plane. And guess which end of that 360,000 year period we're on at the moment? Exactly. We just won the galactic lottery for 'interesting times'.
Anyway, space-rock impacts are on the increase, and will be for a time. Since spring, these stories about actual impacts have appeared. .
The pattern expected is that it will be like a rain shower. A few drops here and there as it begins. Then a short pause where everybody half-relaxes. Then the downpour.
Should be interesting, to say the least! --Espeically in conjunction with the dozen or so other massive things going on. So much to do, so little time!
Keep alert, folks! You don't get to experience stuff like this every lifetime!
-FL
Free markets are a buzword for private corporate GREED! The simple fact, is that when private companies control major (in this case, power) ifrastructures, they first, charge more to buy said product (power), they can artificially limit access to raise prices, they can cut back on funding maintanance, future improvements to the infrastructure (for future demands), which leads to running the system at 100% of capacity (more proned to massive crashes) and, of course, the holy grail is PROFFITS..These proffits can be generated by paying workers less, charging more for power, etc. Public power systems play by different rules, they don't have to make a proffit, they can re-invest money to keep the power grid up-to-date, they can invest in building extra capacity that can absorb unexpected power interruption condition that otherwise would lead to a total systems collapse. Nead I say more?
Some other countries that do not have a free market power grid - most of the United States, Canada, Britain, Europe, Japan... do you think those countries are the envy of the world when it comes to power supply?
Your comment "excessive monopolies are illegal" shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the ecnomics of the situation. You are just repeating a standard capitalist line that has nothing to do with this particular industry. Software, aside from the artificial monopoly of intellectual property, follows standard supply/demand curves. That is not true of electricity.
Electricity (and telecommunications) would be disastrous in a free market, as California quickly learned. That's because in natural monopolies like electricity the supply demand curves are reversed, and the cost of entry of another marginal unit of product is minimal. The normal rules of the marketplace are turned on their head, and don't apply. Its not a matter of stopping fraud, its basic economics. Free markets really do not work in this industry...
"Solar power is not a viable solution in most of the world (it's just not reliable enough, even with very expensive Solar panels running at the giddy heights of 20% efficiency). It's not even a viable solution in most parts of the USA (though it's a fine solution for those in states such as California, Texas, or Florida)."
Ah! The fruits of NOT doing research. As someone else pointed out. Solar cells are improving. Also solar cells isn't the ONLY way to get electricity from the sun. You might want to look at some of the research done in the middle east, before you start speaking again.
"Small Scale Wind Power, apart from being even less reliable, very noisy and an eyesore (promoting NIMBYim), is even less efficient. I think off shore managed Wind Farms are a great idea, personal Wind Farms are unworkable and entirely undesirable."
It's called a windmill. We've had them in the US for decades. And with technology, has come improvements. More fruits of NO research.
"And as for personal Hydroelectric, it's entirely irrelevant as the number of people who have a 'fast [running] creek' in their backyard is infinitesimal and statistically irrelevant in this context (it makes no difference if they were all off grid, particularly when you think of how they are dispersed across the grid).
"
Ah yes! The "if there isn't just one solution, then there's no solution" Monothinking at it's finest.
No one advocating a sane energy policy will tell you that we need only one way. What we need is multiple ways, that fit the particulars of a given region. The people on the coast can use wind, and tidal power. The people were hydroelectric is, will use what comes naturally, along with some wind. An energy consumer may end up drawing from multiple sources.
Redundancy isn't just for the Internet.
Interesting how the whole thing is being kept hush-hush. Engineers have eveb been made to sign nondiscolsure agreements.
Tsk!
What could be going on? If not terrorism, then. . , what?
-FL
This sounds like communist FUD to me.
It's not the liberalization of the economy that is the problem. It's the liberals blocking the economy and the fact that we can't build backup systems because the liberals are too busy protecting the environment and not busy enough protecting the people who live on this planet.
For a good view on how the Liberals (and Greens) are ruinging everything, read "Fallen Angels" by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournell, and Michael Flynn.
Just my $0.02 worth.
"A huge power station in the back of beyond burning trainloads/pipelinefulls of fuel is more efficient than lots of little power stations embedded in the community. "
Everyone says this, but they have no proof, just assumptions. They also forget that the "little" plants don't have the same demands put on them that a big plant would. Throw in the fact that alternative energy is getting better, not worse, and we may see less of the big power plant, and the associated problems (including NIMBY).
Hang on, I'm not sure that is really what you mean considering the rest of your post.
Do you mean LESS important?
There are some posters who do in fact mean 'free market is more important than reliability of supply'. For those: the electricity industry IS supply of electricity, no more and no less. If you're still arguing free market rhetoric, how is it that your apparently religious beliefs about markets are more important than the whole point of the exercise, i.e. distribution of power?
humm how about we put yet another twist on this, why don't we consider the ammount of solar energy that was used to create the fossil fuels!?
Now compair that to the ammount of energy captured with PV or Wind and I believe the ammount of energy that went into creating the oil far outweighs the ammount of energy in the oil. I'm going to be VERY nice and consider that it only takes twice as much energy to create the oil, so now it takes some 70,000 kwh to ceate the oil, that only contains 36,000 kwh of energy.
Frankely I think it takes an exponentially greater ammount of energy to make oil than the oil itself contains. Something allong the lines of millions of kwh's per final gallon.
Solar and PV are simple!
Sun burns Hydrogen and gives off radiation.
Radiation is converted directly into Electricity by a PV.
Or Radiation warms the earth, creating weather patterns, and wind which drive wind turbins.
Or you can grow a massive heap of plants and wait a few million years for it to be converted into long hydrogen chains.
To top off this Wastefull process, burn it releasing 80% of the stored energy as heat, while putting a meer 20% to work on the road.
Next point, I gave examples of the effeciency of an Insight, Average car, and an SUV. Then pointed out that the figures included only passanger vehicles.
Which in this day and age Includes SUVs, Since some idiots choose to do their daily commute, alone, in a huge empty truck.
(Trucks and SUV's are for DOING WORK PPL! Towing Boats, Hauling Lumber, Playing in the MUD!)
"Anonymous Coward" is /. speak for "I'm too chicken-shit to actually use my real name."
-or-
Perhaps that was just a joke?
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
> brought on [...] the recall of our governor.
Yes, rolling blackouts are the only reason for the recall. Look, I'm not going to claim that Republicans have done anything good in this situation, but not all of the blame sits with them. Gray Davis was reelected, correct? That means he's had at least 6 years. Well, how come he didn't try to fix this "Republican mess?" Because he either didn't see it, he didn't thnk it was a mess, or he didn't care. Any way, he is partially to blame for negligence at the minimum.
Maybe Davis believed that deregulation might work, until the rules were changed during those back-room meetings between Dick Cheney and the power companies. Read the links in the parent post. How could Davis have seen this coming?
"Why is it that a functioning system always runs into problems when capitalists get involved? Privatization does not work"
No, things function better with capitalism. Privitization is an improvement because it moves the tasks to those with an incentive to do them better.
However, while privitization of government affairs is a great improvement, it should be considered but a step toward a much more progressive reform: getting government out of most of these matters entirely.
"The only reason it SEEMS to work is because you guys are all short-term oriented and/or don't care about public welfare."
It is because we do care about public welfare that we support turning affairs over to the people (privitization). If you leave the elites in controll, then you are concerned only with elite welfare.
"Capitalists always criticize socialism by claiming that is too utopian because people are greedy"
Of course. Socialism is based on greed and also misguided notions that the elites are better suited to run our lives than we are. Utopian as it is, the socialist ideal of "Trust us. Give us everything. We are the government and know what is best" is very dangerous. Typical socialist leaders like Pol Pot and Castro show this by example.
"Greed essentially means that free markets will result in monopolies and oligopolies."
Yes, the greed of socialism. The monopolies only end up existing due to government meddling in the free market through regulations and other barriers. If you do not believe this, go ahead and try to start up your own car company.
"How much do you want to bet that there will be less than 5 ISPs in 25 years? "
I think there will be no ISP's at all, due to rapidly changing technology. The way things are going, counting ISP's in 25 years will be as useful as counting alchemists today.
I used to work for a law firm that specialized in environmental tort. Believe me when I say that the Dept. of Energy and its subcontractors dumped so much radioactive crap into the United States as to make concerns about a domestic meltdown academic.
There's Hanford doing intentional discharges. There's the fires and missing 50kg of plutonium at Rocky Flats. The list is endless, really.
This is my sig.
4 major blackouts in the space of a couple of weeks?
There was a rumour going around - strenously denied by the authorities of course - that the US backout was indirectly due to the recient spate of Windows worms/viruses. This would explain why it's happened to so many countries at the same time. All these utilties use Windows PCs extensively.
Oh joy. Another Y2K. Get ready for the stone age people! Weeeeerrrreee all gonnna diiiiieee!!!!
I can't wait. Better quickly brush up on my COBOL so that I can fix those buggy legacy programs that cease to run whenever the power goes out.
There have been a number of fatal nuclear accidents over the years. In USA (Idaho), former USSR (Chernobyl) and Japan (Tokaimura) are just 3 that come to mind.
Your estimates of deaths as a result of the chernobyl accident seem reasonable, although I have seen some people quote only 1 death amongst the general public.
I don't think that there are ways of storing nuclear waste for 'millions' of years. How can you ensure that your containers don't leak? How do you know that there won't be seepage from around the containers into the surrounding environment?
Have you seen pictures of the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, UK? - it's less than 40 years old, and it's rusting away, with parts of it unusable due to contamination. Unfortunatley, the use of magnesium cased fuel in the UK's MAGNOX reactors, means the fuel cannot be easily disposed of. The only option is reprocessing, except that at present the plant cannot accept any more fuel for reprocessing because persistant reliability problems mean the process cannot be completed and storage space for the intermediate products has run out.
It's all very nice to speculate and theorise on nuclear waste management methods - One method seperates the spent fuel into mixed fission waste, fuel (U, Pu, Am, etc.) and long-lived isotopes (Cs and Sr). The mixed waste decays to near-background levels within 200 years. The rest can be burnt in suitable reactors. Sounds great, but given the tremendous practical problems that conventional reprocessing has had - I don't think it's going to be practical for a very long time.
Personally, I think we need to learn to decomission and manage our nuclear waste before embarking on a major nuclear building program.
When reprocessing the volume of wast is increasd roughly 150 times.
All 5 european reprocessing plants together have a anual capacity of 5000 tons and produce 750.000 tons waste.
About 1% of the waste (750 tons) is high level radioactive, plutonium contaminated (and also uranium) _hot_ waste, that has to be cooled down for 50 years, before it's finaly stored!
Half life of the different isotopes varies between a few hundret years (I think P 246, but I am not sure) and 4.5 billion years for U235.
4850 tons reusable rods can be used to fuel nuclear powerplants and will again return to reprocessing a few years later.
Not all European countries reprocess used fuel rods, but most of them do and also Russia, India, Japan, China and South Korea are reprocessing, as far as I know.
Roughly about 1/2 of the used rods are reprocessed worldwide and the other half is disposed.
Amazingly, there is _not even one_ final disposal site for these high level radioactive waste in the whole world. (Or did the US proceed with disposal in Yucca Maountain? Then there would be _one_.)
Many countries producing nuclear power do not even investigate repositories right now.
For example Belgum will begin the construction of their final repository in 2035 or Canadia in 2020.
I am not amazed, that nuclear power is that cheap, the huge costs are not "priced in", yet. Future generations will pay.
But I think, it is also noteworthy to mention, that the worldwide production of ashes from coal burning is almost 300 million tons (Just ashes, not the emitted gases!) per year, that is also low level radioactive waste, due to natural radionuklides.
Excuse me? don't you people know anything? Haven't you read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? It's obvious government control causes all these problems, geesh, go learn something guys.
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But in all honesty Deregulating and then adding restrictions/ making them follow all these rules to the power companies that weren't there before; when these rules make operations much more difficult is probly not the best thing in general. Free markets do cause blackouts when they aren't really free, especially compared to the previous standard of rules there was under government control
"We need more electricity, so we're going to build a coal-fired power plant."
"But coal is dirty. I don't want a coal-fired power plant in my backyard."
"OK, we'll build a gas-fired power plant instead. But we'll need to build a pipeline for the gas."
"But I don't want a gas pipeline in my backyard."
"OK, fine. We'll build wind turbines instead."
"But I don't want wind turbines in my backyard."
"Err, we're running out of options here. We can run transmission lines to nearby states and get electricity from them."
"But I don't want power lines in my backyard."
repeat ad nauseum
I think it would be easier to establish a hydrogen economy. Electricity can't be easily stored, so an abrupt increase in demand overloads the grid. So:
I tried to find the parent you were quoting. I guess you just like italics.
The sun is the only source of renewable energy
The sun is the only non-renewable source of power. It is also the main source of power for most of the solar system. All the other sources are storing the sun's power, and can be renewed.
Want more coal: grow trees and bury them.
Want more oil: raise elephants and bury them.
See, they can be renewed, but renewing the sun is way beyond our current technology. But renewing these resources will probably take longer than than it takes to make them obsolete, and upset the elephant-loving environmentalists.
Now in the short term, using power that will be wasted if it is not used is cool. The sun's power can either be captured or wasted, so solar panels are great until the crazies decide they are causing global cooling. Windmills are great until the crazies decide that we are disturbing the weather patterns. Waterwheels are great, unless they upset the migration patterns for fish. Building a dam... can we do that anymore? They cause major changes to the ecology.
So much for the humor. I agree with most of the posts. Nuclear power should be the major source of power today, but it is a public relations nightmare because it was first associated with weapons of mass destruction. Most of the people alive today were not alive when nuclear weapons were used, but the cold war only ended in the late 80s. Give us another 2 generations, and it will be more acceptable, unless there is another catastrophe.
That said, I live in the fallout zone for a nuclear power plant. I have no idea where its power is used, but I doubt it powers the homes in this area.
But everybody, please remember that most of us have no input in the real world. The current power structure is owned by big business, and they will defend the current situation until someone finds a way to make it completely obsolete.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
These are actually well planned terrorist attacks...
These terrorists have headquarters in Redmond, Fleetstreet, Hoolywood and whereever else there are people who sell you intellectual property.
They do there best to teach people not to think, and rely on somebody in big software company or political party to make decision for them. Generation of ignorant have grown up.
It wasn't noticed immediately, but when previously installed equipment worn up, or was replaced by something "new, cool and cheaper", thunder strikes.
New Scientist, a good few months ago. You could probably google for it, but I read the dead tree edition.
Well, why not? I think that these countries *should* have nuclear weapons. After all, there is one rogue terrorist nation that actually has already used nuclear weapons against civilians. They need to be kept in check.
The reason that widespread blackouts occur is that as the power grid becomes overloaded, the generating stations overload, and eventually drop off the grid. This in turn increases the load on the remaining generators, and boom, the whole grid goes down. The essential problem is that the power grids are constructed to keep the power online, with the assumption that there will always be enough generating capacity to supply the load. However, when demand is high, and some amount of generated supply is lost (for whatever reason), the entire grid goes down, not just part of it. The solution is to allow load to be shed. The problem is that current grids do not allow the shedding of power load with any fine degree of control, and even at the region level, it requires manual intervention. The systems have short-circuit protection on a fairly small scale, which is why most power outages are fairly localized. One approach is to divide the generators and users up into localized zone. When a generating zone becomes too overloaded, it cuts itself off from the overall grid, and supplies power to its local zone. It may not have enough power to supply all of its local zone, which means it has to shed some its local load. Who gets shed is a whole other topic, but typically it's residential users, since they can typically sustain a minor power hit without much cost. This way, hospitals, refrigerated warehouses, the police and fire departments, etc stay up. None of this is rocket science, and could probably have been easily done even 20 years ago. The problem is that governments will need to legislate power grid reliability requirements before anything happens, and of course we'll have to pay for it. However, in my mind, it's well worth the few extra cents per megawatt that it would cost. Particularly, since the next terrorist attack may also simultaneously hit the power grid, which as we have seen in pretty damn vulnerable.
more independent power producers is the key. you may trust the powerlines if you want, but keep your genset handy. this has worked for us.
= 9J =
Did you include the weight of the material around radioactive waste to keep it safe?
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
The "loonies on the left" have a point. You must be blinded by the right.