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Electricity Apocalypse Soon?

Posted by timothy on from the power's-on-in-galt's-gulch dept.

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?

2 of 576 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Important not to jump to conclusions by Gordonjcp · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.


    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.

  2. Re:Basically, yes. by Shorthouse · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's been coming for a long time.
    When I worked for the local "Electricity Board" here in the UK, we had some 20 linesmen almost permanently employed cutting and trimming trees which threatened the overhead lines. There were still faults but these usually only occurred in extreme weather conditions.
    Nowadays I hear there are just 2 staff allocated to tree cutting in our region - and one of those is the supervising engineer......

    PS. Checking an old bill, I find that I pay the same per month now as I did almost 5 years ago.