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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?
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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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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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.
Slashdot and your blog are your social life? In that case I think maybe blackouts are the least of your worries...
The Mothership
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?
Because when the tree fell in the woods, nobody was around to hear it. Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Over the past several decades, the ability of the media to provide timely stories from farther away has greatly increased. Because of that, every glitzy, trendy subject can get far more coverage. When blackouts are the media's attention, you'll hear about plenty of them. When gun violence is their target, you'll hear about plenty of that.
The bit is that most of these things really aren't happening any more frquently than usual (sometimes actually LESS frequently!), but because you hear so much about it, it gives you the impression that it happens much more often.
Pick out a make, model, and color of car, and fixate your mind on it for a day or two. Suddenly, you will see far more of them on the road than you ever have before. There aren't really more of them, you just notice more of them.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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
Power outtages are one of the currently "trendy" things to report on, so you hear about much more of them.
Oh come on. I agree that there are trends in news stories, but Italy had not had a power outage on this scale for decades, nor had London or the USA. These are getting reported because they are significant.
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[...] significant blackouts within the same six month period?
My bet is on the weather this summer, at least here in Europe. Nuclear power plants had to reduce their energy output (some down to 50%) because the streams and rivers used for cooling the plant were too warm (max. temp is, iirc, 25 celsius). If a majority of the power plants had to do this, the total amount of power produced is reduced, increasing the chance for an outage...
Overall, while harsh market conditions might create "inferior products", due to budget restraints, those failings put the company in a bad light. I guess the budget for the energy infrastructure will rise in the next years.
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In the USA, I've seen several instances nearly an entire state was without power, and it never hit the national media, and was never really discussed afterwards.
Large-area blackouts happen. They just hadn't happened in New York for a while.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
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.
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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.
...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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.