Slashdot Mirror
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
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!
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.
i gotta build myself a hand powered webserver for redunduncy purposes!
"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.
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!
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
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.
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.
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
- Welcome to Brainwashington D.C.
- Lenin lives
- The New Black Gold
- Skepticism about the Official Explanation of 9-11 Spreads
Just so you know who you are getting your information from--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Cruachan Pumped Store Hydro-Electric power. My father worked on that, back in the 1960s. Wonderful scheme.
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...
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 Book of the Subgenius teaches that in the face of impending emergency, the only things that need to be stockpiled are firearms, ammunition and cocaine. With this, you can build a loyal army of followers who will provide ( one way or another ) the other necessities of life. This is black-box abstraction at its best.
Anyway, I'm not concerned. All these power outages seem like a distinctly northern hemisphere prob
%% NO CARRIEROne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
...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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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 was thinking that as well. I briefly tried searching slashdot for the topic, but it was a long time ago and the search features could use a little advancement, I suppose.
As I recall, these would be about the size of a refrigerator and use natural gas in a pollution free process to generate electricity. I was extremely interested at the time, and I read about it on GE's website, but I haven't heard anything since.
Of course, the problem is that we'll still be consuming natural gas. I use natural gas for heating, so if the gas line gets cut then I won't have electricity for electric heaters or natural gas for my furnace. I suppose it would be effective to have an amount stored on site - a big tank, just in case, or better - a way to have it pumped into the tank and used from the tank, like a hot water heater stores water or a capacitor stores a charge.
It'd be nice to get pricing on what one of these would cost and the lifespan to see if it would be worth the investment.
Now, imagine a beowolf cluster of these... no, really... imagine everyone hooked to the grid pumping back excesses, which would give you a credit and help the electric company not have to build new coal/oil/nuclear plants. Then when you need to draw more current than your unit generates, you could use your "credit". I know there are people with windmills who do something similar.
But I'll believe it when I can buy a piece of paper to play movies on. Just another exciting development that is taking too long to bring to market.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
The funny part is that many people never notice the blackouts other than newscasts or neighbours complaining because they live off-grid already.
I take issue with that. I don't see how you can claim 'Many' people live off the grid, at least by any reasonable definition of the word many.
Even enthusiasts with a tendency to drastically over estimate put the figure at 0.01% of the US population (again, that's a conscious over estimate, based on rounded up figures!). Figures in the rest of the western world aren't even nearly that high (and it's only that high in the USA because you have such a poorly regulated market - especially in places like California where viable alternatives happen to be avalible to those in California, who are uniquely wealthy enough to be able to afford the 20,000 USD to install a system in the first place).
Solar power, wind power, and if you have a fast creek running through your backyard, hydroelectric..
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).
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.
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).
The first step is to reduce your consumption.. turn OFF your computer when not in use... (bla bla it hurt's you computer, costs more to start it up, and all the other idiotic lies that have spread through the years... NO it does not do ANY damage to your pc to turn it off
It does cause significantly more wear and tear on your PC when you turn it off and on (and shortens it's lifespan, particularly of components like CPU, PSU and Graphics Card fans and most significantly of Hard Disks, but I see someone else has already pointed that out.
replace all lighting with Compact flouresent lamps
The best I can say about that is it's ill thought out advice spread by people who haven't take the time to work out scientifically the amount of resources actually being used (based on real world usage patterns).
Lights in Living rooms, Kitchens and/or study rooms tend to have lights that are on for extended periods of time and you can benefit from fluorescent lamps (in terms of electricity used and cost to run). But lights which are only normally used briefly for short periods, such as in a Bathroom or Hallways, Utility Rooms or Bedrooms are far better being off being traditional bulbs. They use far less electricity that way.
It's a catch 22 we need power for our luxuries and toys like computers, tv, Air conditioning.... but they are the cause of the power woes
Well I'm still getting over that you think Air Conditioning and Computers are luxuries and 'toys' but I find the suggestion that they are the cause of power supply problems (or even a 'catch 22') boggling.
The problem in the USA is incompetent government management at Federal and State level (and voters that put up with it, and people to apathetic to do anything about it.). Italy also has a problem with virtually all of it's national infrastructure, but it's drastically worse because they have had appalling mismanagement for years (not to mention they elected a crook to run the country).
Other western countries don't have the same problem and you shouldn't confuse problems in the US with the rest of the world (though it
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?
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.
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 need power for our luxuries
You're a much hardier soul than I if you'd be willing to live for extended periods of time without electric refrigeration to keep food from spoiling quickly. I suppose we could go back to the days of ice delivery, but I doubt the cost per Joule would be less than what on-site refrigeration costs.
Where I live I've been afflicted with enough blackouts that I absolutely have a UPS for my computer, just to insure an orderly shutdown and to keep the cordless phone running.
I have to wonder whether my regulated monopoly provider of electric service is required to provide any level of quality of service for the money I pay. How many times and for how long are they allowed to charge me the same full price if there are significant gaps due to blackouts, or even lower quality power where the voltage waveform isn't within specs?
If things get bad enough I'll probably get a propane powered generator (since I already use gas for heat and cooking already) to provide backup.
If the electricity were taxed enough, it would shift the balance in favor of deploying other technologies (photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries) which are not currently competitive except in areas far from the power grid.
We could simply let the free market play out, such as it is, but new and alternative technologies wouldn't be developed until the very last minute.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
No, the first step is to make energy so cheap and abundant, that we can waste as much as we want.
I refuse to lower my standard of living so you can feel better about yourself.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
*The current infrastructure is failing. It is failing because the basic engineering tenants of managed service and growth have been undercut by neo-free market economics.*
This is so TOTALLY off the mark, it is not even funny. The grid is falling apart because environmental lawsuits have effectively KILLED any and ALL attempts to modernize it.
Case in point. Tuscon Power is attempting to update it's grid infrastructure in SW Arizona. Environmentalists immediately slapped a lawsuit on the company claiming that some stupid sage brush would be impacted by the building of the power line transmission towers. The lawsuit failed, so the same groups immediately petitioned to have the plant declared endangered so that the EPA could stop the project by simple bureaucratic decree.
That is NOT free markets destroying our power grid, it's enviro-nazi anti-capitalists.
The first part of the solution is correctly identifying the problem.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
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...
i gotta build myself a hand powered webserver for redunduncy purposes!
A pr0n server that can be powered with one hand? Excellent! :)