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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?
In Soviet Russia, blackouts cause FREE MARKETS!
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.
"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.
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.