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Electric Grid is a Vast Machine
Guinnessy writes "The latest issues of the Industrial Physicist suggests that 'the vast system of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution that covers the United States and Canada is essentially a single machine-- by many measures, the world's biggest machine.' The article says that because deregulation ignored the physics of the machine, we have blackouts, a fact the industry warned regulators about in 1998. It has some nice hard science data for those interested in why we're going to get some more blackouts in the future unless Congress gets its act together."
A recent report in the UK suggested the same thing ... but we're getting them after the US as usual :(
That in this day and age we are concerned that one of the underlying principles of our success may be a house of cards.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
...and all this time, I thought it was a magic electric grid!
You mean those electrons *aren't* being pushed to my outlet by little electric gnomes?
Um. I'm fairly sure there are tons of redundancies in this one machine. Stop spreading idiotic terror fear.
I'm pretty sure we have a better electricity grid than Italy, which apparently has a pretty poorly designed one in terms of redundancy.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
We are planning deregulation in our most populated state..NSW. And we are using the US as the model for deregulation/privatisation of our energy corporations.
Why isn't this sort of thing in the mainstream press? In Australia there are clear reasons why not..the two richest guys who would undoubtedly cash in on the deregulation own all the media..that's right, Murdoch and Packer own our papers,our magazines, our pay TV, the 'infoportals' for our largest ISP's,our regular tv stations and our sports.
Why are you scared of this "Vast Machine" being bomded any more than you would be if the power supply in general was bombed, what makes is so more scary now??
How can you bomb a whole power grid? It'd be better to sabatoge a few critical components, or to somehow DoS them by making a sharp spike in demand. That's the whole idea behind things like the Internet: a system that has no single physical point of failure. You cannot disable the internet with a nuke, short of nuking the entire planet.
#define DRM chmod 000
Would imply that there's some sort of net work (read net_work, not network) being done. The electric grid spanning the continent produces no net power because of the consumption taking place. Yes, individually the plants are machines, but taking the composite grid into perspective, it is no longer a machine.
Sorry. I like arbitrary semantics.
An Anonymous Coward walks into a bar...
Ouch!
To pay the extensive costs, the utilities and the DOE advocate increases in utility rates. The costs involved would certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars. Thus, deregulation would result in large cost increases to consumers, not the savings once promised.
I think that for many areas in North America, re-regulation is the answer. State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies. They could then form public trusts (with the consumers as "shareholders") and contract out the new grid construction to private companies.
The advantage to this is that a public trust wouldn't be beholden to shareholders and the stock market. They could effectively plan for the long term, rather than shy away from desperately needed capital outlays simply because the managers need to show a profit in the next quarter.
is the Internet, it is way too complex and bigger than the electrical grid, and contains among other things satellites, routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices, so the Net IS the biggest machine made by man
Marshal McLuhan once wrote that the electric power grid is a medium, but it only carries one bit: on or off. The status is plainly visible by looking at the nearest light bulb.
It really is all a house of cards, and it's just a matter of time until it collapses beyond anyone's ability to patch things up again. *sigh*
.nosig
I see slash is now reporting on Philosophy. The same logic that lets you describe the power network as a single machine lets you also describe the human race as a single organism.
It's all interconnected and has complex interdependencies. But just saying that doesn't make a nice sound bite. So, we get articles about a "vast machine" as if that's somehow profound.
$0.02.
that the world's biggest machine is our ecological system.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
The telecommunications Network - be it used for phone conversations, IP Packets or video transmissions is the biggest machine.
It even streches into space.
chess
Ok so what happened in New York and the East Coast was that an example of the redundancies working, failing or was it designed to go out like that so the rest of the nation was ok????? Or did I miss the sarcasm tags in your comment.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
The ultimate problem is that the grid is emphatically *not* a single machine. It's a loosely (some might say poorly) coordinated collection of independent machines and networks. It's not engineered at the system level, or even at the regional level, but rather at the local level with ad hoc interconnects to create larger systems.
This single huge machine has worked fairly well in the past. Now that ill-considered regulation has gone into effect, the problem is really how its being operated.
Trying to fix it by throwing a lot of tax payer money at it without taking into account these realities, would be, in effect, making the same mistake again.
Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house? At over 100KW, the engine outputs >20x my average consumption. And at $2/gallon, that's about $.05/KWh, about 1/3 my utility electric rate. I wouldn't rely on the grid, I'd have a "battery" in the garage. When H2 stacks are affordable, I'd have >10x the fuel economy. How do I hook this up?
--
make install -not war
As far as I know people lived happily during the 18th century, in a state of continuous "blackout".
No they do not taste good.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This sounds somewhat crazy, but the necessity is beginning to show itself. The blackouts in California... the collapse of Enron... the East Cost blackouts... the recent collapse of NRG Energy... is the power grid really safe in the hands of private enterprise?
The power grid is a resource upon which we are all vitally dependant. Therefore, shouldn't we work to make it robust as possible?
Does it really make sense to have 300 little monopolies controlling the power grid instead of one big monopoly, the government itself?
Who says that the government can do better that private enterprise? Well, in the wake of deregulation, we've all seen what too much motivation from profit can do to the power grid. The sweeping general move towards deregulation have had terrible effects on all aspects of our life. Following the deregulation of radio, the majority of radio stations in the US were purchased by an enormous media conglomorate called Clear Channel, which is essentially a monopoly (with the exception of Cumulus Broadcasting and others) and all stations were given playlists. Call in contests were nationalized, so now you have to be a certain numbered nationwide caller. It's everything Rush sang about in the Spirit of Radio all over again...
So, give nationalizing the power grid a try! When you've hit rock bottom, all you can do is go up...
Quoting...
In the view of Casazza and many other experts, the key error in the new rules was to view electricity as a commodity rather than as an essential service. Commodities can be shipped from point A through line B to point C, but power shifts affect the entire singlemachine system. As a result, increased longdistance trading of electric power would create dangerous levels of congestion on transmission lines where controllers did not expect them and could not deal with them.
No doubt there are mechanical issues that weren't accounted for with deregulation, but the political issues are far more complex than the mechanical problems. If this wasn't the case, there would never have been an Enron.
From its origins electricity has been a utopian technology emerging into a world that is staunchly opposed to utopian solutions.
The industrial revolution was exactly that, a revolution and the development of the steam turbine led to prices so low that it seemed electricity would sweep the world in a matter of decades powering every manner of device. Just look at the movie Metropolis. Clearly these expectaions of a great high tech all electric future started long before any of us were born.
Take, for example, the Nazis. One of the things that gave the people such hope during the rise of the national socialists was the promise of electrochemistry. With nothing but air, water and electricity they would live in a world of plenty.
After the Second World War it was nuclear power and unmetered electricity. Near the town where I grew up on the Central Coast of California there was once a billboard outside a small town called Nipomo that advertised the coming age of unmetered electricity.
Then when the problems of nuclear fission became apparent it was fusion just around the corner.
An amazing fact is that all these promises are true. Turbines are amazingly efficient, electrochemistry does work and so does fission and fusion too. But as real as all these technologies are, they overlook the political side of things.
If the real goal was just to provide cheap electricity and everybody agreed, it would be quite simple. We'd just connect the world's grids together and reduce the need for peak load by using existing capacity efficiently. But that's too utopian and it's overlooking the reality of power politics.
The reality is that as a society we advocate greed. Really you can't blame the Enron people. They were just doing what they believed to be the right thing --fuck everybody. Competition has become a moral value in its own right. In a society that holds greed as a value the problem is not merely mechanical.
etc. In this case, rule #3 broke - it's complex and error-prone transporting electricity between different sections of the grid. The fact that one of the fundamental axioms doesn't hold should be enough to stop policy makers assuming that a "market" is the best solution. This kind of analysis should be done whenever regulation of any utility is examined.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Well if you were worried about the terorists taking out power systems, blowing a few of the trunk lines into NYC on a very hot summer day could cause some major problems. Its not like the locations of trunk lines are secret. its hard to hide them you know.
But this seems to be much higher concept than most terorrism we have seen so far. I am personally much more worried about a 18 wheeler filled with fertalizer blowing up on the George Washington bridge at rush hour.
Well what I am really worried about is some palistinian with a bomb under his coat on the bus. Mostly because I live in Jerusalem and take the busses.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Only some of the redundancies worked. There were scattered pieces all over the blackout area that still had power.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
Competition and free markets make everything better. They work great for companies, so they must improve electrical power delivery too. Public utilities are an old-fashioned idea and should be abolished to create a free-market long distance energy trading utopia. We will all save money and cash in on our dividends. The same goes for public schools. Kids get smarter when their schools have to compete for them. Deregulation makes food taste better, roads safer, and can increase your penis size by 3 to 6 inches.
The collapse of the Soviet Union just proves that I am right. Anyone who doesn't share my mindless ideological fanaticism for deregulation is by definition a socialist and we all know how that turned out, people!
Electrical power going out in the northern united states and Canada for an extended period of time during winter would kill hundreds of thousands of people.
I suggest that the system be reconfigured and backed-up so as to default to providing emergency power to those regions for the months of November through March.
The boiled frog scenario aside, no one ever died from being too hot.
Incompetance of management. It is abhorrent to see how the information is provided to the decision makers yet the people without the knowledge end up overriding those with the knowledge.
These are some high profile events where the risks where well known.
Both Columbia and Challenger shuttle losses
Here the engineering team informed management multiple of the risk and yet the management failed to act on the information provided.
The great blockouts of N.E. U.S.A. 1965 and 2003. The risks were well known yet the politics got in the way.
9/11 Terrorist attack - there were numerous signs and the FBI was too worried about politics rather than listening to their own people.
This is not unique to today but it is getting more and more difficult for people to understand.
In the technology industry I find myself "fighting" to unleash the truth and attacked because I simply state the facts as they are.
OK, too bad if a company messes up a product but sometimes it is significantly detrimental - take the Union Carbide toxic disater in Bhopal.
How do we effect a change for there to be more recognition for this ? The risk/reward trade-off for those with the knowledge are often dispropotionate : RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people. REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.
That's it, I'm going to start collating references to stupid management decisions causing untold damage because of management ignorance. Please post your examples here.... I'm going to use it next time I get into a knowledge vs ignorance argument.
Besides, the only country capable of doing that right now is the US. When George gets around to it, we'll have much bigger problems than power on our hands, won't we!
so they were /.'d! Cool Sux to be them....Oh wait, did the lights just flicker?
Generally I am a fan of the market system. Historically, market systems have outperformed regulated systems over and over again. But, as this excellent articla shows, in this case the market system has failed us. I would like to examine why this is so.
As I see it, we are buying two commodities for price. We are buing raw power and security of supply. But the prices are set only for raw power. The electricity companies could justifialby say that they had plenty of power available the day before the blackout, and the day after, and you chose not to take it. But, you cry, I wanted a continuous supply I could depend on. They reply, where did you pay for that continuity of supply? You only paid us for power, not continuity of power.
In any business, there is a cost to reliability. An airline may have a spare plane, so that if one develops a fault, they can still fly. But if two develop a fault, there are going to be cancellations. They choose to accept some level of risk rather than run an infinite fleet to take occare of very rare multiple failures.
If there is one day of power cuts, the power companies lose 1/365 of their annual revenue; perhaps a bit more, because it is likely to happen at the peak, most lucrative, period; say 1/200. How much capital, in a free market system, are they going to invest to squeeze that last 0.5% of revenue? I think they would realistically set an acceptable level of power cuts and just say "You get that" to consumers.
So what we need to is to monetize security of supply, and make a market in it. Get the domestic meter updated so that it can be switched off remotely (my system already does that for overnight heating, using a signal embedded in a long-wave radio station). Require the utilities to offer, at a price that they choose, to offer at least two levels of reliability. Thise who choose the lower level can be cut off when they system approaches failure, leaving more power for those who have chosen to pay more for greater reliability. Those who choose the higher level are providing the funding to pay for reliability improvements. If nearly everybody chooses one level or the other, the market has sent a signal to the system, and a new higher or lower level should be created.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I fail to see why this is a Troll. Ask Londoners about their blackout last month. And for that matter, speak to a few Italians.
A big net of connected nodes. Inputs coming from plants. Switches. Hmmm.
You don't need much more to make a universal computer (i.e. somthing equivalent to a Turing machine).
Just be sure that a correctly guided surge of power can operate switch, i.e. change the direction of other another electric stream.
The input being plants, to perform a computation, you'd just have to blow up a few of them in order to provide the desired input.
Then just watch the cities of northern america twinkle like a biiiig game of Life !
Thomas Miconi
Something to do with the number of interconnections between circuits becoming a reasonable fraction of the typical brains interconnections.
Anyway - it might not hurt to store up some good credit and be polite to your electrical outlets just in case.
Issues of freedom and control aside, who really trusts the goverment to run something complicated and critical? They can barely get the simple things right. At least private industry has profit as a motive to keep the grid running. What's the government's motivation -- sheer good will? The grid already has too many single points of failure, and the last thing we ought to do is put it in the hands of a single authority.
The best solution is the same one a lot of geeks would support on any other issue: keep it open, keep it decentralized, and if there's more than one way to do it, let the user decide.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
OK, so you're estimating $2/gallon for gas, and 100KW of output... your assumptions seem right so far. But, that works out to $0.02 per kilowatt-gallon (whatever the hell that is).
I don't know where you're getting $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, unless you're assuming that you would use 2.5 gallons per hour... which, when multiplied by $0.02 per kilowatt-gallon, would indeed be $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.
That would mean if you've got, say, a 20 gallon tank, you'd have to be able to run it for 8 hours at ABSOLUTELY FULL THROTTLE THE WHOLE TIME for your calculation to work. And I don't mean typical highway speed, where you're cruising and using only a small fraction of that 100KW output... I mean complete pedal-to-the-metal hauling-a-max-load-up-a-steep-incline type of thing. Not likely.
Or, put another way... 1 gallon of gas has an energy content of about 114,000 BTUs, At 3412 BTUs == 1 KWh, thats about $2 = 1 gallon = 33 KWH, or $0.06 per KWh. That might not sound too bad, until you consider:
- your efficiency of converting this to electric energy via an internal combustion engine is way less than 100%
- it doesn't include depreciation, wear and tear on your car, constant oil changes as your car engine runs 24 hours a day to keep your refrigerator running, etc.
- it doesn't include environmental costs (intangible perhaps, but still substantial).
In short, you'll wind up paying a lot more than you do from your local utility, with a lot less convenience.
Slashdot is entertaining like pro wrestling is entertaining
which covers into areas, where no computer has ever set its foot...
-- From Denmark
You live in Jerusalem, but can't spell Palestinian?
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This gives one more reason why the people of Texas should at all costs keep Texas off of the national grid. Not only would such a interconnect expose Texas to greater federal regulation by putting power activities in Texas in interstate commerce, the interconnect would inevitably be used to drain power from Texas driving up the cost of power there only to subsidize the pointy headed elitist parasites of the Northeast. In addition to these existing reasons it now seems it would expose Texas to blackouts to boot!
I'm afraid that you should be afraid...
Rumours are that the power-outage in the states was at least influenced by the Welchia worm. A NY-based powerplant had its system compromised by the worm. Anybody who knows more, please tell.
Well, duh. In related news Scientists claim that all the animals living in an area comprise one vast system called an Ecosystem and exist in inter-related "food-chains" ... Is there a nobel prize for overtly obvious observations and reports? I propose we call it the "Captain Obvious" award.
[signature]
Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.
This is the beast that sets the pace. (There are several in each region, in diverse geographical locations, capible of being the guy in charge, but only one is in the system at a time.)
Every other, lighter turbine generator coil thingy is actually trying to go "ever so slightly" faster than the master. By doing this, but being unable to out-mass the leader, all the turbines stay in synch "naturally".
This is part and parcil of the comment about how a turbine has to be taken out of the loop if it starts to fall off the pace. The coils start acting as a motor instead of a generator. The stress and current demands go way up and either the bearings blow from atypical stress (wobbling) or the current in the coils begin climbing exponentially.
While the "one big machine" analogy seems hollistic, it is actually more a systemic fact. Though the DC connections might make it more like three big machines stapled to one another, the former imagry is close enough to literal fact thaty the times-three oversatement is worth the hyperbole.
The power inputs and outputs are tweaked to effect net delivery and distribution, but the "organisim" is effectively singular (in each region).
The symphony orchastra analogy is also quite approprate. The master turbines are the conductors. The system is arranged such that there is "always" a spare conductor standing by. But at any moment there is, in fact, only one.
Were one able to take over every one of the several (4 or so per region) possible masters, and then take the current master off line and prevent the other masters from comming on line, the mess would be intolerable. The "heaviest" non master would instantly be elected, but his regulator would still be set to try to overtake a real master. With the lack of that moderation the frequency of the entire net (region) would begin to rise. As the frequency rose the same mathimatical factor that goes into the "30mHz of sag loses 1Gw of power" curve would mean that for the same voltage, the power being carried would rise and things would start to melt.
Better yet, take possession of the master/moderators and just turn up the frequency by hand. Say to 70cycles instead of 60.
All of the stations would start to drop off even as the power lines and the generators themselves were being damaged by the excessive current flow. As the rate of dropout increased the damage done to each quitter would increase. That's why the blackout happened so fast. Last guy on the line takes the most damage.
Each region really is just one machine.
The correct analogy is not how all humans are one organism, but how each human body is one machine. Different member organs have different degrees of criticality. You can cut off whole sections and still have a live human, but the shape of the key systems is critical. Arms and legs are disposable but cut a one inch slit in the aorta and see how long you live.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
in "war in the age of intelligent machines" delanda compared battle formations to machinery. an interesting question might be, what does it take to step from object to machine? and, perhaps later, what does it take to step from machine to intelligence, or are they the same? is intelligence a cascading effect, like the recent power outage? or does it take intelligence to create a cascading effect, like pulling the plug?
Can you believe the amount of power they use to run this machine ? No wonder that normal people have to deal with power outage all over the world.
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Film at ... oh wait, guess they won't be able to show a film.
The ultimate problem is that the human is emphatically *not* a single machine. It's a loosely (some might say poorly) coordinated collection of independent cells and neurons. It's not engineered at the system level, or even at the regional level, but rather at the local level with ad hoc interconnects to create larger systems.
:)
I think your problem is you need to zoom out a little bit. Look at the macro system. I hope my word exchange made it a little simpler to show you are full of shit
Transco also own GridAmerica, for their opinion on the blackout, see this press release
Go buy an inverter at the hardware store. I have one, pretty cool. Yes, I can boil water and watch TV in my car. However,you get closer to 100 watts, not 100kwatts.
But seriously, people who buy electricity don't normally buy guaranteed uptime to go with it.
If people wanted five nines reliability on their electricity, they'd demand it and then pay the extra cost that went with providing such service.
Deregulation works; unfortunately it gives people what they want. In the case of electricity people generally express that the dependability of the current systems is good enough.
One could argue that the world-wide telephone network is one large machine as well. And it is in many ways larger than any national electricity network.
I may be missing something here but..
this market has broken down because of overuse of a free resource (transmission) by generators.
Why not simply adjust the market to reflect true costs - if california wants to buy electricity from new york - it will cost more because it has to be transferred further.
This would allow balancing in decisions to build generation locally or build more transmission.
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and on that planet, people ran around after little green pieces of paper which were supposed to make those people happy. The irony of the situation, however, is that much of the time vast majority of the people were unhappy while they ran around after the green pieces of paper. -Hitchikers guide.
Capitalism, like other governing systems, will fail if those leading the system become corrupt. It then becomes our responsability to revolt and take our life, liberty and freedom back.
The power system has failed because other systems failed. Our goverment had to fail before our electricity can fail; the US goverment has some redundancy built into it, however, it doesn't recognize the fundemental fact that if you screw people over they will revolt, the bottom of the pyramid will dispurse and the higher you are up on the top, the farther you've got to fall.
Sure, any way the money flies, things must add up. A corperation promises the goverment they can run the power companies more efficiently, then they turn around, understaff them, let generation plants crumble as demand rises, let the system's redundancy instead be used to fill the new demand, and all the money we're paying them goes straight to stockholders instead of into the power system.
And even then, if the goverment is corrupt while handling it, they will decide it's a good idea to cut cut cut the taxes down and let the machines crumble and eventually reach critical mass, and we've got a mini chernoyble on our hands. All so the politicans look good.
And thanks to our corperate culture, we've been bred to believe that cheaper means better quality.
My question then becomes this; will we revolt when kids start mutating and catching cancer becuase the waste is dumped near towns? When the first plant explodes coating millions of acre's with radioactive dus killing thousands and possibly millions? Will we revolt when the goverment rolls the tanks down the street to keep the violent, or peaceful protesters infront of the power company buildings and govermental buildings angry at theri miserable failure. Will the corpoliticals, in a completed coup, be able to control us?
When do we make a stand? In the voting booths electronically controlled with voting machines and run by corperations which are run by republicans? I don't think we'll be able to. Many states are switching over all to quickly to the new system for which there is no open source, open schematic, or open box. Do we stand in the streets to be sprayed by rubber bullets and tear gas or mowed down by machine guns when someone throws a molotof cocktail? On the internet with our continueous hacking of goverment computers to liberate information on what our goverment's been doing? The incredible truth is this; We're already at this point, why are they desperatly trying to deploy electronic voting machines? Why are they keeping nader off of national television? Why is the flow of major information so incredibly centralized? The quesstion now is when the few who've woken up and taken fighting positions find themselves surrouded by hungry wolves, and bah to wake up more, will they wake up or continue sleeping peacefully, and when they finally do wake up, will they find themselves in a cage on the way to the meat packing plant, or standing among the other sheep surrounding the wolves and preparing to pounce.
I'd hate to think what'd happen if one of those plants blew, they're already unsafe and most need fixing. 3 mile island was a big enough loss of life I believe. But just think if one blew in an urban area, killing 20,000 people. Do you people have ANY idea how angry people would be? There would be rioting in the streets and people demanding the ceo's of the power companies heads on a silver platter, and when they got it, will the be dumb enough to stop their only to let another one blow? Will we be dumb enough to believe what Murdoch or the rest of them have to say or will we say a resounding "No". 7 mile island That is my patriotic bullshit spcheel, I hope you enjoyed it.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Lots of businesses in NYC had private building generators; they were used to power the oh-so-important foodlights that pollute the night sky over Manhattan. Nothing is more pathetic than seeing an empty office building blazing with light during a blackout. But they have the money to afford it, and by your logic this is totally acceptable.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
The power-generation industry is arguably the most heavily regulated industry in the United States. Power companies are given disincentives to upgrade older generation plants. Building new plants is practically impossible in some areas. So how could you expect these companies *NOT* to get their power from elsewhere?
"...We have pointed out that the geologist Francois de Chardenedes wrote for me a scenario of the technology of nature's producing petroleum which disclosed that the amount of energy employed by nature as heat and pressure for the amount of time required to produce each gallon of petroleum, if paid for at the rate at which the public utilities now charge retail customers for electricity, must cost over a million dollars a gallon. Combine that information with the discovery that approximately 60 percent of the employed in U.S. America are working at tasks that are not producing any life support. Jobs of inspectors-of-inspectors; jobs with insurance companies that induce people to bet that their house is going to be destroyed by fire while the insurance company bets that it isn't. All these are negative preoccupations...jobs with the underwriting of insurance underwriters by other insurance underwriters -- people checking up on one another in all the different departments of the Treasury, the Internal Revenue, FBI, CIA, and in counterespionage. About 60 percent of all human activity in America is not producing any physical life protection, life support, or development accommodation, which physical life support alone constitutes real wealth."
http://futurepositive.synearth.net/2003/10/08
It allows powerful entities who have more money, resources, rights, power, and lower tax rates than the individual citizen to accumulate more of it.
Many say that advances free people do to better things.
What happens when a small percentage of the population owns most of the land, most of the food production, most of the money, and they find ways to cut the workforce in every industry and level?
How about the words for people who didn't own anything and spent most of their lives to pay for borrowing something like land, food, or money? Serf, slave, indentured servant
I am a French Canadian you id10t. We have Hydro-Quebec, one of the biggest electricity producer in North America. You Americans buy electricity from us. If we weren't there, french canadians, you would not be able to use your computer, which would be a good thing for all of us.
People who actually know what they're talking about point out the problem is not deregulation, but botched deregulation (California is a particularly stark example of what happens when one side of the supply/demand equation is deregulated, and the other isn't) combined with short-sighted environmental laws and other legal and regulatory issues that make it difficult to build new transmission lines profitably (NIMBY lawsuits, bogus "power line cancer" junk science, etc.). What the energy market needs is better deregulation combined with tort reform and a willingness for Washington to step in and break deadlocks where new capacity is urgently needed. Vice President Dick Chaney's energy task force outlined the problem way back in 2001, but nothing has been done since. Unless something is done, expect more blacouts (at least outside of Texas).
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Given that, I think it is incumbent on the deregulators to explain exactly what was "broken" with this system and what their "fix" was intended to accomplish. Yes, there was some fat and inefficiencies in the regulated utility model (I was there in the 80s), and some new incentives were needed to help address those problems. But again, increasing supplies of reliable electricity were being provided at decreasing real cost. Has that been true since the wonders of deregulation took hold?
Of course, one of the real "problems" that electric utility deregulation addressed was that no one involved in the process was earning 200% gross profit margins. I have to wonder if the real "pressure" was not from those who wanted greater efficiency due to competition, but those (such as Enron) who wanted to skim off more cream from an industry that was limited by law to around 12% gross.
sPh
Let's not forget that the government or whoever is almost forced to sell this limited supply @ pennies per whatever. Thus it becomes so cheap to not turn off unused appliances, creating waste, which has nothing to do with capitalism. When the companies are allowed to sell energy @ their own prices, then we will see capitalism.
I don't mind seeing safety regulations, etc., but that's about it.
testing out my trending skills
Thankyou for a very insightful comment. I'd mod you up but you are already at +5.
Society as a whole needs to recognise the folly of individual greed in an age where nearly anything is possible. Greed of the individual leads to just the sort of symptoms you describe - we have technology which could be made easily available to all, for nothing more than the labour it takes to build it, yet because individuals want to horde the riches for the technology, we only distribute it to those who can cough up the cash.
Another example is medicine - we have the technology to cure and help prevent many diseases such as AIDS etc, yet a few individuals would rather horde the loot for themselves than do the right thing and help their fellow man. "But it costs millions of dollars in development costs" you hear them say. "We need to recoup our investment" they shrill, laughing all the way to the bank as they pocket their stock dividends, oblivious to the millions they should really be paying attention to - the human beings who could be saved by the technology they invent.
It is this type of individual "I'm better than you" mentality that causes greed, war, corruption and the continued division between the rich and poor nations of the world. American greed for the world's oil and gas reserves leads them to annex half the world (the half with oil and gas of course). Pharmaceuticals' greed for money prevents millions of human beings from being saved even though we know how to save them and could easily do so.
Even the very ingrained concept of national borders continues to keep some wealthy at the human cost of keeping the rest poor. After all, you wouldn't be able to be "wealthy" if everyone was on a similar footing to you, would you? And there is the problem - our competitive nature ensures that we continue to backstab each other to the top in some orgy of self-destruction which helps only the few and hinders many more.
We now have the technology to prevent this, and the education to recognise our shortcomings, yet we do nothing. What does that say for our "superior" species?
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
Even in the article it says:
Power deregulation--in reality, a change in regulations--went slowly at first. Not until 1998 were utilities, beginning in California, compelled to sell off their generating capacity to independent power producers, such as Enron and Dynergy.
So "deregulation" means privatizing the most profitable aspects so the Enrons who give $$$ to the DNC and RNC can make money, and forcing the other companies to buy from them at extortionate rates. Something similar happened in CA where they could not by law enter into long-term contracts.
We already have socialism in that "no one" is responsible for the blackouts - if there were there would be someone to sue for breach of contract or similar breaks.
There are ways of making the power grid reliable and robust, but simply having a government agency run it has no magic (consider the IRS who admits to a 33% error rate).
Changing an engineering problem to an economic (the semi-regulation) or political (full regulation) will impede any solution.
Even so, we should really try private-enterprise. Penalize failures but let them keep the profits from keeping things inexpensive and reliable.
One of the "downfalls" of generating your own electricity is that you have to convert to a/c via an inverter for most of your houses needs. However in the computing field, it is basically all dc. With the hoped for drop in cost of photovoltaics, hopefully more smaller shops in sunny climes will set up photovoltaics and a battery system. You can get "pristine" electricity - instead of the dirty brown voltage swings of the grid. You do have a line conditioner don't you? If you have a lot of puters, eliminating the ac to dc portion to supply them makes more sense in the long run. So why talk about the "socialist" aspects of regulating electricity when you might be able to do a mild foot in the water of entering syndical anarchy and taking care of yourself. Shalom, Mark
Our energy grid machine is not deregulated, as the article claims. One thing I have found amusing during this energy fiasco is that some give solid arguments that this problem is probably due to deregulation, and some give solid arguments that it is probably due to regulation. Yet the current "deregulated" system is not truly deregulated nor truly regulated in the traditional sense of the words; it is a grey area somewhere in between what one normally thinks of as regulated and deregulated, perhaps what could be coined as "greyulated". It is my opinion that there are good arguments coming out of both sides because this nebulous state is actually worse than both a traditionally regulated system like we had before and systems more in line with true deregulation. Fixing the machine's problems would need to address this issue.
I will focus on the piece that often get overlooked: differentiating the current "greyulated" energy market from an actual truly deregulated market, and showing how it can be improved through true deregulation, which we have not had yet. I will also focus on how our capitalism is broken: the ways that government and business bend the rules of capitalism to protect the rich and powerful, and how that helps create problems like what we have experienced. Then the reader can compare this to his understanding of the merits and shortcomings of regulation to decide which is best.
So why are we in a "greyulated" energy market? It is quite simple. Using FirstEnergy as an example (yes, I live in the city that caused the blackout), they are required through regulation to open up their lines to competing energy suppliers. For example, next month I will be getting my electricity from Green Mountain Energy even though FirstEnergy does the actual delivery of the energy through its own lines. The energy suppliers and the energy delivery monopoly still have to operate under many regulations, I believe including price regulations that restrict the income that can be collected for investing into upgrading the delivery infrastructure. Thus there is regulated competition for the energy suppliers and a regulated monopoly for energy delivery. Obviously this is not truly deregulated, but the primary difference that distinguishes this from traditional regulation is that energy suppliers are allowed to compete with each other by forcing the delivery monopoly (through regulation) to open its lines to other companies, as opposed to having a regulated monopoly on both the delivery and supply. So it's regulation used to achieve regulated market competition rather than regulation to control everything. That is the key to its failure.
This brings us to the two main problems of this system. They both relate to competition. Capitalism works when there is competition from both producers and consumers. When there is no consumer competition (such as only a handful of consumers) then there is no issue; the producers pack up and start producing something else. When there is no competition within producers, particularly for something that is truly needed by consumers, then the classic problems of monopoly arise. The fact is that capitalism is a failure under monopoly. In this "greyulated" market, there is still a monopoly: a monopoly on energy delivery. This means that if, for example, FirstEnergy is found responsible for the blackout then we have no way of changing distributor.
Many criticize the capitalistic system for encouraging cost cutting, and blame that for the blackout. This is not the whole picture. For one, the failure occurred in the delivery system which is a monopoly that remains heavily regulated; the competition exists in the supply side of things, where things are still regulated, but less so than the delivery monopoly. Thus the area that remained the most heavily regulated after the transition from full regulation was the source of the blackout, not the portion that was only mildly deregulated.
But for the sake of argument, suppose we lived in an imaginary world where we could choose
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
Other than by potentially very costly trial and error, how can we guarantee that decision-makers are well chosen? How do we change the selection process (for decision-makers) when a technology grows to the point where it becomes critical infrastructure?
Of course!! Everyone knows that only Soviet-style central planning authority can produce an efficient system at any scale! Stalin and Mussolini were able to make the trains run on time, after all, and Hitler produced a fine automobile.
That was satire, folks.
Don't you think that the problems may come from TOO MUCH regulation and oversight? The energy production grid in America is anything but free market -- just look at the difficulty in convincing that California had to overcome convincing the EPA to "allow" it to temporarily bring additional powerplants on line last year.
You go ahead and play games in your communist wonderlands, but please leave my country the hell alone.
The internet has no SPOF? Try and hop on the clue train next time it comes around.
The internet was *designed* to have no SPOF. Point of fact, net traffic is increasingly reliant on a handful of high-speed backbones, and this problem can't easily be solved. Cletus just doesn't have the wherewithal to lay *transatlantic* fucking cables, you see.
To ask a simple question with the "public trust" model, do the new grids get constructed where the capacity is inadequate, or where a connected politician needs jobs or favors?
Private does NOT mean beholden to shareholders, and even if it were so, somewhere I miss where it is in shareholder's interest to have the stock tank because they are failing to deliver a product and thus aren't profitable.
With public corporations, at least shareholders eventually have to throw out bad management or the company will go bankrupt (e.g. Enron). Government has no such requirement - they just say they need to raise taxes as more money will fix it.
Consider the "Public School" monopoly that regularly produces graduates who are functionally illiterate and innumerate - not everywhere but the point in having universal educaiton is to educate every child and NOT have education be an accident of geography. This is probably more serious than the power grid, has been going on for two decades, and is resolved by homeschooling, private schools, or by those who can afford it moving to a good school district. Bad schools stay bad yet are often the most expensive in terms of tax money per pupil, good schools stay good. So which areas of the country will be reliable and which will have regular blackouts (until the taxpayer coughs up more money and then we will see)?
Not all companies are ailing or mismanged, but I think under your proposal, all would be nationalized.
And I've missed where government has suddenly become magic and creates solutions to engineering problems by waving some kind of magic wand.
Government created the problem by only deregulating part of the grid (the parts Enron gave money to the DNC and RNC to deregulate).
If anyone is old enough or had read, consider the S&L crisis. Risk wasn't deregulated - the FSLIC (now rolled into the FDIC) carried all the risk, but the S&Ls would get all the reward - heads the S&L bigshots win, tails, the taxpayer loses. We have that kind of deregulation in the power industry.
Some places must buy energy from others by law, some can't or must do certain contracts.
In that, either complete regulation or complete deregulation (with proper economic incentives) would be better than the mix we have now.
In a true marketplace I could choose if I wanted to attach to a more expensive supplier that guaranteed 5 sigma uptime, or a cheaper one that might have an occasional blackout. That might be impractical.
Another problem that goes unsolved is environmental/NIMBY. If no one wants electrical power lines across their area, and don't want the generating plants (some nuclear or coal) next to the industrial areas that consume the power, how do we get power from where it is politically acceptable to generate it to where it is used?
That is a place for government and a legitimate use for Eminent domain (instead of where they are declaring nice neighborhoods "blighted" so they can put in an Ikea store). But if they didn't do it under the current system, why would they do it under reregulation?
Maybe if they replaced all the bureaucrats with engineers, government would be able to solve engineering problems. But shifting an engineering problem from the engineering to the political domain doesn't solve it.
"whats so scary about Socialism anyway? "
A dirty shot against libertarianism (the insolence of the leech!!), THEN this statement???!?!?!?!
I mean WTF!?!??!?!
I guess i should be a good little slashbot and jump on the group-think bandwagon here too...
uhhmmm...let's see...something so horribly stupid that any half-intelligent person would puke at...
cannibalism isn't so bad...
marx was right...
everyone is equal/should be made equal..
there..now i can go praise linux or macOS(not a monopoly,no siree) and let slashbot socialists think for me...the ovens you say..? Sure, ignorance IS strength afterall...
>>When a state gets it wrong, everyone pays the penalty.
Excellent point, but it's also important to note that only those who pay taxes pay the penalty. And considering how the tax burden has shifted in america (the lowest 50% of income earners pay WAY LESS than 10% of the taxes collected) that means the "wealthy" are getting stuck with the bill.
The power industry has never been de-regulated. What was called de-regulation was nothing more than re-regulation.
Why should I listen to a thing the author says when he can't even get this simple a concept right?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
So, all of the individual participants in the electric power industry use the grid to distribute power and make money, but since none of them actually own the whole grid, and there's no regulatory requirement to maintain the grid in good working order, we are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution? Re-regulation, either self-imposed by the industry or government-imposed for the good of society.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
We would need bigger telephone poles though...
1. The problem is not in de-regulated generation markets, the blackout's root cause was failure of regulated transmission. In the "How to Fix It", this is the first thing he says to fix.
... do you like being told you have to buy energy at a higher cost than it is being produced?
2. Re-Regulating the industry will not solve the fundamental problems of poor communication, which was cited as another cause of the 8/14 blackout. First Energy territory (a vertical utility) loosely operates under a regional authority called MISO; essentially, FE does its thing and lets MISO know when it has problems. On that day, FE was doing what a regulated utility does best -- keeping its mouth shut. They had large problems that cascaded into regional problems, which cascaded into an interconnection blackout. Re-regulating more companies will only complicate long-distance communication (because you remove the scheduling authority), and no company will have the view of the big picture.
3. The east coast USA has not only met its capacity needs, but because of construction of generation in de-regulated markets, we are at a comfortable over-capacity level. De-regulation of generation was not the problem out west, it was governmental restrictions that prevented them from building, and they weren't ready in time for demand growth. Because the east markets have a large choice of generation, they are forced to compete with each other to lower costs, which has led to billions in savings and billions more projected. Yet, with spot markets offering cheaper prices, most residents are still locked into regulated prices-per-kW set a decade ago
4. What our fellow doesn't consider is how much NIMBY has affected the status of the grid. If companies are re-regulated back to their small territories, some zones are no longer self-sufficient; some were importing power even before de-regulation. They're not going to magically be able to provide their own energy tomorrow, so they still need to import just like they do now in a de-regulated system. You're back to the old days of each small company makes bilateral schedules with its surrounding zones, and you just have the same problems you see today. Except now, you've forced everyone to duplicate scheduling services, and you force inefficiency back into the system.
5. Congestion. The article goes on and on about congestion being caused by long distance energy trades, but few people know what this is. When I sell energy from Ohio to NY, say 100 MW, my zone produces 100MW more than my load, and the sink underproduces 100MW less than their load. That energy adds to the flows along the transmission network, according to path of least resistance.
Well, sometimes that energy doesn't flow the way you contracted it to flow. It might go 80% along the way you want, but 20% goes through parallel paths through the neighbors, at which point it's called circulation. The author thinks that by eliminating energy trading, these problems magically go away. It's not like circulation never happened while the system was regulated; it's just that the utilities never made an issue of it. And again, this is a problem in already-regulated transmission; letting things remain the same is not solving our problems.
6. Network utilization. Now if I build a line with a 2200 MW limit, and I only put 200MW through it, that doesn't seem like a good return of investment, does it? What you find in regulated systems (which is everyone but GridAmerica) is there's low interest in building high capacity wires; a majority of the mid-west still runs on 138 kV. It doesn't help that government regulations & PUCs are fighting new placement every step of the way. What's worse is that there has been very little research into high-power transmission technology; at least since de-regulation, companies are investigating new technologies like superconductors, because now they have to become more efficient to survive.
7. Markets failures caused the blackou
Just to clarify, the idea of a Hydrogen Economy *does not* use hydrogen as a fuel in the sense that we are used to. The idea is to use hydrogen as a storage and transport mechanism for energy.
Of COURSE it's not efficient to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen. There will be losses with every additional step. It is, however, possible to get your hydrogen from other sources. A couple of solar panels used to electrolyze water (you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen) are only one example. The idea is to start now by switching infrastructure over to handling hydrogen-- which is far cheaper and easier than a wholesale transition to somtehing else. Older cars can still get gas at a gas station while their newer counterparts will get gas and use a catalyst to convert it to hydrogen. As the newer cars become more common, stations will begin to carry pure hydrogen, which eventually will be made more efficiently via nuclear, solar, hamsters, etc...
Anyway-- as you said, think of hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. How efficient it is depends entirely on how efficient the process was that created it.
Why is $87 Billion US going to help fight the illegal, unilateral, hands off you other countries, occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, when we have a serious threat of blackouts today?
Government-owned power is great! You get it all at cost, and if you need extra capacity the government can take out a loan to build another one (and pay lower interest than any private company).
Here in Ontario the government started to slowly chop up our publically-owned power generation company and sell it off, bit by bit. As soon as profiteers got involved, rates began to soar.
Fearing public outcry, they quietly induced a rate freeze (by using tax dollars to fill in the profit margin) until privatization was completed.
Fortunately they were put to a stop, but our new (8-day-old) "Liberal" (centrist) government sees privatization as a quick and easy way to pay for their campaign promises.
Oh well. Looks like it's off to Finland for me!
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Ask any economist, widespread electricy deregulation simply HAS NOT HAPPENED.
There are a very few markets, and probably no two contiguous states, that have meaningfully reduced regulation and moved electricity generation essentially into the competitive private sector.
The rest are variations on the California theme: re-regulation. Change some rules here, loosen this up, but go over there and tighten down on that. Net result, same government-run bullshit, different clothes. Fortunately none of them have proved to be the same kind of ticking time bomb that California's system was... yet.
No apostrophe?!!!! YES!!!!! WE GRAMMAR NAZIS ARE making a DIFFERENCE!!
Oh joy of joys. Oh wonder of wonders.
*grin!*
From the Greek:
Orthos - Upright or correct
Doxa - Glory
So Orthodoxy literaly means Correct Glory.
In order to attain the literal meaning of Orthodoxy you must use all your faculties, all the time. Your signature line is incorrect.
the problem with letting profit motivated organizations control essential resouces is where the responsibility lies. they don't want to provide you with power/water ... they want to charge you money. they are only accountable to their share holders not their customers. now true, letting the gov. control is a form of monopoly but at least you can vote to change the gov. you can't do much of anything to change a private/public company.
what happened on the east coast might have been a problem with the grid but what happened in california was because not generating power ment more money for the power barons.
water degulation
a good reason the lights went out the american press won't tell you about
It has been deregulated in that the rules have been reduced. The rules have not, however, been abolished, it is therefore not unregulated.
www.wavefront-av.com
It clearly states that the US electric grid was more reliable when it was more tightly regulated by the government and gave a number of reasons why this was so.
Could someone please explain why we need a national energy grid in the first place? What's wrong with each state providing energy for itself?
The one in the UK lasted all of 41 minutes, and only occurred because the back-up line was having maintenance on it. It hit the headlines because it affected the London Underground, and the transport chaos that ensued was significant. The power cut itself was not remotely on the same scale.
So how can straight-thinking people call that "deregulation"? What next? Rename DoD "The Department of Foreign Happiness"?
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
sounds like the setting of CUBE:
http://www.cubethemovie.com/
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
When a subsystem fails that is critical to a system, liability is incurred. The contracted power was not delivered as demanded. Someone fucked up and should pay damages. If the damages are insufficient or unpaid then you don't put fraudsters (practically and ethically speaking: profitable incompetence) out of business. If you don't put fraudsters out of business you can't correct the situation by centralizing control under the folks who were so incompetent of malign as to let them stay in business.
Seastead this.
An orbiting array of solar cells with intense microwave power transmission downlinks to mid-ocean electrolysis plants. Not feasible now, but in the next 10, 20 years it could happen.
:P
Your entire last paragraph is wrong. Fuel cells are not batteries; they do work on the same very basic electrochemical rules, but a fuel cell doesn't have a self-contained store of reactants; also, fuel cells use the much more energetic 2 H2 + 02 -> 2 H2O reaction, instead of a lower-energy ionic redox reaction like batteries (If I'm speaking Greek, get an intro chem text and read up on electrochemistry, then look at the potentials for various half-reactions). AFAIK, it's also impossible to build a "rechargable" cell that will take H2O and electricity and spit out H2 and O2; it is possible to build a rechargable battery. Fuel cells are actually a hell of a lot (potentially an order of magnitude) more efficient than internal-combustion engines; fuel cells go directly from chemical energy -> electrical energy, while an ICE has to go chemicals -> thermal -> mechanical -> electrical energy.
Now for the numbers *hunts down PChem text (PW Atkins, Physical Chemistry, 7th ed.)* OK, the maximum theoretcal efficiency for a Carnot cycle engine is around 80%, depending on the delta-T between the engine and the environment; 80% is reached at around 900-1100C, at less than 100C it's limited to around 20%. Fuel cells are more efficeint at lower T, theoretically greater than 90 percent at less than 100C. Here's a pretty good summary page; the bottom graph is really good. Brush up on your thermodynamics, you're a clearcut case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Ideally, we'd be able to squirt in some reactive power when needed, but until a few years ago, the electronics for doing so didn't exist. MCTs are getting bigger and faster all the time, which will allow a more graceful response to overloads than throwing the Big Switch.
...-.-
We're seeing a high degree of non-linear behavior here, as befits a system that has reached this degree of complexity.
... which, as we know, are pretty good but not perfect.
Given this nonlinearity, the grid -- like the weather -- will probably resist conventional mathematics. This makes it likely to remain relatively but not absolutely predictable.
The proper application of chaos theory, identifying the systems strange attractors could allow a better ability to predict behavior and possibly to allow some sort of alerts akin to hurricane warnings
The power grid strikes me as very similar to the highway system, to me it makes sense to nationalize it, the same way highways are federalized.
Power companies would pay fees both ways, as consumers and producers of power. The inablity of either to expand their business would drive capacity increases, in the same way highways are expanded.
The air traffic control system is another example of the feds controlling a competitive marketplace.
You can guarantee that any report which concludes
that the problem, whatever it may be, is rooted
in the fact that the industry is not "regulated",
is all about politics and social action, not
science, by some leftist group.
I, for one, refuse to call this the Computer Age until this issue is addressed. Or we go to a form of computing that can't be interrupted directly by power outtages (chemical, for example). And that may come about before electrical utilities upgrade their grid.
Oh, and as for the expense. If management had set aside a half-percent of the profits for the last 30 years, and invested it wisely, it would have taken care of it.
What all does management do, anyway?!
This is a rant. If you don't want to read it, don't.
It's been clear to me for some time that when it comes to energy policy, stupidity and fear rule the day. I believe Heinlein once wrote: "Never underestimate the power of human stupidity". Can there be a more truthful statement? Consider:
We humans handily ignore the 13 TRILLION pounds of carbon emitted by our chemical-fuel economy, nearly all pumped out of the ground, causing global climatic change. Many people go so far as to argue that this would have no effect on the global ecology!
How can you argue that this much CO2 will not have an effect on our environment?
We pay little more than lip service to all of the apparent results of our decisions to persue chemical energy.
I'm not one to say that we should go back to banging rocks, and eat bark and bugs, but since we all think so highly of our children WHY AREN'T WE THINKING ABOUT THE WORLD THEY WILL LIVE IN?
I cringe every time I see a new make of unsafe, inefficient, ecologically expensive SUV and consider the irony of the owners of such vehicles being among the most likely to have an "I love America" bumper sticker when such vehicles provide only a dependence on foreign oil. Even funnier still is the idea that an SUV is a good car "for the kids"...
And yet, when you mention alternatives, such as this ultra-clean and efficient compressed-air car that cleans the air as it drives, refuels in under 2 minutes, and provides reliable transportation at an equivalent cost of around $0.35 per gallon of gas, it's "nerdy" or "unsafe" or "a hassle".
And, perish the thought that having a clean, safe, self-sufficient micronuclear power plant ! I mean, cheap, safe, non-polluting energy! Oh, "but it's DANGEROUS!" they say. Never mind the annual death toll of just under 1.2 MILLION people from those wonderful cars. If 2 dozen people died in a power plant, it'd be a "national disaster" in the papers, but 1.2 million people dying in cars barely make the obituaries column on page B-11.
How is stupidity not in power?
And one of the primary reasons why the SUV is so popular is because of all the stupid legal benefits that automakers enjoy for making large, cheap, polluting, inefficient, over-priced-but-"stylish" SUVs and light trucks.
If we just applied some sense to the situation, we'd have cars that didn't pollute, we'd have energy that didn't force us to sell the birthrights of our children, all combined with a reasonable economy we could all be proud of.
What kind of world are your grandchildren going to live in?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This is obviously wrong, and power deregulation in California is the premier example. After deregulation, loads of wheeling and dealing caused black-outs all over the state. Are you an amnesiac? The shareholders of those companies were probably sitting on their yachts on the other side of the world, while the people of California had no lights.
Deregulation didn't break the machine, it merely allowed the machine's flaws to become obvious.
In a fully deregulated system (deregulated both at the wholesale and consumer level) there would be no need to worry about a decrepit old machine, since there would be clear price signals telling companies when it makes more sense to try alternative methods of solving the "transporting power" problem, such as building a new smaller plant in the target location, shipping natural gas, or (gasp) voluntarily reducing power consumptoin because prices are high during the heat of the summer.
Most of the US has been duped into believing that government regulation is necessary in the area of electrical power. This is absolutely untrue. Regulating the grid (or prices at the consumer level) creates monopolies that can't be broken, and who we must all pay for through our taxes.
The reason deregulation failed was because it was done asymmetrically... How well would you be able to walk if gravity only applied to one half of your body. Markets responded to "deregulation" exactly as one might have predicted. The missing piece was that consumers continued to be able to buy electricity at unnaturally low prices, and so they had no incentive to turn down the AC to a level where the existing infrastructure could provide power at a reasonable price.
The "big machine" analogy sounds inviting at first, until one realizes that the answer is to allow big government to maintain the big machine.
Amazing magic tricks
[The world's biggest machine...] is the Internet, it is way too complex and bigger than the electrical grid, and contains among other things satellites, routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices, so the Net IS the biggest machine made by man.
Almost right - but you've got the wrong net.
The overall communication network is the world's biggest machine. Geographically the telephone network is probably the largest component. It carries its own separate power distribution and goes many places the power grid does not. That's obvious when you consider POTS phones located in off-grid locations, or cell phonees.
Radio and other non-phone wireless services are more pervasive geographically - but actual components are fewer. The internet is nearly a strict subset of the phone network, though it does have a few of its own links. But almost all of it is in locations where power is supplied by the grid and little is self-powered.
For sheer included volume, though, consider NASA's communication with their space probes. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's especially true of what's happened in California; the new regulations here are really, really bad. For instance, the utilies are not allowed to buy any long term contracts, but instead have to buy electricity on the spot market to make up any shortfalls in local generation. Anyone that has even the slightest knowledge of economics can tell you that this will cause higher prices. How can the government prohibiting the utility from exercising proper fiduciary responsibility to their customers and shareholders possibly be considered "deregulation"?
No, the legislature here, and in other states, decided to jump on the "deregulation" bandwagon, and just used the word deregulation to fool the media and their constituents about what is in fact simply different regulation.
I am really sick of people saying that deregulation doesn't work! We haven't tried it, so we don't have strong evidence that it won't work.
-cp-
Clearly this article illuminates some of the practical/political and economic problems that need to be addressed with the electricity grid. But what about security?
It seems to me from reading the article (and looking at the nice maps of the elecricity flow) that you do not need to be a rocket scientist to make a good attempt at prompting a blackout through sabotage.
Consider these facts: Transmission lines often go through remote areas. It is not infeasible to deliberately short circuit these lines. The system has been proven to be fragile. There is a lot of information in the public domain about how power is transmitted.
How do you design a grid that is tolerant against faults that may be planned as opposed to accidental?
-f
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation.
Vernon Smith Economics
Those of you who think that "electricity is too important to leave to the private sector" should look into the work of last year's Nobel prize winner in Economics, Vernon Smith. One of his pet topics is electricity deregulation. He's the pioneer in experimental economics, and he advocates deregulation (the real kind, not the fake kind as in California).
Vernon Smith Economics
Apparently you didn't read the fucking article, because a great contributor to the problem was that nodes that are even slightly out of phase can cause major problems such as fires, and hurt the system more than help. Your proposal of loosely-coupled nodes is a recipe for disaster for precisely the reason that the system failed in the first place. This just accentuates the underlying problem: people trying to control something they don't truly understand. Computer Science solutions do not necessarily solve Electrical Engineering problems. And if Computer Science cannot transfer to Electrical Engineering, then imagine how badly lawyers are fucking up our world in Congress.
To the skank who posted the story, and namely
this line:
" It has some nice hard science data for those interested in why we're going to get some more blackouts in the future unless Congress gets its act together."
I'd just like to say FUCK YOU and your disgusting leftist mind. It is sickening that you imbicles cannot even IMAGINE that there could be a solution to any problem aside from increasing the involvement of the coercive force of government. (The originator of all the problems in the first place.)
Historically, market systems have outperformed regulated systems over and over again.
Show me the data that backs this up? When you compare the growth rates of developed nations during the heavily regulated 20th century as compared to the classically lightly regulated 19th centruy, you see a huge growth in productivity, GNP, and GDP in the 20th.
Further insights as to how our current regulated market economies differ from laissez-faire market economies can be found in the excellent Late Victorian Holocausts .
Da Blog
I work for the power industry. The essence of the article is that deregulation has resulted in the use of the electrical interconnect grid in a way it was not designed to handle. (Your basic profit-conflicting with-physics argument.) In order to maintain reliability, someone must invest billions to enhance the grid. So ... the promised savings will be offset by higher infrastructure costs or less electrical reliability, or both?
The article is not excessively technical so if you are inclined to read it entirely you should have a better understanding of an issue that we all have a vital stake in.
Let us never let physics, engineering, or common sense interfere with the pursuit of happiness (ie "greed"). Is deregulation an attempt by a powerful few to profit from the many in the name of free enterprise? (Oh, and let the consumers/taxpayers foot the bill?)
Ho can the north american power grid be the biggest machine?
What about Europe? What about China? Both have more people on their power grid. The european one goes from the atlantic far east till Moscow.
Certainly a significantly bigger machine than the "biggest amchine ever".
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How would that have stopped Enron, Dynegy, etc., from defrauding the state and the ratepayers? The only thing that stopped the insanity was reinstating price ceilings. These bastards shut down plants just to squeeze us. And it worked. And now our new governor is going to let them get away with it.
What happened in CA had less to do with deregulation than with conspiracy, fraud, and cronyism.
As you can see from the DoE summary, the grid entered a cascade state (failed) on about the 9th redundancy.
Breaker trips in New Jersey, and north of NYC, were examples of "good" operations, where it halted the voltage collapse by isolating load. South and West were spared, but it sucked if you were on the wrong side of the Hudson station.
You haven't been watching the California power fiasco. I think if anything, we learned from that that when an energy company gets it wrong, it whines to the Public Utilities Commission that it needs to raise rates to remain profitable, lines politicians reelection coffers, gets its way, and everyone except the shareholders and executives pays the penalty. If the choice is between a for-profit corporation, whose stated goal is making money for its shareholders, is beholden only to its shareholders, and I have no recourse against, getting it wrong, and the government, whose stated goal is providing for its citizens, and where my vote helps determine who's in charge and what policies they should pursue, gets it wrong, I'll happily choose the latter, thank you very much.
-----Chaz
Yes, by the definitions of mechanics, the power grid is a machine. And by the definitions of computer science, it could be considered a computational device (a network being a device). Most germane to its continued operation, by the definitions of physics, it is a nonlinear dynamic complex system. By those rules, it is constantly fluctuating in a determined though seemingly random fashion, and subject to unpredictable catastrophic failure via the "butterfly effect". Of course, equally likely is the possibility of sudden, inexplicable surges in extremely high efficiency, but when it works right no one notices. Just be glad it's still as fragmented as it is. If it were better integrated, but still being run as it is, as massively multiple semi-dependent linear systems, the whole thing could crash instead of just parts of it.
The real and pertinent issues with respect to failures (vs. not) are effective control and feedback/foward systems, not regulation/deregulation.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Florida Power and Light has hooked up shut-offs to my pool pump and air conditioners, with which they can kill the power for a given number of minutes a day. In return I get a small discount every month.
FPL On Call
So in effect I'm paying for less reliability, and FPL can switch some customers off and escape rolling blackouts. And they didn't need to build two new plants whose only purpose would be to provide for peak usage.
Rick DeBay
The grid being a distributed system of power generators. Each power plant is independent and is governed by a simple set of rulls, but collectivly the overall system gives rise to complex and unexpected behavior. Stephan Wolfram goes into this sort of thing in a New kind of science, but I have also seen this in Peer to Peer network or even the early studies of TCP trafic flows causing ocilations. Also highway trafic simulations exibit this collective behavior that is now well understood.
The problem here stems from power plants haveing inadequate monitoring and control to allow then map the power loads and to trigger small local rolling blackouts and predict internal and external power loads before they get out of hand.
Currently the whole power generator kicks off line! causing them to take hours to restart. This make sense if there is a crowbar short in some of the lines directly out of the plant, but not if it's an external surge triggered from another grid.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
From the article:
> Experts widely agree that such failures of the power-transmission
> system are a nearly unavoidable product of a collision between the
> physics of the system and the economic rules that now regulate it.
So, when physics collides with economics, which one wins?
this is one example of how capitalism is not a perfect system!
Well, one problem is that capitalism (or Neo-Liberal Economics) assumes that there is competition, which means, there are no monopolies.
Another assumption is that what we have is capitalism in the first place.
Also, I don't think that Libertarian and Socalism are mutually exclusive. There are examples of Libertarian Socialism and I think the GPL is a perfect example: Anyone who wants to use GPL Software can, and if you don't want to use it or contribute to it, you don't have to.
With utilities you have a choise: You can have a monopoly with regulation to ensure the ratepayers don't get ripped off, or you can have a Public Utility District. The "California Energy Crisis" fraud proved that monopolies don't work when you take away the regulation. Companies got greedy and turned off the power to increase the prices.
Here in Portland we have a ballot initiative to make Portland a PUD. After dealing with Enron as the owner of PGE I'm much more concerned about Corporate Fraud than Government Incompetense. (I'm concerned about both but Enron's track record says a lot.)
Possibly another example of Libertarian Socalism is people getting solar panels and feeding the excess back into the grid. You don't have to buy solar panels, but it will probably reduce your bills by a lot, makes your bills more predictable, and distributes the power generation across the entire grid. When everyone has a little power generating system it is a lot harder to have a black out. Also, business tend to use more electricity durring the day, and homes use more at night so it is a symbiotic relationship.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
The Power Systems Engineering Research Center's web site (http://pserc.org/Resources.htm) provides information about the on-going investigation on the U.S./Canadian Blackout. Sections include: - Blackout Description - Data Measurements - Investigations - Background Papers - etc. For an overview of the Blackout and unfolding information about it, see: http://pserc.org/PSERC_Blackout_Overview.htm