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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."
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
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.
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 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.
But since the electric net plays a fairly important role in making all the routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices work you cannot see the two apart... So to me it seems a non-issue : they both are connected and dependant on each other. Since the internet is used to connect electrical equipment all around the globe you could say that we have a global electric-powered information machine. And that is the real news here.
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"'
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.
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.
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.
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!
Hydrogen has an escape velocity sufficiently great to escape the earth's gravitational pull. That means that is doesn't exist naturally on earth. That means that you have to make it from other things. Because hydrogen makes heat (i.e. is exothermic) when burnt, making hydrogen is endothermic, which means you have to put heat in, in other words burn some kind of other fuel. This manufacturing process is necessarily less efficient than just burning the original fuel, whether it be mineral oil/gas, or agricultural products like wood or plant oil.
This is a matter of scientific law. No amount of environmental wishful thinking can change these laws. You can't have a hydrogen economy. You can talk about it to other people who lack the scietific background to grasp why it can't be done, and you can run cars on the stuff with relatively little conversion. But what you can't ever have is the efficency of mineral or agricultural fuels, becuase necessasily they are used to make the hydrogen in the first place, and that process itself is inefficent.
Also, you need to see fuel-cells in their proper context, which is as a store of electricity - lightwieght high power batteries. Even if they get the technology right you are still limited to conventional power sources for them, which is either charging them from the power in your house, or charging them somewhere else and changing them often. Both of these are merely enegy displacement, and are still less effecient than burning , say, natural gas in an internal combustion engine.
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
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.
:)
If you are interested in the deregulation here in the US, you can poke around this web site....
BTW, large portions of the United States deregulated without any problems. New England is mostly there and Texas has deregulated without any problems.
The main problem with the North American grid, as I understand it, is that it basically works by having twenty guys spread across the NA calling each other when something goes wrong in their part of the electric grid. It's the administration-by-Batphone system and the same low-tech solution they've used for 80 years. Like the US Air Traffic Control system, everyone is afraid to upgrade to computer control because they don't trust the electronics.