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Electronic Armageddon, and No Electricity Either
Smart grid technology is a hot issue on Capitol Hill, but some are raising questions about the idea. In recent days we've discussed the smart grid's potential exposure to worm attacks, consumers' unreadiness for the idea, and whether the whole concept may need a rethink. A Congressional hearing on Thursday surfaced another reason for caution: the smart grid's vulnerability to EMP. "Electromagnetic Pulse" refers to the damage caused in electrical circuits and systems when a nuclear explosive goes off nearby. The electric grid as it's currently constituted is vulnerable to EMP; the further down the road we go towards a smart grid, the more vulnerable it will become. "It makes a great equalizer for small nations looking to stand up to military Goliaths, argues Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (Rep.-Md.), a former research scientist and engineer who has worked in the past on projects for NASA and the military. All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then fling the device high into the air and detonate its warhead. Such a system might not paralyze the entire United States, he concedes. 'But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it's as good as a bulls eye.'"
The utilities want the government to foot the bill for them to have modern telemetry as well as a bunch of routine maintenance type of stuff - old transformers rebuilt, etc - stuff that improves their old, core business. Stuff that they've been miserably slacking on for the last 20 years order to pocket more short term profits while their infrastructure rots.
The Big Lie is that this modernization supposedly needs to be done in order for green energy technologies (eg grid interactive solar) to work, when in fact, nothing could be further than the truth. Grid-interactive systems actually RELIEVE load on the grid, and they do it especially at peak hours when AC loads kick in. And it works just great on the plain old dumb grid we have today. They might feel threatened because local generation obviously reduces the amount of energy sold, but it also makes that energy cheaper to sell and distribute because it smooths out the peak loads and reduces average current on long-distance transmission lines.
But the power company has this line that it's making the grid "congested" as if the electrons are trying to go in **ZOMG!** both directions or something! It's a crock of shit - propaganda and political games to try and fleece us of money that should otherwise be spent on deploying modern technologies. Not saying the grid doesn't have its place, on the contrary: grid-interactive is a very elegant solution. But the supposed smart-grid is being pushed in a very underhanded way and it's not at all what people think it is.
In the documentary film Escape from LA, Snake Plisskin (who I thought was taller) shuts down the entire world with an EMP allowing Latin American countries to invade the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_bomb It's scary brilliant how they convert explosive energy to electromagnetic. It's also far easier to build than any nuclear device.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Carbon dust, preferably something that drifts easily, probably something on a nanoscale like carbon nanotubes. That will damage all kinds of electronics. Many Air Force military communications and computer facilities near flight lines have vents to cut off outside air. They're used mostly for when a plane crashes and burns though it can afford minimal protection against NBC's.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon
I'd imagine a lot of Evil Plans have that one basic requirement.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
El Reg got this one about right. ( Do check the comments though.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Yeah because a sea worthy steamer, scud missile launcher and crude nuclear weapon are so easy to come by. Not saying the smart grid doesn't have other problems but it is far from easy to do serious EMP damage.
Well at least on purpose, all you really need is one good sized CME, Coronal mass ejection, which happen about every 50 years so we're due for one. Of course about every 500 years we get a big one, one that will make the Amish look high-tech afterwards, the last one was in1859;
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
He spent buzillions out of pocket to buy the windchargers, some non trivial amount. Yes, the water delivery right of way issue is also involved, but he also has the water that needs delivering some day.
My guess is eventually they will relent when they really *need* the water in those metro regions, and it will just be more expensive then. His was a damn good idea, replace the natgas used for electricity plants with the wind power. The natgas then can be diverted and goes to fuel fleet vehicles, to keep the conversion costs down (all the same model, etc). The natgas is cheaper to run the vehicles on. Oil cash doesn't have to be exported out of the US so it saves on balance of payment issues. win/win/win/win overall.
Ya, he stood to make some serious dollars on the deal, but so effin what?? Where's the beef there, you work for free or don't expect a return on a lot of investment? Bigass huge projects that succeed *tend to make some bigass dollars*. That's just reality, no different from anything else like that in our world.
He's an old guy, been in the energy biz for a long time, and I saw his plan as something he really thought about, came up with a two birds with one stone deal that would work, FOUR birds really, and he wanted it for a legacy contribution as well. The latter is a guess but bet I am right on that one.
Any random young guy can be scary smart, but it takes an older guy who started out scary smart to see all the angles, because you only get that with a ton of real world experience.
He really does not "need" the money at his level and age. Like Gates going off developing medicine action for africa, something to do while you are already rich, and it is in his level of proven expertise.
As to the water, the southwest is in for real long term drought according to the bulk of the climate guessers, while at the same time demands keep going up. We WILL be building more water transfer pipelines, either now while it is cheaper, or later on when it is way more expensive. No "ifs" about it at all, it is GOING to happen because it needs to happen.
Running the new water pipelines from the same areas roughly where the new electricity (which we will also be needing shortly) will be coming from on the same right of way *made sense*. Doing it in two different right of ways at two different times when they start and stop at the same places roughly is way stupid and short sighted.
Way stupid, and way shortsighted. Those boneheads jumped the shark by not doing it all now while materials are cheaper and there's a glut of non working unemployed construction labor out there. They got handed an incredible deal and blew it!
I give the dude props, he has a logical and well thought out long view, not that lame "this quarter" view or "this election cycle" view that most businesses and politicians have and that we all suffer from constantly.
The ship, or boat, is no problem at all. A tugboat and a garbage scow will accomodate a scud missile - you don't need anything massively huge, like the USS Enterprise. Some private yachts are big enough for the purposes being discussed here. Stability isn't a big issue here, where the goal is to lob a package somewhere/anywhere near a city. Of course, a larger, more stable weapons platform would be desirable, but people work with what is available.
The launcher isn't that big a deal. Iraq has a surplus at the moment. The thing is only truck sized, weighs less than 20 tons, easily portable. The missile isn't hard to get, either.
The only real obstacle, is to get some weaponized fissionable material into a warhead that will fit on the scud, then control it. I recall that there were some briefcase nukes that came up missing in the old Soviet Union. Who has them? THAT is the scary part of this whole scenario - we don't know if the bad guys might have them.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Forget the E bomb... How about we get a couple of guys with a pickup and a couple of hundred bucks of steel pipe from Home Depot... they drive around flinging the pipes into transformer substations....
"Security" is a lie. There's always a way around whatever protections you can put in place, and the false protection is often extremely expensive while the workaround is usually cheap.
Security Theater at it's finest...
I recall that there were some briefcase nukes that came up missing in the old Soviet Union.
You mean you recall hearing one of the myths about there being suitcase nukes. (read truth here)
The key flaw in the mythology is the "minor" flaw that fissionable material in a device that small would decompose in a matter of months. Even if there were such devices, their warheads would now be all but useless.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I actually worked with nascent smart grid technologies in the late 1990s. We wrote energy monitoring software for mid-size and larger enterprises. They have time of use rates and so understanding how to do peak shaving was very beneficial to them and they would wind up investing considerably to bring their demand down. These systems are usually pairs with SCADA systems that intimately wire up their processes and with all of that comes a certain amount of redundancy. The thing is though, if the control systems were to go offline, they could certainly still continue.
The question is put, do you need to have telemetry on residences? I would say the answer is no. Well in the late 1990s a load recorder by itself would set you back about a $1000 and then you needed either a network jack and a phone line to talk. I would be shocked if the same hardware could not be put together for a fraction of that, and I'd bet that a utility could get a smart meter at the residence for not that expensive in hardware cost. The real cost is the labor of the electrician to install it. This is a skilled job and its going to take some money to pay some guy to be out there for an afternoon wiring up a load recorder at your house. Then from there, the load recorder would have to attach to your communications infrastructure, and what might that be? Well, it could piggy back your internet by being its own wireless, it could plug into your POTS, it could have its own cell line (and boy that would drive costs up). The central software to manage all of that is there.
And so, after the utility spends millions of bucks installing all these meters on residences, what will they find? They already -KNOW- that the number 1 predictor of consumer electrical demand is the degree day. Seriously, go have a look at the temperature curve for the last 90 days, and compare that to the spot energy price for the last 90 days. They are going to be almost identically the same shape...
One has to wonder, if there is not a simpler way to get consumers to peak shave. Perhaps the easiest thing might be to have a collective energy bonus. Basically, if the utility does not have to fire up its oil units on it a hot day, and can avoid running spinning reserves, there's a certain amount of give back they can profitably put on the table to get people to not use so much power. So what they could do during summer months is basically calculate a collective credit, where, if a region meets a certain usage reduction goal, everyone gets some amount of credit back on their bill. From there consumers could, instead of spending energy dollars on metering, could spend things on actually valuable peak shaving products, which no doubt the utility and its local energy services partners would be more than happy to sell, to make this an economical deal for everyone. With a collective energy bonus, you get most of the benefits of a peak shaved grid, but without having to actually build one.
This is my sig.
I'll ignore the smarmy insult...
Which part don't you understand? I'll clarify again.
He has water that is needed or will be needed, plus he invested in a large wind project for electricity, which is or will be needed as well. He doesn't own all the pieces for this project, but enough for a good start, and the plan itself makes several logical points. Right of ways are necessary to move these utility products, so of course the government would need to establish these routes, it's the basic way they are done in this nation with centralized delivery systems, which I termed the precedent. I then mentioned, just as a "for instance", that huge sums of money are being used to bailout some dubiously named banks, which I (and many other people) contend are more huge gambling casinos than anything else, and I said if these huge emergency sums were going to be spent anyway, I would much rather see these huge sums spent for national energy and water infrastructure projects, one example being the topic, the "Pickens' Plan", and also more scientific research and development, etc. What isn't clear?
Well, that's your opinion and you are welcome to it, I just am of a differing opinion. He bought the windchargers, bunches of them, big ones, so it was both. Water was a huge part of it, and the first part of it, that I will grant readily, but the plan itself evolved.
And I've driven across Texas a few times..I think they have more than enough land for *both* a lot of windchargers and solar thermal farms! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
And either way, if you are talking electricity, you'd *still* need the right of ways to build new transmission towers and powerlines, wind or solar thermal or any other method, so that's a complete wash and a non issue. The windchargers are built or being built, they got contracted for and paid, they are going to go in someplace, either the Texans will get the juice or someone else will. Wind in large enough numbers and over a decent enough area can provide base load enough power, it's used all over now and is still, for the last buncha years running, the fastest method of new plants going in outside of the chinese coal burning plants (they are doing one new one per week average, that's why I think leaving them out of environmental treaties is lame and disingenuous and why even though I am pretty green I did not support Kyoto and I do not support the dems/obama "cap and trade" swindle stealth tax. the atmosphere has no boundaries).
And theoretically speaking, wind verus solar thermal,if a few or even few dozen of your 1-2 megawatt windchargers go down in your large farm of hundreds or thousands across many states, or the wind is not blowing there right now, no biggee, it's just not that much of a huge loss all things considered, but your 300 megawatt solar thermal plant, if that goes down..some huge city is sitting sweating in the dark, maybe for a long time.
Something to be said for *more points of production*.
All the various methods have benefits and tradeoffs and are part of the big energy mix we have. I want to get away from the "all or most of your eggs in one basket" approach we have been using. I like the "all of the above" method instead.
I have nothing against solar thermal. I like all forms of alternative energy and unlike 99% of all the slashdotters here who comment on energy topics I own both a solar PV rig and a windcharger. I just liked his plan because it was a credible quadruple play, one better than a hat trick. Yep, he stood to make a lot of money..all big energy (and water) projects when they are successful (built and running) make a lot of money. Because the world has an insatiable demand for more and more power and more and more water, to more and more places.
Personally I am in favor of a lot more smaller individual projects and a big decentralization effort (and re purpose a lot of closed rust belt factories to do this and put a lot of blue collar guys back to work), but I also recognize the need for centralized power delivery to provide juice for the cities primarily. The rural areas and suburbs could be well served with mass adoption of solar PV in a large number of areas for example, then no new big "plants" or new towers would be needed at all. And a *ton* of family farms could be doing some base model A large windcharger, provide all their own power most of the time plus sell any surplus. When and if I see a smallish home owner styled solar thermal rig (beyond a water heater into electricity production as part of the package, or just ground loop geothermal), I'd endorse that as well. I've seen several one-off prototypes, but nothing else. Might exist but I haven't seen it.
I like big power projects, mediums and small, all of the above. And I *really* endorse the idea of a huge national water pipeline grid, to move water around from where it is in excess to where it is in deficit. A lot of pipelines and hundreds of new deep reservoirs. *Really*, as in a big huge national "we need this yesterday" infrastructure project. Linking up already existing pipelines could help, then y