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After Recent US Storms, Why Are Millions Still Without Power?
Hugh Pickens points out a report from Jamie Smith Hopkins that "The unusual nature of the 'derecho' is complicating efforts to get everyone's much-needed air conditioning up and running again as more than 1.4 million people from Illinois to Virginia still remain without power and power companies warn some customers could be without power for the rest of the week in the worst hit areas. Utilities don't have enough staff to handle severe-storm outages – the expense would send rates soaring – so they rely on out-of-state utilities to send help, says Stephen Woerner, Baltimore Gas and Electric's (BGE) chief operating officer. Hurricane forecasts offer enough advanced warning for utilities to 'pre-mobilize' and get the out-of-state assistance in place but the forecast for Friday's walloping wind was merely scattered thunderstorms. 'No utility was prepared for what we saw in terms of having staff available that first day,' says Woerner. But is it a given that a strong storm would cause this magnitude of damage to the electricity grid? 'Even without pursuing the extremely expensive option of burying all of the region's electrical lines, the utilities can and do take steps between bouts of severe weather to prevent outages,' writes the Baltimore Sun, adding that consumer advocates are concerned that utilities invest sufficiently in preventive maintenance. 'Tree trimming and replacement of old infrastructure — particularly in areas that have been shown to be vulnerable to previous storms — helps prevent outages.'"
It's because we never bother to maintain our infrastructure. We build bridges and let 'em fall down. We hang power lines off wooden poles, and never bother burying them. We sort of fix it when it breaks, but then it breaks again, but we don't really learn from it.
--Udo.
Utility rate regulation is a system of assuring the investors of their return in return for doing something the public wants done. US Utility Rate Regulation used to be aimed at making sure that the maximum generation capacity was present with adequate return for lines and repairs etc. Under the George W Bush administration this regulation shifted towards "Pipeline" design for power sales. This stripped the local Coop or supply company of its revenue for service and maintainence. Further changes in regulation changed the position of the large generators so that they have little or no incentive to build new facilities. As such the USA is losing its grid to a very finely tuned profit machine that has no instinct for self preservation. Everything is now and nothing is tomorrow. The result is that the USA is fast sinking into a 3rd world power grid with massive failures and stunningly stupid management. The power rating system optimizes the push towards insufficient demand and planned brownouts. The 1930's regulation design caused the largest expansion and most robust utility system in the world. The 2000's are seeing this systematically dismantled in favor of "deregulation" which in this case is a farce because the regulation exists this is only a matter of how it is designed.
Here in Europe, the news reports a very simple reason: a totally dilapidated infrastructure. Most power wires still hanging off of poles, subject to lightning, wind and falling trees. Decades-old transformers and switching stations that fail catastrophically, and sometimes cause cascading failures.
I haven't lived on the East Coast for decades - any power engineers want to comment on the truth or falsity of these reports?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
As someone who was without power from Friday night to yesterday afternoon in Maryland (served by BG&E), I get that this was bad storm and outages are probably inevitable. My problem is: Why are there so many of these outages?
I moved to my current residence in 2006 and there have been at least 4 outages lasting longer than 24 hours. I think I'm missing one in that count, but I didn't want to put it down without remembering it better. But we've had one of these 24+ hour outages each of the last three years.
When I step outside during an outage, I'm greeted with the sound of generators all around me (including my own, but it's quiet enough that I hear several others over it). Why do we all have generators? Because we need them so frequently! I bet if I did a poll, half the neighbors would either have a generator or have power from someone that does. And a good portion of the rest probably have friends or family far enough that they might have power, but near enough to make staying at their place feasible.
Meanwhile...my water works fine. My natural gas service works fine - we were able to take hot showers throughout the outage. My FiOS worked fine after I hooked it to the generator. All of those things have one thing in common: the lines are buried. It's sad that my internet service is more reliable than my electricity. If it's so expensive to bury wires, how come Verizon just did it a couple years ago when they installed FiOS?
BG&E did a "reliability improvement plan" in our city a year or two ago, moving some main wires underground. It seems to have cut down on the shorter power outages, but no such luck for the longer outages. We're tired of it. My wife and I are going to write BG&E a nice letter that basically asks "WTF?" I plan to CC the city council and local papers as well.
I sat in on a town hall meeting where JCP&L fumbled majorly in explaining themselves after taking a week or more to restore power in northern NJ. They gave all manner of excuses, and the meeting attendees pointed out endless examples of dead branches hanging over wires. Their policy? Then don't touch the branch unless the branch is *hanging* on the wire. How's that for foresight? The moment a strong wind kicks up, they lose power. They're so fucking cheap that they fired all their linemen, and now out-of-state emergency support has become the ONLY support.
Shame on them.
I completely agree here... When I moved back to Europe in 94 they were in full swing moving power cables from above ground to below ground. Now in 2012 it is rare to see an above ground house to house power cable... With most of them, outside of the big distributor cables, underground it is also nicer looking as there are no more power lines.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Yes, let's spend trillions for that extra 1% uptime instead of just let the people who absolutely have to have emergency power buy an inexpensive generator.
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it's like the wal mart attitude of just buy the cheapest no matter what the hidden costs are of buying more products to make up for the crappy cheapest product in the first place
same here. dollar wise for the initial costs its cheaper to put up overhead wires. and the repair costs are probably low enough that digging holes is always too expensive.
and the fact that when you get to the republican areas everyone is always against higher taxes so they make due with crappy infrastructure
Remember - government spending is bad. REGARDLESS of the outcome for us. Government spending = taxes, and as everyone knows, this country was founded on three principles:
1.God is in heaven, satan is in hell, and we are a Christian nation.
2. I have the right to own any firearm I wish, up to and including napalm.
3. TAXATION??? This country isn't designed to have taxes. Why should I have to pay for YOUR roads and YOUR power and YOUR schools? Socialist pig.
Seriously, though, it seems to me that infrastructure spending is one of those no-brainer things that shouldn't even be a question.
Right because they're not paying health dividends instead of paying for regular maintenance....
"...recent Public Service Commission investigation of Pepco found a years-long pattern of shirking such maintenance (curiously, at the same time that the company was paying its stockholders healthy dividends). The commission handed down a $1 million fine, its largest ever, for what it called a pattern of neglect. "
Moron...
> Seriously, though, it seems to me that infrastructure spending is one of those no-brainer things that shouldn't even be a question.
Of course it's a question; why should it be any different just because it's "infrastructure?" If there is demand for it, let the free-market provide it... nothing dictates that "infrastructure" be provided by some entity that maintains a monopoly on the use of force. Note too that "free market" includes voluntarily assembled co-operatives and communes. Communal activity for common good is one thing... forced participation in some initiative, at the point of a gun barrel, is something quite different.
Except that utilities are a regulated industry so free market doesn't apply.
I think you're right, except for the spin. The idea of throwing warm bodies at repairing high power lines is not a good one. The reason the liability would be high is because it would be carnage. The job is already dangerous - it's the 8th most dangerous job in the US. Work that is a safe distance from power lines won't be done by the specialized workers you're talking about anyways. As for those greedy unions, right now they're working 16 hour days in 100+ degree heat. I think they deserve every penny. Electricity is cheap.
Have you actually been to any third world countries? I have, and I can tell you that the US is nothing at all like a third world country. In the slightest.
Case in point, I walk into my hotel for business in a third world country *at night*, it's a fairly nice hotel even. The power flicks out. No one is fazed because the computers and some lighting are still on, but most of the lighting is off and I am standing in the dark in a hotel lobby, without a cloud in the sky. Yes, this is due to scheduled blackouts. The blackouts continue for the rest of my two week stay, with perfect weather. That is what a third world country is like.
In the US, an unexpectedly strong storm with hurricane force winds come through. Some portion of people are without power for a few days because it was basically a hurricane without the days long weather track. That is annoying, but not a big deal.
As for the rest of it, the US has a shitty public transit system, but 95% of Americans own cars with relatively cheap gas. We don't *need* a public transit system like you might in other countries. The internet may well be slower than what you have into your house, maybe, but I can still do pretty much anything that anyone needs to do, short of running a popular website from my home computer.
The problems you are talking about are what we call "first world problems", not third world ones.
We spent 4 trillion on a tax break and two wars and got NOTHING for it. Why not spend trillions on building a huge industry that would make us energy independent? Money spent on building shit benefits us all. The fifties were full of crazy ideas and huge projects and what did we get, the most awesome country in the world.
Also "inexpensive generator" do you mean one that can run AC? So in my house that is 4x40 amp circuits, plus a 15 amp for the fridge, two more 15's for the lights so a ~20K watt generator? So $5k plus installation, that's a two day job for an electrician so lets say $10k installed. Even if that is one in ten house houlds in America that is a fuck load of money. Why not spend it on something that will generate electricity for many many years and give us a hard currency export.
Print it. It is called stimulus. We need to bury all of our lines AND run fiber that is owned by the public. If we do not engage in physical infrastructure (data and roads/energy) soon it doesn't matter if you fix education, the job market or international trade. If we do not have the medium with which to facilitate economic activity it will be like taking the wheels off of a bus.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
If anyone really gave a shit they would just let the other political party take full credit for the idea and legislative implementation. Get it done. The greatest infrastructure planner/implementer ever used to say, "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you are willing to let someone else take the credit."
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
You're the first to mention tree trimming. That's a big debate in itself.
People complained about outages after Hurricane Whatever a few years ago so the utility came through and cut back everything. My neighborhood looked like a war zone when they were done. They even bush-hogged my flower garden. Then everybody complained about the trimming. Of course, we still lost power for 36 hours last weekend.
Every homeowner should have a generator, a water pump, and a gun. Waiting until you need one to get it is too late.
:wq
Because "free market" is a lousy way to provide essential services. If you do, then only high profit neighborhoods will have affordable power. Most rural communities are heavily subsidized by their denser neighbors.
If this was a free market, then utilities would pull out of poor and low profit neighborhoods.
I know; I work for a utility. We have neighborhoods where we will never, ever, "make a profit", because we had to sink so much into the infrastructure that at our normal rates we will never make our investment back.
On the whole we're "profitable" - as profitable as a public corporation can be. But we could be raking in the big bucks if we were private and allowed to abandon "poorly performing" or "unprofitable" neighborhoods.
So your "free market" would take us back to the days when the rich had power, clean water, sewer, and internet, and the poor lived in squalor and filth.
they would be difficult to find and extremely expensive to fix. I'm not sure that I see underground cabling to be that much of an advantage.
Look up Time Domain Reflectometry. With it, an engineer can find a line break or insulation leakage to within a few centimeters on a kilometers-long stretch of wire. Underground damage is just not all that hard to find anymore. As far as expense, maintenance of overhead wires is surprisingly high. They have to continually trim trees to keep them away, they have to continually fix broken wires due to storms or cars and trucks accidentally ramming poles, and the risks to passersby from downed wires is a huge liability, with millions of dollars of lawsuits per death on the line. Compare those to the costs of burying a cable that basically will just sit there for years on end, with generally no significant mechanical stresses on it to cause failures.
The only drawback is making the investment to bury the wires. The payback is measured in decades, not months like the Chief Financial Officers want to see. They'd rather spend money on investments with quick profits.
John
There are also geographic issues as well. East of Houston to Florida is swamp. Good luck burying anything there. There is a reason why Louisiana is known for its elaborate crypts and morgues. There is just no way to bury the dead, so they have to remain above ground.
The US is a very disparate country. Some places the cities are as safe as Europe (Seattle, Portland, and chunks of NYC.) Other places, not so much. One of the main reason why some cities are burying cables now is because overhead lines tend to be a target for metal thieves so they can get their next meth fix.
PLEASE PLEASE buy a real transfer switch. It will only add another couple of hundreds of dollars, but prevents the backfeed from killing the guy trying to fix your power.
Don't forget that hose poor living in squalor and filth would be stealing from and infecting the rich, and periodically lining them up against walls and shooting them.
Subsidizing basics like power, clean water, sewer and education for the poor works out quite well for the rich overall.
Gov't spending IS bad regardless of outcome. ALL gov't spending is bad under ALL situations.
Sending First generation and low-income students through college is bad? I always assumed that more education = less money spent in the long run . . . . But I guess that decades of research (just google that) can be wrong. . . .
The productive USA was built without income taxes, without corporate taxes, without payroll taxes, without FDIC, Fed, IRS, FDA, FHA, EPA, CIA, FBI, SS, Medicare, EI, Medicaid, welfare, without dep't of energy, education, agriculture, small business, commerce, interior, HUD, etc.
Do you know why those things exist? To protect citizens. You can say what you want about the Gub'ment being out to get you, but it's true. Private enterprise in the 19th and early 20th century proved one thing, over-and-over, it will cut costs to the point of being dangerous to its workers, just to increase short-term profits. What choice do we have? Are you telling me that we can trust corporations to do what's in our best interests? If you say yes, please google anything with large businesses and the start of the labor movement.
But how does a country become a productive exporter, creditor without gov't building infrastructure? Because it's not true that gov't is needed to build any of it, what IS true is that WEALTH is needed to build infrastructure.There has to be a REASON to build infrastructure, there has to be wealth first, there has to be a promise of making a return - the profit motive is the driver, nothing else.
Okay, what about us who live where it wouldn't be profitable to run power, water or any other essential service? I guess we're just screwed. And Profit as the driver is an incredibly fine line. Today's attitude of bar-the-door short-term profits at the expense of all else doesn't exactly lend itself to developing long-term strategy. You know what does? Slow-moving government.
Infrastructure? How about the Keystone pipeline - the actual PRODUCTIVE infrastructure that private companies want to build, because they believe it's going to be profitable, it's going to make money. Is that the wrong thing today somehow - making money? USA was built by business, not by any government. USA was built by ABSENCE of gov't, people came to USA for freedoms from their totalitarian governments.
Keystone pipeline = 250,000 jobs is what we're told. NO, Keystone pipeline = 250,000 MOSTLY TEMPORARY man-year jobs. So, if it creates 20,000 jobs that last for 6 months, that's 10,000 jobs, correct? Nope. A job is a stable, long-term position. A temporary employment opportunity is what they're counting. It has nothing to do with long-term solutions. Granted, it's better than nothing, but change the discussion from how many jobs it will create by hyperbole, and actually give us a realistic number. I haven't been able to find one. And I'm not willing to trust someone who is driven by PROFIT to do what is in my best interest. No thank you.
The countries today that do the best are those that removed the most government controls from their economy over time, and USA is moving in a completely wrong direction.
Citation please? Are you talking about third world hell-holes? Or the pseudo-socialist Europeans?
You want infrastructure? You can't have infrastructure, there is nothing to build it for, and if there is something to build it for (like an oil pipeline) you are arguing against it, and it's not even a government project. You are not going to have infrastructure, because you don't have production. You are not going to have education and science, because you don't have manufacturing and engineering.
Wat? Are you saying that infrastructure necessarily equals profits and oil? Infrastructure means fixi
PLEASE PLEASE buy a real transfer switch. It will only add another couple of hundreds of dollars, but prevents the backfeed from killing the guy trying to fix your power.
More like $300-$400 US for the switch, an additional $300-$400 US to get a qualified electrician to install it properly, and $50-$100 for the proper permits. YMMV of course based on location.
Having said that, it is something you really should do if you are going to connect a generator to your house wiring in any way, shape, or form. To expand a bit, a transfer switch connects your house wiring to your generator's power while at the same time disconnecting your house wiring from your power company's feed. If you don't disconnect from the power company, power from your generator can back feed onto the pole and ultimately down the line to where a lineman might be working. At best the lineman will detect that the line is still live and it will take time to track down your feed. At worst he could be electrocuted. No matter what, switching your house systems to generator power should automatically disconnect those systems from the public utility. If it takes two separate actions then one of them can be forgotten and someone can get hurt or killed.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
imminent domain
LOOK OUT!
It's about to happen.
What's about to happen you ask?
Domain. It's imminent.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.