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US Electrical Grid On the Edge of Failure
ananyo writes "Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned, simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse, according to a mathematical study of spatial networks. The upshot of the study is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse. The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. The authors say that this outage is an example of the inherent instability the study describes. But others question whether the team's conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world. 'The problem is that this doesn't reflect the physics of how the power grid operates,' says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage."
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
The goal for a good analogy should always be to score points and win the game.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As every electrical engineer knows, an AC transmission system is a quadratic-complex system. And in the sense of both the inherent complexity and the complex numbers involved. There is no energy storage in the system (no inertia), has noticeable delays, and it is tightly coupled. Only high redundancy and decoupling can make the system more reliable. But that is costly. Who wants to pay more?
American house wiring runs on 110V, which is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
Any voltage is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
....but we are used to regular power outages here in Upstate New York. We lose it for several hours monthly and have an automatic backup generator for these purposes. We have a Gas stove, wood fireplace, and oil lamps so even without the generator it would just be darker and the internet would not work. My point is, the northeast blackout proved just how unprepared most Americans are for a power outage. I understand the technical challenges of living on the 30th story of a building are much greater than for my house in the middle of no where, but there are some basic things you can do to function for a few days without power if need be.
neorush
not enough sunlight in many parts of the country
Actually most of the USA gets more sun than Germany but they are building out their solar capacity at record speed.
high capital cost, maintenance costs, etc
In case you missed it, the price of solar cells has fallen off a cliff in the last few years. And some companies will install the system for no money down, then sell you electricity at a rate lower than the utility.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
That's what every Citroen salesman used to parrot, yes.
And it's true! (for some models with self-levelling suspension)
eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HK2nTRvm_s
No sig today...
It does not make sense in your situation as a renter, but when you own it does, even with where installation costs and everything else are now. The average American family uses 940kwh/month.
Let's take the case of a house in NYC, which has both some of the highest labor costs (pertinent to installation costs of solar panels) and electricity costs ($0.35/kwh from ConEdison). You need 26 290W panels to produce the electricity you need. The cost of panels plus installation totals $48.5K. After just the federal incentive it comes down to $32K. The ConEdison-provided electricity costs $4K/yr, so that's a break-even time of 8 years. Most people own their homes longer than 8 years.
When you factor in the New York State solar incentive of 25% the break-even drops to 5 years. When you consider that ConEdison's price per kwh has increased more than 10% every year for the past 10 years, that break-even time drops to 4-4.5 years.
If the upfront cost of $22K is still a barrier when you buy that house, you can shop around for energy efficient mortgages. They lend to you at an advantageous rate so you can afford to upgrade the home's energy efficiency, as in they knock of a couple basis points. The savings over a 30-yr mortgage are huge, on top of what you save on the electricity (most solar panels are rated for that long).
In short, it already makes financial sense to do this stuff, and since the cost of going solar dropped 80% between 2008-2012 it's only going to get easier.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.