Slashdot Mirror
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."
So facebook could probably lose a few servers is probably the more apt analogy, yes?
...I was talking to someone on a forum about a hot-air rework station he bought. It's basically a glorified hair-dryer. Every time he turns it on the lights flicker, and then they dim periodically as the heater turns on/off.
American house wiring seems to be terrible. There also seem to be a lot of barriers to setting up solar feed-in systems. The concept of a smart grid is unheard of.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The capital city of the 9th or 10th largest state. If the wind blows or the rain falls or someone somewhere drives a car and gently brushes a power pole, the power goes out. And our wonderful power company rarely if even even acknowledges there is a power problem and all their lines are busy etc etc etc But thank the lord they pretty much get 8% rate hikes every year.
Basically, the problem can be almost entirely blamed on FirstEnergy of Ohio. They had, in a matter of hours:
- A software bug in the monitoring tool.
- No backup monitoring, so when the first one wasn't started properly there was no way of knowing there was a problem.
- A plant shutdown due to poor maintenance.
- Multiple power lines failures due to not cutting back trees as they were supposed to.
- Alarm systems breaking, that were simply ignored.
- Utterly failing to notify nearby states that there was a problem so they could prevent it from spreading.
You'll notice that almost all of these problems would not have happened had they not cut corners wherever they thought they could get away with it. And if the US electric grid is in trouble, I'd have every reason to expect that it was other electric companies doing the same sort of thing.
Can we get Morgan Freeman on the case?
I am officially gone from
I remember it vividly, I was leaving SE Michigan to drive to my home the upper part of lower Michigan. By sheer luck, my home was outside the area affected. Help my decision to work from home permanently.
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?
....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
Oh, I see.
An outage that involved 'the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada...cutting power to some 50 million people' WOULD be very hard to extrapolate to the real world.
Thank you, I thought otherwise on first glance.
No brain, no pain.
I've been seeing it coming for years. It seems like it would be prudent to have other means of power generation at your house if at all possible. You can get a generator that'll run on LP or natural gas, power your whole house and cut in automatically if there's an outage for less than 10 grand. After a three day outage last winter, this has moved WAY up my list of priorities. If I had an exta few tens of millions sitting around I'd just drop a pebble bed reactor in my back yard and watch the vein in that one neighbor's head just explode! Heh heh heh.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production. Individual homes can often produce as much power as they need with solar and micro-wind turbines. If they tie in to a micro-grid--essentially a neighborhood-level grid--they can load balance against their neighbors.
Decentralizing power production yields many other benefits, too. Individuals save tons of money on power bills (the cost of solar, for example, has been dropping dramatically), the country produces less CO2, and everyone has a lot more money in their pockets they can boost the economy with.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
A downed transmission line in Ohio or wildfire in California shouldn't affect me.
http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/library/national_energy_grid/united-states-of-america/graphics/USA_grid.gif
The Swiss would like to greet another War-Untouched country, and demonstrate some modern infrastructure.
I know Jeff Dagle and he knows what he is talking about. I meet him when visiting PNNL earlier in the year and he understands how the bulk transmission system in the US works better than most people on the planet.
The best thing the US TSOs have done to prevent this happening again is install lots of PMUs under the NASPI program (see https://www.naspi.org/) which Jeff is a member of. This is what gives the TSOs (and all the regional coordination authorities etc....) the real-time operational awareness of the stability of the bulk transmission system that just didn't exist a decade ago.
This sort of rhetoric only kind of works if those countries have failed to update their electrical grids since then; even so, that was 65 years ago and you should probably get over it. The US not updating its own infrastructure is simply inexcusable.
Shareholder value could drop if people work out the next Enron too early?
National security could be pulled for the power or cooling water needs of new regional NSA sites?
The US grid seems to be well maintained, well thought out for the big power needs for large scale cold war production and now select tourist sites.
Long term what was build generations ago and patched up with a view on shareholder return will have to be thought about as populations shift and energy needs change again.
Smart meters and per device shut off for discounts could be interesting at a local level.
Solar FIT or NET payments could be reduced with the need for costly home engineering reports or state energy laws.
So yes expect some data to go dark just due to the pure embarrassment factor.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
By law, corporations in the US must enhance their shareholders value. That means they're cheap. Cheap infrastructures are not robust. They are built to fail. Another blackout that happened in the NE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965
Don't stop where the ink does.
Sweden, reporting in. In practice there are quite few countries where GP's assertion is even relevant (Germany is a given, but otherwise it's at most partial destruction).
So, GP is perhaps "informative" as the post is currently modded; just too bad the information in this case does not hold water.
Many eurotrash countries have a stiff government finger in the HV transmission soup, which means their investments might be based on something other than "cheapest stuff that probably won't cause global meltdown in next quarter". I live in Denmark and have had one 10 minutes power cut in the last 5 years.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
How could this post be modded Informative? The only information it contains is that the author of the post is an idiot. Europe was not "utterly destroyed". It's not just one country. Countries were affected differently, depending on where they were with respect to the fighting. We've already heard from Swiss and Swedish readers who live in countries that have working infrastructure despite the fact that they were not "utterly destroyed" in WWII. I didn't reply to this post before because I assumed that the poster was just trolling and that it would get moderated down as soon as a someone with mod points saw it. I'm replying now because it has somehow been moderated up.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130318-treading-softly-in-a-connected-world/
Just a few more classes or methiods away from utter chaos, unless its refactored.
We decided that regulating how much maintenance work utility companies have to do on their lines stifled innovation, so we deregulated. Naturally, said companies cut back on maintenance to save money. This was covered pretty well in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy by Greg Palast, flawed as he may be in terms of his self-importance.
Democracy Now discussion from 10 years ago.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
particularly when a forest fire burned one of the transmission lines, and another got so hot it sagged and shorted out. we had 24 hours of battery backup in the DA Hotel in San Jose, and when the Liebert went down, so did our service for 3 or 4 days. rotating blackouts for several weeks.
take any two lines down into any city, and you'll have the same thing anyplace. any two. even a piddly little 40 KV feeder.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I lived in Toronto at the time. We were without power for about 24 hours. We all banded together in a crisis situation to drink the beer while it was still cold.
Local bars and pubs were giving it away free. And it was patio-season too!
And I got to mock all of my friends whose cars were useless only because they didn't know how to manually open their garage doors. Funny.
I'm looking forward to the next power failure.
for less than 10 grand
Well then, I'll just head on down to WalMart and drop the extra $8k I have sitting around on a generator...
Oh wait.. anyone want to lend me 8K?
Well, I've observed the problem at multiple locations in the US and none in the EU.
Older buildings in general have shoddy wiring. Pretty obviously the EU has a lot of older buildings than the U.S...
Modern buildings in the U.S. have wiring that is just fine thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A gust of wind does not produce equal power even within the same neighborhood. And energy usage among households is not uniform even at time t1. What if I'm not home, not using the electricity generated from my wind turbine, but you are? What if we both have battery packs to store unused power generated, that smooth out availability between changes in windspeed? What if we store excess power as hydrogen that gets run back through a fuel cell when we need more power? Or, what if we sell back excess to the larger grid and have them cut us a check? You see, load balancing in a micro grid gives you all that flexibility and resilience.
These are all things that exist now, that people do. It's simply not widespread yet. But it will be.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
We need more police to watch the transmission lines to keep us safe from terrorists.
Ahh. Then it's not Facebook that faces disaster - it's my commute.
I just bought a Tesla Model S!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
That's why it's important to use wind maps (average wind speed where you are) and insolation (average number of daily hours of maximum solar production where you are) to determine if you should do wind/solar and how much. Energy storage (batteries, hydrogen, gravity, etc) help with temporal buffering and smoothing, as in, my solar array produced more than I needed yesterday but not as much as I need today. Micro-grids provide lateral buffering, as in, a tree branch took out my neighbor's wind turbine but he can still function because I and the neighbors are still producing.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that even on cloudy days solar panels still produce electricity, just not as much as on full sunny days. It's also worth pointing out that the house up the bend and slightly lower than me can have a different local wind speed; and if you live anywhere near an ocean or large body of water, there is almost never *no* wind.
So if ConEdison were to struggle to supply Jackson Heights and the swathes of Queens that always experience brownouts every summer and those areas were to have micro-grids in place, then they could continue to function no matter the problems ConEdison might have. That is the definition and benefit of "decentralization."
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
YOU are on edge of failure!!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
yes, my cousin lives there. that Barcelona blackout of 2007 was a doozy, wasn't it? 153 portable generators placed through the city with their constant loud noise, while it took a month to repair the infrastructure. Too bad they didn't get some Marshall plan love.
I couldn't let this go without a response. Greedy jerks are all over the place; however, the vehicles differ greatly. Monopolies have zero competition benefit.
FAITH in the superiority of "free enterprise" is a religion and your true god is Mammon.
Private interests use their ill gotten gains to corrupt and undermine democracy! Those corrupt officials who take an extra $100k are small fry who can't defend themselves anything like the CEOs and shareholders stealing millions do. The bigger the crime the LESS accountability. Don't rob banks, run them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Basically this is about the failover systems not having sufficient resources to handle their normal job plus the extra stuff failing over to them.
We've had that same issue at the hosting company where I worked 10 years ago. They had a regular power feed and a backup UPS-backed feed, plus an ATS system to automatically fail over the regular feed to the UPS feed when needed. The UPS-feed was regular power, plus batteries and a generator. The idea was that servers with multiple PDUs should be connected to both feeds and everything else to the regular feed. Now, both feeds had the same capacity ratings and the regular feed was close to maximum capacity. This shouldn't be an issue as the dual PDU servers were fairly few.
Now the regular power dies.
The UPS-backed feed now powers everything, including both PDUs in multiple PDU servers, bot the switch isn't completely instantaneous which causes a few servers (5%) to crash and reboot, causing more load still. Now we're quite a bit over capacity and the UPS feeds goes down too. Instant silence. No cooling, no fans, no hum. Just silence.
Lesson learned: Make sure you have enough capacity on your backup systems to handle both the combined needs and a generous margin to ensure that spikes relating to the switchover can be handled as well. Too many high tension systems have limited failover capacity so if more than one thing fails, overload is guaranteed and a cascade failure unavoidable.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The differences remain mostly semantics. Over here 'Residual Current Devices' are called 'Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter', or GFCI. If the device detects any imbalance of current between L-N or voltage on ground it trips. US standards for the leakage voltage is so small though that we only mandate it's usage on 'likely' circuits- outside, bathroom, and kitchen. Another option we have is Arc-fault devices, which attempt to cut off if arc-like loads are detected.
US doesn't usually have ring circuits in domestic situations, hence you guys rate cables at pretty much the maximum current they can handle without actually catching fire
We normally NEVER have ring circuits domestically. The ratings are NOT just 'without actually catching fire', they're also rated for acceptable voltage drop. There's also actually 3 standards - 60/75/90C - IE 12 gauge with 60C insulation shouldn't ever get over 60C even at maximum load, run length, and environmental temperature, with minimum heat dissipation and no more than a 5% voltage drop.
If you have above average length runs, there's formulas in the NEC that will tell you if you need to shift to larger cables.
I don't read AC A human right