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?
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
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
Solar panels is un-American.
Try to set up a gas-driven backup generator first. You will get tons of support and advice. Then try to add some solar panels "to help a bit when it is running over capacity"
Then you might be allowed to sneak over to full solar as long as the gas-driven generator is clearly visible.
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
I could model power outages like dominoes, and my model would also predict that the power system was very unstable, but my model would not actually reflect the "real world physics".
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?
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
Delivering electricity to a socket isn't hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
bickerdyke
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
Hey! That's one better than some of the climate change theories!
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Delivering electricity to a socket isn't hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency is already hard.
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create production spikes is definitly hard.
You missed two other factors...
Delivering electricity at constant voltage and frequency in a grid where a few wandering clouds and a gust of wind create *unpredictable* production spikes and drops, and where the source of some of the generation assets is hundreds of miles from the distribution points it needs to get to, is hard.
Lots of people like to talk about how much sun the US gets, and how much space there is to put up wind farms. But they don't realize a few things. One, the best places for PV farms and wind farms are far, far from population centers...and that means that utilities have to figure out how to manage VARS over those distances which is still not a problem that's entirely been solved. T. Boone Pickens had to bail on his whole wind farm venture in the Southeast because of this. And two, while the cost of PV panels (as would be put on the roof of a home of business) has dropped significantly, the majority of the cost of an on-premise solar installation is the anti-islanding gear that ensures the safety of any linemen who show up to deal with a power outage, assuming that only the end of the break in a line that leads back to the rest of the larger grid is live. And the cost of that gear has not changed much at all.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Most of Europe (and much of the world) pays more for electricity than the average American. So what? The fact remains that in much of the USA it is already economical to install a solar system. And as time goes by, that trend is going to continue.
But the real game changer will be the advent of affordable, grid-level storage, which is just around the corner. In particular, Khosla Ventures is backing two novel technologies that are expected to hit the market around the end of next year. One is the liquid metal battery that came from a research project at MIT. The other is a new twist on compressed air storage that uses a type of water carburetor to achieve isothermal compression. Both of these offer cheap, simple, reliable electricity storage.
As the grid becomes more distributed and "islandable" it will naturally be more robust. And storage is a key enabler to make that happen.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
Hm, american electricity prices: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a obviously in $ cents.
A link that compares several countries (in german, but the countries should be easy to read) prices in dollar cents:
http://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/13020/umfrage/strompreise-in-ausgewaehlten-laendern/
German electricity prices according to wikipedia however are 25 EURO cent.
Pretty strange, as far as I recall I pay 17 EURO cent per kWh.
So you are right: you pay less per kWh in the USA: However you use between 4 to 10 times the electricity a German household or person does. So bottom line you pay far more than we do.
You know efficiency can be defined arbitrarily. You seem to define it on "cost per kWh" we define it on "consumed kWh".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
P=IV. Good place to start. Now just consider V=IR too, and look at the implications.
House wiring does have resistance. Not much, but some. So, for the sake of argument, lets assume there is 4ohm in the cables from your transformer to the other side of your house (This is actually rather a lot, but something you might encounter on a long run such as powering an outbuilding), and that you want to run a decently powerful appliance - say, a kettle, 1KW (Make it resistive so we don't have to worry about power factor).
In a 230V Euro house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/230 = 4.35A. Voltage lost in the wiring is thus V=IR=4.35*4=17.4V, or 7.5% of your line voltage. That's not *too* bad - but it'll dim the lights in your shed if you want to make a cup of tea out there.
Run the same numbers in a 110V American house: P=IV, I=P/V = 1000/110 = 9.09A, voltage lose is V=IR=9.09*4=36V, or 33% of your line voltage. That's... nasty. That's into the territory where your computer crashes and your tea takes too long to boil.
This is also the reason long-distance transmission is done using very, very high voltages (Between 12KV and 1MV) on overhead pylons. Higher voltage means lower current means less voltage drop, and also means that drop makes up a smaller percentage of your total.