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Ask Slashdot: Why Is the Power Grid So Crummy In So Many Places?
An anonymous reader writes: I live in a relatively large college town that's within easy driving distance of several major metropolitan centers. In many ways, the infrastructure around here is top-notch. The major exception is the electrical grid. Lightning storm? Power outage. Heavy winds? Power outage. Lots of rain? Power outage. Some areas around town are immune to this — like around the hospital, for obvious reasons. But others seem to lose power at the drop of hat. Why is this? If it were a tiny village or in the middle of nowhere, it would make sense to me. What problems do the utility companies face that they can't keep service steady? Do you deal with a lot of outages where you live? I'm not sure if it's just an investment issue or a technological one. It hasn't gotten better in the decade I've lived here, and I can imagine it will only get worse as the infrastructure ages.
Aerial, or underground, that is the question.
Have a look see in developed nations.
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Houston Texas - Lightning Storm? Voltage Sag. Loss of power for long enough for all clocks in the house to go to 0:00, and for computers to turn off. Never longer than for 5-10 seconds.
-Since the electric motors draw more current when they are starting than when they are running at their rated speed, starting an electric motor can be a reason of a voltage sag.
-When a line-to-ground fault occurs, there will be a voltage sag until the protective switch gear operates.
-Some accidents in power lines such as lightning or falling an object can be a cause of line-to-ground fault and a voltage sag as a result.
-Sudden load changes or excessive loads can cause a voltage sag.
-Depending on the transformer connections, transformers energizing could be another reason for happening voltage sags.
-Voltage sags can arrive from the utility but most are caused by in-building equipment.
An actual power outage on the other hand can be caused by ANYTHING.
-Tree branch fell on a power line.
-Someone drove into a utility pole and broke a wire. Again with the Houston Texas example....I work in Oil and Gas, and my shop was out of power for 7 hours because someone ran into a utility pole on the corner of the street that leads to my office.
-Ground short.
-Transformer either on a line or at the utility shorts.
-Everything in between.
-All the way to emergency outage with the base load generator at whomever your power production company is.
All power lines are buried here, so no matter what weather conditions, no problems at all. I did not have a power outage in the last 10 year.
Only long distance power lines are sometimes above the ground, but they are very robust.
For one, the US is big.. really big.. So it's not cost-effective to run power cables and alike underground. So that makes them more vulnerable.
Also, the US enjoys a form of super-capitalism, where the almighty dollar stands above things like quality of service and stability. So companies do the bare minimum of maintenance, also worsening outages.
Because your infrastructure is above ground instead of in the ground.
It's true that renewable power levels like wind-power rise and fall, but once you look at a larger area then it pretty much evens out.
Of course you can back it up with other types of renewable that have a more stable output like hydro-electric of geothermal.
You already pay for it - so how is it in their interests to invest in improvement? Nobody is going to build a better grid to compete on price or quality.
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You could take care of some of the daytime failures with solar (and evening if you get some batteries).
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The utility companies need to pay to the customers for power outages, and also can be held liable for damages, for example spoiled food in fridge, freezer. The ordinary payment is 10 % of yearly transfer fees for 12 hours...
Thanks to the underground cabling, in Finland the last time I witnessed personally witnessed a power outage was in 2006 in thunderstorm, lasting for 2 minutes.
The power grid is considered by many (investors) low tech. If you check carefully, a lot of energy related stuff is relying on low-tech or old-tech: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... For these reasons, probably, there is not much attention (or even competences) in planning, research and design. Also technicians tend to underestimate technology impact in those areas.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I life in a small town in The Netherlands. Been to many places in Europe and except one rual area in south France where lights blinked when there was a strom. I never seen long or any power outages...
And as it seems in 2010 an average dutch home had only 36 minutes of power outage.
Because our elected officials love to talk about public infrastructure, but as long as the decline isn't so bad that it's killing people left and right and causing a riot as a result, they don't care. Witness the complete lack of interest in Newt Gingrich's SHIELD Act which would have spent $100B on anti-EMP measures. EMP bursts could kill more people than a nuclear blast due to starvation and exposure in winter. Did anyone care? Nope.
This is because the power co's have been paying their share holders too much money, and not renewing the hardware.
Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.
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Generally, a public company will invest only if there is an expectation of an acceptable return, or if they are forced to by actual regulation. Businesses like power, water, public transportation, telecommunication, and others require huge investments to get into the market, where possible at all, so there is no real competition either.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Have you complained to them about the power reliability?
I live in a conservative suburb of a southern city. The state is "blue", hates taxes, and lets the power, telephone and cable companies run their lines on poles. (Part of the justification is that the water table is pretty high, and it rains a lot.) But... my house went more than a year without a clock-resetting power flicker, and that one lasted only a few seconds.
One thing that I do know that the power company does is make an annual drive through each neighborhood looking for tree branches that hang too close to the lines, and then cuts them off. Presumably, they perform other sorts of behind the scenes maintenance, in order to keep reliability so high.
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Seriously... try it... (That's South Africa btw).
Living in the our biggest and most productive city we have a nice saying that goes along with the lights going out. "I've been Eskomed (They're our utilities supplier - supposedly)" this occurs at least 3 times a week.
Q. Is the infrastructure really that bad?
A. No - but you have to wonder what they're doing when you have coal silo's collapsing, oh and coal getting rained on... Really?
Q. Are there other influencing factors in power outages?
A. Yes, we have a notorious problem with cable theft.
Q. What are authorities doing about it?
A. Nobody knows...
Q. What does our government have to say?
A. Well that's a touchy subject but they may or may not be striking nuclear deals with the Russians.
Meanwhile our president cannot account for roughly 20million dollars worth of tax payers money spent on upgrades to his personal home...
All in all you think you've got problems. Try being us. But i do hope you get some decent input on your matter.
It requires a decent battery, and an inverter with the ability to run off-grid. Lead acids are cheap but short lived. Lithium phosphates are still expensive. The inverter/charger combo is much higher priced than plain grid-tying.
It only makes sense if you aren't already on the grid, since paying for a new line to the property has it's own hefty price tag.
Earthquakes are just mean. They'll completely null the entire area. Expect to rip up the entire network and start afresh.
As with internet providers, just change to a different energy provider. One that puts their cables underground.
The free market is the solution to every problem.
It is obviously a plot by power companies to keep us at their mercy. Not only do we have huge power fluctuations at the slightest breeze, I also feel they do it on purpose so we sign up for their power protection plans. Let's just wait for Google to power us up, yeah right - waiting forever for Fiber :(
I live in a village of 700 inhabitants in the middle of nowhere in Germany and have not experienced a single power outage in 9 years. We have no overhead wires and if your are going to do any excavating you have to contact the power company to make sure you're not going to cut through an underground cable.
Why is the power grid so crummy?
Simple. Pure unadulterated greed. The power company does not want to spend the money making it not crappy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I spent several years working customer service for a large electric utility in the US, and spent a great deal of time dealing with outage calls. The vast majority of outages that last longer than 30 minutes are due to various issues that arise from lines being above ground. This is not necessarily the utility companies fault, as they always preferred to build underground, and would do it for free for new installations in most cases. But in existing areas where it was already built up with overhead lines years ago, it would be a massive and expensive project to go through and redo everything, unless there was some major reconstruction going on. And in rural areas, where homes or businesses are relatively far apart, running underground may just not be feasible.
Now when the lines are above ground, just about anything can cause outages. A common issue was squirrels or other small creatures getting into the transformer or something on the poles. Another issue can be vehicles hitting poles, which is something I saw quite often. Hell, one time there was a train derailment that took out some major transmission lines. Trees are probably the single most common cause of outages though. And it simply defies all my understanding as to why these idiots put trees at the end of their yard near the power lines. And then when we want to go through and trim the trees in order to maintain the stability of the grid, these jackasses get all pissed off about it. Of course, when ice or a major storm comes through and the limbs come down onto the lines, those same jackasses are the first to call in and cuss me out because their power went out.
It really comes down to investment by the power company.
If they invest to keep power lines clear of trees and other hazards, power can be very reliable. I live in the Northeast US, with above-ground lines, and have never had an outage. And we can have some pretty major storms in the winter.
In contrast, I lived in another community for about 15 years, in another state, and power would go out frequently - perhaps on the order of magnitude of once every two months.
Given the differences in state regulations and their enforcement, some power companies work harder to bring quality to avoid fines, while others know that they can skip out on maintenance and save money.
The more urban trees you have around the more problems you will see with the grid. Trees are the source of all kinds of grid problems
- When the weather causes damage to power lines, it is rarely direct damage but indirect damage caused by a nearby tree. Wind can blow branches into lines and transformers, shorting them out. And ice and snow can build up on tree branches causing them to bend into lines or snap.
- Trees attract squirrels and birds, who like to play around and nest in transformers and on poles and short them out. I have a squirrel related power outage at least once a year.
Ironically, at least in the north-east, the nicer the area you live in the more likely it is to have lots of urban trees. It's the price you pay. The only better system would be to bury all the lines but the cost for that is immense.
the power in my area is reasonably reliable. and yes i am on the same sub station as a hospital. but the times the power has gone out. is mainly to 2 events. 1: drunk drivers for some reason are attracted to telephone/ power poles and of course other things that should not be hit with a car... 2: animals... a squirrel or raccoon get into the electrical equipment and tries to have a lunch. i remember seeing one lighting up the sky for miles as 100,000 volts went through him.
American infrastructure was untouched during WW2, hence we still have draped lines on sticks in many places. Cutting edge tech... from the 1880's.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We lose power all the time, sometimes for days. We put in a whole house generator and transfer switch, and hooked them to a sizable underground LPG tank. It was an investment, but it was worth it. The setup has saved our butts many times, including the dead of winter. Our power never goes out for more than a minute now, as we wait for the transfer switch to change us over to generator power. At 20KW, it powers everything as long as we don't go crazy turning everything on.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
A few years back, Maui Electric upgraded their power distribution system by replacing wooden poles with steel towers. The claim was that the towers are much more typhoon-resistant, and I'm sure they are. However, given the aerodynamics of round cable, it's a given that the lines will still part in a gale. Why not bury the line? Because for most parts of the island, you hit blue rock (solid lava) within a few feet, and it's expensive to trench through. On the flip side, you only need to trench once, but Maui Electric decided to play the odds and go cheap.
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No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.
Quote correct. Thing is someone has to pay for the upfront cost of burying the cables and it is much more expensive. Where I live stringing wires on poles costs in rough numbers something like $1 per linear foot. Burying the cable costs about $8 per linear foot. (this is semi-reliable info from family who worked in the business and would know) Getting the funds to do any sort of meaningful program of burying wires would likely involve a rate increase which tends to be as popular as a lead filled life preserver.
In the long run buried lines will save money - even if you are in an area where the ground is filled with rocks.
That isn't so clear in a lot of places. Repairs on above ground wires are more common but cheaper when they occur. Roll a truck, look up and get busy. Repairs on buried cable is just the opposite. Even finding the problem is harder and many repairs involve a lot of digging. There are places near where I live (semi-rural 20 miles from a major metro area) where it might make economic sense to bury the cable but also quite a few where it most likely doesn't. You can do a LOT of repairs before you even break even on the buried cable despite its general higher reliability. Plus you are replacing infrastructure that already exists and lots of it so any sort of economically rational replacement program would take decades. Every place that truly needs reliable power has a backup generator anyway so it's not like you are gaining much in practical terms by burying the cables for quite a few customers.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot more cables should be buried than currently are but it's not as simple an equation as buried = more reliable = cheaper.
You could compete with the power company yourself. Install solar or maybe a wind turbine if there is room, large battery pack for backup. Will pay for itself in 10 years anyway and no more outages.
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Although they are regulated to death, power companies want to maximize profit, and there are no rules that say they have to invest in improving infrastructure "as long as everything is working fine." They have no motivation at all to seek out aging sections of their power grid and replace them during normal operation. Rather, they are entirely reactive. When power goes out, they fix it on demand. Nothing more. Moreover, whenever there are major storms that take out massive swaths of their network, they cry for help from the government to pay for the repairs becuase they "can't afford it." The only reason they do anything at all when power does go out is because they'd be slapped by regulators if they didn't. Otherwise they'd be perfectly happy to leave paying customers without power the way Comcast leaves paying customers without internet service.
Just imagine if power delivery were government-run. It would be even worse, because there would be no profit incentive.
I live in a large village or small town. I get a lot of power outages. Some of these last for hours. Most of the rest of the village does not get these - just a small clump of houses around the church. Our cable comes underground from Hemel Hempstead. The rest of the village gets power from the pylons that run alongside the M1. We can claim back money for the power outages.
I would imagine our group of houses has problems because (a) we are at the end of a spur (b) we got electricity before anyone else, and before the M1 was built, so our lines are particularly old, and (c) the power distribution network has probably shifted, and our little bit has not been altered to reflect the changes. If you live out in the sticks, you become more vulnerable: I remember a house where the power used to trip out when the transport cafe about a mile away turned off their grills last thing at night. One of the downsides of generating your own power may be that the network only has to fill in when we have a number of dull, still days. The US equivalent is probably hot days where everyone turns up the airconditioning.
It is not because (a) our lines are overhead, or (b) our corner of the village is particularly greedy, or (c) that the power company does not have to pay when services are disconnected. Beware of people suggesting 'obvious solutions' without evidence.
.
The internet answer is to always have redundancy. have one shitty solution (like hard drives that fail often) then N+1 this solution. So implement RAID 4 Power, deploy shitty aboveground power cables, just do many of them!
The USA is in many ways like Australia was with electricity. Installation was done as cheap as possible. Maintenance was done as little as possible. Capacity is setup as close to the limits as possible.
A lot of people here are talking about overhead vs underground cables, this is really the very tip of the big mess of transmission. A lightning strike should at most cause a powerdip or a very small localised outage. Falling trees should not be able to hit powerlines according to the regulated maintenance requirements.
The reality is the USA now is running like Australia used to, everything is at the limits. We changed. We have seen massive infrastructure upgrades throughout all states in interstate transmission. We've setup many more transmission networks. Our localised providers have been mandated to install N+1 capacity on transformers so they can withstand an outage without losing power. The 110kV network has more redundancy still. Poles were replaced. Transformers were upgraded. Ring-main-units were improved and setup in actual rings to provide more network redundancy.
And...
Our electricity price has gone up by 200-350% depending which state you're in.
While you are complaining about power outages, we're complaining about the cost of those damn companies which "gold plated" our electricity network.
Yes, underground lines are less likely to be knocked out, but going underground is quite expensive, and someone has to pay for it. And the cost to the end user for things like spoiled food and so forth aren't borne by the power companies - their only cost is the cost of the electricity that they don't sell and the cost of the repairs. That being said, in our area, they are in the process of burying a subset of the lines that are considered to be the most problematic (the ones that are knocked out most frequently and affect a lot of customers).
That being said, for overhead wires you *must* keep the tree branches away from the wires, and the way to do this is with tree trimming. It used to be that power companies had an annual budget for tree trimming to minimize problems, but my understanding is that to maximize profits they have cut way back on this and just deal with the outages as they occur.
While certain it is likely that - as other commenters note - above ground lines are more prone to failure, I would like to point out another possible factor: the structure of the network itself. Certain network structures which have more redundency in links between nodes are more robust, so that a failure of one line would result in less damage. Conversely, certain places might be located in particularly vulnurable sections of the network (for example, areas serviced by a single line as opposed to several).
On the contrary, market forces work fine. The problem is simply a case of the leaky roof problem. You can't fix the roof it when it's raining, and when it's not raining there is no need to fix it because it isn't raining. When people's lights are on and working it's hard to convince them to voluntarily pay more to upgrade transmission systems.
No one wants to pay for it.
No hour on a horse is ever wasted. Winston Churchill
Storage is the "next great myth" - a solution looking for a problem. And government handouts.
I was stuck behind storm Sandy in New Jersey and discovered that 99% of the problems there were self induced. Guess what - they don't trim trees away from the power lines. Every time you get wind, dozens to hundreds (or thousands in this case) or branches snap the lines.
Power outages ? Here in central or western Europe ? Hardly ever. The electric power infrastructure in the USA is almost on the level of that in the Soviet Union just before the end of the cold war.
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Maybe the power grid software in that area was designed by the same person who designed "Close, and never show this again" functionality for the Slashdot Deals notification.
Nah... at least the power grid works at least some of the time. I still get that damn Slashdot Deals message every time I visit the site.
To be fair, when the utility company trims trees the residents raise holy hell.
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Last year, after the ice storm knocked out power to large parts of Toronto for several days, the local utility published some numbers of what it would cost to fully bury Toronto's power lines; it was a mind boggling number -- in the billions. No one has the will to spend that kind of money to improve the grid's up time by .1%.
But ... above-ground lines aren't the worst thing in the world. First, if there is a problem, above-ground lines are far easier to repair. Second, parts of Toronto are prone to flooding. We lost part of our subway system for a few days a couple years ago due to flooding shorting out the buried power infrastructure downtown.
FWIW, it's not the aboveground nature of Toronto's grid that causes most of our problems; it's 60 year-old infrastructure with a rated lifespan of 50 years that kills us. Coming out of WWII, there was public will in Toronto to build grand projects -- the citizens were fine with the idea of doing without for the greater good. Once the boomers came into power, they started nickel and diming everything and put off maintenance. Infrastructure spending? Not cool. Lowering tax rates far below what their parents paid? That's cool.
We recently (as in the day before yesterday) had some high winds tear through our area causing power at my house to go out twice, each stint lasting about 6 hours. The cause in both cases?, a single quarter mile stretch where a major power line goes through a wooded wetland area. While the power companies in our area are getting a lot better, for about the past year there have been over a dozen permanently stationed tree trimming trucks trimming along power lines, even so there are still areas that have yet to cleared. That is a constant battle, made worse by some homeowners/areas which seem to freak out if the power companies so much as clip a few branches. So at least in my experience most of the cause is mother nature combined with a lack of "maintenance" (not to the lines, but trees). Beyond that my power hasn't went out once for nearly a year, not bad uptime for residential.
In my neighborhood (Chicago area), they most certainly trim the trees, to the point that many of them look downright weird. That doesn't completely prevent storm-related power outages, but it at least makes them pretty rare for me.
Still, if the crown of one of those trees snaps off, like it did in a severe storm late this June, it can result in an extended outage. That's when I discovered that my UPS outlasted the batteries in Comcast's local infrastructure by a wide margin.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
We had two big trees in our backyard whose branches went around various wires in our backyard. We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job. Meanwhile, every storm we would worry about a branch snapping and taking out our power. (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
and profit must always be positive. no, scratch that, profit must increase every year.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Surely that would make it more difficult, due to the large number of unexploded bombs buried in the ground. Trying to excuse the sorry state of utilities in the US in that manner only serves to make you look foolish.
You win the internet today.
The power grid is only under strain during peak use. The rest of the time it's got power to burn. If everyone charges their electric car at night there won't be any trouble.
While we're on the subject of investing in infrastructure, we've got a water crisis coming up very soon now. With undeniable climate change, a large part of the country is never going to have to enough water, while another large part of the country is always going to have way too much. I think we need an interstate highway system level project to move water around the country as needed. I think this will be vital for the well being of tens of millions of Americans over the next couple of decades, but no one is even thinking about such at thing right now.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well I think the AC has hit on at least part of the problem with above ground wiring. These electric networks are very old. Many were probably put up with no idea about using a topology that would be more fault tolerant. And then came explosive growth in suburbia forcing add ons to an already suspect network. A few failures in the grid can really cause chaos.
However, even taking your 10 day outage and doubling it, over 10 years that is still 99.45% uptime per year on average.
As is often the case, there's several reasons. I work as an engineer for a utility that has been struggling with reliability.
The basic fact of electricity is that if something touches the wire and something grounded, or touches multiple electric wires, there's going to be a fault, which usually means there's going to be an outage. Electric service generally has to go several miles from the substation before it reaches your house. Preventing anything from touching wires for that distance is difficult, and a problem that cable, telephone, and other types of utilities don't face.
There's also different philosophies on system protection. For example, is it better to momentarily blink the lights for a lot of people, or have a lower number of people have an outage that will probably last an hour or two? The company I work for prefers the former, despite the fact that many of the customer complaints I see are about momentary interruptions, not sustained outages. The reliability metrics we report to regulatory agencies currently only include outages lasting longer than 5 minutes. Until we're forced to report on momentary outages, I don't think that's going to change.
Another factor is that our system right now is rather dumb, for the most part. "Smart grid" is here in some ways, but not in others. There's a few areas where we have pilot programs to do automatic switching in the event of an outage to reduce the outage's impact, but its not widespread yet. Even when it is widespread, it still won't prevent momentary interruptions. Its also not cheap, and requires a lot of engineering work to get running.
As for the elephant in the room, undergrounding, it's expensive. I don't think most people understand just how expensive it is. I'm sort of peripherally involved with a major undergrounding project we're doing now. It's in a relatively densely populated area, not out in farmland or anything. The cost per customer is expected to be somewhere in the ballpark of $15k. Also, undegrounding is a capital expense, which means one way or another,customers are going to pay for it. Utilities don't generally do capital work without the assumption that they will be reimbursed for it. They also aren't sitting on the piles of money necessary to do it out of pocket.
I get the whole "my service sucks, the utility needs to pay to fix it" mentality, I can't count the number of hours I've been on the phone with Comcast about my cable being out, so I understand frustration with utilities. (On a sidenote, god damn do I wish Comcast had to deal with all the regulations we do.) But look at it this way. If your reliability is bad, you say "I don't want the utility getting more money. Why should we reward them for bad service?" If your reliability is good, you say "They don't need more money to spend on reliability upgrades, my service is already good enough." Somewhere along the line, the money to do reliability work has to come from somewhere.
I do think we're going to see a lot more undergrounding in the next 10 or 20 years, at least in urban and suburban areas, but its going to come at a cost, and there's probably going to be some sticker shock. I also think that smart grid technologies, such as the automated switching, are going to become more prominent. The industry really is changing at a faster pace than ever before, and the pace is only going to accelerate. But its still going to take a lot of time, money, and man-hours before we have perfectly reliable service.
(Sorry for any typos/errors. I'm at work right now, so I typed this on my phone. Didn't want to submit it from my work computer.)
It really can be as simple as greed. Your power company likes its money and wants to keep it in pocket. Heavily populated areas can generate a lot of complaints and woes for the power company whereas smaller areas can not. You may be able to find that power crews do not stand at the ready to service outages near you. In my town we suffered a similar issue with cable TV. If a car smacked a pole and took out the cable or someone cut the cable in a digging operation on Friday night it would take until Monday to get the cable back on. It was really lousy as we do not get over the air tV here. I had lived in a highly populated area about 100 miles south of me and was accustomed to repair crews being able to jump to the job in a few minutes any time of day or night. Our area grew in poulation and service improved accordingly. That might be solely due to alternatives to cable becomming better in quality than they were 15 years ago.
Thought I'd actually look up some real numbers for reliability by country (terms can be found on wikipedia, larger is not better...):
International Comparison of 2007 Reliability Indices
..... SAIDI SAIFI .. 1.5 .. 33 .. 0.3 ...... 72 .. 0.9 ...... 24 .. 0.5 ....... 62 .. 1.0 ...... 23 .. 0.5 ........ 58 .. 2.2 ....... 104 .. 2.2 ........... 90 .. 0.8
COUNTRY
United States 240
Netherlands
Austria
Denmark
France
Germany
Italy
Spain
UK
Source: Council of European Energy Regulators ASBL. (2008). 4th Benchmarking Report on the Quality of Electricity Supply. Brussels: CEER.
It's even better than that. In exchange for a discount, most people would settle for a charging outlet that guaranteed (say) net full charge between 8pm and 6am. That is it might charge for three hours, draw for one and then charge for two, or charge at half-rate for 8 or whatever suited the grid.
More overall capacity might be needed, but this kind of thing makes it very flexible.
Um, easement!
When you purchase a home, you should know where the easement is before you buy it. Either people need to trim their own damn trees, or the city will do it for you; often in the form of a rushed lopped job.
Life is not for the lazy.
Because bean counter walk over the engineers... Grid is built cheap as bossible instead of being reliable, maintained even cheaper and that means no alternative routes, no backups... All this in name of Maximizing profits... After all you cant sue them for not delivering, so wheres their risk of this gamble...
My electricity is supplied through substation on 230kv transmission line that steps down to the 35kv distribution which feeds my development underground, my development is also part of a distribution loop in the 35kv grid. During hurricane Sandy my power was out for 10 hours others in my community waited several weeks. My brother who lives just off the development 700 feet from me, was feed by a rural style section of the 35kv grid and it took 2 weeks for all the trees to be removed to bring that part of grid back online. The original poster cited "top notch" infrastructure. But does this include all the infrastructure that connects him to the Transmission lines? Transmission if federally regulated by FERC and is very reliable. Most of the failures occur in the Distribution phase after the voltage is stepped down to Distribution levels. In the US most of the distribution infrastructure was designed in the '30s and '40s many of these rural designs were based on a tree network with very few redundant loops - the number of customers serviced counted above the quality of service. As the suburbs developed some loops were introduced but right of way complications and interests of local landowners made the creation of these redundancies expensive. A move to "deregulate" power utilities happened starting in the 1990s this added the calculus of "Financial Engineering" which cut maintenance efforts while housing construction was "Financially Engineered", this results in an overall reduction of quality of service. The public still opposes electric infrastructure upgrades ( http://www.stopthelines.com/ ). You need to design and pay for redundancies of local reliability and need to overcome local NIMBY attitudes.
Why? Protected monopoly. The price for having such a money spinner granted by a government is supposed to be to supply good service, but for various political reasons, up to and including outright graft, that's not always written into the contract or there are loopholes. Hence ridiculous shit like fires when Hurricane Sandy hit 1920s infrastructure with too many live wires in contact with wood! The third world has bad shit but not that bad.
Greed. Plain and simple. Because most power providers in the U.S. are corporate beings - they care not about service but about profit. So they'll keep string aerial lines and using 19th century technique to keep it going. When burying it would be so much better. And the thing is, they COULD bury it and it wouldn't be all that much more expensive than re-stringing aerial cable.
Even the Bell System was smart enough to know this. Most of it's critical infrastructure went UNDERGROUND and that on the poles was basically engineered to take a F5 hurricane and not come off the pole. But you have to remember, for the majority of Bell's life they were a REGULATED monopoly. No such thing ever happened with electric power. In fact the demise of Bell was brought about by advances in telephony switching. It got to the point in the early 1980's where long distance cost per minute was plummeting due to the #4ESS toll switch. So the cat got out of the bag and the end of the Bell System. It's pretty much back together now as at&t and Verizon anyhow.
"profit must increase every year."
That's what inflation is for.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I live in a suburban area in one the USA's ten largest metropolitan areas. Sorry, but I don't like to be more specific about where I live. On average I experience brown outs once a month. A true loss of power probably occurs 3 or 4 times a year, almost always in conjunction with some type of weather event (ice, snow, heavy rain). In the past I was stupid and never used a home UPS for any computers I had, so from time to time I would have disk drive problems after power outages, even if only brown outs. I also had quite a few PC power supplies fried by brown outs. Switching to UPS devices has stopped this. In fact, we have so many brown outs that I actually have my TV and some electronics connected to a UPS which I use really to protect against the constant brown outs rather than using it to provide power in outages to those devices. I wish power was reliable where I live, but it's not.
Now, don't get all pissed and shit and whipping out the negative mods, but in Austin, the primary cause of power failures are all the people who go ape shit whenever the power company starts to trim trees. "Preserve the Historical Nature!", "Save the Trees!", etc.
Then, when an Ice Storm comes along or high winds, the tree limbs break and fall on the lines. Of course, then they go ape shit because they have no power. What is really funny is that the power company is owned by the City.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It costs money and it isn't sexy to spend money on infrastructure.
If you don't like being dependent on the utility for your electric power, generate your own. You also have control your power consumption. Those are two forces that could change the market for electric power.
new letter/phrase: hex-u means "www"
We called the electric company once as a branch had fallen on the line and was being held up. It was a y shaped branch that had broken from the tree above and balanced perfectly on the line. We got fined for calling in a problem that didn't exist. The inspector knocked the branch off the line and then said it was the wind. We had a witness to that so the fine disappeared.
In NY power companies are only required to trim trees once every 20 years. Most of the trees that grow reach full height in 10 years.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Medium sized power outages are generally caused by a failure of local transmission lines. These lines are frequently exposed to a variety of hazards, particularly trees, wind, ice, wildlife, and humans. There are only really two ways to secure against this, burying cables and building redundancy, both of which are quite expensive. Transmission fees in the USA are usually heavily regulated and the prices they may charge would not cover such an expense. It is also unclear if a market would want to pay for this, and it is very difficult to discriminate in price and service among customers who would.
Finally, bureaucracy and in-fighting between local utility providers sometimes blocks redundancy when it might otherwise available. Historical feuds, hurt feelings over regulatory decisions regarding service area, and disagreements over cost sharing to handle inter-network connections can leave one person at the end of a service line with no way to get power from another provider just down the road.
I don't think that is going to happen any time soon. Electric cars are still too expensive and impractical for most people. Not everyone lives in a house where they can install their own charging system or can afford to buy a vehicle that's just for commuting. Battery production will need to improve quite a bit in order to supply that number of vehicles too. Hopefully by the time they are more practical, the utilities will have improved their side of things, not to mention home solar & wind generation should be cheaper by then too.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
"Um, easement!"
That is far from certain, for modern installs they tend to be pretty good about getting one and making sure they stay in it. But in the past at a bare minimum they didn't maintain proper records of when they did get an easements, and in some cases for older lines an easement was never procured or they were but the line wasn't put on the easement. So it is a legal quagmire that most utilities don't like to get into so they generally get permission, and if they can't get permission THEN they start digging for legal justification.
I've often wondered about the possibility of not re-burying the trench: make the trench shallower, cover it with a walkable grate, and just leave it that way.
Looks terrible, creates a safety hazard (grates WILL be pulled up and people electrocuted), creates a metal theft problem, doesn't adequately protect the cable from freeze/thaw problems, doesn't protect from rodents & wildlife adequately, still vulnerable to weather, etc. Problems with doing this are legion. The biggest is safety. You do NOT want the general public to have convenient access to power lines because someone will inevitably do something stupid.
It's actually cheaper and safer to bury it. A grate like you propose would be kind of the worst of both worlds in practice.
it's possible to dig it yourself...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Big in terms of cost. You might as well use gas turbines instead and can then create energy denovo.
So we don't need storage for electricity? good to know.
Moron.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job.
Does your phone service support three-way calling?
On the contrary, market forces work fine.
Pft. Their attempts at inserting additional market forces worked SOOO well.
And there is no market force from the consumers. They have no choice about where their power comes from. There are natural monopolies at play. The only thing they can do is complain. That's a political force, not a market force.
Ours has an awesome machine. Just drives down the road with a giant cutter on top, bottom and sticking out the side. They do it once a year or two and we don't seem to have any problems. Well, except for a lot of trees looking like this: http://www.stategazette.com/photos/12/57/62/1257622-H.jpg and http://www.seattle.gov/light/Vegetation/images/power-line-trees-530x351.jpg
The problem whose solution is storage is the variability of wind and solar, the most prominent renewable energy sources, from one hour to the next.
That's because what the utility company calls "trim", most people call "cut", if not "butcher". The root of the problem goes further back: The telephone/power poles are all placed just off the edge of the road, between the curb and the sidewalk, and the town plants trees IN THE SAME STRIP - directly under the wires. Trees belong further away from the wires, but people have this idea of a "nice lawn" (which nobody ever uses, at least not in the front of the house). I see this being done in brand new construction, too.
But dimensioning the grid for average power draw is cheaper than dimensioning the grid for peak power. During the night, power consumption is low, and batteries can be recharged. When everyone wakes up, and makes coffee peak power occurs. With local storage the consumption can always be kept at the average level.
This also means that when there's good wind, you can save the energy for consumption later, without transporting it. Yes, batteries have a 5% energy loss, but so do long haul transmission. And long haul transmission technologies like HVDC costs a lot of money when you get into high effect converters.
I'm currently involved in a project where the conclusion was that a local battery storage was cheaper than renewing the power grid for peak load. The point where it's cheaper to install a Smart Grid Solution instead of bigger grid is only gonna move in favour of smart grid the next few years...
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
Is all about investment. The City of Toronto is reportedly well behind its investments in the local Toronto infrastructure. The less you invest keeping equipment up-to-date the more breakdowns you will have. http://www.torontohydro.com/si...
Any power company will tell you where to avoid planting trees, this includes anywhere in the utility easement and anywhere that they may grow up under overhead service lines. People of course ignore this because they have no common sense. Yes in many cases the trees were planted by previous property owners but ultimately if you own a tree and it is causing a problem for your power, phone or cable, why wouldn't it be your problem? Many power companies will do minimal trimming because of the dangers associated with downed power lines, but cable and phone lines are much less likely to be a danger if downed, just a service loss. Unless the trees are actually interfering with the distribution system, don't expect the telco or cableco to do anything. They will replace the service drops when they get pulled down by trees, but won't pay to maintain your trees for you.
Well if your lucky to live in an area that is serviced by an electric coop you might get high speed gigabit fiber on those wooden poles. Yes the COOP's are doing it where the commercial power companies will never do it, ever. So some people are lucky and get fiber from Google others get it from the COOP. The rest of America is going to just wait....
If your in an area where your power is underground it might take an additional decade or two for you to get gigabit fiber to your house from underground.
So have if your way. I say cut the trees down that could knock out power and that would be like 90% of the power issues. It also means your internet will keep working. ;)
Your Average Joe
That's because they don't properly trim trees, they hack off whatever might be near the lines. If they would actually trim the trees so they don't look like the crippled survivors of a war, people wouldn't gripe.
There are a couple trees near me that they 'trimmed' such that they will almost inevitably fall over onto the road sooner or later. That's what happens when you cut all the branches off of one side. It's a classic "somebody else's problem now" sort of 'solution'
I would have to agree with that. Arizona for example has a VERY reliable power grid; so reliable in fact that a lot of companies are building datacenters in Phoenix, in spite of the heat. Yet at the same time Arizona doesn't rely on storage. Phoenix in particular is powered by the Palo Verde Nuclear plant (largest in the US) as well as hydro power from Salt River Project. Arizona has so much power that it actually provides California with 25% of theirs.
July 20, 1969 was, possibly justifiably, the biggest national ego-validation event in human history. The problem was after that when it came to national achievement, our eyes were firmly pointed back in time. We no longer do things "because they are hard". We're more focused on cashing in on the achievements of past generations.
When you tell Americans we have a backward mobile telephone system, a technologically primitive electric grid and distribution system, and Internet connectivity that lags behind the rest of the developed world, the reaction is usually disbelief. How can that be? We put a man on the Moon -- although by now it should be "grandpa put a man on the Moon."
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To add to that, in Arizona, power outages occur maybe once a year for any given area, and failures are rarely (perhaps never) the result of the grid itself failing. Last time it happened for me, it was because some derp wrecked their car into a transformer (and being able to damage a transformer in such a way with a car is a rather difficult thing to do because they're otherwise pretty well protected.)
We raise hell because they are butchers about it, at least in south jersey (PSE&G). Have a 300 year old tree near the lines? Let's cut down 80% of it so we dont have to come back and trim again in the next 20 years.
When they bury cables, do they at least have the good sense to be surrounding these cables in pipes?
Depends on the type of cable and where it is being buried and how deep. Often yes but conduit is not always necessary. A lot of the cables are pretty robust on their own and the biggest utility in conduit is making it easier to service the cable later on. If you don't need to do that then it isn't always necessary. I'm more familiar with what they do with data cables and those frequently are not put in conduit.
I just imagine that if people dig trenches to lay cables, it would make sense to have them lay a pipe
The conduit they use for transmission usually comes on reels from what I've seen. They trench it into place then use some specialized wire feeding equipment to push the wire through once the conduit is in place. My father actually used to service and sell this sort of gear. They also don't always need to dig trenches. There is a lot of boring equipment not unlike stuff used for drilling that can be used so that you don't have to dig up everything between two points to lay the conduit. Some of this stuff is pretty cool to watch in action.
If the wire wants to curl up, so it doesn't want to go straight through the pipe, then fine: just attach the wire to a battery-powered toy car, and drive it through the pipe.
Wire curl isn't really the big limitation because the conduit is (usually) fairly smooth and it's not usually super hard to straighten the wire. The big problem is that you are essentially pushing a rope and the force you can use is limited by the durability of the cable jacket and the weight of the cable itself plus friction. 4AWG copper wire (think jumper cable thickness) for instance weighs 126lbs per 1000 feet. Add in frictional forces and you have to drive the cable with a force of a few hundred pounds to feed 1000ft of wire through a piece of conduit. Since the insulation material is relatively soft it's not hard to get to the point where you cannot feed more wire without damaging the cable due to the force required.
Why not just stand at one end of a pipe, pull out the old cable, and replace it with a good cable?
Sometimes they can do that but it depends on the circumstances. Remember that if they are replacing a cable there is probably a reason and the old one may no longer be intact. It also can be the case that they need additional wires. This sort of work is quite a bit more challenging than feeding wires through conduit in a building.
I live in an old suburb where they ran the wires behind the houses. Trees are still a problem, since they like to grow in the no mans land between properties.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Be careful; in some areas it's flat-out illegal to generate solar power, worse yet some places make it illegal to consume any non-grid power for certain applications.
A friend of mine in Kentucky has a large vegetable garden, about 1/2 acre on his property. It's surrounded by a low voltage electric fence, to keep out rabbits and such, which for ~10 years was powered by a tractor battery. Well he got tired of having to swap out, recharge, or replace the batteries all the time, and bought a solar kit, the panel is about 30"x30" and charges up its own battery pack. Neat setup, it cost him several grand but he never has to touch the thing or worry about the juice running out.
Mid 2012 he's doing some renovations on the attic and roof of his house, the contractor calls out the electric company to disconnect power at the weatherhead for a few hours while they put in some new paneling. One of the electric guys sees the solar cell and all sorts of shit ensued. Electric guy says you can't use a single drop of sunshine without X, Y, and Z permits, and by the way, I have to report this. It got heated (my friend is the type who likely launched into "bull fucking shit I can't, it's my property and the fuck if you're gonna tell me what I can do...") and the electric guy warned him to prepare for some big fines. So he writes a letter to his public utility commission, he wants to get himself on record and ask for clarification. Explains how he's using the solar panel, it's easier and more eco-friendly than burning through tractor batteries, etc.
PUC writes him back and says not only is it illegal to use solar anywhere in the entire county without permits X, Y, and Z (which would run many thousands of dollars), it was also illegal to use the tractor batteries! Any power consumed for any purpose must be purchased from the utility. There was a short list of exceptions like small household appliances, emergency backup generators, etc. but of course electric garden fence wasn't excepted. A fee schedule was included and it was ridiculous, they have it rigged to where the law automatically assumes you're generating half your own energy consumption, the utility is allowed to retroactively adjust your bill for the power you "stole" by not buying it from them, on top of multi-thousand dollar statutory fines.
He responds to them, apologizes, pleads ignorance, and says he'll unhook the fence. Hasn't heard a peep from them or from the utility in 2 years, and of course he didn't disconnect the fence. It's still running from the solar cell. But if they spot it again they might not just drop the issue.
tl;dr Energy companies have lobbied to make generating your own power illegal in many parts of the US, proceed down that path with caution.
> (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was
> dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our
> back yard unusable and attracting flies.)
Just be thankful you don't live in Toronto. See http://www.toronto.ca/311/know... Even removing a *DEAD* tree will cost you several hundred dollars for the paperwork+approval alone...
> Private tree permit exemptions
>
> A tree that is dead, terminally diseased or imminently hazardous does
> not require a permit, however the applicant must send a detailed Arborist report
> and receive approval from Urban Forestry before proceeding with any tree work.
The cost of a contractor to cut down+remove the tree+stump is additional. An "Arborist" is a licenced professional "tree doctor" with an applicable university degree. Their reports are equivalant to an MD's "medical opinion", and their fees are equivalant to having a medical specialist examine you without medical insurance. And in case you're wondering...
> Fines for illegal tree removal
>
> A person convicted of an offence under City of Toronto Municipal
> Code Chapter 813, Article III is subject to a minimum fine of $500.00
> and a maximum fine of $100,000.00 per tree involved in an offense;
> a special supplementary fine of $100,000.00 is also possible.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Actually it isn't. I work for a publicly owned electric and telecom utility. At a cost that can run upwards of a million (yes, $1,000,000) per *mile* to replace move aerial to underground, the rate payers don't generally want to pay for it. Almost all new construction is buried.
And while it seems like most of the causes for outages would be removed by going underground, you only exchange one set of causes for another. Cars get replaced by gophers. Trees on the line get replace by ice when conduit riser fills with water and freezes. Aerial teardowns due to heavy equipment become backhoes that dig on the wrong place and tear up a line.
You also have confined space issues. Now instead of everyone being certified for climbing, bucket trucks, and cranes, they also have to add confined space training and equipment (including continuing education), confined space rescue teams, interlocal or interagency agreements for CSRTs. All of these things add hidden (but not cheap) costs.
In addition fault locating and repair on an underground is much more manpower and technology intensive than aerial. All of these things drive the cost.
Another problem that factors in is environmental regulations. It is much easier (and cheaper by hundreds of thousands of dollars) to get permission to do an aerial build than underground. Every underground build had to deal with permitting for aquifer contamination, native artifacts, wetlands remediation, and so on and so forth. Permitting can add 10% to 100% to a segment of utility infrastructure.
It all boils down to costs. If you can go to your local utility board, commission, or shareholder meeting and convince them that raising rates by 50% to 500% won't get them burned out of their homes, I'll bet they would jump at it. Every utility I know would love to move most of their aging infrastructure underground.
Yeah yeah ... americans with their braindead idea how power grids work. As if it was not possible â" even in the USA â" to read up about it. ... how else would you meat peak demand? ... as soon as even the simplest garage, bakery or small shop is 'connected' you simply can forget battery storage.
For starters: "peak demand" is not at the morning when everyone stays up, but it starts around 10:00/11:00 and lasts till 15:00/16:00.
Of course power grids need to be build for the peak and not for the average
No idea about your project, sounds like a household project to me
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It costs money to upgrade and stabilize the power grid. It costs money to stay ahead of the failure curve.
The current infrastructure sucks mainly because it's unpredictable and takes too much effort to synchronize disconnected sections of the grid before connecting them. You can't just "route around" a dead transmission line if there are generator stations active on both sides of the break. You must wait for the two sides to synchronize in phase before connecting them, which can take several seconds to a minute. If you don't, you'll cause even more breakers to trip.
None of this would matter if we switched distribution to HVDC. We have the technology, but again, the cost to convert everything to employ DC-DC switching converters is prohibitive. The biggest upside to switching everything to DC (all the way to the end-user) is that you could add standby capacity by simply connecting batteries to your mains circuit between the main breaker and load panel. The more people in a neighborhood using batteries to buffer their power source, more aggregate protection the neighborhood has against blackouts.
the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies
these two statements contradict. by definition if your yard attracts flies it has a very significant and specific use.
In our case, the trees were planted several owners before us. The reason I didn't want to take care of it myself was that the branches criss-crossed around various wires. One slip up and I've taken out a major power/cable/whatever line. And even if I ignored it, one bad storm and the branches would snap taking down the lines. All we wanted them to do was some trimming to prevent this, but nobody was willing to do it. (Not a problem now since we took down our trees, obviously.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Power grids does not need to be dimensioned for peak power - provided you have local energy storage. 1MWh of Lithium batteries will weigh in at approx. 10T, and will fit in a small garage, and will be able to supply a peak power of 2MW for half an hour. During periods of lower use, they can be recharged - bringing the peak load on the grid down. They can also assist in smoothing power production. Have an excess gigawatt? Put it into your batteries around the neighbourhood.
The project is definitively not backyard. I cannot tell details, but it is supplying a power in the megawatt range twice an hour, and then recharging using the power grid - enabling huge peak loads that the local grid cannot support. It is a project you've read about in Wired...
If you google smart grid you'll see that it's a big thing. Siemens, ABB, Schneider Electric and many other big companies are working on it. So your comment smells of trolling with no real insight in the field.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
. . . The entire reason they deregulated anything at all was to lower the price to the consumer. That's the goal. That's why they did it. They argued all the way to capitol hill that "trust us, market forces will work their magic and prices will come down".
They deregulated generation and transmission, specifically splitting companies to separate the two. The two sides were supposed to compete and buy/sell power amount themselves to compete for the lowest price. The maximum prices were a safeguard in case it all went to hell.
Listen, Enron found they could manipulate the industry and create artificial scarcity and drive up prices. If there was no regulated maximum price, the price would simply be pushed off to the regular people who have zero choice about who to buy from.
I understand what they were trying to do. A competitive capitalistic market is fantastically good at finding out how to eat each other's lunch, deliver better products, and make a buck. This is a REALLY ROCK SOLID example of a deregulation clusterfuck. And not for the reason you pointed out.
In general, I'd agree that market forces don't work on essential utilities (because not delivering is not an option, as well as the natural monopolies aspect)
Ofc smart grids help. ... ... actually you mix up but half correctly use 'peak power' ... we are storing in this situations only very low percentages of the daily produced energy. And also only very low percentages of the power consumption. ... they don't help at all to cut down on the grid to be scaled for peak, as the peak is still there.
Especially if they have access to grid wide 'storage'
Nevertheless
SmartGrids like I believe you mean them, are usefull to prevent wasting the peak solar energy around day time
So your comment smells of trolling with no real insight in the field. ...
Two mistakes in one sentence, hohohoho. Go figure
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Constant outages. Go DTE! :)
There exists some positive integer N that you are the Nth person to read this signature.
A smart grid will help. If you're able to serve up 20-30 percent of the supply from batteries (EV's can be batteries in a SG system too), you can reduce the grid. They can also serve as UPS systems, effectively smoothing out dips as switchgear changes layout of the grid.
So yes, smart grid with energy storage can help by averaging load over time. For an EV you can configure it to be fully charged at 4, when you leave work, and let it feed the grid in the meantime. You can supplement this with stationary batteries. As EV's become more common, used batteries from EV's which are unsuitable for the size constraints of the EVs can be repurposed to fixed location storage, where size is not as big concern.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
have you seen how they do it? around here they dont come out with chainsaws and trimmers.
they use a tree grinder: an oversided brush cutter on the end of a cherry picker arm. and they just go at the tree til the wires are clear.
instead of neat cuts and easily disposed limbs, it leaves the trees looking like a mangled mess, with trunk ends splintered and cracked.
and a ton of small chunks and shards of wood laying on the ground.....that they also dont clean up, but leave behind.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Why modded down? I was responding to the "buy a car just for commuting" bit!
no problems in my country, but you know, we are commie EU and stuff ...
No, you can not reduce 'the grid' storage etc. does not help you in any way having the necessary capacity to transport the amount of energy that is needed at a certain time.
It only helps you to store surplus and leaves you the option not to power up plants but use the previously stored surplus.
Bottom lime for a random factory close to you, the grid changes not at all.
Hint: if your town needs 2GW power around noon, the grid has to handle 2GW, it does not care if the power comes from a plant or a battery close to you. The total energy is the same.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Big goose migration stop on the other side of the hill from me. Used to have a couple of power outs a year due to bird strike on the line until they finally wised up and put it underground
Trimming trees costs a lot of money. Regulatory agencies drive the prices for power (and then point fingers at the utilities). So the utility does what they have to and then waits for the weather to point to weak spots. Then the utility files for Federal emergency funds and hires crews and equipment from far away to clean up and ... trim trees.
Bill Gates is a communist -- he's just more equal than the rest of us.
Here, the power company will trim them, and nobody else can. But then they'll send the bill to other people. Nobody should be trimming near the trees, except for people who are electrically trained. Or so says the electric company.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah - so about that..
I live close-ish to some power lines. Some 4 or 5 years ago - I guess following that NorthEast USA blackout period which was unrelatedly due to some electricity surge from Canada.. or something - the power company came along and cut down a bunch of trees off 'my land' within 100 feet of the lines. I was pretty peeved. I like trees. I have a whole bunch of them on my land. Next year they returned and cut down more... This has happened for every year since..
Sandy comes along - all the trees which sheltered my 'other trees' have been cut down. Result - I lost 9 trees which were previously sheltered from the wind (and I guess hadn't grown the root structure to survive). 2 hit my house.
Elsewhere - where the utility company had not cut down trees to 'save the power lines' - all the trees survived.
While I appreciate that the utility company needs to protect their lines - there are *much worse* situaitons than where my trees border their lines - even just 1 mile down the road. And I'm convinced they opened up the nightmare that was Sandy.
Also BURY YOUR FUCKING POWER LINES.
Depending on your local laws but if the company or a government inspectors hasn't complained about it in >24mo around here, then it's supposed to be 'grandfathered' in.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I installed solar panels on my house for exactly this reason. It's really just a whole house UPS, but once the batteries, chargers, and inverters are installed, adding panels is a minor extra cost. No more power outages. Saving money (and not giving as much to the power company) is a bonus.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Either way, storage is the "next big thing" for the electric grid. For one thing, it's essential for integrating intermittent sources like most renewables. But it will also help to make the entire grid more "islandable" -- diverse and distributed -- and thus more robust.
In Quebec, we were accustomed to power outages, until the electric utility put James Bay online. This was a phenominal amount of water resource and cheap electricity. As a consequence, a majority of homes in Quebec switched to all electric heating and A/C. This consumption required redundancy for transmission towers and lines. That redundancy came after one bad winter storm tore down a few miles of towers and the lines. Now they are rebuilt and are transmission paths are in triple. The transmission lines are not side by side, but as I understand it, they run parallel about a mile apart. The towers are also much more reinforced. Don't want outages, introduce redundancy.
There is a vast amount of padding for profitability and it's a "who watches the watchman" situation since the government setting the rules is one of the direct beneficiaries of increased profits.
Energex reaps record profits:
http://www.couriermail.com.au/...
Queensland electricity bills could be reduced without selling state's assets: report
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...
It links to this report:
http://images.brisbanetimes.co...
Points 9 and 10 are interesting - 88 million in the last year the government received out of the pockets of electricity consumers as a dividend. The previous government did the same which is one reason it has not been raised by the opposition. It's one of the many downsides of pretend privitisation and a pretend market (others include a loss of economies of scale from artificial barriers constructed between groups that all have the same owner).
Powerful surge in profits as Energex delivers huge dividend for State Government
http://www.couriermail.com.au/...
Seeds have this annoying habit of ignoring power lines.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I once asked the same question to a local power company making the comparison with western Europe where power outages are generally a rare occurrence. At the place in Europe I lived in for 27 years we had one power outage and that only because a guy with the steam shovel ripped the cables out of the sidewalk by accident. In the US the main reason that power grids are still constructed like in Edison's times is cost and the fact that the US was not devastated by wars in the past century. It is cheaper to nail cables to poles as opposed to run them underground. Underground cabling is more expensive to put it, but it really is only impacted by heavy flooding (as are poles). I could not find any comparison of cost between spaghetti wiring and doing it the right way, it might just be that fixing it after every breeze is cheaper in the long run. And any infrastructure run by for profit businesses in the US is banking on cheap = better.... for shareholders that is. So unless the entire mindset of maximizing profits against the greater good gets changed the best investment is in gas powered generators and battery backups. Sad, but true. In return you can enjoy rather low electricity prices in the US. In Europe electricity costs way more, but you rarely get outages...although even that is changing now because the infrastructure put in place right after the war is now EOL.
The real reason IMHO is that we have over-regulated everything to the point that it's darn near impossible to accomplish anything cost effectively.
.vs. everybody else. No kidding.
I live in an area with lots of trees, and storms. Line clearance used to be just cut the damn trees down. Then the tree huggers got all upset (which is insane most of the state is wooded). So the cost of line clearance tripled, and we now have trees with giant holes that the lines go through. Costs much, much more.
Cutting down trees is a dangerous job. So a few guys get hurt, and the power company has big money, so along come the ambulance chasers. The result is that the power company fired it's tree cutting staff. They contract it all out, to avoid the liability. So now we need a power company guy and a tree cutting guy on site, double the cost, half the line clearance budget. The tree cutters got together and formed a union, so no more competition, all the tree cutters charge really high prices, because, as everyone knows "Those evil power companies, they have all kinds of money, and so we should get more of it. They have SEPARATE PRICE for power company work
You want to run more lines? The EPA gets involved, the environmentalists get involved, the lawyers get involved... all these people cost money. So very few new lines are built, and the existing infrastructure is more and more loaded.
This is the story in darn near every industry today. And what are we doing? The feds, the states, the counties, and the cities are writing thousands and thousands of pages of new regulations every day. And the cost of everything just keeps going up and up and up, with reliability going down.
All this shit worked quite well before everyone started screaming "There ought to be a law"....
Murphy was an optimist
You'd need a power station every two or three blocks to run DC.
Murphy was an optimist
If the power company is like the local ISP monopoly where I lived until earlier this year, most of the activity was financial: companies buying and selling each other. The ISP tech who told me this while working at my house said little to no money was put into infrastructure for the past 20 years or so.
We have a co-op rather than a private utility. They trim every year and if you don't allow that they add a cutoff switch to your leg so that when branches/trees/etc fall on the lines you get cut off and the rest of customers still have power. They then only repair your leg when the weather improves enough for it to be safe for their linemen to work there. The system isn't perfect of course as not every tree can be trimmed far enough back to make the lines immune to damage but our power rarely goes out even in high winds, storms etc and we're out in the boonies.
There are two rules to success in life: 1) Don't tell everyone all that you know.
This isn't surprising at all. Utilities long ago split responsibility for poles fairly evenly between the incumbent telecom carrier and the incumbent power provider. So when something does wrong they just stand there pointing the finger at each other until such time the pole topples over taking all their lines out.
And let's not talk about construction and rental fees on said poles. It's what tanked a municipal wifi project.