Slashdot Mirror
Puerto Rico is Experiencing an Island-Wide Blackout (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Seven months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, the power grid is still unstable. But progress was being made; according to CBS, less than 10 percent of the island was without power as of a month ago. But now, the Associated Press reports that the island is undergoing yet another full blackout. The power company is still investigating the cause and estimates it will take 24 to 36 hours for power to be restored. The saga of Puerto Rico's power grid has been an unhappy one. The US territory was already facing a financial crisis before the hurricane hit. The island only has one electric company, and prior to Maria, it was $9 billion in debt and utilizing outdated infrastructure and equipment.
How can any company be so far in debt and still operating, in any shape or form. I would have figured they would have closed long ago and their assets sold to other companies.
Stiff the power company's creditors. Allow them to declare bankruptcy. Then re-capitalize the whole thing without debt and move on with what you can actually pay for. If that's impossible or they are too corrupt/incompetent to get that done, then as an individual you should factor in whole-house power generation before getting a house or moving to PR. I'm not saying this with a shaking finger or judgment, I'm just saying it seems like common sense, now.
Democracy is the best way for people to remove a government peacefully. I do realize that in the USA that's generally not possible, American's can only vote for "the other lizard", you can't actually remove both. However, in almost every other place in the world such gross mismanagement of the economy would lead to at least a viable opposition being created. What is so special about the USA when their government (i.e. congress) regularly has support in the low teens. The government of Syria has more support and they have to use violent suppression to stay in power.
I've lived in the USA both in the Bay area and in a wealthy part of black Decatur Georgia. I like Americans. I really don't understand their support for their government.
Is this the same place that sent away the crews that had started rebuilding the infrastructure after the hurricane because they suspected cronyism with the Trump Administration?
Because a company with an employee count that can totaled on the hand of a drunk carpenter is the best possible choice to rebuild the power infrastructure of a whole island. Not to mention the contract prevented the PR government from auditing the contract and that the company was charging over $300 per hour for each worker.... Their contract was bigger than the one for the Army Corp of Engineers! That whole situation smelled worse than, well, a San Juan fish market after a few weeks of no refrigeration.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It's an extreme example of what happens when you allow the rich to dictate financial policy against all bounds of sanity.
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
As an American citizen I could move to Spain as a resident, and still vote in the US presidential election. If I moved to Puerto Rico and became a resident, I could not. How fucked up is thqt?!
Make them a state or let them go already. ENOUGH!!
and there are political reasons for both of those things.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How well do you suppose your solar+wind combo would have held up in a hurricane? How about 2 hurricanes? Do you really think you are going to get those el-cheapo deals when every house on the island has to simultaneously replace their system due to hurricane damage? I am sure you would have no problem finding enough solar/wind installers to install 2 million systems. Should be no problem. What a great idea!
Renewables are nice, but not a real solution for the individual household consumer and don't remove the need for a power grid.
If you have solar, you need batteries to get you though the night and cloudy days, plus additional generation capacity to charge all these batteries. Windmills are a bit better, but individuals would have a hard time building and maintaining enough capacity to keep the lights on when it's calm so you'd likely need to share capacity with your neighbors, meaning you need transmission lines.
The issue PR has is power distribution infrastructure, not generation capacity. Adding a raft of solar panels everywhere doesn't fix the infrastructure problem. You are still going to need a power grid.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Well,
instead of answering to the dumb posts I just make a new post, so you can flame me :D
9 billion debts are not peanuts, but for a power company that is nothing!
Puerto Rico has a power production capacity of about 5GW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Building a new power plant costs between 1billion and 2billioin per GW, depending on technology used and other construction hassles: https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
So much to: "corruption", "sozialism", "state owned", "burning tax money" ...
The numbers above btw. do not include grid costs. Puerto Rico us burning a lot of oil, hence they have a relatively high power cost.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You might not need a grid in the traditional sense in the future but you would want a microgrid. https://www.energy.gov/article...
The reason is that if a component in your household breaks, the system could switch automatically to the microgrid that your neighborhood shares and draw power off of that until you can get your distributed generation fixed. In addition, if you produce more than your battery bank can store, you can sell the power into the microgrid.
I'm wondering if Puerto Rico might be a good place for some companies to test and showcase new power technologies. If the country's electrical grid is utter crap, then perhaps the fastest way out of the hole is to abandon large parts of it in favour of localized wind and solar capacity, with battery storage and some fossil-fuel generation capability as backup. Maybe even a couple of those dumpster-sized nuclear generators, if they're buried deep enough...
Yes, it will cost money. That could be partially offset by the good publicity and the possible tax write-offs. It's also an opportunity to try out experimental ideas and processes in a place where the people will be a lot more accepting of failures and interruptions, because right now they have nothing to lose. That's worth money in its own right. And much of the work could be done with cheap local labour. The Puerto Rican economy could benefit in three ways - reliable power, local jobs, and technical training that would raise the level of local expertise. I could see Elon Musk taking the lead on this, and perhaps other companies would jump on board as well.
Depending on the electrical grid to power households and small businesses is kind of quaint anyway. Local power generation provides redundancy, avoids single points of failure, reduces transmission losses, and is friendlier to renewable energy. The Grid should power industry, and serve only as a backup for less power-intensive users. Puerto Rico might be a good place to start moving in that direction.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
when you're dirt poor in PR. We've been dumping on PR for ages because they lean left.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What? Seriously WTF?
Modern _economic_ wind turbines are huge, they feather the blades and stop when the wind gets too high.
Putting a model airplane propeller and a tiny generator on your roof is useless, unless you're pursuing a hippy chick.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
like most poor States they don't have the resources to build a power grid without help. The same is true for KY, AL, SC and just about the entire South. That's one of the reasons they're a net importer of Federal dollars.
PR's problem is that they're like a state but they're not. They have the disadvantages (paying taxes, military service requirements, etc) but none of the benefits. They've been trying to become a full state for ages but they lean Democrat and the Republicans have been in charge since Reagan (I'm not counting Clinton, he was so right wing he might as well have been a Republican).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Hurricanes are not 'high winds'. Have you ever actually seen hurricane damage? Do you really think your 'pole with some u-bolts' is still going to be there when the structure it is attached to is gone?
....you could have had a privately owned power plant, and paid 3x the rates for worse service. Assuming they even put a line out to your neighborhood if you were in a sparsely populated area.
PREPA is the only entity authorized to conduct such business in Puerto Rico, making it a government monopoly.
But the microgrids will still be interconnected, so you still have a grid.
Just retrofit the local water tower with a lower tank and a turbine to act as the neighborhood's battery for wind and solar power, or build a new one if necessary. If pumped storage is good enough for nuclear, it's good enough for renewables. With very low maintenance it would be usable for centuries at least.
Of course, because that was the ONLY power company in the entire world that could come and work on the island.
/inserteyerollemoji
...then that this didn't happen?
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/0...
I certainly haven't heard anything about it since the initial reports.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The purpose of the local water tower is to generate enough pressure to distribute the water properly. If you stick a turbine in there you are taking away the main benefit of having the tower in the first place.
PR has turned into a shitshow so people in the contiguous states can point fingers and pat themselves on the back.
It's hard to figure out what's going on down there. For example, the significant under reporting of hurricane-relate deaths (that requires government complicity) makes no sense. I assume it's to keep the local officials from looking bad and losing their jobs, but the locals are still going to know the government is lying when grandma died but the government reports zero deaths and, if anything, you would want to over report deaths as that would make the situation look worse and therefore more worthy of aid and rebuilding dollars.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
And payment upfront. When they were kicked out, they were in the process of stopping work as they hadn't been paid anyhow.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just how much power do you think is stored in 20,000 gallons, 100 feet up?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In the near-term, yes. In the longer term like 100 years from now, I suspect most microgrids will operate with no interconnection the main grid or only a tenuous one with a very small ability to draw current usually just to make up in dips in renewable generation or losing a large portion of a battery array.
Just retrofit the local water tower with a lower tank and a turbine to act as the neighborhood's battery for wind and solar power,
Methinks you WAY overestimate the amount of power that can be generated from a windmill mounted on a water tower. And the assumption that any given water tower is in a place that gets usable winds is one you might want to do a little research on.
^My error, I read your post wrong. I thought you were recommending adding a wind turbine to the water tower. Ignore my other post.
In other words, useless.
The people of Puerto Rico have been led by corrupt and useless leaders.
http://politicalvanguard.com/i...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Of course, sending them away worked out SO well for Puerto Rico.
Letting them try to fix anything probably would have been worse.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Solar is a complete loss.
The 27 MW San Fermin solar plant in Puerto Rico came through Maria just fine. Ditto the recently built 1100 MW Santa Isabel Wind Farm. Gusts up to 118 MPH were recorded on some parts of the island, but San Fermin was built to withstand 155 MPH, and Santa Isabel Wind Farm was similarly properly engineered for the site.
Solar and wind are how Puerto Rico should be largely powered in the future, with some peaking plants to cover when the output of low.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Most of the UK's power infrastructure is above ground.
They get just the same, if not worse, weather as Germany.
We don't have these problems.
It's not nothing to do with under/overground, it's to do with designing and maintaining the system properly.
No worries
See the aforementioned "or build a new one if necessary".
One of my favorite films.
You mean the average backyard swimming pool? Only small rooftop water towers hold that much - in which case they can act as a battery for the building it's sitting on. Standalone water towers typically have many times that capacity, with the largest holding millions of gallons.
It's not their choice. It wasn't ever their choice.
I was in Hawaii back when it was a territory, and it wasn't their option whether they would be a territory or a state. Being a state would have advantages. Being independent would have advantages. Being a territory... the only advantage is passport-free movement between there and the US.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How about "Hawaii isn't in the normal path of Hurricanes" or "Hawaii doesn't have it's trade with the rest of the world restricted"?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So your recommendation is to let a bunch of con-men take your last resources on promises they can't deliver on?
It wasn't just cronyism, though that was pretty blatant, but it was also incompetence. They *couldn't* have delivered on their promises, but they could have charged a fortune to try.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't think the cost figures are correct, but with proper design a solar system should survive a hurricane without problems. OTOH, this wouldn't be a normal roof-top system. I don't know enough about wind power to comment on that, but I believe I've seen designs that were *claimed* to be durable enough to survive hurricanes. I have no idea how efficient they were under low wind conditions.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Thanks for proving you are a mindless tool parroting what your read from hate sites.
have you looked at the new contract they were are pushing through now? Also look at the size of the other electrical companies and the number of employees they have that are full time or hired for a specific job; how do those numbers compare?
First time I've heard of wikipedia being referred to as a "hate site". Are you one of those "alternative facts" people where anything that goes against what you believe is "fake news"?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The island only has one electric company, and prior to Maria, it was $9 billion in debt and utilizing outdated infrastructure and equipment.
and
With a population of 3.74 million people, it works out to $2406/person, 8.7%GDP. on a per capita income of ~$20k.
That $2,406/person is only to bail out the power company financially, it doesn't provide one penny for rebuilding the infrastructure to current standards, it simply settles the debt for the craptacular power grid the hurricane wiped out. To "Build Back Better" is estimated to cost an additional $17.6 Billion, which adds another $5K or so per capita...
Ken
Go here, scroll down to the picture of the modern wind turbine mast standing without any blades attached and explain to me again how a wind turbine can survive a Category 4 hurricane. While you're there, look for the picture of the devastated solar panel field and tell me again how modern solar panels can survive a Category 4 hurricane.
Wanting something to be true isn't the same as it actually being true.
Ken
You know, I actually looked up your first Wikipedia cite. It's a potential danger you need to consider when posting.
That would be one heck of an impressive water tower.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Read the damn GP post, the twit is talking about injection molded blades.
Just because something feathers and brakes doesn't mean it can stand any wind. You appear to be arguing a point I didn't make.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
That's some impressive flexibility, turning a simple point made on how pumped storage is good enough to backup nuclear generated power to thinking the proposal is to put a few square miles of artificial reservoirs in every neighborhood, in a post talking about water towers.
It's a matter of scale. Pumped hydro is useless for a power grid unless it can store a whole lot of energy. Moving 500 tons of water up and down 20m isn't going to be significant compared to the demands of a neighborhood. If it were that easy, everybody would be doing it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Or 7500 tons for the largest water towers. But 500 would be significant, unless we're using Manhattan as the definition of a "neighborhood". Pumped storage is a proven idea, used around the world, even to back up nuclear power plants - only new thing would be using a water tower to do it. A storage tower would of course take up more space than a Tesla Powerpack. It would also have its operational use measured in centuries rather than decades.
We're still on energy grids built around central power generation from nuclear or coal plants, not decentralized grids using renewables. So we don't have neighborhood sized batteries to speak of yet, using any tech. But they would plug the "baseload power" FUD that is thrown at wind and solar power.
Back of the envelope calculation suggests that a ton moving down 20m will release about 400 Kj. That means the 500-ton tower would store about 200 Mj. That's under 60 kilowatt-hours. The average US home runs about 30 Kwh a day, so that's about a day's worth of electricity for two houses. Building a water tower 15 times that size would store a day's worth of electricity for thirty houses. That's assuming 100% efficiency; in actuality, it's about 70-80% efficient, so say 22 houses. That's for a really big water tower. You can tell people to conserve on power, and you can be overconfident and figure it's 8 hours of storage, but that's a really big water tower that won't serve 100 houses with overnight electricity. There may be other problems. It would be fairly expensive to build and maintain, and might be noisy.
As I said, it's a matter of scale. Pumped hydro is not practical for neighborhood storage.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm talking a backup to maintain "baseload power" level for dark windless days, not acting as a complete replacement in the event of a power outage (a feature also not provided by coal or nuclear power grids). The real limiting factor would be geography, as it would obviously be cheaper (and more provide more power) to build your upper tank on top of a 200m high hill as opposed to a 100m tower. So a better idea for mountainous West Virginia, not so great for flatty-flat-flat Florida.