While it is all fine and dandy to claim the bill is to help out the service market the fact of the mater is this bill is help counter what the automotive industry has been doing lately.
In the last several years as demand for SUVs and more horsepower vehicles Auto manufacturers are getting more and more clever with emissions testing. Today's cars can figure out when they are being emissions tested, between a certain set of operation parameters (like CARB's dyno-tests) and certain requests from the OBD-II interface the ECU can easily figure out what is being done to the vehicle and tune its behavior accordingly.
There are many, many reasons for this; some of which are to give the vehicle more performance on the road, others to counter some legacy laws of the EPA such as the rule saying all vehicles must have catalytic converters, converters that have to be doing something, however today's modern electronically controlled vehicles under steady state burn fuel clean enough that they don't emit measurable levels of unburned fuel, thus the engine has to be de-tuned to meet the EPA rule saying cats have to be doing something.
Detroit Diesel got in some serious trouble a little while back when the EPA found out it was detecting emissions testing and adjusting performance parameters accordingly. By forcing the car manufacturers to open up their bus protocols the EPA can make sure that there is no special emissions test mode that the ECU is going into and make sure the numbers are real.
I doubt anything from this law will help the automotive service industry.
While the article was right when it comes to internal networks to the control stations (such as ISOs) the extent of insecurity in the
energy bussiness is far greater that most people can think of. The fact of the mater is the reason most of the grid is immune to hacker attacks these days are the devices that control power transmission at the lowest level (relays, they control the circuit breakers) are all vt100/rs-232 terminal devices hooked up to aging modems 19.2 is the fastest I know of. Theses relays form the base level of what the power industry calls SCADA (system control and data acquisition). Unfortunately, the vast majority of relays still use the default password, and of course even if it is changed the password is probably going to be the same across all of a companies relays (I
haven't seen a relay that has a password attempt
lockout either). Of course nobody war-dials anymore so these devices go untouched. Security through antiquity.
Given the number 700 I'm pretty sure our definitions are different, for I don't know of any power company that would have had that many as a whole, much less one division. When I think engineer I think PE. Of course the only friends I have from power industry from that time were from protection, harmonic, and system arch. groups.
I must confess that I have no knowledge of those let off imediately after the energy crisis and prior to deregulation which caused severe panic in several markets. However after the advent of deregulation and development of the systems that debuted what? 10 years ago?
Actually power companies didn't fire many engineers, the advent of deregulation made many of them quite rich and many took early retirement, especially during the tech boom. However if you are refering to those who aren't actually degreed or have their PE I guess you're right.
I orginially posted this to my blog for my friends but came to my attention that there was a discussion that could use a little help. Also the power engineering community has been expecting this for a very long period of time California was just the first to go (the grid in California has a different stability point due to its geography), east coast next, and then the Midwest will be the next one to go (I would guess that Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are going go next year)
First to address the technical details.
Q: Why was the blackout so wide spread? A: A number of factors could lead to this, most of it was the grid failed fairly quickly, the grid was stressed and the all plants were at peak capacity. When the automated protect circuitry kicked in to protect the system most of the trips would have been over voltage and over frequency which are substantially faster trips than say over current. The overvoltage/frequency rise in fact would travel as a transient wave on the power lines at the speed of light all the way back to the power plants where the main generator protection would trip to keep from arcing the generator windings. Also power plants tend to be grouped in certain regions, many regions (think urban) don't generate enough to support themselves.
Q: Why are they saying some stations have damage? A: Sometimes the generator protection isn't fast enough to prevent the transient from making it back to the source. Also if there isn't a place for the energy to go, the generator having a huge amount of inductance and generating in the kilo amp range, will create an open circuit voltage large enough to arc itself. Generator protection is a last resort; it is preferable to take out load in a controlled manner.
Q: Why will it take so long to repower everything? A: Power in the United States is distributed using AC at 60Hz. Each and every generating station has to be synchronized with the grid at the connection point or else there will be a tremendous amount of harmonics generated and thus huge amounts of power wasted (plus a whole slew of power related problems that I won't get into). So when the whole grid goes down like it has the power companies and ISOs have to energize the main power transmission lines while leaving all consumers and generators off, then bring up generators near the border of the black-out first and gradually move toward the center of the blackout. This is because it takes time for a signal to propagate between point A and point B, thus while the whole grid is in sync at 60Hz there is a phase difference between point A and B associated with the distance between. Granted this could be accomplished with modern technology but power plants don't have any newer technology than what would have been state of the art in about 1970. Also the time it takes depends on the type of plant and type of trip. For Example take a steam (nearly all big ones) power plant: generator protection notices an over-voltage occur on the line, it trips and takes the generator out of the circuit, the generator over-voltages, so the winding energizer shuts down removing load from the steam turbine, the turbine overspeed protect trips and cuts steam pressure, the boiler preasure relief goes and now the plant is totally off-line. It takes about a week to bring a boiler online from cold. So lets hope the big plants didn't have trips going all the way back to the steam system.
Q: Why did some states loose power while their neighbors didn't? A: Due to de-regulation the grid is segmented by ISOs and they have to buy power from one place and sell it to another until eventually the person buying it is a consumer. Some states at that time were not selling near their peak capacity either because they were charging more than someone else or because the interconnect was too week to supply that much. I would suspect a combination of the two.
The human aspect of the problem:
My suspicions as to what probably caused it was, instead of admitting they couldn't handle the lo
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While it is all fine and dandy to claim the bill is to help out the service market the fact of the mater is this bill is help counter what the automotive industry has been doing lately. In the last several years as demand for SUVs and more horsepower vehicles Auto manufacturers are getting more and more clever with emissions testing. Today's cars can figure out when they are being emissions tested, between a certain set of operation parameters (like CARB's dyno-tests) and certain requests from the OBD-II interface the ECU can easily figure out what is being done to the vehicle and tune its behavior accordingly. There are many, many reasons for this; some of which are to give the vehicle more performance on the road, others to counter some legacy laws of the EPA such as the rule saying all vehicles must have catalytic converters, converters that have to be doing something, however today's modern electronically controlled vehicles under steady state burn fuel clean enough that they don't emit measurable levels of unburned fuel, thus the engine has to be de-tuned to meet the EPA rule saying cats have to be doing something. Detroit Diesel got in some serious trouble a little while back when the EPA found out it was detecting emissions testing and adjusting performance parameters accordingly. By forcing the car manufacturers to open up their bus protocols the EPA can make sure that there is no special emissions test mode that the ECU is going into and make sure the numbers are real. I doubt anything from this law will help the automotive service industry.
While the article was right when it comes to internal networks to the control stations (such as ISOs) the extent of insecurity in the energy bussiness is far greater that most people can think of. The fact of the mater is the reason most of the grid is immune to hacker attacks these days are the devices that control power transmission at the lowest level (relays, they control the circuit breakers) are all vt100/rs-232 terminal devices hooked up to aging modems 19.2 is the fastest I know of. Theses relays form the base level of what the power industry calls SCADA (system control and data acquisition). Unfortunately, the vast majority of relays still use the default password, and of course even if it is changed the password is probably going to be the same across all of a companies relays (I haven't seen a relay that has a password attempt lockout either). Of course nobody war-dials anymore so these devices go untouched. Security through antiquity.
Given the number 700 I'm pretty sure our definitions are different, for I don't know of any power company that would have had that many as a whole, much less one division. When I think engineer I think PE. Of course the only friends I have from power industry from that time were from protection, harmonic, and system arch. groups. I must confess that I have no knowledge of those let off imediately after the energy crisis and prior to deregulation which caused severe panic in several markets. However after the advent of deregulation and development of the systems that debuted what? 10 years ago?
Actually power companies didn't fire many engineers, the advent of deregulation made many of them quite rich and many took early retirement, especially during the tech boom. However if you are refering to those who aren't actually degreed or have their PE I guess you're right.
I orginially posted this to my blog for my friends but came to my attention that there was a discussion that could use a little help. Also the power engineering community has been expecting this for a very long period of time California was just the first to go (the grid in California has a different stability point due to its geography), east coast next, and then the Midwest will be the next one to go (I would guess that Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are going go next year)
First to address the technical details.
Q: Why was the blackout so wide spread?
A: A number of factors could lead to this, most of it was the grid failed fairly quickly, the grid was stressed and the all plants were at peak capacity. When the automated protect circuitry kicked in to protect the system most of the trips would have been over voltage and over frequency which are substantially faster trips than say over current. The overvoltage/frequency rise in fact would travel as a transient wave on the power lines at the speed of light all the way back to the power plants where the main generator protection would trip to keep from arcing the generator windings. Also power plants tend to be grouped in certain regions, many regions (think urban) don't generate enough to support themselves.
Q: Why are they saying some stations have damage?
A: Sometimes the generator protection isn't fast enough to prevent the transient from making it back to the source. Also if there isn't a place for the energy to go, the generator having a huge amount of inductance and generating in the kilo amp range, will create an open circuit voltage large enough to arc itself. Generator protection is a last resort; it is preferable to take out load in a controlled manner.
Q: Why will it take so long to repower everything?
A: Power in the United States is distributed using AC at 60Hz. Each and every generating station has to be synchronized with the grid at the connection point or else there will be a tremendous amount of harmonics generated and thus huge amounts of power wasted (plus a whole slew of power related problems that I won't get into). So when the whole grid goes down like it has the power companies and ISOs have to energize the main power transmission lines while leaving all consumers and generators off, then bring up generators near the border of the black-out first and gradually move toward the center of the blackout. This is because it takes time for a signal to propagate between point A and point B, thus while the whole grid is in sync at 60Hz there is a phase difference between point A and B associated with the distance between. Granted this could be accomplished with modern technology but power plants don't have any newer technology than what would have been state of the art in about 1970. Also the time it takes depends on the type of plant and type of trip. For Example take a steam (nearly all big ones) power plant: generator protection notices an over-voltage occur on the line, it trips and takes the generator out of the circuit, the generator over-voltages, so the winding energizer shuts down removing load from the steam turbine, the turbine overspeed protect trips and cuts steam pressure, the boiler preasure relief goes and now the plant is totally off-line. It takes about a week to bring a boiler online from cold. So lets hope the big plants didn't have trips going all the way back to the steam system.
Q: Why did some states loose power while their neighbors didn't?
A: Due to de-regulation the grid is segmented by ISOs and they have to buy power from one place and sell it to another until eventually the person buying it is a consumer. Some states at that time were not selling near their peak capacity either because they were charging more than someone else or because the interconnect was too week to supply that much. I would suspect a combination of the two.
The human aspect of the problem:
My suspicions as to what probably caused it was, instead of admitting they couldn't handle the lo