Now,I'm not looking to "cash in" on the recent Power Faults in the US.
But, even though the US is in the midst of a HOT summer.
Could this be a call to address, as to how dependant we have ALL become on Electricity?.
Parents could not keep cool, children would have no entertainment, the Hot Water would not be hot.
Now, as an Electrician, I am not looking to cut my own throat, but, it seems to me that a few Installations could be a bit more efficient than what they are at the moment.
When HV/EHV equipment starts to trip,it would suggest that there is too much load on the system.
I read in the paper, that President Bush said that the US Grid System is antiquated and in need of an update, just HOW this is going to happen, your guess is as good as mine!.
But I must say, the world over, Electricity, is being used irresponsibly!.

These sort of outages really do highlight just how dependent society has become on electricity.

Have we got any reasonable-sounding theories as to what happened yet?

I don't know if there was too much load on the system(maybe on one line which caused the domino affect) but generation was only at 75% of capacity from what I've read. It wasn't that hot in the northeast to max the system. Something else happened and they are saying it happened in the Erie loop which circles lake Erie. Certainly an antiquated installation that runs a huge(used to be anyway) industrial area. It will be months before the whole story is known. How after deregulation the free market is going to invest in new lines is beyond me.

We certainly are addicted to electricity and its benefits. Mainers learned that in 98 when ice took down lines thruout the state and folks went without for days to weeks

From CNN,three power lines in Ohio wen't down an hour before the cascade.An alarm to indicate the stability of the grid was not working so they thought it was stable and didn't disconnect however they are still not 1OO% sure.They also said data was coming in so fast durring the first few minutes that it was't logged in a timely fashion.I'm sure somewhere there's a fault history file that will tell the story.According to our equipment we had a spike at 4:06 pm and then zero line volts at 4:07 pm.The system was even not at capacity when it happened so load was not a factor.

[This message has been edited by frank (edited 08-17-2003).]

Apparently, something happened at Niagara Falls. As it is on the border, the Americans blamed the Canadians, and the Canadians blamed the Americans. Since it was a tie, they both decided to blame Detroit, Michigan.

New Jersey was absent from the debate, because everybody was stuck, trying to get home from work in New York.

Detroit took offense at the finger-pointing and decided that something had to be done to deflect the blame.

Thus, everything pointed to a problem in Ohio.

Upon further investigation, it was determined that there was a new employee who forgot that the "SAVE ENERGY" notice refers to the right hand switch only:


Officials at the power plant are working to prevent such a problem from occurring in the future.

I think we have become too dependent on businesses in general. We don't seem to have any backup systems for our daily necessities like food, fuel, clean drinking water, or power. I wouldn't think we need to go extremes and create backup luxuries but at least some local aid.

I think the New York subway system should have backup generators just for the purpose of evacuating people from the city.

But, like everything else, who pays for all the backup systems?

Off the main subject but related.
The timing was convenient for George W., but I'm sure it's just coincidence.

ThinkGood — Your switch labels remind me of a vaguely related announcement: “Due to the unforeseen economic downturn, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off.”




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 08-17-2003).]

LOL

From the various figures I've seen bandied about on the rise in U.S. electricity usage over the last 10 years ~ up 30% to 35%, but capacity only going up 15%, that says one thing to me ~ chronic under investment.

Sadly, the only thing that the billions of dollars needed, are likely to be spent on, will be litigation, and not infrastructure.

The U.S. has got to decide whether the lawyers benefit, or the consumers and the grid network benefit!

[This message has been edited by Plugman (edited 08-17-2003).]

a srceam ThinkGood!


oh and, to all our foriegn correspondents here, be glad you've no catch of buried electrical resources


.... off to crank up the AC then!

~S~

TG,
LOL! Love that picture!

One of the main reasons for under investment is the NIMBY syndrome-no one wants a new power plant in their backyard, no matter what it's energy source may be.

Of course, it occurs to none of these folks that the lack of new power plants could mean more blackouts and brownouts in their future.

MacWire

I've come across similar attitudes here. There's a windfarm a few miles down the coast from here at West Somerton, consisting of 10 turbines. Some people have complained about it, saying that they don't want these things to become commonplace, but of course they don't want to stop using all their power-consuming gadgets which are pushing our power consumption up higher every year.

It's the same with cellphones: I've found that quite a few of the people who are opposed to cell-towers being erected and the same ones who are grumbling about the poor coverage in many areas.


[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 08-18-2003).]

The whole time the folks in the Northeast/Midwest area were out of power,and all the talk about billions of dollars for upgrades,I feel lucky to be hooked to relatively cheap TVA hydro-generated power.


Russell

from the news the other night it looks like hydrogen will produce the electricity of the future. for cars and everything else. and the only exhaust is clean h20.

targetshootr,
I'd agree with you there.
I'd also like to see increased use and development of Fuel-cell technology.

Thinkgood:

I think the switches are due for a replacement!! The little frame around the toggle is cracked.

Leads me to wonder if the mechanism inside might be damaged....

Macwire said:


These NIMBY pamby folks are the same ones who complain about a wireless phone company slapping a tower in their precious little upscale community and how it would be an eyesore and infect people with radiation (say what??).

Then these SAME people turn around and complain that their wireless phones don't work when they want to order a pizza because they're too lazy to walk up the block and order it at the counter.

[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 08-22-2003).]

Check out this website www.igrid.com. A lot of info to scroll through. Most of it goes over my head. It is suppose to monitor and log all the events that happen on the grid. Maybe someone here can interpit it for us.

Blessings, Mark

Blackout from Space

WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

Awesome photo.

As soon as it's dark I'm going back to that site to see the difference.

Wow! Anyone not familiar with the outline of North America could be forgiven for thinking that there's another huge bay there!

This photo has been called a fake on another site. Do you know where it came from? If not I will try and verify, and get back to you.

A pretty lousy fake at that.

What is the blob of black extending out over the Atlantic ocean?

Why is the blackout area BLACK, when dark land and water areas are various shades of dark blue?

Yup... If you can believe Snopes it's a fake. Their description makes sense.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/blackout.asp

Barbara Mikkelson at Snopes seems to make extra effort to preserve their credibility, including updates and occasional corrections/retractions as necessary.


[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 08-25-2003).]

If I wanted to make a fake blackout picture like this, I would, using say Photoshop, select the appropriate area with the lasso tool, feather it a little, and adjust down the contrast not to zero but to around 5% and adjust down the brightness to that of the land in northern Canada. To simulate car lights and emergency lighting in the blackout areas.

Somewhat related: http://www.eypmcf.com/Critical_Power_Executive_Summary_EYP_MCF.pdf

This may sound kind of silly... and straight out of the X Files
(and a little touch of Dale Gribble ...)
but I first thought the problem was Induced Currents from intense Solar Flares, causing transient surges and other fun things.

Believe this happened once before on the East Coast, and killed power for many hours across several states - including New York.

Feel free to fire away with straight jacket jokes if needed

Bjarney, does this sound feasable? (not the straight jacket ...)
And if possible, would this either cause or assist in a Sub Sync Resonance situation going really bad?

Possible to throw excessive levels of Reactive Currents (or true power currents even) between Transformers?

Would something like this also interrupt or otherwise knock off-line the PoCo's Carrier Current monitoring and / or control systems?

Just hanging out with Fox Mulder...
Scott35

Here is a link that relates to the solar flare thing. I will try and 'unlock' it to answer your question.
http://www.badastronomy.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=7453&start=0

Scott35, I think you are referring to GICs, or geomagnetically induced currents related to solar-flare activity. That can be a real bad problem in power transmission, for they cause DC currents to circulate from one switchyard ground grid to another. High-voltage transformers are usually wye-grounded, and DC currents of <10 amperes can fry transformer windings in fairly short order. Because current transformers are AC devices, they cannot reflect DC to be sensed by protective relays that are used for a major part of transformer protection.

Solar-flare activity is supposed to peak on an 11-year cycle, so effort and money to invest in solving the problem varies. I haven’t read anything that related the NE 14-August outage to solar activity, although there have been well-documented cases of GICs being a problem at other times in the northeast. Apparently rock content in soil determines an area’s susceptibility to the problem.

A few extra-geekey links are http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abs_free.jsp?arNumber=141760 http://wham.phys.ucalgary.ca/satellites/html/sp_weather.html http://www.estec.esa.nl/wmwww/WMA/spweather/workshops/spw_w4/proceedings/PulkkinenPoster.pdf

A couple of decent outage links:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/special/aug03/black03.html
http://platts.com/features/poweroutage/index.shtml

Another not-too-geekey link is: http://www.itctransco.com/documents/B_8-14-2003_ITC_Analysis.pdf

On the electrical dependence:

Saturday I visited a 17th century palace, which had been kept intact. The owners kept it more or less like a museum already in the 19th century and it's now a real museum. It has only had some minor modifications since it was constructed. To this day, there is no central heating, no running water and no electricity. The only light is the daylight coming in through the windows. And the guide's torchlight.

What surprised me was that you really didn't miss the electric light. One could probably get by really well at night too with just an oil lamp.

But here comes the shocker: The lack of heating meant that it was far below freezing indoors during the winter. There's ice in the attic and top floor in winter. "Doesn't the cold damage all the paintings?", I asked the guide. "No, on the contrary. The paintings and wallpapers have been excellently preserved for 300 years because of the cold and the lack of light."

The palace was never completely finished. You can see the ongoing construction work in the largest room as the worker left it off 300 years ago. No cables and no water pipes there, just the beams