So what did you do during the Great Blackout, and how long did you have to do it?99 responses total.
Luckily (well, I forget how much is luck vs. plan) my storage locker place doesn't allow volatiles, so my camping stove was stored here instead. That got me coffee in the morning. Then I'd just bought a new cylinder of propane for my tiny grill, which served to cook up the meat that would have gone bad. Got online a few times with my laptop. Oh, and I turned on my police scanner and sharpened a bunch of knives. Well, I had the police scanner on for early news, then in the process of looking for something else I finally found the whetstone I'd been looking for. Then today in a burst of bored energy I nearly completed my 3rd chainmail shirt - probably an hour left to finish the armpit seams.
Dozed off in front of the radio, woke to hear that George Bush had sent troops to invade Canada in reprisal for their unprovoked attack on America's power grid. No wait, that was a dream.
Looks like people are having problems getting on grex. DNS seeems to be down.
Made a trip to 'Arbor - unaware that it was anything but some local power company screw-up, until I turned on the radio mid-trip. SemiSlug was canceled, though two or three people did show up. Came home, stopped at the local Meijer to pick up a fresh deep cycle battery to replace one with a surface charge of 8 volts. Managed to get a light and a fan, plus the computer equipment, powered some of the time. Today, took off looking for fuel. Listening to radio reports of where power was coming on, I decided to get just before the wave front, as it were, and after three tries found a station with not too long a line. Took fubar battery to Meijers and collected the core charge. Got power back at 2pm, while I was out, and water around 9PM.
(what blackout? we haven't had a blackout in at least two years.)
(where are you now, carson?) Lesseee. Took my long-haired bunkie to work around 17:30, when the power had been out for an hour. No power at work, but they found things to do with flashlights and little else. While she was at work, the rug rats and I went out to the sailing club, where I did some painting. After sunset, drove back to Ann Arbor, hung out in the parking lot until my LHB got off work. Read by flashlight until we fell asleep. Friday, took folks to work. (Daughter-mine wasn't needed; my long-haired bunkie wasn't so lucky.) Then went back out to the sailing club to do some more painting, reading, etc. Got home around 14:30 to be told that power came on at or about 14:00. Ended up going to Chelsea, since the stuff around the house was closed (got gas at the Marathon at Packard and Stadium first; I'd hoped not to have to, but that didn't work out. The line wasn't bad at all.) Went back out to the sailing club, just because. (Power came on out there at or about 18:30.) Picked up my LHB at 20:00, and drove over to the Pumpkin, where I proceeded to plug stuff in and turn on switches, during which fun activity I was joined by i. Dinner was at Fazoli's on Stadium at Liberty. A fun time was had by (almost) all. :)
Did the club have power Joe? We never lost it on the other side.
Was at the UGLi, in the computer lab, when the lights did a crazy dance and computers went off and came back on for a few seconds before finally dying. Not knowing it was wide-spread, tried to call DPS (UM campus police) but couldn't get through, so called AAPD (not the emergency number, no), which was the first time we heard it was city-wide. Somehow the Grad still had power; went up and checked news online & read NYTimes's early report identifying the problem as a cascade failure of the Niagara-Mohawk grid, then walked home. Glen street was barely moving. Somewhere around 6 my dad got home -- the Exhibit Museum never lost power, either, so he didn't even know there was a problem until he left to come home. Listened to radio and read by candle/flashlight until going to bed. Friday, sat outside listening to radio & reading until about 1, when we noticed the porchlight had come on. Went inside and noticed the clocks had been on for half an hour. . . . My dad went out to stores to find food -- hadn't had much, but had no ice, so lost what we did have -- and got stranded at the mall when the thunderstorm rolled through mid-afternoon & made it impossible for him to drive. Made it back eventually, and we had hot dogs from the grill for the second night in a row. The Ugli continues closed today, but is to reopen Sunday.
Huh? Mostly, I just listened to the radio! The BBC even! Wow! And then my power was on at like 2AM or something thereabouts somewhere 'round there.
I was in line at Price Chopper when the power went off. After about 5 minutes, the backup generators had kicked in, and the lights went on. Took them about 15-20 more minutes before they were able to get the cash registers up and running. Got through the line, went back to my apartment, sat on the front porch with roommates for a while, then went out to dinner. The restaurant had power (apparently they were running from the grid, not the backup generators, because all the tv's were fully operational). Drove back, noticed street lights were on ... until about a mile away from home, where everything was off. Got home, sat around on porch for about 45 minutes, then power came back on. (about 2115 thursday, IIRC)
I first tried to call DTE, but it was busy, so I walked up to Stadium to see if the traffic lights were out. Then I went home and turned on the police scanner, where I heard somebody mention that this was ahpening in other states. Then I dug out a regular radio and found somebody still broadcasting. Some of the AM stations were eventually just broadcasting the audio from a TV station.
Got up on Friday morning, heard about power blackouts in the US, thought, "hmm, that's interesting"*, went to work, got on with my life, went out, came back and went to sleep, got up, tried to log on to GREX, failed, thought, "hmm, that's annoying"**, got on with my life, bought a suit, came back, logged on to GREX, thought "Thank Christ, what a relief"***. * That's the polite version. ** That's also the polite version. *** You think that's the polite version?
I enjoyed the unusual quit - no airplanes, few cars - and the lack of streetlight glaring through my window (20 feet away). Listened to birds in the morning. Counted cricket calls - average 3, sometimes 2 or 4 or even 5.
I did what I usually do, really... because the blackout didn't reach this far west. I was wondering why Grex was down until I saw the 20/20 report and then figured it had something to do with it.
I was at home when my UPS started beeping and the lights flickered and dimmed for about 4-5 seconds. I thought it was because I was using too much electricity, so I went around turning off my A/C, and lights. Then went about my day as usual, a few hours later, I flipped on the TV and heard the news about the big power outage. I live in Kzoo. It sure looked like the NY'ers were have a good time. We should have more black outs. I think I depend on electicity too much in my daily life. If it wasn't cloudy, yesterday would have been a great night for watching the persides meteor shower and Mars.
I happen to be in MI right now and was caught in the blackout in my office in Southfield. The lights went out and I was on a conf call. Because the phone switch is on a UPS, our phones worked for a couple hours. I just kept going on the phone, then someone came in and let me know what was really going on, so we got off the call. I stayed at work until 7pm cause I was low on gas and I knew it would be a waste of time to drive anywhere where I was going to sit and run out of gas in the deadlocked traffic. So we sat around and played Euchre for a while. Then I called all my relatives to see who had power, and my mom had it up in Flint, so I went up there and stayed. I was on the phone until about midnight with my boss and others deciding what we were gonna do (which was nothing, but it took them until the next day to figure that out.) Our DR team called from Atlanta to ask us what we were going to do, and when we would start flying people to Denver to get them up and running. I just said "Listen, this is going to be probably one day without work, so basically we are going to wait it out." Gee, I was right! Our power at work came back on at 7pm yesterday and my infrastructure guys went in to bring everything up. Corporate spend 6 hours trying to figure out what to do, then they finally decided that we would just wait it out. It was just frigging ridiculous. My cell rang off the hook yesterday from 6am until 6pm. People just need to take a chill pill.
Managed to walk all the way home to Brooklyn in pitch black darkness, pushing through throngs of people with only a poorly working flashlight guiding the way. With no subways running, everyone was walking on the sidewalks to get anywhere, and with no parking lights or walk/don't walk signs working, you crossed streets VERY carefully. They suspended side street parking rules and were telling people who were driving to pull over and park their cars, because with no street lights and everything pitch black, even car headlights don't help much. Better to park your car, and hope you remember where you left it later, then to risk driving and hitting someone in the street because you couldn't see them. After I finally got home, I popped open a beer and went up on the rooftop of my apartment building where it was much cooler than it was inside. There I could see the entire manhattan skyline pitch dark, Jersey was dark. It was quite a sight. The only thing that appeared to stay lit that I could see, was off in the harbor-- the Statue of Liberty, which apparently has its own generator powering its torch. Well after all, it IS Lady Liberty's eternal flame, so they CAN'T allow that to go out right? All in all, everyone here in NYC seems to have handled things well. There were people taking turns on my street running out to direct traffic at the intersection. Some of the bars and stores stayed open, using candelight. Quite an experience.
Thursday I got kicked off of Pierce Lake GC because it was a State owned facility and they went into emergency mode. Filled my truck with gas in Chelsea where the electricity was still flowing. Drove home and grabbed five five-gallon gas cans and drove the side roads back to Chelsea where the pumps had since run dry. Continued down I-94, checking the lines at gas stations along the way until I found one with a short line at exit 145. Filled up and ate dinner. Came home and set up my generator. Last summer I hired an electrician to set up a breaker board for my generator. I hooked that all up and fired up my juice. My house was powered and we watched some TV (all blackout coverage) until bedtime. Friday I reran my generator in the morning and then went to all the nearby neighbors offering to roll my generator to them and pump up their fridges, freezers, and sump pumps. I serviced about six houses on a rotating cycle. One neighbor has water problems and was freeking about the rain. I was at his house running his sump when the TV came on about 4:15 PM. I worked very hard and received a lot of appreciation. Today, I'm resting dammit.
Our 30 hour Holiday in Phoenix AZ: We got up at 4:30 a.m. PDT in San Francisco on Thursday morning to make a 9:00 a.m. flight to Detroit via Phoenix: on time in Phoenix and boarded the flight to Detroit at noon MST. We rolled out, but plane had backup hydraulics problem, so returned to ramp where we sweltered for an hour, and finally deplaned. Plane was finally declared inoperable so another plane was brought in to be prepped. At about that point a rumor of a power outage in the East began to circulate and finally the flight to Detroit was cancelled and we were rebooked for a 6 pm MST flight Friday, and given a room for the night at the airport Holiday Inn plus dinner vouchers. Meanwhile, our daughter who had flown with us from SF had departed on a flight to Columbus OH at about the same time we had been scheduled to fly to Detroit. She got to Columbus OK to a emergency-powered airport and picked up her car to drive to either her apartment in Springfield OH or to our home in Ann Arbor. But Springfield was reported without power so she opted for Ann Arbor. We got to our Motel, had dinner, and called daughter on cell phone, and discovered her in her car disabled by the road outside Columbus after the car's battery had exploded. She was waiting for a tow truck from a non-AAA garage because AAA garages were overloaded. So back to the Phoneix airport in the AM to wait 'til 6 pm MST for our flight. While waiting we got a cell call from our daughter who had gotten the car repaired and driven to Ann Arbor to find the power was out, but but it had came on again by Friday morning. We left on time and arrived ca. 1 a.m. EDT Saturday in Detroit, to an emergency-powered airport. The parking garage was unlit but the shuttle was operating. They were, of course, collecting parking charges: the attendant was in his booth illuminated by a candle. Home by shortly after 2 a.m.
goose: no, the club did NOT have power Thursday evening nor most of Friday. We could see lights across the lake, in Livingston County, but the Washtenaw side was dark (except for the folks who had their own generators, of course. ;)
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After I got home (an interesting exercise in itself, as the fuel pump of the car couldn't take the heat at its advanced age and decided to croak about 3 miles out), I got out my camping lantern and patched my backup power system together from the UPS and storage battery. I had never tried it before, but it worked the first time. (Re item 161 response 1: Yes, it's a deep-cycle battery, labelled for trolling motors. I'm running through an APC 600 UPS (the internal gel-cells had failed long ago, so I just patched onto the wires and went from there). It's a sealed battery, so it requires no venting. I'm charging it from an external charger to avoid compatibility issues.) After taking care of the basics, I pulled a still-cold Coke out of the fridge and sat down with the newspaper and crossword, and then I powered up the computer and wrote what became item 161 and played a game or two. That didn't take the whole evening, so before bed I went to the bookshelf for some things I hadn't read yet. My little white-LED book light from Meijer wasn't optimal, but it did the job. Friday morning, power was still out so no work. I drove over to where the VW had died, and of course the fuel pump worked just fine after cooling off overnight. I drove it to the shop on the corner and left it with them, farted around home for a while, dropped the book I'd started the previous night in favor of Terry Pratchett, and rather than trying to cook I decided to kill two birds with one stone and get some hot food and a cold drink while recharging my storage battery. Using the lighter plug and cord from a defunct tire-compressor, I patched the storage battery into the Taurus's power system and went for a drive. Found food, ordered, read book, ate food, chatted with another customer about Linux, moseyed home by back roads, found that battery had charged very nicely. I pretty much sat around and read until the power came back on. My only regret is that I didn't have a big enough inverter to run my refrigerator. With another battery I could have run just about everything but the fridge, including main lights and a fan or two as well as the computer. I'm considering this, as the start of a solar electricity system.
So, can we Californians gloat about your unreliable electric power now?
Feel free, Steve. :)
I live in Tecumseh. I got my power back around midnight on Thursday night. Friday morning, I was just finishing breakfast when the power went out again. There was nowhere to get gas; my Taurus was about out, so I drove my pickup to work. There was no power at work, but a few of us went to Pinckney on Friday and worked for a while from my manager's house. When I got home, around noon, the power had been back on for less than an hour. I was able to fill up with gas without waiting in line around 4:00 Friday.
Friday's San Francisco Chronicle had a headline saying "It could happen here, expert warns: California vulnerable to blackouts." Really? Gray Davis was on TV tonight, claiming credit for this blackout not happening in California.
Waaah. Memphis had its power out for over a week from the straight line winds storm.
One of the San Francisco TV stations last night showed some interviews with people in Iraq, who were saying something along the lines of, "they've left us without power for three months, but they think it's a problem when they lose power for a day?"
Damn straight, you ragheads! And whats more, we don't have to have a big fucking super-power with big phucking military to do the regime change for you too stoopid or lazy. We do it ourselves in the ballot box with little or no casualties every couple years.
Re 27: Well, we get ice storms every couple of years up here in the frozen white wastelands, with accompanying power outages. This is actually the first real power outage I've ever had in the summer, but in the last 7-8 years I've had a couple multi-day outages during freezing weather.
Which is WAY more convenient for keeping food cold!
Nyup. We can't handle things like ice storms here, but we know to anticipate problems in the winter. The storm that hit here was totally unpredicted.
Yeah but when there is a power outage in the winter, I have no heat :(. I dont even care about the no heat too much because I can always pack up all the animals and head up to my parent's house but if the heat goes, then the pipes might freeze. Luckily for me, the one time I lost power for any significant length of time in the winter, it was during an ice storm and the temp had risen to just above freezing. On Thursday, I was at work trying to fix some problems related to a virus we got earlier in the week when the power went down. It didnt take us long to figure out that it was a big outage because some of our stores are required to call in if their power goes out. Our phone system has around 1/2 hour of battery backup. Around 4:30p, the company decided to close the building. So everyone left at once. That sucked. Even if the light at the one exit from this office park was working, there would be a traffic jam. However, it wasnt working so the traffic got *really* backed up. Some co-workers and I took some popsicles out of the freezer and sat in the shade eating them. We waited for about an hour. The roads had cleared somewhat by 5:30 but it still took me 45 minutes to drive to Ypsi. I was a little worried about the dogs because I knew they would be doing a pee pee dance by the time I got home. Luckily, I ended up getting home only about 1/2 hour later than I normally would get home and they seemed fine with that. I had about a 1/4 tank of gas so I had no trouble getting home. I thought about going up to my parent's house because they have a generator and also a lake which means it is cooler there. It was really muggy and hot on Thursday night. But then, I figured that people get crazy when the power is off and I didnt want to risk having someone break into my house so I got out all my millions of candles and lit up the joint! I read a book. I only had pasta for dinner but that is ok because I like pasta. On friday, a couple of gas stations in Ypsi opened up and the lines were LONG. I thought about going to get gasoline but decided it wasnt worth it to wait in line. When I went to go get gasoline on Saturday morning, those gas stations had sold out of gas! My power came back on at around 8:30a on friday. Nothing spoiled from my freezer. When I checked on things at 8:30a, everything was still frozen. I still had ice cubes. I didnt open the door until the power came back on so it held all the coldness inside.
Winter is certainly more convenient for a lot of cooking-related stuff. Being able to just stick your freshly-boiled soup stock outside the window and skim off the congealed fat a few hours later beats most things Nature does for the cook in the summer. On the other hand, when the power is out it's very nice not to have to worry about draining your pipes before they freeze.
Of course now that I'm living in a house with a woodstove the power failure is during hot, muggy weather. I did hole up here for a 3-day failure a few years back, though. Brought the cats over and everything.
If there's a power outage in the winter lasting more than about 6 hours, my pets are goners. They're tropical fish. They're in 50 and 55 gallon fish tanks and so might last for a few hours. Since I moved here, I've had one several hour long power outage in the winter, and that was before I got my fish. My fish help keep the power running in Tecumseh, I think.
re #5:#6: (Chicago. beady probably has a more accurate recollection of
this: a couple of years back, during some pretty hot summer days,
there were a number of blackouts, including at least one that affected
the downtown area. the situation left Mayor Daley Jr. none too
pleased and he made a number of public statements to the effect of
"this isn't going to happen again." so far, his word has held up.)
re 36:
Have you thought about putting your fish on a UPS, John?
Staci went off to a sleep over birthday party. I can only imagine a sleep over party with 8-10 teens with no power. Damon and I sat on the porch, reading, stitching and talking. We grilled sausages and eggs for dinner. STeve was at work at MSU which is self contained and had power even though the rest of the Lansing area didn't. After it got too dark to read outside I lit candles and continued reading (homework, with a final on Wednesday) until STeve got home around midnight. I listened to STeve struggle to breath while I scratched at mosquito bites. We are going to be setting up a battery backup for his CPAP very, very soon, he did call about checking into the hospital for the night, but decided that he would try sleeping at home since they had people that needed the machine more than he did. Spent Friday reading and stitching on the porch until power came on at 14:00. We lost milk and cream type stuff from the refrigerator and one fudgecicle from the freezer. Everything else was ok.
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re resp:38: That's a very good idea! No, I never thought of it.
A weird but fanciful thought: if this were to continue enough, would more people consider technologies that would allow them to get off- grid?
Maybe. Maybe not. You can put solar panels on the roof. Mostly how they work is they feed power into the grid and you draw power off the grid. So maybe you sell power to the utility during the day, and buy it back at night. What does this buy you when the grid is down? Not too much. If you actually want this to provide power for you when the grid is down, then you'll need to have your own energy storage - batteries maybe. The system just got a lot more expensive. And you need capacity to satisfy your peak need, so the solar panel just got a lot bigger. Really getting off grid costs a lot of money. I was interested in the behavior of the two phone networks during the blackout - landlines stayed up and worked without a hitch, while the cell phone network disintegrated. The cell phone network problems weren't because they lost power - it was because of excess demand. There isn't anything intrinsic to the technologies that says the land network should be more robust. I think it has to do with history - the land network was built by a regulated monopoly, the cell phone network was built by a free market. In a competitive marketplace, it doesn't make sense to design a communications network with a lot of excess capacity. It costs money and earns you no reliablity. If you over build like that, other companies will undercut your price and put you out of business. A free market cannot build a phone network as reliable as the old Bell Network. I think this is the issue with deregulation of the energy companies as well. You cannot simultaneously maximize reliability and and profit in a competitive market, so deregulation will get us flakier power grids.
Nationalise them ;-)
Our AT&T phone cards could not be used last Thursday and Friday (at least): busy signals on the 1-800 numbers. Even landlines don't work if an intermediate facility is down or jammed.
Our Sprint cell phones worked great.
Our landlines were out, but we're in Verizon (formerly GTE) territory. I had some problems with system overload on the cell phones (AT&T), but as the outage progressed it became harder and harder to get a signal at all. I'm wondering if towers were dropping off as their battery backups ran out or something.
That was the report I heard on NPR, jmsaul. The problem was particularly acute in places like NYC, where it was assumed the towers, often built on the roofs of buildings, would always have power so no backup system was included at all.
My AAT phone card worked like a breeze Thursday afternoon/evening, and all day Friday. Got almost all my "big-picture" information by calling a cousin and having him give me the latest update. Never got a busy signal.
Re #47: That was my experience, too. My T-Mobile phone worked from the time the power went out until about 7 pm (though with lots of fast-busy signals and cancelled calls due to the circuits all being busy) but after that I couldn't get a signal until about 8:20 am, when power came back on in the area of the local tower. At work we have no battery backup for our PBX, so when the cell network clogged we effectively had no means of communications. I'm not even sure a backup for the PBX would have bought us much, because both our voice and data T1 lines appeared to fail as soon as power went out.
My land lines were fine but my parents' land line was down until Saturday. I dont know if my cell phone worked because I had forgotten to charge it and it had no power. I was wishing I had spent the extra money on a car charger. :) doh!
Just heard on the radio that SBC has said they won't pay people for days they were out of work due to the power outage. They'll have to either use a vacation day or have their paycheck docked.
If those SBC employees belong to a bargaining unit, then any payment would be governed by the labor agreement and not be at the unilateral discretion of management.
Was able to call to land phones fine from my Verizon cell phone, but had difficulties reaching other cell phones, ranging from flat-out no response at all to busy signals.
All the people here in my department were told the same thing. We could either use vacation time or have our paychecks docked. Luckily for me, I always have Fridays off so I'll only lose the 45 minutes I left early on Thursday.
Wow. We were told to count it as a paid working day, even if we didn't work. Just like a snow day. One good thing, anyhow.
Going off-grid in town isn't much of an option. A real off-grid system has a lot of energy storage, whereas most on-grid RE systems have no batteries and use grid-interactive inverters and net metering. Without storage or an active grid connection, you're limited to the power you can make at that very moment; if starting your refrigerator's compressor requires more power than your system is putting out, you can't do it (and everything else might shut down when it tries). Batteries change the entire picture. If you had an inverter running from the battery of a hybrid car (the Toyota Prius has a 144 volt, 6 AH battery for about 850 WH of storage), you could run most everything in your house save air conditioning and electric heaters. Then your problem would be maintaining your energy balance between production and consumption, which is much easier to do - and if you already have the battery as part of the car, it's a lot cheaper.
I work for an SBC subsidiary, and will be paid in full for last Thursday and Friday.
Guess it depends on whether Catbert is running your HR department or not, then.
I have no particular knowledge of the SBC situation, but at another large telco, that was the sort of thing that started happening after management announced that "our goal is to shrink through attrition."
We're getting paid for Thurs and Fri...like Twila they are treating it as a 'snow day' or whatever. I came in part of the day anyway, and worked from home for a bit.
Checkout today's (Sunday, August 24, 2003) User Friendly at
http://www.userfriendly.org/static/
Monday's (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030825) is also good. But then, I gather they pretty nearly always are.
True, but yesterday's was about the blackout.
Speaking of the blackout, I finally got a chance to read Saturday's NYT article about it. The details of the timeline are awe-inspiring in the way massive forces marshalled themselves with such speed, but I digress.... As it happens the problems began with First Energy in Ohio, but the vulnerabilities are probably built into the system. We depend too much on long-distance transmission of power (which is not terribly efficient in any case, and should be discouraged by policy) and the communications system for handling imbalances is people yakking over telephones. This is good for problems coming up over the next hour, but totally inadequate to handle lightning-fast changes over the next ten seconds. If we are going to continue as we are, we need to find ways to manage power much better. For instance, if First Energy had been able to cut every air conditioner in Cleveland back to half power in response to the power lines failing, the problem might never have happened. If Michigan had 2 GW of surge power on tap, the local grid would have stayed up long enough to cut Ohio loose. Etc, etc. There are a lot of things we need to address.
I found that the articles in the newspapers I read quote officials giving oversimplified analyses of what they think happened, talking as though electricity was like water being pumped around the system. One event that was describe was an "unexplained" surge of 4000 megawatts into the Michigan network. Well, electricity isn't stored in the network, so a "surge" of power into the network would require that it be consumed somewhere, but unless it melted a lot of copper, where would it go? Of course, trey didn't say how long that "surge" lasted, and there could be such a pulse into reactance in the system if the source phase slipped from the load phase. That's the kind of detail I would like to read about. I suppose it will be available eventually. One commentator on NPR tried to explain how fast problems can move in the system by saying that the "electrons move at the speed of light". Well..not quite. Direct current electrons move at most at only centimeters per hour, depending on the current and the wire cross section (there is a calculator for this at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/miccur.html#c3). Disturbance, of course, move much faster as waves through the population of electrons. If he had said, "disturbances move at the speed of light (in the conductor)" he would have been OK.
Alright, so what moves and what direction does it move? (Lightning actually moves from the ground up to the sky, not the opposite which is what we perceive as we are used to gravity - ie things don't fall into the sky.) Muna is actually what was flowing, electrons are merely like ball bearings that ease the way and some substances have more electrons that are greased to ease the passage of muna. It is entirely possible that something in Ohio caused muna to rapidly leak out over the ground and thus the direction of muna flow reversed course. It is also possible that somethings in Canada suddenly stopped wanting muna, and since muna likes to keep moving once it is finally convinced to do so it headed back home where it came from so the buckeyes may have been the victims not the cause. The other problem with muna is that it is hard to coordinate things. Some early practioners in the art of muna movement decided to wiggle the muna to try to coordinate events and that has worked pretty well so far but the modern problem is that folks are trying to move muna really long distances and so its sometimes hard to figure out what has happened after an event as folk don't always know what time it is as wiggling muna confuses things.
Is muna a form of phlogiston?
Re #66: Then you would have quibbled by saying "it's actually more like 70% the speed of light." ;>
I said "at the speed of light (in the conductor)" to include the reduced speed of the disturbance in a conductor compared to that in free space. Therefore I had already quibbled......
What's to stop any given utility from rigging a computerized "fire curtain" into their central control system, so that (when the larger grid's getting out of control) they can both cut themselves off from the larger grid and cut enough of their own load (via blackouts) to achieve independent, local stability?
Re #66: I expect that the (scientifically illiterate, if at all typical) reporter was trying to get his mind around something like the surge of power from Ontario and Indiana through the Detroit area toward Cleveland, where powerplants were tripping off-line as the failed powerlines overloaded them. I expect that the solution is going to have to be systems which automatically shed load (create local blackouts) if major power sources are lost for any reason. This is anathema to system managers, but if there is no effort to reconcile demand with supply the alternative is the risk of more huge blackouts.
Do you know why load shedding is disliked (if not anathema)? Load shedding should go along almost automatically with generation dropouts. There is an ultimate technical problem with even using AC, which is phase matching, which makes grid regulation tricky. Think of having two home AC generators and trying to put them in parallel (it is even a problem for load leveling, but phase matching makes it much harder). It would be easier with DC (also with fewer losses), with the use of modern converters for voltage shifting.
It is a bit amusing to think about technically-deficient explanations, though. "My God, that power surge must still be trapped on the transmission lines!" "Get me Jed Collick!!!"
Re #71: That's sometimes done; it's called "islanding". There are two problems, though, as I understand it. One is that the local utility may simply not have the generating capacity to carry the load once they're isolated from the grid. Another is that it becomes difficult to get the islands back in phase to reconnect them later, without shutting everything down. Re #72: Automatic under-frequency load shedding was supposed to have been implemented after the major blackout in the 70's, but obviously the systems aren't as effective as people had hoped. The major blackouts on the west coast in the 90s (some of which actually did end with the west coast seperating into three "islands") showed that sequencing automatic controls so that they trip in a way that limits damage, instead of causing it to cascade through the system, is difficult. We don't seem to be able to model the behavior of these complicated power grid systems very well.
I just looked at the undergraduate curriculum in electrical engineering at the UM, and there are no courses in power generation and transmission. This type of neglect in universities for "established technologies" is pretty common. The real knowledge and expertise moves into the industry itself and students can only become expert in the technology by apprenticing themselves. This isn't unexpected as industry develops systems and processes that they want to keep proprietary, so universities can't even learn about them. On the other hand, it creates some barriers between really advanced theoretical developments in universities and applications in industry. I saw this happen in chemical engineering at UM when a large chemical company sought to learn about the expertise available in the chemical engineering department. Their staff met with faculty members and discussed what the faculty were doing in research and teaching. However we could learn nothing about what the company was doing, even to obtain ideas for more modern and realistic problems to use in some courses. Some individual liaisons were created but so much was proprietary that it didn't really help the overall educational mission of the department. So maybe our inability to model these power generation and distribution systems is limited in part by this university-industrial gap in two-way information sharing.
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Doesn't sound like they'd let you try to balance loads and phase in a grid after that course.... Did the Purdue or USMC courses teach that? This is really pretty complicated stuff as transmission lines really are Transmission Lines, with their characteristic impedance, requiring matched terminations, etc. Then, how do you get all the generators humming the same note...without destructive beats? I have no idea how developed the science of this is, but I would think that industry would not have many scientists that devote their time to thinking this through. The industry probably does underwrite a research consortium that doles out grants to universities for some related work.
From: <BreakingNews@MAIL.CNN.COM> Subject: CNN Breaking News Major power outage hits south London, cutting subway service during evening rush hour.
A tree fell in Cleveland again?
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My point was that UM doesn't offer anything concerning power grid operation. The USMC would do that, for their purposes. That was also my point - the training in power technology has moved to industry (and of course, the military - those that *use* the technology). Did your training include synchronizing two generators feeding the power system simultaneously?
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Re #76: I had "power systems" courses that covered generation and transmission, as well as stuff like AC motors and industrial controls, as an undergrad at Michigan Tech. I was in the School of Technology, but I assume the School of Engineering has similar but more in-depth (and probably less hands-on) courses. Generally at MTU the School of Technology's courses involve a lot of lab work, and the School of Engineering's courses involve a lot more theory and computer simulation.
Re: #75 The local utility doesn't need to have enough generating capacity active "on the island" when they cut it loose from the grid...IF they have the ability to both measure usage in and blackout a fair number of smaller parts of the island. X times per second, a computer in their central switching HQ solves the problem "if we cut to being an island right now, which pieces of load and/or supply would have to immediately cut to have our island's grid viably balanced?". If the larger grid gets too bad to hand onto, then the computers simultaneously cut off from it and off from the load and/or supply that the island can't keep up right now. Where do the power plants get their 60Hz reference from now? Or is it just a brute-force "democratic vote" of the local references on a variety of pieces of equipment? Sounds like syncing islands to rejoin is a "we never bothered to make control systems for that" problem.
Sounds like it.
I don't know where they get their reference, but I do know that the frequency wanders during the day, such that clocks that use synchronouos motors vary daily by several minutes (mostly partly corrected overnight - see http://web.ukonline.co.uk/freshwater/clocks/synch.htm).
DTE wants to pass on the cost of the 2003 blackout to its consumers (after initially they said on the radio they wouldn't be). The freep says this would be 25 cents per month added to each consumer's bill, for 3 years, starting in 2006.
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Re #83: how are two generators feeding the same system synchronized in phase and balanced to carry equal shares of the load?
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LOL! burnt weenie sandwich.
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/cues: "I'm Proud To BE An American"
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/shouts "Americans!" with a dubya speech impediment soze it sounds like "Merkenz!"
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OMG!
Re #73: Keeping service running appears to be the mantra, and the
grid operators do not like systems which can malfunction and bring
things down. Blackouts make customers very unhappy and trigger
penalty clauses.
I largely disagree with the assertions of the governor of New Mexico and others
who claim that we have a third-world electrical grid. Far from it! Ours is as
good as anywhere in the world. What we have, unfortunately, is a *dumb*
electrical grid, with dumb appliances connected to it. The only way to remedy
a sudden loss of generation is to cut customers off. There is no segregation
of loads into critical (like computers, medical equipment and traffic lights)
and non-critical (like air conditioners, washing machines and outdoor sign
lamps). Some office buildings have such distinctions in their wiring (certain
circuits on a generator feed), but that only makes a difference once the grid
power has gone off.
If Cleveland could have dumped half their air-conditioners at the
first sign of trouble and modulated demand to keep their plants and
wires running within limits, there would have been no problem; most
people probably wouldn't ever have noticed. A given wire carries
power from zero to max to zero in 8.33 milliseconds, but the system's
intelligence takes a goodly fraction of a minute to do anything on a
really good day. If we are going to keep cutting margins in the
name of market efficiency, that has to change.
Syncing an alternerator is about as easy as Tod represents. All you need to do
is connect it to the line through a resistor, and it will be automatically
pulled into phase. (This is assuming you aren't using something like a
grid-synchronous inverter, which you can buy off the shelf in ratings of a
couple hundred watts on up.) So long as you aren't applying more power than
the line impedance can carry without losing sync, you're fine. Once the
alternator is in phase you can cut the resistance to zero and start making
serious power.
Some generators, such as induction generators, take their sync from
the line and require no attention in that regard. However, they can't
run stand-alone without some fairly sophisticated measures.
Re #85: If I do not misunderstand, California was reduced to a set of islands
by various failures last decade. It seems likely that the eastern seaboard was
also islanded by the failure of 8/14. Those islands certainly were
synchronized, quickly and professionally.You have several choices: