response 39 of 99:

Aug 18 03:17 UTC 2003

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.

response 41 of 99:

Aug 18 20:59 UTC 2003

re resp:38: That's a very good idea!  No, I never thought of it.

response 43 of 99:

Aug 19 03:21 UTC 2003

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.

response 45 of 99:

Aug 19 06:12 UTC 2003

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. 

response 47 of 99:

Aug 19 12:03 UTC 2003

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.

response 49 of 99:

Aug 19 13:03 UTC 2003

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.

response 51 of 99:

Aug 19 15:00 UTC 2003

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!

response 53 of 99:

Aug 19 16:21 UTC 2003

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.

response 55 of 99:

Aug 19 17:32 UTC 2003

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. 

response 57 of 99:

Aug 19 23:27 UTC 2003

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.

response 59 of 99:

Aug 20 02:10 UTC 2003

Guess it depends on whether Catbert is running your HR department or not,
then.

response 61 of 99:

Aug 20 14:48 UTC 2003

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.