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.  

response 63 of 99:

Aug 25 23:36 UTC 2003

Monday's (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030825) is also good.
But then, I gather they pretty nearly always are.

response 65 of 99:

Aug 27 03:05 UTC 2003

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.

response 67 of 99:

Aug 27 04:50 UTC 2003

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.

response 69 of 99:

Aug 27 12:59 UTC 2003

Re #66: Then you would have quibbled by saying "it's actually more like
70% the speed of light." ;>

response 71 of 99:

Aug 28 02:47 UTC 2003

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?

response 73 of 99:

Aug 28 06:09 UTC 2003

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.