 rpeAMP
join:2000-12-02
San Antonio, TX | Expert on Fox News... An expert with the North American Electric Reliability Council was just interviewed by O'Reilly and basically said that they tried to prepare for something like this. He said he was in awe of the fact that something of this magnitude has taken place. He was incredibly bewildered at the whole situation and kept repeating that they thought they'd prepared for a situation like this...
Scary when someone who's supposed to insure that this doesn't happen has no idea how it's going to be fixed or what they did wrong or how to fix it... |
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| Naa, the guy from this "Council" is just an ex-spurt. The people on the ground know what they are doing, at least in terms of starting it back up. One of the channels had the CEO of one of the Michigan power companies on and he seemed to have a handle on it, though he didn't know what started it either.
This happened before in 1965, and systems were put in place to prevent it. NY got blacked out again in 1977 (I think) but it didn't spread nearly as far that time. |
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 tschmidtPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-12
Milford, NH
kudos:5
 ·Fairpoint Commun..
 ·Hollis Hosting
| reply to rpeAMP
I do not think there are good theoretical models for the power, telephone, and communication network. They have become so vast and complex that models are only able to predict a subset of events. In most cases large scale interconnect increases stability.
Failure occur when resonances happen - these are incredible difficult to predict. That is why fast isolation is so important. As the network begins to become unstable the best defense is to disconnect.
Electricity is unique in that the network has no storage capacity. Every minute change in consumption is mirrored back to the generators. |
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 ikarus1Premium
join:2002-10-23
Urbanna, VA
| said by tschmidt:
I do not think there are good theoretical models for the power, telephone, and communication network. They have become so vast and complex that models are only able to predict a subset of events. In most cases large scale interconnect increases stability.
Failure occur when resonances happen - these are incredible difficult to predict. That is why fast isolation is so important. As the network begins to become unstable the best defense is to disconnect.
Electricity is unique in that the network has no storage capacity. Every minute change in consumption is mirrored back to the generators.
"Failure occurs when resonances happen" ... There is a bit of profundity.
Failure occurs when resonances happen and one can not know whether those resonances are in the grid itself or in the communications system which supports the grid. Worse than this one can not know if they occur when there is a resonance CAUSED by one or the other system feeding back into the other system...
To restate:
If your communications are not behaving as your models predict, you can't know how your primary systems are going to behave and if your primary systems are not behaving as your models predict you can't know what impact that will have upon your communications systems...
TRUTH.
-m-
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[text was edited by author 2003-08-14 22:13:25] |
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| reply to tschmidt
No storage? Actually, that isn't exactly true:
»www.aucmi.org/Resources/ludington.html
But such cases are few and far between. |
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 TA63ST215WPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-23
there
kudos:2 | said by dilettante:
Actually, that isn't exactly true:
»www.aucmi.org/Resources/ludington.html
But such cases are few and far between.
The resevoir you show is not the storage that is referred to.
The idea, as well as I can try to express it, is when the power shuts off at your house. The power shuts down instantly. Take this and try to apply it to the scale of entire cities.
One city is now down. The system will try to route power from other areas to bring up the one that is down. The power required to bring the "dead" city back online is too great, and the surrounding areas cannot handle it. they are now pushed offline from the effort of trying to restart the area that is down. This scenario is what occurred, just like a set of dominoes falling down.
As for storage, the "switching on" of the dead areas requires a tremendous extra capacity. Think of the refrigerator or airconditioning switching on at your house. The lights may dim for a second. this is because the network at your house cannot store (in an instantenous sense) electricity. This is the same problem that is faced when switching on the power. After you get your power back, you will see the lights dim periodically, as they continue to switch on areas gradually.
This "instantenous load" is what the capacitors in the power supply in store electricity in anticipation of these capacitors can cahrge and discharge almost instantly. It is this "instant" ability to provide additional power that would be useful. Capacitors can store electricity in the sense that is referred to here. It is not pratical to use capicitors to store electricity on the grid (as far as I can see) though.
Hope this was some help.
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Don't Feed the Trolls----Click 'Hey mods' instead!:) |
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 dandemanPremium,MVM
join:2001-12-05
Chapel Hill, NC
·AT&T Southeast
| reply to rpeAMP
Re: Expert on Fox News... The distributed inductance and capacitance that is an inherent part of a large power distribution system, and becomes increasing large as the grid size grows, is a contributing factor to the instablity of the system.. Capacitors added to the system to offset the power factor from inductive loads don't help either..
That's what resonance is... when the system (which ideally would be a passive transport system) can momentarily absorb energy and then give it back very rapidly, and lead to failure from undershooting and overshooting (or ringing) of the voltage levels in the system.
A good analogy is a bridge that resonates at an un intended frequency... »www.civeng.carleton.ca/Exhibits/···idge.mpg
Just as the above bridge is absorbing wind energy and then releasing it, in increasing violent movement, the power grid can similarly go into oscillations from sudden load changes.
I think the kind of storage referred to above as being needed is a UPS type system... that can instantaneously kick in and pick up the load when the supply begins to go down.. That's very expensive even on a small scale...
[text was edited by author 2003-08-15 10:01:07]
[text was edited by author 2003-08-15 10:13:19] |
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 JTRockvilleData HoPremium,MVM
join:2002-01-28
Rockville, MD
 ·Verizon FiOS
| reply to tschmidt
said by tschmidt:
I do not think there are good theoretical models for the power, telephone, and communication network. They have become so vast and complex that models are only able to predict a subset of events. In most cases large scale interconnect increases stability.
While that's largely true, there ARE models, and warnings WERE issued regarding transmission congestion: said by ICF Consulting News & Events:
Watch the CNBC Wake Up Call television interview with Judah Rose, Managing Director of ICF Consulting's power and transmission practice, regarding the sudden disruptions in the power grid and why measures taken to isolate power grids failed. ICF Consulting warned the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and industry leaders of the possibility of such a wide-scale failure earlier this year and forecast a 1 in 4 chance of losing power in a major urban area.
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 dravenEx-Mod 2004-10
join:2002-02-20
my bunker
| said by JTRockville:
While that's largely true, there ARE models, and warnings WERE issued regarding transmission congestion:
This is exactly right. In fact, from previous conversation I believe JTRockville  is involved in this very type of planning, and I can ascertain from her comments that those 'planners' feel helplessly frustrated as their warnings are not heeded by those who should be listening. Yet the blame is always placed on those 'planners' by the public, even though they issued the warnings to the right people in the first place.
Hopefully this situation will cause some heads to roll, as well as put the focus back on homeland security rather than what country we want to fight next.
[text was edited by author 2003-08-15 14:06:09] |
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TA63ST215WPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-23
there
kudos:2 | reply to rpeAMP
I am in awe at some of the skills that are represented here at DSLR.
My little blurb above is surely not as correct as it could be, any clarifications or links that can explain a bit more would be greatly appreciated.
Most of my electrical experience relates to automobile service, including the Toyota Prius. (300v dc + inverter assy).
I am absolutely in awe that a system such as we have could even work at all. ( I am referring to the mind numbing complexity, not anything in a conspiracy sense.)
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JTRockvilleData HoPremium,MVM
join:2002-01-28
Rockville, MD Reviews:
·Verizon FiOS
| Here's more analysis from the "experts".
ICF Consulting Releases Issue Paper on U.S. Northeastern Blackout—Recommends Actions to Prevent Future Problems
btw - The webmaster @ ICF Consulting assures me they can take the hits! said by ICF Webmaster, 8/15 @ 3:30pm:
I wanted to share some interesting information
I have been monitoring our servers and media streams since we went live… check this out.
News and Events is our # 1 page for today…
347 Unique visit so far … 455 total views.. .
16.68% of ICF consulting traffic…
Visits peaked from 11:45 AM till now….
The Media Server peaked at 28 simultaneous connections
55.3 % Utilization
All Streams were served with no errors… and no pending connections.
We are averaging a total of 11 simultaneous connections since stream went live.
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tschmidtPremium,MVM
join:2000-11-12
Milford, NH
kudos:5 Reviews:
·Fairpoint Commun..
·Hollis Hosting
| JTRockville, interesting paper, thanks for the link.
It is my understanding that deregulation has placed severe stress on the power grid because energy flows are much more bidirectional then before and to arbitrage sourcing power dynamically from low cost providers.
What I find frustrating is that deregulation was sold as a way to increase competition and reduce cost. According to the paper you referenced the deregulators apparently neglected to build in profit incentives for the transmission line companies. They did not invest to upgrade facilities, returned that money to investors, the system became overloaded and now taxpayers/ratepayers are once again expected to bail out private enterprise. Have I missed something?
So far I find little to recommend electric deregulation. What is in it for the customer?
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 TrainBuffThe New Haven RailroadPremium
join:2003-05-01
Buffalo, NY
kudos:4 | In my opinion, deregulation is a failure. Like you said tschmidt, the power grid was designed to handle service to local utilities. And now with power being moved back and forth between markets, it is overloading the grid for which it was not designed for.
When New York deregulated, all the investor owned power companies had to sell their generating plants. Now the power company has to have a contract with the owners of the plant to purchase power at market price. Niagara Mohawk is my power company but I can use any supplier that is on a list. So I pay a delivery charge to NiMo which is a basic charge not including usage and a bunch of charges based on my usage and then pay the supplier my usage, which for me is NiMo, so I get only one bill. Before deregulation, I never had some of these extra charges. All I saw is a increase in my electric bill.
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