[PeakOiler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Grimnir', 'W')ell, big parts of Missouri and the area to the north are/were without power today due to some major storms that went through last night. Mine is back already; much sooner than I expected--gives me a little hope that the grid problems are at least partially surmountable. I kept hearing things explode all night long. Any electricians know what's going on when you hear BANG! (sizzle sizzle sizzle)? Is that power lines shorting out, transformers blowing, or what?

[Pops]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PeakOiler', 'T')hat loud sizzle and pop is the fuse on top of the utility pole blowing out.

[Grimnir]

Everything's fine here except for a bunch of branches on the ground. Is replacing those blown fuses a pretty simple matter, then? What about when it's a transformer? Some of the explosions were pretty loud and in the direction of the local substation/whatever you call those collections of boxes etc. Yet the power was back within 6 hours of the sun coming up. There's a pretty big company down the street from me, so I suppose that helped prioritize my neighborhood a bit.

[jeezlouise]

Are there any statistics or graphs out there that would tell us if the frequency, duration, and widespread-edness of significant blackouts in any/all parts of the country are going up, year on year? Perhaps someone of a more techno-savvy mind than mine could devise some sort of layered map... could it be adjusted to eliminate accidents and only show overload? This could add something to the Olduvai discussion. If such figures are already available, forgive my laziness! My head and eyes start to hurt after too much time at the PC...

[rogerhb]

Greg Palast's version of A Christmas Carol featuring the ghost of Ken Lay.

Ken Lay's Alive!

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Greg Palast', 'I')n the old, pre-Ken days of regulation, my fellow economists used to complain about something called the Averch-Johnson Effect. The A-J Effect was the result of regulations which gave companies incentives to gold plate the electricity system, making it way TOO reliable. Too much cash was spent on keeping the lights on.

[Pablo2079]

My wife works at a large user of electricity in the Seattle area. They've been asked to "curtail" their usage today (looks like we may break a record for high temp).

In the winter, when it's unusually cold, they are asked to curtail their NG usage.

Sure seems like we are on the edge when they have to go to extremes like that. Maybe the electrical grid and NG distribution system have always been designed this way. Seems very JIT to me.....

[tsakach]

They are expecting the Queens outage to continue over the weekend, which means some customers will be out of electricity for more than a week:

Day 5 of Queens Blackout

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')n Wednesday, 10 of the 22 feeder cables that supply the area with power were down simultaneously, delaying subways. The temperature had hit 100 degrees in the neighborhood the day before.

The company has more than 500 splicers, troubleshooters, mechanics and support personnel working around the clock to restore power.

In an effort to locate damaged equipment, crews are inspecting thousands of manholes and service boxes, as well as transformers and miles of cable.

[Bleep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tsakach', 'B')ut in this case, a force of 500 workers was required to inspect and repair problems throughout the entire system.

[gg3]

Tsakach is pretty well on target for causes. Another possible cause would be a heat-driven breakdown in cable insulation. Either way the result is that underground cable goes short or open, or has a ground cross, and in the latter case it might even spot-weld itself to the inside of the cable ducts (heavy conduits) under the street (oh joy!).

Bleep, re. incompetence: what do you do for a living...?

I work in telecoms; have done more than my share of cable pulls and cable fault testing & troubleshooting over the years. And while it's true that 48 volts DC is hardly 14 KV AC, the basic principles are similar.

I have no doubt about the conditions Con Ed crews are dealing with in New York right now. We have some slang terms for that when it occurs in telecom cable & cross-connects: "spiderweb," meaning a God-awful mess that's a royal pain in the arse to work on, and "string & glue," meaning, work that was done "expeditiously" without following standard practices, usually as a "temporary" installation but which has become permanent over time. (And here I might mention, thankfully our dude who is in charge of cable is absolutely meticulous, I can always count on his work to be 100% with no compromises, which makes for not only smooth PBX installations, but vastly simplified troubleshooting if repairs are ever needed. In fact we can basically rule out cable troubles a-priori on his installations, so when trouble comes up, we can start looking elsewhere than the cable plant. This saves time like crazy. Behind every reliable PBX is solid cable plant, no exceptions.)

So... If you were on the Con Ed field crew going after these blackouts, you'd be looking for opens, shorts, and ground crosses. Then upon finding one, you'd have to backtrack it until you could isolate the bad segment. Then you call in the truck with the large winch that would try to haul the bad cable out from under the street. Ideally you'd splice good cable to the bad segment, and use the latter as a "pull string" to tug the new cable into place as it went.

If your bad segment was a short or ground cross, it is entirely possible that it could have welded itself to the underground ducts, which are basically bundles of pipes that carry various cables, electrical and telecom and other (in separate pipes of course!). You would notice this because your truck, despite a diesel motor rated for a couple hundred horsepower, would start complaining. Then if you were having a particularly unlucky day, the bad cable would snap, the truck would jerk forward just a little, and the motor would purr along as it hauled up half of the proverbial worm in the apple, leaving the other half down there still stuck, jamming the conduit.

Plus or minus a few well-chosen cusswords, you'd get on the radio and call for a backhoe. This would show up and position itself at a likely spot, along with a couple of guys built like football players, the latter wielding jackhammers to help break up the pavement. When the jackhammer crew got a reasonable amount of pavement broken up, the backhoe operator would start digging into the street. After a while, the ducts would be exposed, and along would come additional workers with shovels to dig out the last little bit where the digging was too finicky for a backhoe to get at safely.

The backhoe operator might have air conditioning in the cab. The rest of the crew are out there broiling in the hot sun.

So they dig out the duct where the bad cable has refused to come out, and then presumably go at it with gasoline-powered chop-saws or similar, to physically cut into the duct and get at the jammed cable, and then grind down the spontaneous spot-weld until it comes free. By this time, the truck with the winch has been repositioned and is now ready to give a mighty tug on the newly-exposed free end to pull the rest of it the hell out of there.

At this point the crew are highly relieved because the trouble has been located and the heaviest work done. Someone climbs back into the hole in the street, welds or otherwise affixes a sleeve over the two ends of the conduit to knit them back together again, and now it's time to pull new cable. A flexible rod gets shoved through the duct in much the same manner as a drain snake. It pops out at the far end, gets attached to the new cable, and once again it's time for diesel-powered tug-of-war to pull the new segment into place.

That being done, another worker climbs in and splices the new segment back into the line, and upon cimbing back out, calls for a partial load test. If this succeeds, they go to a full load test.

If all is well, the backhoe operator will then pile the excavated earth back into the pit, or will use gravel conveniently delivered by a dump truck that would be considered large in any other city in the world. This operation is followed by another worker with a plate-compactor or a trench roller, to consolidate the backfill. And then, hopefully the same day, comes the concrete truck, all forty or fifty tons of it fully loaded (NYC allows 15 cubic yard loads of concrete, i.e. 30 tons, on its streets), and another handful of workers to pour the subgrade for the street. Last but not least this will be cordoned off while the concrete hardens, which should take at least a few days but is often sped up by the use of special additives so the road is passable the next day.

By this time, your lights have been working again for at least a few hours while you watch the rest of the construction operations going on down the street, and while impatient drivers hoot their horns at the inevitable traffic delays.

Or not.

And if not, then what we are looking at here, described in the media as "just as soon as one area is brought online, another blacks out, and they keep popping in and out like that, and it's a bloody mystery and no one knows what's going on....", what we are looking at there, is a state of cascading systems failure. And as I said elsewhere, there comes a point where it becomes too expensive to fix. And that, fellow citizens, is the first step down the slippery slope to the proverbial Olduvai Gorge.

[Cobra_Strike]

Nice long winded passage ^^ more then I cared to know but interesting to read...Ahhh, good old cascading system failures...I keep laughing that hard, pained laugh...eyes fixed to the future with less light.

Its fucking hot here in the Pacific NW...moreso then I remember as normal...I know the hydro will hold out longer then other places coal, even with large coal plants in Eastern Washington...I just remember taking trinps into the mountins as a youngster and admiring the palm frond fossils there...I have a feeling hotter is more normal...living on a tropical beach might be enjoyable....

[Andrew_S]

It's now reckoned the real number of people without electricity in Queens is 100 000.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he number of people who have been without power in Queens for five days now is actually closer to 100,000, not the figure of 2,000 customers that officials of Consolidated Edison had cited in previous days.

[rwwff]

I think another poster already alluded to it.

When you fix wiring things, there are two ways..

The fast way.
The meticulous way.

Often times people justify the fast way by saying "we gotta hurry up and get power to those customers!!", so they do it thinking it'll be temporary. Problem is, the temporary fix is usually adequate to non-limit loads and will last a long time; so no one ever goes back and does it the meticulous way. For a city as big, and as old as NYC, I can't imagine the nightmare of hundreds of temporary fixes, undocumented, tangled blacksheated wire stretching for miles..

[Carrie]

Is it just me, or does this not look good for California?:



California ISO: System Status

And this is on a Saturday!!

[Chaparral]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Carrie', 'I')s it just me, or does this not look good for California?:

[tsakach]

Statewide STAGE 1 EMERGENCY NOTICE [200601616]

The California ISO hereby issues a Statewide STAGE 1 ELECTRICAL EMERGENCY Notice,
effective 07/22/2006 13:12 through 07/22/2006 20:00.

Reason(s):
Due to the loss of a large resource and high loads across |the CAISO control area.

Operating Reserves are currently, or forecast to be, less than amounts required
by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. If Operating Reserves deplete
further, the ISO will declare a Stage 2 Electrical Emergency and may begin
curtailing Interruptible Loads*.

Monitor system conditions on the California ISO Website at www.caiso.com and
check with local electric utilities for additional information. This message
was sent by Market Operations at the California ISO.

CAISO system status

A “Stage One” level means those who have signed up for voluntary power cuts as a trade off for lower rates will have to curtail electricity use. In a Stage One emergency, reserve levels of available generation capacity would have dropped below 6 percent.

The more severe levels mean deliberate blackouts.

On Friday, the heat wave gripping California saw 49,036 megawatts of demand drawn from the power grid at 4:28 p.m.

But Saturday’s demand is expected to exceed that record. Grid managers say as much as 50,798 megawatts will be sucked down the lines in late afternoon.

A major 750 megawatt power plant in Northern California went off line just after 1 p.m. Saturday causing electricity reserves to dip below acceptable levels.

[Zardoz]

Or maybe because it's just hotter than Hell:

[Armageddon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'O')r maybe because it's just hotter than Hell:

{Don't quote images, MQ}]

[SupplyConcerns]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('armegeddon', 'i') think they are hiding alot of them in the msm.

[gg3]

Port attacks: Iran might, but Venezuela won't. At minimum, the Venezuelan government knows that would lead to war, and they do not have the Strait of Hormuz to use for deterrence value. Chavez may be a socialist, but he's also a rational leader, by which is meant, concerned with "this world" and material conditions in his country. Whereas the Iranian leadership are more "next-worldly" and regard martyrdom as a ticket to a happy hereafter.

California: Yeah, it's as if returning Iraq war vets are "bringing the weather with them":-(. In fact the temps around the Bay Area today are positively Iraq-like: 109 to 115 depending on where you are. Lucky me, only mid 80s where I live. A close friend in a nearby area that should be equally "cool" said his house was in the mid 90s today.

There have also been spot power outages in San Jose, Livermore, and a couple of other areas.

Why the media doesn't report power outages:

They are not "news." Daughter dies, father cries: that's news, particularly if you can capture some nice juicy sobs, the better to titillate the audience. Murders, disasters, etc.: those are news, and again, weeping makes them even newsier.

A power outage isn't even as photogenic as a water main break, with street flooding and ideally a nice big geyser in the middle of a street and lots of police cars with flashing lights on.

Also, unless it's a major grid failure, very rarely will a news editor correlate all the small localized outages and realize something more serious is going on. Each of those local outages is "merely an inconvenience." (And there's no weeping, dammit!)

---

What I've been doing today to deal with this:

One light on, over my desk, 26 watt compact fluorescent.

One fan in the attic hatch to pull air from the house into the attic, thereby preventing the attic heating up and re-radiating heat back through the ceiling. Power consumption about 98 watts.

Two windows open in strategic locations so the incoming air passes through the entire house on the way to going out via the attic hatch.

A small 6" desk fan on the floor, blowing across one of the incoming air paths toward my desk. 16 watts, and more than sufficient to keep me cool.

The usual background electric load consisting of fridge, computers (Mac and Windows laptops, and Open Source firewall/router), phone system (Panasonic PBX), and security infrastructure (no comment).

I might run the dishwasher later tonight, 125 watts, total 0.03 KWH using household hot water. If I wash some clothes, that should be about 0.05 KWH (both of these appliances are high-efficiency units of the same types as we'll be selling soon when R&D phase is complete).

Additional hints for staying cool:

Wear nothing but underwear or a swim suit indoors. Keep your feet exposed also, they radiate away much heat (yes, go get some cheap flip-flops for around the house).

Get a water-spray bottle of the type you use for "misting" your indoor plants. Use it for "misting" yourself, on any exposed skin surfaces.

Get three quart-size or larger bottles, for example juice or soda bottles. Fill with water, put two in the fridge and one in the freezer. The latter will be colder more quickly, so take it out when ice has just begun to form, and use it for drinking water. When empty, refill it and stick it in the fridge, and by this time one of the other two have become cold enough to drink. Rotate all three through the fridge and you'll have enough cold water to stay very happily cooled down no matter how bad it gets.

If you are in a low-humidity area, do this: get your bath towels, soak them in water, and hang them above the bath tub to drip dry. Then position a fan on the floor pointing in the bathroom door. The towels will provide evaporative cooling of the air in the bathroom, and the fan will circulate new air into the bathroom and push the cooled air out into the house.

In a power failure, if heat is a health risk, stick your feet in a bucket of cool water from the bath tub faucet. Your feet in cool water will keep the rest of you surprisingly cool. Use that water for toilet flushes so it doesn't go to waste, and refill each time with fresh cool water from the faucet.