Electricity Blackout

ehBeth, someone once told me I have an "all or nothing" type personality, so it's ruling the world or nothing. Last I heard, the blackout started in Cleveland. That seems to be the official report, but then again, it's Cleveland, why not blame them? At least it wasn't Canada. What pissed me off was the slow reponse on both sides to say ANYTHING....our fearless leaders were too busy placing blame to get on the horn with a few words of encouragement until people were already pissed off. Power here, but sadly, no A/C for now, until the okay is given (the building has only a minimal run on the coolers going now) I'm friggin dying here...so far, no rotating blackouts in our area, but no promises for tomorrow.

ya know what mel says - tranna's the greatest city in the world - so you might as well start with the greatest city before you tackle the world, genghis paul.

True enough, dictators need to start somewhere I have to admit, Smel says a lot of dumbass things, but when questioned about blame, he comes out with "When have you ever known Americans to accept blame for anything" I nearly pissed myself laughing with pride.

How about that. More demonstrated leadership.



Bush to Back Delay of Plan On Power Grid

pdiddie - are you trying to turn me into a radical? ok - out me as a radical :wink:

An argument, and a very strong one, can be made that the FERC proposal opposed by The Administration essentially sets up a Federal Enron. In fact, PDiddidies article references that concern. Leadership doesn't mean "Just do something" ... it should mitigate against "Doing the wrong thing". While the transmission grid has seen essentially no significant upgrade investment since the Eisenhower Era, generation capacity has swelled several hundred percent. The chief impediment to upgrading the transmission grid is the opposition of Environmentalists to the requisite infrastructure. Huge towers strung with multi-hundred kilovolt cables as thick as a man's thigh, and big, ugly, switching and transformer facilities just aren't politically correct. They would have to go through forrests and over mountains and close to where some folks live, and, of course, they come under a mountain of state, local, and federal regulations, restrictions, and requirements which make them simply, plainly, unarguably uneconomic ... the lawyers, the legislators, the local zoning boards, the lenders, and Joe and Sally Suburbia, along with Buzz and Muffy Treehugger, just won't have it. That may change this fall. Of course, it was supposed to start changing damned near 40 years ago, and we know where we are at the moment. The only effective energy legislation recently was '92s Deregulation, which just about guaranteed this latest fiasco. I'm surprised it took a decade for it to happen.

Timber -- I think "The Environmentalists" may often get blamed for things which are in fact the result of lethargy and/or corruption. It would be interesting to hear from a more developed country in terms of high quality power transmission. Walter? What's the relationship of power transmission to the environment in Germany?

Conversation with local electrical coop when I was about to pay for having power brought to my rural land:

Me: But the overland lines (cedar poles) are not only ugly, but they are at much greater risk, in this area, because of the frequent destructive weather events.

Them: But they're cheaper.

Me: To maintain, as well?

Them: No. Maintenance is high. Buried lines are very low maintenance and secure but they cost more initially.

Me: No initial investment? Constant maintenance problems? End of story?

Them: End of story.

Part of an article by by Greg Palast, who is a reporter, and was an investigative reporter, and writes for the Guardian, the Globe, and is now appearing in many newspapers across the country. This was in the Opinions section of the Bergen Record (NJ) today, Sunday, 17 August 2003.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0


POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE --- THE TALE OF THE BRITS WHO SWIPED 800 JOBS FROM NEW YORK, CARTED OFF $90 MILLION, THEN TONIGHT, TURNED OFF OUR LIGHTS

ZNet

Friday Aug 15, 2003

by Greg Palast


I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers. To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal. But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.

And so began an e ... [ Click here for full article ]

hamburger is right: companies would have very strong difficulties to sell anything electricity-connected, whic isn't in the highest energy saving class! (And with washing maschines, we look at water-saving-class and washing-edffiency-class as well - all over EU-Europe, btw).


But obviously not only the consumer beg´haviour is different in the USA, thus of electricity componies as well:
a) we always have about 20% electrity "in reserve" here,
b) if a power station in Denmark and/or Norway and/or Italy and/or Portugal stops working, we (they) get electricity from Poland, Greece, UK, Spain, Sovjet Union .....

I'm more and more wondering, how the re-building of electricity in Iraq looks like - done by engineers from a country with "hird world standard in electricity" as Bush said yesterday.

I was thinking 'Ghostbusters', not 'Star Trek'...



What Went Wrong

here are a few points (in no particular order) : hydro-quebec , which did really badly during the ice-storm of january 1998 , has now invested pretty large amounts of money to upgrade and strengthen their power-grid; they also now have a FIFTY year plan to bury many of the high-transmission lines at an estimated cost of ? (i believe a saw FIVE BILLION DOLLARS somewhere); rather than having a few massive power stations there seems to be a trend towards more decentralized power generation(thus reducing the need for more and more overland transmission lines); just outside our city limits a plant was opened a couple of years ago that uses an on site natural-gas fed powerstation with backup from the powergrid; i understand that fuel-cell power-stations can now be built to produce power closer to the point of usage. in all of these cases of course, there will have to be investments that will have to be repaid by the consumer. sorry, no free lunch today! here in ontario the former PUBLIC UTILITY ran up huge debts in the process of trying to generate more nuclear power (NOT very successfully in my opinion - now they are broke and consumers have to pick up part of the debt while a large portion of the debt is being repaid out of general tax-revenue. well, it's only money! hbg

Just to put things in perspective, that would be a month's worth of Iraq occupation (in US dollars).

PDiddie : pls. keep in mind that we are using CANADIAN $ here; so it would be about a weet's worth of occupation ! i think someone (who was it ?) said : "a milion dollars here, another million dollars there .. and before you know it it amounts to some REAL money" ... must have been a long time ago ... even i can't remember when that was real money. hbg

"Just to put things in perspective, that would be a month's worth of Iraq occupation (in US dollars)."

And keep also in mind that if we had an administration which really put its back into energy conservation, we'd have the solution to the problem.

Meanwhile, Bush has said the complete renovation of the system should be the burden of the consumers. Even though his buddies have been making bucks for years living off an unreliable, antiquated sysem.

Tartarin : i guess we all get the government (more or less) that gets elected. that's true in canada as in other country. i remember some years ago - i think it was right after the first oil crises - the energy minister of the (conservative) government (joe clark was prime minister) suggested a FIVE CENT (!!!) hike in gasoline prices; can't even remember if we were still on imperial gallon or already on liters. the money was to be used to produce more fuel in canada ... at the next election the government was swiftly turfed out and pierre trudeau was brought back into power; of course he figured he could now do anything he wanted. i did vote for trudeau when he first got elected, but the rerun was a true disaster ... just like in the movies. hbg

Recommended reading...

Newsweek's excellent blow by blow description of the first few minutes before and during the blackout and the Home Security Department's response to it can be found here.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/953562.asp?cp1=1#BODY

The "Complete Story" link appears to be finicky. I got it to work after clicking on it a few times.

It's a good read.

I'd be curious to know how the participants rate themselves on a scale of 1 (no way!) to 10 (damn right!) on the issue of whether the disruption of service was deliberate and linked to the energy bill?

Instinct and a sense of history puts me at about... but you go first! Please!

It was the late senator Everett Dirksen who said
"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon ....".

according to one web source I just looked up. That quotation has been in our newspapers recently, but I couldn't find it there, in all the many weekend papers stashed here, after a quick search.

The power companies donated almost $70M to Republican candidates during the past election cycle. Much less to Dems.

My proposal: Guarantee a basic number of kilowatts of uninterrupted power to consumers at a specific rate. Enough to keep a small house household without "vampires" in power. Any consumption over that basic amount to be charged at a much higher rate. Reward thrift, low consumption. As long as power is provided by the private sector, heavy use will be encouraged.

Actually, Tartarin, that's the way electricity is billed by lots of utilities ... particularly to business, but also to some home users as well. "X" price-per-kilowatt up to "Y" Kilowatts, then "X+" for the next tier of useage, and so on. The idea is to help regulate useage more predictably, by encouraging bulk users to contract for larger blocks of energy. The problem is that there is both economic and political disincentive to upgrade transmission facillities ... so the added revenue gets plowed back into production and top-line profit, not into infrastructure upgrade. There simply has been no valid reason, from a purely business point of view ... read "Responsibility to the shareholders", to put money where it has been known to have been most needed for 38 years now. Don't blame the Utility Companies for being businesses ... that's their job. Blame the lawmakers and the special interest groups, particularly the environmentalists, for thie current state of affairs. No one has had the political courage to deal with the issue appropriately and effectively; it just upsets too many folks and isn't good for getting votes, tax credits, or donations. Sorta validates "Be careful what you ask for, 'cause you just may get it".