Posted on 08/14/2003 5:07:29 PM PDT by GraniteStateConservative
The Constitution also mentions the promotion of interstate commerce. Do you see much commerce going on right now?
I am more libertarian than all but a tiny handful of posters on this site, but if there's really no better answer to the fragility of our power grid than, "well, they're private companies; it's between them and their customers", then Bush would do well to nationalize the entire system today. (That's a "modest proposal", for those of you following along at home; of course there's a better answer.)
Market forces are preferrable to command economics, but in our economy the power grid underlies the market. Short circuit the power grid and you disconnect many of the forces you were counting on. Of course the government has a responsibility to get the power back on ASAP, if for no other reason than that the government can't fulfull its other responsibilities without it. If intervention can help facilitate that, then that's what should happen.
Well, no, because humans didn't design the laws of physics, but we did design the power grid. There is nothing inherent about power grids that means they have to be arranged like rows of dominoes.
The only way to make the Grid more reliable is Distributed Generation. Think one generator/fuel cell/etc. per household or business.
We already have distributed generation, as compared to the affected area, but that didn't help. And breaking up the system into finer divisions isn't the only way to do it.
He announced the Al Qaeda news himself earlier in the day. That was not why his remarks were scheduled last night. He was attending the fundraiser and they arranged to have him make his comments about the blackout before he attended that. It was not to address what he'd already talked about earlier.
Not I. You must be thinking of someone else.
I was using an analogy that would be familar to your field of reference.
The power grid relys on a Protective Relaying system to prevent the dominoe effect that you described. The system monitors potential failure points for multiple variables that can effect the operation of the grid. If a failure event is detected by a Protective Relay then the "dominoe" that is exhibiting the failure systems is supposed to be isolated from the rest of the "dominoes" thus isolating the failure to as small an area as possible. In the current grid system the "dominoes" are too large to allow a failure to be absorbed into the overall grid wihout making the whole system unstable. If a dominoe isn't isolated within 100 mSec from the start of the event then the whole grid begins to destabilize. That is what happened yesterday.
One problem in this scenario is that the Protective Relay has itself become a failure point that can effect multiple dominoes. Building redundancy into the Protective Relay system is a partial solution but it has its own problems. A dual redundant system only doubles the number of failure points. A triple redundant system is better but you still have to have a final point of intelligence to vote on which 2 out of 3 sensors to trust. That point of intelligence is a potential single point of failure that can effect the whole row of dominoes. Obviously taking redundancy to the next level where the transmisson lines themselves are redundant has the same eventual fallbacks.
The power grid has become so complex with millions of protective relays that modeling it completely has become impossible.
The cause of the blackout that effected the N.E. back in the 1970's was eventually traced back to the failure of a single protective relay on a transmission line. A similar cause will eventually be found for yesterdays event. A fire or overheated transformer or lightning strike may have been the root cause but a protective relay had to fail to allow the event to spread beyond the local dominoe.
The only real solution is to break the system up into smaller dominoes where each dominoe can provide enough power to provide for its own area with enough reserve to help assist its neighbor dominoes when necessary.
Think of a pentagon cell design where each cell can only effect the cells to which it is directly connected. That can best be accomplished by the house by house, building by building generation capability that I originally described. With widely distributed generation the failure of single point can easily be absorbed into the overall grid even if its own protective relaying were to fail. In that scenario cells 2 to 3 steps removed from a point of failure would have completely absorbed the fluctuations caused by the original failure. In other words the event would never spread beyond a city block from the original event.
Obviously this is going to require a major modification of our infrastructure but the good news is that it has already begun. Microgenerators are already on the market. They will be combined with solar, wind, fuel cell, etc. sources over the next twenty years.
Give me a break. I was referring the the blackout. Look at the date of my post.
If you really are Liberatarian,
I am not. I am a libertarian.
you should rail against the nationalization of any industry.
Where did I say that any industry should be nationalized?
did you know that 'nazi' was a slang term for 'nationalize'?
I've seen people run afoul of Godwin's Law before, but I've never seen anyone stretch so far to do it.
That redounds to my point. The grid is so complex NOT because there are many producers and consumers of power--computer systems and phone networks involve many more nodes--but because the system grew by accretion, with the most important structural decisions being made on an individual basis, without regard to how they affected the whole. If minimal standards had been developed and followed in the first place, most of this complexity could have been avoided.
Sounds like what is happening now with our transportation systems.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by the term "minimal".
A good arguement can be made that "minimal" standards WERE developed. Afterall, we use electricity generated at 60 Hz while much of the rest of the world operates at 50 Hz. And as far as transportation: we drive on the right side of the road (most of us, anyway) while many other nations drive on the left. It's a virtually impossible task to establish visionary standards for technology that's not fully developed. Incremental improvements occur haphazardly over time, and even major "breakthroughs" are often subject to compatibility constraints with what already exists.
By golly, you got me good on that one. Not only that, I agree with your post.
My wife and I were discussing our trip to Africa and we recorded 13 different means of transportation for the to/from trip.
I will admit, it is tough to compare transportation to electricity. Uncle.
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