The Marvel of Electricity

[thackney]

The Marvel of Electricity
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marvel-of-electricity-1468616241
July 15, 2016

Although the grid’s vulnerability to cyberattack and sabotage gets the headlines, the No. 1 cause of power outages is foliage. Almost as problematic are squirrels.

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Without electricity, life shuts down. Buildings and streets go dark. Computers and smartphones die. Televisions flicker off. Food perishes in refrigerators. Even money, which is stored, traded and monitored electronically, becomes inaccessible. Yet power outages occur regularly—whether caused by storms, computer bugs or overgrown trees like the ones near Akron, Ohio, that in 2003 triggered a blackout in eight Northeast states and the Canadian province of Ontario. Fifty million people were without power for two days, making it the largest blackout in U.S. history. Lost business revenue amounted to $6 billion.

Power outages may be regular in the United States, but they are not frequent. On average, Americans can depend on power 99.7% of the time. Perhaps this is why most of us are blithely incurious about the source of the electricity that powers our lives, safely counting on it to come out of the socket in the wall. Beyond the wall lie three synchronized regional grids of electrical lines spanning the continental United States and large parts of Canada. Nearly 20,000 power generators housed in more than 7,500 powerhouses convert primary energy sources—coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, flowing water, sunlight, the wind—into electric current, which is then transmitted across more than 160,000 miles of high-voltage power lines to some 60,000 substations. From there, transformers step-down the voltage and send it through millions of miles of distribution lines to keep the lights on, the fridge cold and the information streaming into our homes and offices.

The U.S. electrical grid is one of the engineering marvels of modern history. But it is aging and under stress. As Gretchen Bakke explains in “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future,” a vast network that arose to provide electricity in a centralized and standardized fashion is “being colonized by a new logic: little, flexible, fast, adaptive, local.” The large utilities no longer enjoy a monopoly over the power that they spread across the grid. They are obliged to transmit electricity produced by independent generators and to purchase power from a growing number of wind and solar installations, which, on cloudy or calm days, can subject the system to massive fluctuations in electricity generation.

In January, the Energy Department announced an ambitious multi-year plan to modernize the grid, starting with research into ways of making it more resilient, reliable and green. Ms. Bakke contends that the challenge is as much social and cultural as it is technological. More than a collection of wires, the grid consists of an interconnected web of consumers, utilities, legal structures and natural environments. There is no single entity that controls it. Authority is shared and divided among eight regional reliability councils; numerous federal, state and local regulatory bodies; and the private and public utilities that own pieces of it. Modernizing the grid, she argues, will require changing the way we relate to it.

A cultural anthropologist at McGill University who has studied the subject of state failure in Eastern Europe, Ms. Bakke investigates in “The Grid” what she fears is another failing system. She begins by summarizing electric power’s history in the United States, describing how the system emerged not from a preconceived plan but through business and regulatory improvisation. The key figure was Samuel Insull (1859-1938), the father of centralization. This former secretary to Thomas Edison consolidated the many small, local and intermittent power generators in the Midwest into a utility behemoth, Commonwealth Edison. Unlike its predecessors, it was able to deliver power around the clock and at greatly reduced prices. Progressive Era reformers encouraged the rise of “natural monopolies”—mostly investor-owned or “private”—granting them exclusive control over large service areas in exchange for tight regulation. “You know these,” writes Ms. Bakke, “you likely pay a bill to one of them every month. They have names like ConEd, National Grid, PG&E, PEPCO, Xcel, Entergy, and Southern Company. These are the direct descendants of the system that Insull built in Chicago.”....

[geronl]

bump

I abuse the marvels of elasticity as much as electricity

[IsailedawayfromFR]

An EMP attack might Return us to the Iron Age

[thackney]

An EMP attack might Return us to the Iron Age

Such fears are based upon assigning magical power and range to an EMP and are not based in reality of past testing and modern equipment.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Such fears are based upon assigning magical power and range to an EMP and are not based in reality of past testing and modern equipment.

I hope you are right, but many experts believe otherwise.

As to the reality of past testing, here is how one fried a satellite.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150910-the-nuke-that-fried-satellites-with-terrifying-results

[thackney]

I hope you are right, but many experts believe otherwise.

As to the reality of past testing, here is how one fried a satellite.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150910-the-nuke-that-fried-satellites-with-terrifying-results

Frying a satellite and some street lights are hardly comparable to claims of returning to the Iron Age.

I'm not claiming the would be no damage.  But claims of modern technology ending is just silly.  Also the 1.4 megaton yield of Starfish is over 1,000 times more powerful than what a Scud/No-dong/Shahab family of missiles would be capable of lifting to high altitude.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/2

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Frying a satellite and some street lights are hardly comparable to claims of returning to the Iron Age.

I'm not claiming the would be no damage.  But claims of modern technology ending is just silly.  Also the 1.4 megaton yield of Starfish is over 1,000 times more powerful than what a Scud/No-dong/Shahab family of missiles would be capable of lifting to high altitude.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1549/2

I am not making myself clear.  An EMP or several EMPs will not fry the entire world.  Neither would the detonation of every single nuclear warhead.  But, like a nuclear war, the entire world would be impacted.

The point of all this is that we as a society have become increasingly dependent upon electricity, whatever form it might take from units operating a car to a watch to financial transactions to GPS to whatever. A partial breakdown of this, particularly for some length of time over a large enough area can send a large-scale panic that will empty grocery shelves and cause human behavior to revert to a much less civilized time.  People act weirdly when they feel threatened.

I have seen this first-hand on a very small scale the last time a hurricane (Ike) came through and we were without power for a week.  No communications as the cell phones could not be recharged, no batteries or ice anywhere to be found,  gas stations running on generators, etc.  Also envision Katrina and what happened as to degradation into thuggish behavior.

I recall Y2K had similar predictions that proved unfounded.  That was a software event that would cause physical reaction. What we are talking about will take place in the physical world.

It will not take world-wide breakdown to occur.  But enough could occur to spread and affect much larger areas.  The human behavior of survival is the Iron Age I am talking about and the breakdown of societal norms.

One reason I own a farm where I have animals to eat and enough land to grow potatoes if needed.

[thackney]

The human behavior of survival is the Iron Age I am talking about and the breakdown of societal norms.

I do not want to be rude or insulting.  But from my perspective, you've made up a completely different definition of Iron Age than most folks would use.

God Bless

[IsailedawayfromFR]

I do not want to be rude or insulting.  But from my perspective, you've made up a completely different definition of Iron Age than most folks would use.

God Bless

I think you are right, as most would think it is the technology of the time, not the societal norms.

Guess I have bee watching too many Sci Fi flicks.

[billva]

When a hurricane or storm comes though the damage is to poles, lines and equipment.  They are in the power company's stock and can be replaced in a relatively short period of time.

The EMP attack concern might cause problems with some automatic systems, but as long as the power lines go to your house or business and a power plant can run and produce electricity there would be work arounds to electronic equipment damage.  Some outages might be longer but power would be available.

Interesting article and discussion.

Love the Reddy Kilowatt image.