MASSIVE FUCKING BLACKOUT

[RedImperator]

So? Everyone got a free day off from work in NYC and power
was restored within 24 hours. A few years ago, a bad ice
storm in Vermont knocked out power to large parts of the state
for as long as a MONTH.

Now THAT's a catastrophe, not a burp on the grid that happens every
20~ years...

Hmm, the fact of the matter is, losing power for 24 hours in Toronto and New York (not to mention the other cities that went dark) is going to cause more economic damage than losing power for a month in Vermont. Not as much misery (especially in a Vermont winter), but definitely more economic damage.

[aerius]

Ah right, because we all know how well government quickly and efficiently responds to the demands and needs of the populace, let alone a dynamic system like power generation... nevermind that THE EXACT SAME THING HAPPEN IN BOTH THE 60s AND 70s when the government "heavily regulated" or outright controled the power generation in the US. One also need only look at the former Soviet Union to see the efficiency of State run industries....

Lemme put it to you this way, the power grid under goverment control and regulation was far more reliable than it has been in the past few years when they started privatization up here. In the last couple years we've had about 10 blackouts at my work, each of them lasting from 5 minutes to 1.5 hours, and averaging about 20-25 minutes. In the previous 10 years which is as far back as I can remember we've had maybe 8-10 blackouts, lasting a maximum of about an hour, and most of them were only a few minutes. I know this because I'm the one who has to reset all the clocks and VCR's after every power outage. It might be a statistical fluke but I'd say deregulation has fucked over our power grid reliability pretty good.

Ontario Hydro ran up a damn massive debt, but they kept our lights on a hell of a lot better than the dorks running the system these days.

[Joe]

Lemme put it to you this way, the power grid under goverment control and regulation was far more reliable than it has been in the past few years when they started privatization up here.

Can someone please cite for me whatever deregulation of the power grid has taken place? I honestly want to know, because as far as I know the grid hasn't been deregulated (and if it has, this is something I'd like to research).

[aerius]

Can someone please cite for me whatever deregulation of the power grid has taken place? I honestly want to know, because as far as I know the grid hasn't been deregulated.

Privatization started about 4-5 years ago I think when they broke up Ontario Hydro and allowed private companies to get into the electricity generation business. Last year they opened up the market and allowed supply & demand to dictate the prices, though that only lasted a few months backlash forced the goverment to cap prices at 4.3 cents/kw hour. The were going to sell off the entire power grid too but that fell through with the public outcry over high electricity prices after deregulation.

Blackouts have become more and more frequent since the Ontario Hydro breakup. Use to be the power would go out only in severe thunderstorms when power lines got knocked down, nowadays it goes out for no damn reason at all. We've had clear days and nights when the power would just go bye-bye, not even a high demand day, and not a single weather system in all of southern Ontario.

[Stuart Mackey]

The environmentalists also hate dams and reservoirs as much as they hate nuclear stations.

[Greenpeacenik]Must blow up the dams to save the fishies! Must blow up the dams to save the fishies! Must blow up the dams to save the fishies![/Greenpeacenik]

Is there an online tally of how much generating capacity we lost through dam-cracking during the Klintoon years?

I cant beleive you guys cracked dams..Hydro is a great source of clean power..and as for fishies they are a excellent source of food.

[Joe]

Can someone please cite for me whatever deregulation of the power grid has taken place? I honestly want to know, because as far as I know the grid hasn't been deregulated.

Privatization started about 4-5 years ago I think when they broke up Ontario Hydro and allowed private companies to get into the electricity generation business. Last year they opened up the market and allowed supply & demand to dictate the prices, though that only lasted a few months backlash forced the goverment to cap prices at 4.3 cents/kw hour. The were going to sell off the entire power grid too but that fell through with the public outcry over high electricity prices after deregulation.

Blackouts have become more and more frequent since the Ontario Hydro breakup. Use to be the power would go out only in severe thunderstorms when power lines got knocked down, nowadays it goes out for no damn reason at all. We've had clear days and nights when the power would just go bye-bye, not even a high demand day, and not a single weather system in all of southern Ontario.

What about the grid? Transmission and distribution are different things altogether.

{edit} Argh, not distribution, generation.

[Stuart Mackey]

The market for power in the U.S. is hardly free; if it was, we'd have enough nuclear power plants to make this sort of thing a non-issue.

With all due respect, that's bullshit. You are trying to distract from the failure of the free market in this situation by arguing that it should have been made even more free.

The problem is one of simply motives; in a free market, corporations inevitably move to build the least amount of generation they can get away with, because excess capacity is LOST PROFITS. You can spin this any way you want, but the end result is that free-market thinking and profit motives are precisely what got us into this mess.

Actually, thou seems to forget that the TRANSMISSION section of the market was not deregulated, making it incredibly incredibly hard for a power company to upgrade the transmission part of their grids, making it so that there is no way to upgrade that with profit. If it was deregulated on the other hand, they would upgrade for the profit thus helping to ensure that this would never happen again.

Wanna bet? NZ's transmission, along with everything else that sparks, was deregulated and it didnt help us. I have no problem with a broadly deregulated power market but ther must be some government involvment for the odd occation when there is a fuck up, and there will be a fuck up.

[Sea Skimmer]

I cant beleive you guys cracked dams..Hydro is a great source of clean power..and as for fishies they are a excellent source of food.

As I pointed out, most if not all of the cracked dams provided no power and many didn't even provide drinking water. They where flood control and navigation aids.

[Stuart Mackey]

I cant beleive you guys cracked dams..Hydro is a great source of clean power..and as for fishies they are a excellent source of food.

As I pointed out, most if not all of the cracked dams provided no power and many didn't even provide drinking water. They where flood control and navigation aids.

You did? must have missed that...
But if they were not power plants then I guess its no biggie in terms of Genreation but I do wonder if they could not have been turned into hydro power dams? extra generation is a good thing IMHO

[Sea Skimmer]

You did? must have missed that...

Its on page six

But if they were not power plants then I guess its no biggie in terms of Genreation but I do wonder if they could not have been turned into hydro power dams? extra generation is a good thing IMHO

I don't know if that's feasible. With some I'm sure its not, they're simply not big enough in capacity or height to support any significant generation. I found a listing of dams over six feet high in the US. The total number removed since 1998 when the process began is only around 500.

The first number is percent of total, the second the total number




Recreation 31.3 23,185
Fire and Farm Ponds 17.0 12,557
Flood Control 14.6 10,801
Irrigation 13.7 10,176
Water Supply 9.8 7,226
Tailings & Other 8.1 5,967
Hydroelectric 2.9 2,166
Undetermined 2.3 1,732
Navigation 0.3 243

[aerius]

What about the grid? Transmission and distribution are different things altogether.

{edit} Argh, not distribution, generation.

The power distribution part I'm not 100% sure of, so I could be wrong, but this is the system as I understand it. The government owns all the the power lines, hydro towers, and switching stations, but the actual day to day operation is done independant market retailers and overseen by the IMO which is some kind of marketing organization.

[Cal Wright]

Power's been fine in Alabama. Heh, damn Yankees.

[RogueIce]

Power's been fine in Alabama. Heh, damn Yankees.

Dame in Florida. Hell, we got the A/Cs running on high all day in just about every building there is, and severe T-storms to boot, and we don't lose power for 25 hours, and it certainly doesn't take the whole South Eastern US with it. The only exceptions would be after a major storm like a hurricane or something to physically knock down lines and/or wipe out a plant.

[Stuart Mackey]

You did? must have missed that...

Its on page six

But if they were not power plants then I guess its no biggie in terms of Genreation but I do wonder if they could not have been turned into hydro power dams? extra generation is a good thing IMHO

I don't know if that's feasible. With some I'm sure its not, they're simply not big enough in capacity or height to support any significant generation. snip

Ahh, thanks. For some strange reason, I had this idea that some unbalanced enviro twit had managed to get a number of hydro dams de-hydroed. Nothing surprises me when it comes to weird shit from the states.

[MKSheppard]

And in other words, I have discovered a detailed OOB of Army Group Don...which I soon shall be posting here, all 500MB of it.

Hopefully, my ramblings on the grognardly minituae of WWII German Army
Group Organization shall overload the powerlines and cause another
blackout.

[J]

I had wonderful time during the blackout, it reminded me so much of small town Nova Scotia where I grew up and the small town we stayed in when my family visited Nepal. Everything was so peaceful and quiet, and people throughout my neighbourhood and the city were mingling with each other and actually talking and enjoying a night out in the fresh air instead of yaking on cellphones and hiding behind their computers. I almost wish we could do this every weekend, just shut everything down and get people out there and have this sense of community and everything, almost.

For my & my family it was just another adventure to be taken in stride, sure we got inconvenienced and the ice cream in our freezer melted before we could eat it all, but we got to see all the stars and do some fun things that we never get to do in the city. The only downer of the night was hearing some guy whine on the radio about how this blackout was such a pain and then going on and on about suing the power companies for a whole bunch of completely frivolous damages, it was enough to make me sick. Yes it was an unfortunate event that shouldn't have happened, but if the first thing on your mind is suing for compensation on the spoiled food in your fridge, you need a goddamn reality check.

Our power came back on at 2am Friday but we go hit by a few rolling blackouts throughout the day and our cable didn't come back on till Saturday morning sometime. The power's been on all day today and I'm hoping it stays on for good now. Anyways, we came through happy and unhurt and so we're all happy.

[Darth Wong]

Before the misinformation about the power utility situation gets out of hand, here's how it works in Ontario, based on what I know of the situation:

The public utility formerly known as Ontario Hydro was broken up into three pieces, based on the recommendations of a "think tank" which was commissioned to write up a report on privatization.

The three pieces are Hydro One (which runs the transmission system), OPG (Ontario Power Generation, which runs Ontario Hydro's old power plants and sells power in competition with other vendors), and the IMO (Independent Market Operator, which acts as a sort of stock exchange and securities commission for electrical power).

Of the three, OPG and Hydro One were both partially deregulated (there is no such thing as complete deregulation in a society of laws) and were put on the privatization block. OPG was made into a private corporation, and Hydro One (the transmission company) was in the process of "preparing for an IPO" (I think people familiar with business know what that means). The IPO was scrapped at the 11th hour last year because of public outcry and political opposition delay tactics, so it remains a Crown corporation.

Under the old system, Ontario Hydro supplied all the power. If it didn't have enough, it would buy extra from outside suppliers. Under the new system, OPG has no special priority over any other supplier. If the end-users (municipal utilities and certain large companies which patch directly into the grid) decide they'd rather buy power from someone other than OPG based on the latest spot prices, they can do so and there are no real limits to this behaviour. This naturally leads to much more fluctuation in transmission patterns.

PS. I find it rather distressing how doggedly some people cling to the notion that further deregulation and privatization will improve the situation. When you start doing something and run into all kinds of problems, the rational reaction is to step back and say "hey, let's re-evaluate this", not "let's push on with even more gusto!"

[phongn]

Dame in Florida. Hell, we got the A/Cs running on high all day in just about every building there is, and severe T-storms to boot, and we don't lose power for 25 hours, and it certainly doesn't take the whole South Eastern US with it. The only exceptions would be after a major storm like a hurricane or something to physically knock down lines and/or wipe out a plant.

The Florida grid is almost independant - something like 90% of demand is generated in state. It's also fairly robust, designed to withstand random hurricanes wiping out large sections of the grid and the like.

OTOH, quality of power sucks, with lightning sending transients through the lines all of the time...

[MKSheppard]

The three pieces are Hydro One (which runs the transmission system), OPG (Ontario Power Generation, which runs Ontario Hydro's old power plants and sells power in competition with other vendors), and the IMO (Independent Market Operator, which acts as a sort of stock exchange and securities commission for electrical power).

FULL FUCKING STOP RIGHT THEN AND THERE

What fucking MORON made one company own the power lines, and
another own the power plants?

That's exactly what the fuck happened with the "privatization" of British
Rail....one company got the trains, another got the track and signals..
and it's been all fucked since then...

You don't split CRUCIAL tasks between two companies, you split the AREA
between the two companies...

Company A gets all the equipment, etc left of this line, and company
B gets all the equipment right of the line.

That's exactly what we did when we Broke up Ma Bell in the 1980s,
and it's worked out great...unlike all the other European style
"privatization" schemes

[RogueIce]

OTOH, quality of power sucks, with lightning sending transients through the lines all of the time...

True, though the lightning has to get either fairly close for it to do anything.

Most I've ever had out of a single storm is two. Are other methods in current use capable of not having that when it gets either a close or otherwise strong lightning-strike nearby? I've never seen it happen up North with their storms when I went to visit. I always figured it was our rather heavy amount of lightning that did it.

[Joe]

PS. I find it rather distressing how doggedly some people cling to the notion that further deregulation and privatization will improve the situation. When you start doing something and run into all kinds of problems, the rational reaction is to step back and say "hey, let's re-evaluate this", not "let's push on with even more gusto!"

Most deregulation is not deregulation at all, at least where electricity is concerned, it's merely restructuring. Of course deregulation is going to fail if it's not done right, that doesn't mean all deregulatory schemes are doomed to failure.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Recreation 31.3 23,185
Fire and Farm Ponds 17.0 12,557
Flood Control 14.6 10,801
Irrigation 13.7 10,176
Water Supply 9.8 7,226
Tailings & Other 8.1 5,967
Hydroelectric 2.9 2,166
Undetermined 2.3 1,732
Navigation 0.3 243

This article:

Would lead one to suggest that a fair number of the dams might have been dual-use if albeit relatively low output--and some for outright hydroelectric purposes. I'm continuing to look for a comprehensive list.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Let's hear it for that baby boom comming next year.

Yeah something about blackouts and floods that turn humans into Rabbits...

[Patrick Degan]

Most deregulation is not deregulation at all, at least where electricity is concerned, it's merely restructuring. Of course deregulation is going to fail if it's not done right, that doesn't mean all deregulatory schemes are doomed to failure.

Hmmm... Sounds so like the "Communism's failed because it's never really been tried" argument.

[Xenophobe3691]

I got stuck in JFK during this blackout. I FUCKING HATED IT!