Job Discussion Forums

stil · Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 259 Location: Hunan

Right at rush hour, the power went out. You generally asume it's localized, but then you realize once the street lights are out it is going to be more of a hassel than that. I went to a pub (for the food of course) Wink

and I find out it's the whole north-eastern seaboard power grid thats down. New York, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Ottawa, about 50 million people. I leave in a week and a half, and I know this is just going to make travel a little more of a pain in the ass.

Roger · Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 9138

Yes, America at its technological best...

guty · Joined: 10 Apr 2003 Posts: 365 Location: on holiday

Lets show those Iraqis how civilised people behave when there are no alarms in shops

scot47 · Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343

How could this happen ? Is the electrical system in that area so primitive ? I thought those guys over there were supposed to be technologically advanced !

I can't imagine this happening in Germany, Sweden or Japan.

Are they too busy spending their money on armaments ?

SueH · Joined: 01 Feb 2003 Posts: 1022 Location: Northern Italy

Not a lack of technology, just a lack of investment. With deregulation and a market system nobody is going to spend money if they don't have to.
It's called 'efficiency' I believe..

stil · Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 259 Location: Hunan

There was human error involved also. As a grid loses power they are supposed to separate from the next grid. Somebody in Ohio was asleep or drunk, otherwise it would have been localized to the Cleveland area. Had others been asleep it could of shut down south to Florida and west to the Rockies.

SueH · Joined: 01 Feb 2003 Posts: 1022 Location: Northern Italy

In a decent system I believe most of the isolation should be automatic (I'll have to check with old colleagues). The art of the grid control engineer is to get people back on supply by rerouting, calling on standby plant, load management of interuptible supplies etc.

Where a system is operating on the margins, there aren't the options for rerouting and so forth, then it all happened too quickly for the existing sytems to cope.

I'm a bit worried about the situation here in the UK where we have followed the same deregulation route with a decline in generating capacity and infrastructure which has the potential results we have just seen.

Steiner · Joined: 21 Apr 2003 Posts: 573 Location: Hunan China

Now they think the whole thing may have been caused by a tree that wasn't trimmed back properly. For want of a nail....