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United States Science

Electric Grid is a Vast Machine 329

Posted by CowboyNeal from the con-edison-and-cohorts dept.
Guinnessy writes "The latest issues of the Industrial Physicist suggests that 'the vast system of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution that covers the United States and Canada is essentially a single machine-- by many measures, the world's biggest machine.' The article says that because deregulation ignored the physics of the machine, we have blackouts, a fact the industry warned regulators about in 1998. It has some nice hard science data for those interested in why we're going to get some more blackouts in the future unless Congress gets its act together."
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Electric Grid is a Vast Machine More

Electric Grid is a Vast Machine

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  • Same over here (Score:2, Interesting)

    by stewwy ( 687854 )
    A recent report in the UK suggested the same thing ... but we're getting them after the US as usual :(

  • strange (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @03:44AM (#7180912)
    That in this day and age we are concerned that one of the underlying principles of our success may be a house of cards.

    • Re:strange (Score:3, Insightful)

      by faldore ( 221970 )
      This is an excellent point - this is one example of how capitalism is not a perfect system! I am not saying that socialism is the answer in general, but it is clear that in some areas capitalism is an excellent way of handling distribution, but in others socialism is superior. That's why we're seeing the free software movement - because software makes MUCH more sense in a socialistic distribution system, because it's so easy to build on others' work, but our capitalism prevents us from doing it.

      I repeat
      • Well, government supported and regulated monopolies are the only way to do business sometimes. It mainly depends on the integrity of the people at the helm of both, which in this country (the US), both are routinely called into question.

        Yeah, our government has some nimrods, and our global corporations do too, but overall, I'd say most people do a good job.
      • This is an excellent point - this is one example of how capitalism is not a perfect system

        A free market system is where generators own their own networks and peer or don't peer with other power companies as it suits them. What this system is an example of is a centrally planned system, where the political fasions of the day become laws about how the industry is required to work. In this case it spefied that electricty must be traded etc., but that does not alter the fact this the electricity system bea

        • First have to define what wasn't working (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sphealey ( 2855 ) * on Friday October 10, 2003 @08:19AM (#7181745)
          Investor-owned (private), state-regulated, geographically compact and exclusive electric utilities provided stable supplies of electricity to North America at decreasing real cost from 1920 to 1990 (there was a relatively small cost problem from 1978 - 1982, but that was true of most of the US economy). Electricy use (and therefore supply) doubled every 7 years from 1880 through 1960 or thereabouts, and continued to grow pretty fast after that time.

          Given that, I think it is incumbent on the deregulators to explain exactly what was "broken" with this system and what their "fix" was intended to accomplish. Yes, there was some fat and inefficiencies in the regulated utility model (I was there in the 80s), and some new incentives were needed to help address those problems. But again, increasing supplies of reliable electricity were being provided at decreasing real cost. Has that been true since the wonders of deregulation took hold?

          Of course, one of the real "problems" that electric utility deregulation addressed was that no one involved in the process was earning 200% gross profit margins. I have to wonder if the real "pressure" was not from those who wanted greater efficiency due to competition, but those (such as Enron) who wanted to skim off more cream from an industry that was limited by law to around 12% gross.

          sPh

    • Of course!! Everyone knows that only Soviet-style central planning authority can produce an efficient system at any scale! Stalin and Mussolini were able to make the trains run on time, after all, and Hitler produced a fine automobile.

      That was satire, folks.

      Don't you think that the problems may come from TOO MUCH regulation and oversight? The energy production grid in America is anything but free market -- just look at the difficulty in convincing that California had to overcome convincing the EPA to "all

  • Machine?! (Score:2, Funny)

    by identity0 ( 77976 )
    ...and all this time, I thought it was a magic electric grid!

    You mean those electrons *aren't* being pushed to my outlet by little electric gnomes?
    • A big net of connected nodes. Inputs coming from plants. Switches. Hmmm.

      You don't need much more to make a universal computer (i.e. somthing equivalent to a Turing machine).

      Just be sure that a correctly guided surge of power can operate switch, i.e. change the direction of other another electric stream.

      The input being plants, to perform a computation, you'd just have to blow up a few of them in order to provide the desired input.

      Then just watch the cities of northern america twinkle like a biiiig game o [bitstorm.org]

  • Meanwhile in the land of Oz (Score:5, Informative)

    by evil_roy ( 241455 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @03:48AM (#7180924)
    We are planning deregulation in our most populated state..NSW. And we are using the US as the model for deregulation/privatisation of our energy corporations.

    Why isn't this sort of thing in the mainstream press? In Australia there are clear reasons why not..the two richest guys who would undoubtedly cash in on the deregulation own all the media..that's right, Murdoch and Packer own our papers,our magazines, our pay TV, the 'infoportals' for our largest ISP's,our regular tv stations and our sports.
    • We are planning deregulation in our most populated state..NSW. And we are using the US as the model for deregulation/privatisation of our energy corporations.

      That's rather ironic, since it must be a Labour government doing the deregulation.

      Some things just shouldn't be deregulated and/or privatised. Like anything involving essential services, significant infrastructure and long term planning.

    • Maybe because people are don't understand physics.

      :)

      If you are interested in the deregulation here in the US, you can poke around this web site.... [doe.gov]

      BTW, large portions of the United States deregulated without any problems. New England is mostly there and Texas has deregulated without any problems.

      The main problem with the North American grid, as I understand it, is that it basically works by having twenty guys spread across the NA calling each other when something goes wrong in their part of the el

  • Would imply that there's some sort of net work (read net_work, not network) being done. The electric grid spanning the continent produces no net power because of the consumption taking place. Yes, individually the plants are machines, but taking the composite grid into perspective, it is no longer a machine.
    Sorry. I like arbitrary semantics.
    • True, but Networks behave very oragically. They may have many "pieces" but the whole has a life of it's own. It is good to compare them to software though. After all, the current situation is much like Windows OS. Arbitrary connections between components based [and maintained] on profit motive rather than health of the network...And just like windows, it leads to a wreck. Now a system built on network principles where each part has limited access and limited ability to adversly affect other parts, like
    • Where did you get the idea machines have to generate 'net power'?

      machine

      n 1: any mechanical or electrical device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of human tasks

  • Re-Regulate? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @03:53AM (#7180941)

    To pay the extensive costs, the utilities and the DOE advocate increases in utility rates. The costs involved would certainly be in the tens of billions of dollars. Thus, deregulation would result in large cost increases to consumers, not the savings once promised.

    I think that for many areas in North America, re-regulation is the answer. State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies. They could then form public trusts (with the consumers as "shareholders") and contract out the new grid construction to private companies.

    The advantage to this is that a public trust wouldn't be beholden to shareholders and the stock market. They could effectively plan for the long term, rather than shy away from desperately needed capital outlays simply because the managers need to show a profit in the next quarter.

    • Re:Re-Regulate? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) *
      State and provincial governments should buy grid infrastructure back from the mismanaged, ailing private companies.

      As Gray Davis demonstrated, politicians never mismanage finances. When a company gets it wrong, the damage is limited to its shareholders, and other competing companies take up the slack. When a state gets it wrong, everyone pays the penalty.
      • >>When a state gets it wrong, everyone pays the penalty.

        Excellent point, but it's also important to note that only those who pay taxes pay the penalty. And considering how the tax burden has shifted in america (the lowest 50% of income earners pay WAY LESS than 10% of the taxes collected) that means the "wealthy" are getting stuck with the bill.
    • To ask a simple question with the "public trust" model, do the new grids get constructed where the capacity is inadequate, or where a connected politician needs jobs or favors?

      Private does NOT mean beholden to shareholders, and even if it were so, somewhere I miss where it is in shareholder's interest to have the stock tank because they are failing to deliver a product and thus aren't profitable.

      With public corporations, at least shareholders eventually have to throw out bad management or the company will
  • is the Internet, it is way too complex and bigger than the electrical grid, and contains among other things satellites, routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices, so the Net IS the biggest machine made by man
    • But since the electric net plays a fairly important role in making all the routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices work you cannot see the two apart... So to me it seems a non-issue : they both are connected and dependant on each other. Since the internet is used to connect electrical equipment all around the globe you could say that we have a global electric-powered information machine. And that is the real news here.
    • which covers into areas, where no computer has ever set its foot...
    • Fascinating, so what do all these devices function on?

      Dark magic vooooooooodooooooooooooo?

      How many computers you have in the house? How many lightbulbs? How many routers do you have in the house? How many distribution boxes?

      Ad fscking naseum...

      The problem is that the grid in US does not have algorithms to adapt and decrease demands in times when capacity is at premium.

      The control algorithms are usually extremely primitive and based on simple feedback. When you combine lack of adaptability in consumptio
  • Marshal McLuhan once wrote that the electric power grid is a medium, but it only carries one bit: on or off. The status is plainly visible by looking at the nearest light bulb.
    • in "war in the age of intelligent machines" delanda compared battle formations to machinery. an interesting question might be, what does it take to step from object to machine? and, perhaps later, what does it take to step from machine to intelligence, or are they the same? is intelligence a cascading effect, like the recent power outage? or does it take intelligence to create a cascading effect, like pulling the plug?
  • I see slash is now reporting on Philosophy. The same logic that lets you describe the power network as a single machine lets you also describe the human race as a single organism.

    It's all interconnected and has complex interdependencies. But just saying that doesn't make a nice sound bite. So, we get articles about a "vast machine" as if that's somehow profound.

    $0.02.
    • Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.

      This is the beast that sets the pace. (There are several in each region, in diverse geographical locations, capible of being the guy in charge, but only one is in the system at a time.)

      Every

      • Each of the three regions, Eastern, Western, and that Texas place have exactly one (1) active controlling generation turbine online at any one time. It is a case of "Biggest Rules". The heaviest (really, as in weight) single armature (?) turbine, coil thingy in the entire region has an oscilator that sets the clock.

        Maybe in the 1890s. Last time I checked, the various power pool authorities monitored frequency at multiple points throughout their control areas and sent digital pulses to the governers of al

  • *Not* a single machine. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@gmaLISPil.com minus language> on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:06AM (#7180977) Homepage
    The ultimate problem is that the grid is emphatically *not* a single machine. It's a loosely (some might say poorly) coordinated collection of independent machines and networks. It's not engineered at the system level, or even at the regional level, but rather at the local level with ad hoc interconnects to create larger systems.
    • Yeah, too bad they didn't take simple lessons in planning from that OTHER loosely coordinated collection of independent machines and networks that WAS built for stability over profit!

    • The ultimate problem is that the grid is emphatically *not* a single machine. It's a loosely (some might say poorly) coordinated collection of independent machines and networks. It's not engineered at the system level, or even at the regional level, but rather at the local level with ad hoc interconnects to create larger systems.

      The question being whether that is a problem (weakness) or a strength. Very often when humans take a loosely-coupled system that has grown organically over time and try to replac

    • It's not even the worlds biggest power grid. Consider the article text:

      'the vast system of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution that covers the United States and Canada is essentially a single machine-- by many measures, the world's biggest machine.'

      Since when was North America the biggest continent? Surely the interconnected systems of China, Europe, Africa or the former USSR are much bigger? In fact, I'm fairly sure that you could find interconnecting links between each of these, m

    • Re:*Not* a single machine. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GeoGreg ( 631708 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:22PM (#7183921)
      Well, I'm not an electrical engineer (IANAEE?), but the fact that disturbing the system in Ohio affects things in New York indicates that the machines and networks are not independent. A and B are only independent if fiddling with A cannot affect B. Those "ad hoc interconnects" make it a single system. Just because it's not engineered at the system level doesn't mean it's not a system. There are continuous electrical connections, made up of many components (transmission lines, transformers, generators, etc), connecting all the pieces of the grid. It may be a Rube Goldberg [rube-goldberg.com] machine, but it's a machine.

  • Garage Generators (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 )
    Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house? At over 100KW, the engine outputs >20x my average consumption. And at $2/gallon, that's about $.05/KWh, about 1/3 my utility electric rate. I wouldn't rely on the grid, I'd have a "battery" in the garage. When H2 stacks are affordable, I'd have >10x the fuel economy. How do I hook this up?

    • Re:Garage Generators (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ikewillis ( 586793 )
      One of the great advantages of moving to a hydrogen economy is that cars *would* be able to do this. Specifically, GM's AUTOnomy [gm.com] vehicle contains fuel cells which are capable of generating electrical power for general purpose use, as GM even states on their page:

      "With its robust 42-volt electrical system, the car is configured to run any number of devices in the passenger compartment, from homes to entire farms."

      After moving to a hydrogen economy, and at 95% efficiency, you'd certainly be getting a l

      • "great advantages of moving to a hydrogen economy"

        Hydrogen has an escape velocity sufficiently great to escape the earth's gravitational pull. That means that is doesn't exist naturally on earth. That means that you have to make it from other things. Because hydrogen makes heat (i.e. is exothermic) when burnt, making hydrogen is endothermic, which means you have to put heat in, in other words burn some kind of other fuel. This manufacturing process is necessarily less efficient than just burning the

        • Just to clarify, the idea of a Hydrogen Economy *does not* use hydrogen as a fuel in the sense that we are used to. The idea is to use hydrogen as a storage and transport mechanism for energy.

          Of COURSE it's not efficient to turn fossil fuels into hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen. There will be losses with every additional step. It is, however, possible to get your hydrogen from other sources. A couple of solar panels used to electrolyze water (you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen) are o

        • You're sooo wrong about fuel cells. (Score:4, Informative)

          by caveat ( 26803 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @11:59AM (#7183624)
          An orbiting array of solar cells with intense microwave power transmission downlinks to mid-ocean electrolysis plants. Not feasible now, but in the next 10, 20 years it could happen.

          Your entire last paragraph is wrong. Fuel cells are not batteries; they do work on the same very basic electrochemical rules, but a fuel cell doesn't have a self-contained store of reactants; also, fuel cells use the much more energetic 2 H2 + 02 -> 2 H2O reaction, instead of a lower-energy ionic redox reaction like batteries (If I'm speaking Greek, get an intro chem text and read up on electrochemistry, then look at the potentials for various half-reactions). AFAIK, it's also impossible to build a "rechargable" cell that will take H2O and electricity and spit out H2 and O2; it is possible to build a rechargable battery. Fuel cells are actually a hell of a lot (potentially an order of magnitude) more efficient than internal-combustion engines; fuel cells go directly from chemical energy -> electrical energy, while an ICE has to go chemicals -> thermal -> mechanical -> electrical energy.
          Now for the numbers *hunts down PChem text (PW Atkins, Physical Chemistry, 7th ed.)* OK, the maximum theoretcal efficiency for a Carnot cycle engine is around 80%, depending on the delta-T between the engine and the environment; 80% is reached at around 900-1100C, at less than 100C it's limited to around 20%. Fuel cells are more efficeint at lower T, theoretically greater than 90 percent at less than 100C. Here's a pretty good summary page [visionengineer.com]; the bottom graph is really good. Brush up on your thermodynamics, you're a clearcut case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing :P

    • Re:Garage Generators (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mt-biker ( 514724 )
      Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house?

      A great idea, and one that gets discussed by Amory Lovins in Natural Capitalism [natcap.org] (See chapter 2, "Reinventing the Wheels", about half way through).

      Lots of details to be worked out, of course. What happens when your car's not there? When it breaks down? Do you store energy yourself at home (H2, whatever), or do you rely on the grid?

      What does the grid become? I was shocked (groan... bad pun) to learn how much power the transmission lines lose. What if lot
    • OK, so you're estimating $2/gallon for gas, and 100KW of output... your assumptions seem right so far. But, that works out to $0.02 per kilowatt-gallon (whatever the hell that is).

      I don't know where you're getting $0.05 per kilowatt-hour, unless you're assuming that you would use 2.5 gallons per hour... which, when multiplied by $0.02 per kilowatt-gallon, would indeed be $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.

      That would mean if you've got, say, a 20 gallon tank, you'd have to be able to run it for 8 hours at ABSOLUTELY
    • Go buy an inverter at the hardware store. I have one, pretty cool. Yes, I can boil water and watch TV in my car. However,you get closer to 100 watts, not 100kwatts.

    • Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house?

      Assuming that you can get a suitably-rated alternator {230V single phase, self-exciting, 10kVA or thereabouts for a whole house; 2kVA if you don't plan on running anything that gets hot for a living}, can successfully couple it to the engine and can maintain an accurate 3000rpm {50 cycles/sec * 60 sec/min = 3000rpm} and have room for a big DPCO switch between the meter and the consumer unit {for switching over}, there is precious little stopping yo

    • One of those electric car manufacturers is planning to do just that, tap into the 'grid' of cars on charge to get back power when it's needed.

      It was on slashdot a little while ago - anyone remember it?

  • Armillaria ostoyae (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bhima ( 46039 ) <(Bhima.Pandava) (at) (gmail.com)> on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:17AM (#7181001) Journal
    This reminds me that the worlds largest living organism is an underground mushroom in the US somewhere.

    No they do not taste good.

  • The Socialist solution... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ikewillis ( 586793 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:19AM (#7181005) Homepage
    would be the nationalization of the power grid. That is, the government would take control of all properties owned by current energy companies for the purpose of electrical production and distribution (which would most likely involve financial compensation for the property) and would work to make the power grid as robust as possible.

    This sounds somewhat crazy, but the necessity is beginning to show itself. The blackouts in California... the collapse of Enron... the East Cost blackouts... the recent collapse of NRG Energy... is the power grid really safe in the hands of private enterprise?

    The power grid is a resource upon which we are all vitally dependant. Therefore, shouldn't we work to make it robust as possible?

    Does it really make sense to have 300 little monopolies controlling the power grid instead of one big monopoly, the government itself?

    Who says that the government can do better that private enterprise? Well, in the wake of deregulation, we've all seen what too much motivation from profit can do to the power grid. The sweeping general move towards deregulation have had terrible effects on all aspects of our life. Following the deregulation of radio, the majority of radio stations in the US were purchased by an enormous media conglomorate called Clear Channel, which is essentially a monopoly (with the exception of Cumulus Broadcasting and others) and all stations were given playlists. Call in contests were nationalized, so now you have to be a certain numbered nationwide caller. It's everything Rush sang about in the Spirit of Radio all over again...

    So, give nationalizing the power grid a try! When you've hit rock bottom, all you can do is go up...

    • Somewhat the British system. The National Grid is owned and managed by the National Grid company as a single unit. I think that it is in turn owned by the big power companies, with some government input

    • Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sybert ( 192766 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:58AM (#7181098) Journal
      The socialists never know when it's time to upgrade capacity until after it's too late. In California, the utilities did not build any new generation for about twenty years before de-regulation (and even paid money to not build new generation). The private generators started building capacity only after de-regulation, and were not able to finish before the power was most needed. If CA had deregulated sooner there would have been no problem. Plus the braindead CPUC insisted on charging very low consumer rates when wholesale rates were highest and now are charging very high rates when wholesale rates are very low. California is a great example on how to completely bungle regulation surrounding deregulation.

      Getting government involved is the best way to block the next round of expantion necessary. We just need to make sure that companies that are sucessful can expand and take-over those that are unsucessful without disruption.

      Despite consolidation, there are now more radio stations then before. Plus it's our fault that we choose to listen to centrally controlled radio rather than locally programmed stations.
      • The socialists never know when it's time to upgrade capacity until after it's too late.

        Why? Is there some inherent problem with socialism here? Lot's of countries have nationalised power grids that seem to get along just fine.

    • > So, give nationalizing the power grid a try

      good idea, but you seem to confuse the grid with the energy suppliers. I think competition in the electricity production industry can (and does) work. The problem is that transmission of electricity is inherently a monopoly.

      In the UK i believe transmission is dealt with by the "national grid" which then purchases electricity from a number of private companies.

      If the grid is fully or partially nationalised it can also impose rules on electricity suppliers, s

    • The problem you're likely to run into is that central planning requires the solution of a very large sparse input-output matrix. That's a very hard problem that's easy to get wrong, as is frequently demonstrated here in the UK.

      "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." (Catherine Aird)

      Harry Erwin

    • That is, the government would take control of all properties owned by current energy companies for the purpose of electrical production and distribution (which would most likely involve financial compensation for the property) and would work to make the power grid as robust as possible.

      You people never give up, do you? Using your logic, in some countries the government "nationalized" the farms - millions starved. There is decades, almost a century of real-world evidence that Socialist economics do not wor
    • The energy supply system here in the UK used to be owned by the government (post-war socialism) and was privatised by the Thatcher government partly as a matter of dogma and partly because it was seen as "over-engineered" and bloated.

      It was replaced by a single grid company, local distribution companies and generator companies. Power was bought on a complex "pool" system in which generators bid to provide power in various timeslots and the lowest bids were accepted. This was gradually changed and now cons

    • The great thing is, we DON'T NEED a centralized solution:

      1) decentralized/localized power generation
      2) alternative energy sources
      3) more stable power grid
      4) more jobs
      5) $$$!

      This problem can be solved by smaller, more efficient (either alternative energy, or reduction in transmission distance inefficiencies), localized power sources. Each of the nodes is not necessarily very stable, but because there are so DAMN MANY of them, it would be very hard to have a large blackout like the entire east coast. Soun
    • Even in the article it says:

      Power deregulation--in reality, a change in regulations--went slowly at first. Not until 1998 were utilities, beginning in California, compelled to sell off their generating capacity to independent power producers, such as Enron and Dynergy.

      So "deregulation" means privatizing the most profitable aspects so the Enrons who give $$$ to the DNC and RNC can make money, and forcing the other companies to buy from them at extortionate rates. Something similar happened in CA where the
    • Government-owned power is great! You get it all at cost, and if you need extra capacity the government can take out a loan to build another one (and pay lower interest than any private company).

      Here in Ontario the government started to slowly chop up our publically-owned power generation company and sell it off, bit by bit. As soon as profiteers got involved, rates began to soar.
      Fearing public outcry, they quietly induced a rate freeze (by using tax dollars to fill in the profit margin) until privatization

  • The stock market idea was dumb (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:19AM (#7181006) Journal
    Quoting...

    In the view of Casazza and many other experts, the key error in the new rules was to view electricity as a commodity rather than as an essential service. Commodities can be shipped from point A through line B to point C, but power shifts affect the entire singlemachine system. As a result, increased longdistance trading of electric power would create dangerous levels of congestion on transmission lines where controllers did not expect them and could not deal with them.

  • The problem is political more than mechanical. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ahfoo ( 223186 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:19AM (#7181007) Journal
    No doubt there are mechanical issues that weren't accounted for with deregulation, but the political issues are far more complex than the mechanical problems. If this wasn't the case, there would never have been an Enron.
    From its origins electricity has been a utopian technology emerging into a world that is staunchly opposed to utopian solutions.
    The industrial revolution was exactly that, a revolution and the development of the steam turbine led to prices so low that it seemed electricity would sweep the world in a matter of decades powering every manner of device. Just look at the movie Metropolis. Clearly these expectaions of a great high tech all electric future started long before any of us were born.
    Take, for example, the Nazis. One of the things that gave the people such hope during the rise of the national socialists was the promise of electrochemistry. With nothing but air, water and electricity they would live in a world of plenty.
    After the Second World War it was nuclear power and unmetered electricity. Near the town where I grew up on the Central Coast of California there was once a billboard outside a small town called Nipomo that advertised the coming age of unmetered electricity.
    Then when the problems of nuclear fission became apparent it was fusion just around the corner.
    An amazing fact is that all these promises are true. Turbines are amazingly efficient, electrochemistry does work and so does fission and fusion too. But as real as all these technologies are, they overlook the political side of things.
    If the real goal was just to provide cheap electricity and everybody agreed, it would be quite simple. We'd just connect the world's grids together and reduce the need for peak load by using existing capacity efficiently. But that's too utopian and it's overlooking the reality of power politics.
    The reality is that as a society we advocate greed. Really you can't blame the Enron people. They were just doing what they believed to be the right thing --fuck everybody. Competition has become a moral value in its own right. In a society that holds greed as a value the problem is not merely mechanical.
    • Thankyou for a very insightful comment. I'd mod you up but you are already at +5.

      Society as a whole needs to recognise the folly of individual greed in an age where nearly anything is possible. Greed of the individual leads to just the sort of symptoms you describe - we have technology which could be made easily available to all, for nothing more than the labour it takes to build it, yet because individuals want to horde the riches for the technology, we only distribute it to those who can cough up the cas

  • Blind faith in free markets again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by divec ( 48748 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:20AM (#7181012) Homepage
    This is another example of what happens when you blindly assume that a "free market" will solve everything. For a free market to work effectively, certain axioms need to hold, such as:
    1. Easy entry into the market
    2. Good information available about buyers / sellers
    3. Freely exchangable goods

    etc. In this case, rule #3 broke - it's complex and error-prone transporting electricity between different sections of the grid. The fact that one of the fundamental axioms doesn't hold should be enough to stop policy makers assuming that a "market" is the best solution. This kind of analysis should be done whenever regulation of any utility is examined.
    • Furthermore, it is too easy in the current system to use distribution schedules to stab competitors in the back (by making it hard for company Co to get electricity from A to B since most of the capacity in a few critical places is deliberately used by company X.)
    • The main problem here is that there is not, in fact, a free market for energy. Government is still very entangled in the energy market. "Deregulation" is nothing but a government-manufactured label for a slightly different scheme of government control -- a convienent scapegoat for when the program fails.

      The argument proposed by this article (and most everyone here) is completely baseless. In order to prove that free markets cannot produce reliable energy, we actually need a free market to study. Until then
  • Competition and free markets make everything better. They work great for companies, so they must improve electrical power delivery too. Public utilities are an old-fashioned idea and should be abolished to create a free-market long distance energy trading utopia. We will all save money and cash in on our dividends. The same goes for public schools. Kids get smarter when their schools have to compete for them. Deregulation makes food taste better, roads safer, and can increase your penis size by 3 to 6 inche

  • Ice Storm Blackouts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:31AM (#7181034)

    Electrical power going out in the northern united states and Canada for an extended period of time during winter would kill hundreds of thousands of people.

    I suggest that the system be reconfigured and backed-up so as to default to providing emergency power to those regions for the months of November through March.

    The boiled frog scenario [culpepper.com] aside, no one ever died from being too hot.

  • Pattern is all too obvious (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ozzee ( 612196 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @04:33AM (#7181038)

    Incompetance of management. It is abhorrent to see how the information is provided to the decision makers yet the people without the knowledge end up overriding those with the knowledge.

    These are some high profile events where the risks where well known.

    Both Columbia and Challenger shuttle losses
    Here the engineering team informed management multiple of the risk and yet the management failed to act on the information provided.

    The great blockouts of N.E. U.S.A. 1965 and 2003. The risks were well known yet the politics got in the way.

    9/11 Terrorist attack - there were numerous signs and the FBI was too worried about politics rather than listening to their own people.

    This is not unique to today but it is getting more and more difficult for people to understand.

    In the technology industry I find myself "fighting" to unleash the truth and attacked because I simply state the facts as they are.

    OK, too bad if a company messes up a product but sometimes it is significantly detrimental - take the Union Carbide toxic disater in Bhopal.

    How do we effect a change for there to be more recognition for this ? The risk/reward trade-off for those with the knowledge are often dispropotionate : RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people. REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.

    That's it, I'm going to start collating references to stupid management decisions causing untold damage because of management ignorance. Please post your examples here.... I'm going to use it next time I get into a knowledge vs ignorance argument.

  • Learn from market failure (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Friday October 10, 2003 @05:00AM (#7181105)
    Generally I am a fan of the market system. Historically, market systems have outperformed regulated systems over and over again. But, as this excellent articla shows, in this case the market system has failed us. I would like to examine why this is so.

    As I see it, we are buying two commodities for price. We are buing raw power and security of supply. But the prices are set only for raw power. The electricity companies could justifialby say that they had plenty of power available the day before the blackout, and the day after, and you chose not to take it. But, you cry, I wanted a continuous supply I could depend on. They reply, where did you pay for that continuity of supply? You only paid us for power, not continuity of power.

    In any business, there is a cost to reliability. An airline may have a spare plane, so that if one develops a fault, they can still fly. But if two develop a fault, there are going to be cancellations. They choose to accept some level of risk rather than run an infinite fleet to take occare of very rare multiple failures.

    If there is one day of power cuts, the power companies lose 1/365 of their annual revenue; perhaps a bit more, because it is likely to happen at the peak, most lucrative, period; say 1/200. How much capital, in a free market system, are they going to invest to squeeze that last 0.5% of revenue? I think they would realistically set an acceptable level of power cuts and just say "You get that" to consumers.

    So what we need to is to monetize security of supply, and make a market in it. Get the domestic meter updated so that it can be switched off remotely (my system already does that for overnight heating, using a signal embedded in a long-wave radio station). Require the utilities to offer, at a price that they choose, to offer at least two levels of reliability. Thise who choose the lower level can be cut off when they system approaches failure, leaving more power for those who have chosen to pay more for greater reliability. Those who choose the higher level are providing the funding to pay for reliability improvements. If nearly everybody chooses one level or the other, the market has sent a signal to the system, and a new higher or lower level should be created.
    • So you are advocating a system in which the rich get to keep their electricity while the poor sit in the dark, throw out their food, and so forth. Real nice of you there -- just the kind of human compassion we find in the free market.

      Lots of businesses in NYC had private building generators; they were used to power the oh-so-important foodlights that pollute the night sky over Manhattan. Nothing is more pathetic than seeing an empty office building blazing with light during a blackout. But they have the

      • That is the way of the world in everything: the rich travel in cars, the poor use public transport. The rich live in leafy suburbs, the poor in inner city slums. The rich hire private security guards, the poor get mugged in the alleys. The rich get all the medicine that technology can create, the poor go broke paying for minimal treatment. Why is electricity a special case?

        I am not against supporting the poor - in fact, from distinctly mopre socialist Britain, I am all for it. But I don't think you should

  • VERY slippery slope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by IntelliTubbie ( 29947 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @05:26AM (#7181162)
    If you think the power grid argument is safe, then try these on for size:
    1. The Internet is really one giant machine, so computer use and information exchange should be controlled by the government -- otherwise, there will be even more viruses and spam and piracy.
    2. The economy is really one giant machine, so the government should control industry -- otherwise there will be even more recessions and labor strikes and market crashes. That would never happen in a centrally-planned economy.
    3. The government should control speech, otherwise people might express ideas that are damaging to the "machine" of human society. Without regulation, we'll just have more dangerous ideas like racism, communism, and (insert your favorite religion here).

    Issues of freedom and control aside, who really trusts the goverment to run something complicated and critical? They can barely get the simple things right. At least private industry has profit as a motive to keep the grid running. What's the government's motivation -- sheer good will? The grid already has too many single points of failure, and the last thing we ought to do is put it in the hands of a single authority.

    The best solution is the same one a lot of geeks would support on any other issue: keep it open, keep it decentralized, and if there's more than one way to do it, let the user decide.

    Cheers,
    IT
    • You speak of "the government." There's no reason electricity can't be largely locally generated and controlled by local public utilities. These work very well in, for instance, Los Angeles (which had no rate spike in the California debacle) and Seattle. They are responsible, and responsive, to local voters.

      Decentralization can often be more successfully done in public (local government) hands than in private (corporate) hands. Corporations have a nearly irrestible tendency to conglomerate, homogenize, and
  • This gives one more reason why the people of Texas should at all costs keep Texas off of the national grid. Not only would such a interconnect expose Texas to greater federal regulation by putting power activities in Texas in interstate commerce, the interconnect would inevitably be used to drain power from Texas driving up the cost of power there only to subsidize the pointy headed elitist parasites of the Northeast. In addition to these existing reasons it now seems it would expose Texas to blackouts to b
  • Well, duh. In related news Scientists claim that all the animals living in an area comprise one vast system called an Ecosystem and exist in inter-related "food-chains" ... Is there a nobel prize for overtly obvious observations and reports? I propose we call it the "Captain Obvious" award.
  • and on that planet, people ran around after little green pieces of paper which were supposed to make those people happy. The irony of the situation, however, is that much of the time vast majority of the people were unhappy while they ran around after the green pieces of paper. -Hitchikers guide.

    Capitalism, like other governing systems, will fail if those leading the system become corrupt. It then becomes our responsability to revolt and take our life, liberty and freedom back.

    The power system has
  • The power-generation industry is arguably the most heavily regulated industry in the United States. Power companies are given disincentives to upgrade older generation plants. Building new plants is practically impossible in some areas. So how could you expect these companies *NOT* to get their power from elsewhere?
  • Take a look at this [energy.gov]. The United States has not one power grid, but three (the actual article cites this, but it hasn't been emphasized enough):

    "It is important to note that there is no "national power grid" in the

    United States. In fact, the continental United States is divided into three
    main power grids:

    • The Eastern Interconnected System, or the Eastern Interconnect
    • The Western Interconnected System, or the Western Interconnect
    • The Texas Interconnected System, or the Texas Interconnect

    People who actu

  • The power industry has never been de-regulated. What was called de-regulation was nothing more than re-regulation.

    Why should I listen to a thing the author says when he can't even get this simple a concept right?
  • So, all of the individual participants in the electric power industry use the grid to distribute power and make money, but since none of them actually own the whole grid, and there's no regulatory requirement to maintain the grid in good working order, we are back to the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution? Re-regulation, either self-imposed by the industry or government-imposed for the good of society.
  • 1. The problem is not in de-regulated generation markets, the blackout's root cause was failure of regulated transmission. In the "How to Fix It", this is the first thing he says to fix.

    2. Re-Regulating the industry will not solve the fundamental problems of poor communication, which was cited as another cause of the 8/14 blackout. First Energy territory (a vertical utility) loosely operates under a regional authority called MISO; essentially, FE does its thing and lets MISO know when it has problems.
  • Ask any economist, widespread electricy deregulation simply HAS NOT HAPPENED.

    There are a very few markets, and probably no two contiguous states, that have meaningfully reduced regulation and moved electricity generation essentially into the competitive private sector.

    The rest are variations on the California theme: re-regulation. Change some rules here, loosen this up, but go over there and tighten down on that. Net result, same government-run bullshit, different clothes. Fortunately none of them have
  • No apostrophe?!!!! YES!!!!! WE GRAMMAR NAZIS ARE making a DIFFERENCE!!

    Oh joy of joys. Oh wonder of wonders.
    *grin!*

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