Electric Grid is a Vast Machine 329
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."
Same over here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Same over here - not a troll? (Score:2)
strange (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:strange (Score:3, Insightful)
I repeat
Re:strange (Score:2)
Yeah, our government has some nimrods, and our global corporations do too, but overall, I'd say most people do a good job.
Re:strange (Score:2)
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)
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
How true! (Score:2)
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
Re:strange (Score:3, Insightful)
Machine?! (Score:2, Funny)
You mean those electrons *aren't* being pushed to my outlet by little electric gnomes?
But could you make it a *Turing* Machine ? (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Meanwhile in the land of Oz (Score:2)
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.
Re:Meanwhile in the land of Oz (Score:2, Insightful)
:)
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
Actually, the world's largest machine... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry. I like arbitrary semantics.
Re:Actually, the world's largest machine... (Score:2)
Re:Actually, the world's largest machine... (Score:2, Informative)
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)
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)
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.
Slight correction (Score:2)
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.
Re:True Deregulation is the answer. (Score:2)
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
Re:Re-Regulate? (Score:2)
What you see with US electricty is a *classic* example of the failures of central planning, even if in these cases the operations being centrally planned are notionally private companies. Government mandated pseudo-trades are conce
Re:Re-Regulate? (Score:2)
It seems the rest of the world is also stuck with a third-world electricity grid.
And at the rate we're going, we'll be stuck with a 3rd world electricity grid before long. What we had before "degregulation" worked well enough. But noooooo, they had to fix it. They fixed it alright. Allowing all this speculative trading is what screwed it up.
It's not just the blackouts. As the article points out, the utilities have cut their headcounts, even as their customer base grew. So, whenever we get an ice storm
Re:Re-Regulate? (Score:2)
Investor-owned regulated utilities had charters of service from their regulators which explictly required them to take the welfare of their customers and service territories into ac
The world's biggest machine... (Score:2)
Re:The world's biggest machine... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tell that to the telephone system... (Score:2)
Re:The world's biggest machine... (Score:2)
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
McLuhan said this many years ago. (Score:2)
manual delanda extended it... (Score:2)
Re:McLuhan said this many years ago. (Score:2)
Go read "Understanding Media" by McLuhan.
Ah, philosophy. (Score:2)
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.
Barring one fact (Score:2)
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
Re:Barring one fact (Score:2)
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
Re:Ah, philosophy. (Score:2)
Aspen tree formations are the single largest organism on planet earth. They're all dependent and interconnected, forming one organism. So next time someone quizzes you and before you say Elephants or X Whales...now you know.
*Not* a single machine. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Not* a single machine. (Score:2)
Re:*Not* a single machine. (Score:2)
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
Re:*Not* a single machine. (Score:2)
'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)
Garage Generators (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Garage Generators (Score:3, Interesting)
After moving to a hydrogen economy, and at 95% efficiency, you'd certainly be getting a l
Re:Garage Generators (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Misunderstandings about the Hydrogen Economy (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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
Re:Garage Generators (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Check your units (Score:2)
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
You can! (Score:2)
Re:Garage Generators (Score:2)
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
Re:Garage Generators (Score:2)
It was on slashdot a little while ago - anyone remember it?
Armillaria ostoyae (Score:3, Interesting)
No they do not taste good.
Re:Armillaria ostoyae (Score:2)
Re:Armillaria ostoyae (Score:2, Informative)
The Socialist solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
Why? Is there some inherent problem with socialism here? Lot's of countries have nationalised power grids that seem to get along just fine.
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
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 UK National Grid (Score:3, Informative)
Transco also own GridAmerica [gridamericallc.com], for their opinion on the blackout, see this press release [gridamericallc.com]
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
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
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
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
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) decentralized/localized power generation
2) alternative energy sources
3) more stable power grid
4) more jobs
5) $$$!
This problem can be solved by smaller, more efficient (either alternative energy, or reduction in transmission distance inefficiencies), localized power sources. Each of the nodes is not necessarily very stable, but because there are so DAMN MANY of them, it would be very hard to have a large blackout like the entire east coast. Soun
Re:Try real deregulation (Score:2)
Power deregulation--in reality, a change in regulations--went slowly at first. Not until 1998 were utilities, beginning in California, compelled to sell off their generating capacity to independent power producers, such as Enron and Dynergy.
So "deregulation" means privatizing the most profitable aspects so the Enrons who give $$$ 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
The situation in Ontario (Score:2)
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
Re:The Socialist solution... (Score:2)
Also, if you couldn't or wouldn't work to create what you needed, and decided to grab it from those who had it, what makes you think you can or will work to create what you need next, after your victims have already been fleeced?
The stock market idea was dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
so they were /.'d (Score:2)
The problem is political more than mechanical. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Society needs to re-embrace community (Score:2)
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)
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.
Re:Blind faith in free markets again (Score:2)
Re:Blind faith in free markets again (Score:2)
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
Come on, fellow libertarians! (Score:2, Funny)
Ice Storm Blackouts (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Ice Storm Blackouts (Score:2, Informative)
Lots of people die from being too hot.
15,000 died as a result of a heatwave [bbc.co.uk] in France this summer, and 2,000 died in the U.K. [guardian.co.uk].
Re:Ice Storm Blackouts (Score:2)
In fact I was in that heatwave and it was not pleasant. But while ice cold is certainly more dangerous heat does kill people. En masse, in fact.
Pattern is all too obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Your system: A summary (Score:2)
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
Re:Your system: A summary (Score:2)
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)
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
Re:VERY slippery slope (Score:2)
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
Texas should stay disconnected! (Score:2, Insightful)
One vast machine? (Score:2)
There once was a little blue planet... (Score:2)
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
"deregulation"? (Score:2)
Not one power grid, three (Score:2)
People who actu
What de-regulation? (Score:2)
Why should I listen to a thing the author says when he can't even get this simple a concept right?
Deregulated != unregulated (Score:2)
It has been deregulated in that the rules have been reduced. The rules have not, however, been abolished, it is therefore not unregulated.
Tragedy of the Commons (Score:2)
Wrong on so many levels (Score:2)
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.
What "deregulation"? (Score:2)
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
"[...] unless Congress gets its act together." (Score:2)
Oh joy of joys. Oh wonder of wonders.
*grin!*
Re:Scary Concept... (Score:2)
Re:Scary Concept... (Score:2)
But this seems to be much higher concept than most terorrism we have seen so far. I am personally much more worried about a 18 wheeler filled with fertalizer blowing up on the George Washington bridge at rush hour.
Well what I am really worried about is
Re:Scary Concept... (Score:2)
Re:Scary Concept... (Score:2)
Besides, the only country capable of doing that right now is the US. When George gets around to it, we'll ha
Re:What happens when it wakes up (Score:2)
What happened in reality is even scarier than fiction... the Terminator became the Govinator.
Why did Calif vote out Davis, the previous gov?
Because he botched electricity deregulation and ran up a huge debt!
It's all connected, man.
Re:Blackouts are the end of the world (Score:2)
Previous major outage affecting the NYC metro area: 25 July 1977
Most recent outage affecting NYC metro area: 14 August 2003
Duration of most recent outage: Total hours between 26 July 1977 and 14 august 2003: 228360.
1 - Duration of outage divided by time between failures: 0.999868. Looks pretty close to five nines to me!