One Worldwide Power Grid 464
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
Not a great idea (Score:1, Insightful)
I think this is very dangerous. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
More good than bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
The blackout is far more likely the result of aging and inadequate infrastructure in the Northeast, and not the interconnected nature of the grid.
Interconnected power-grid not a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Tesla suggested this *long* before Fuller (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The power outage would have never occured if the power distribution system was distributed and centralized.
Uh, I think Distributed and NON-centralized is a better idea. Otherwise your just giving monopolies even more power to gouge consumers and make big mistakes. If it did go ahead. we should be able to use any supplier in the world, including ourselves. Like that's gonna happen.
well its a good idea! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Internet model (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)
Re:The Internet model (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if I want to read a straight-up unadulterated Iraqi viewpoint of the war, or the outage, or anything, I'm not going to go to Fox News, I'm going to go to an Iraqi news source. British? I'll go to the BBC, or the Telegraph, or something like that. Canadian? Well, there's a-plenty of Canadian news sources on the web.
Likewise, if I want to read American perspectives on anything, I'm not going to be reading the BBC.
In fact, I'd propose that when a news source goes too far out of their way to show "the other side", they risk covering up important truths altogether. Look at how CNN deliberately squelched stories that might make the Hussein regime look bad, all to keep their "access" to Baghdad.
It is as it is. Reporting facts is one thing, reporting "perspectives" is another. It ain't an American thing, it's a human thing.
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire reason we have a power grid is to improve reliability. When a power plant needs to be taken down for maintainance, power is brought in from somewhere else; without the grid, we'd have blackouts every time plants were shut down for maintainance.
Solar and wind power are far less reliable than fossil and nuclear power. As a result, using them would require a larger, more expensive, grid in order to maintain the same quality of service.
Having distributed generation might be a good idea, but it would need to be distributed *reliable* generation; wind and solar just don't make the grade.
Re:BAD idea.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines
And leave most of the rural areas of the coutry to what? Where one can set-up some kind of home-grown solution to the networking, you just can not expect every community that wants and needs electricity to build its own nuclear/coal/gas power plant just because they dont have rivers, wind, coal, gas, or sun in the amounts needed to produce electricity. If you will leave this area to completely free market, you will essentialy widen the gap between metropolis areas and rural areas, producing something to the effect of true Mad Max style civilization. Thank you, but count me out.
and this will grow much like WiFi is
You mean like Wi-Fi hot-spots that you can find around most frequented areas in cities (airports, hotels, cafees, ...) If you find economic viability in setting up those everywhere where there is electricity available at this instance, please do call me. I want to move to your country.
starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there
I'm listening about the broadband for everybody, Wi-Fi for everybody, spreading the connectivity to everybody, ... Well, I just don't see this happening. I just don't like to have American Dream include power generator in the basement. Governments can be good for some things that are not economicaly sane in the short run, but bear fruits in range of 20-50 years down the road. I'm sorry, but electricity is not about competition and free market, it's about common good that has to be provided to everybody for a fair price. This ideally means that country takes more taxes from the richer and builds infrastructure that can be used by all equaly. I guess the next thing you will probably suggest is to dissolve the coutries all together and let the corporations run everything. Including printing the money. Why don't we liberalize priting the money? Why don't we have, say, 4 or 5 money printing companies that are fighting each other for the market share of the paper notes. I don't think so. Either go anarcyh, or leave the democracy alone, please.
Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had
You must not be serious? I guess California has those redundancies? The only thing that California gained is some spare power in the production part of distribution grid due to people moving out businesses to more 'regulated' areas of USA, where they were fairly shure there will be no regular rolling blackouts happening and prices set on more manageable level. This and tech bubble bursting. Since it is a fact, that accidents do happen (and it's not like they are happening on year, by year basis) what do you think what happens when some bean counter disconnects your part of the grid since it is not economicaly viable any more. Haven't you listened for past few days? Redundancies are basicaly wasted resource. If you host some small web server with couple of pages, do you plan it for ./ effect? If you do, you are wasting enormeous resources (bandwith lease, CPU power to cope with serving, memory, storage requirements for logs, ...), but if you don't you're living with a threat that one sole link will kill (not premanenlty we hope) your connection and server. Redundancies don't make much of economic sense if you are profit oriented. On the other hand, if your paycheck depends on people voting you in or out of office, you want to be service oriented. I do not want to debate current political situation in USA (I don't care sh**t about it actually), but the idea is that you want to please the people. In this instance you please them with balancing their mandatory part (governement taxes) against their infrastructure expectations (no blackouts) against their participatory part (electricity bills). Do you really want to risk having this balance to be taken by some unscrouplus corporate entity going
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, windmills and solar panels just appear out of thin air...
Actually, these things have to be manufactured, a process which causes pollution.
I recall the manufacturing of a solar panel takes more energy than it'll ever give back.
Re:BAD idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You should seek professional help for your paranoia.
Human society is a system where people collaborate to achieve more than they could by themselves. So instead of having to learn how to hunt and cook and make shoes and build a home and make clothes, people can specialize in a single skill, perform it more efficiently and achieve more collectively. Money is what you use to facilitate this trade.
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference with American news sources is that this cultural distortion seems to be ignored, and as a result, much greater in effect. As a Brit, I was shocked when in New York at the one sidedness of reports on Israel-Palestine. And the whole NYT fabrication stuff - this would not have been so big an issue in almost any other country, because the assumption is that all the media has some slant. I was surprised at how a lot of Americans were so shocked that journalists are not transferring direct knowledge of deep reality into their minds.
I would say that American media is far more insular, and far more likely to distort the truth. They are not uniquely different in having a bias and twisting the truth - they are just plain worse than a lot of the rest of the western worlds media.
Not so sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Ahhh, but the day will never, ever come where the laws of thermodynamics will stop, creating a way to not lose copius amounts of energy creating hydrogen. Can't get more out than you put in. Never going to so much as break even. Water is a very, very sound molecule. It doesn't even come close to trying to break it for energy. There is no energy solution, because we're talking the first law of thermodynamics, and we're talking basic science. Sounds great. "We've got whole oceans here!" So is it really going to be that much better if we went to it?
What about other chemical processes? Unless you want wholesale ecological disaster in exchange for your Playstation 2 time, I cannot imagine it. Acids? Bases? What else just makes a LARGE, CONSUMABLE AMOUNT OF H2? It would be great for a camp stove, but what about whole cities?
You can't flip a molecule and make water into hydrogen and oxygen so easily. Water is the ANTI-FUEL. It's not gasoline that is waiting to combust. It's a real nightmare to try to get the energy back. Electrolysis just doesn't cut it. We'd really need a magic bullet with hydrogen.
Are hydrogen lines better than power lines?
IMHO It's never been about the resource, it is all about the energy you consume. We need to learn to lower our overall energy usage. That is my solution to all of this.
Hydrogen sounds like the greatest idea ever, too bad physics doesn't seem to back it up, at least right now.
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure how we get from "applying market forces" to "leaving the rural areas to build their own power plants". Other technology infrastructure types have shown that market forces result in greater availability, not less. Rural areas would not compelled to switch to a local power generation source, but if that was more efficient, the market is the only thing that's going to make it happen, and would result in cheaper prices for its residents.
Redundancy is not a waste of resources, and the only thing determining what is or is not a waste is... the market. The Slashdot example is contrived; what I would want is enough server capacity to handle the full demands *and* have a failover.
We can go with the "fair price" as defined by the utility companies, or the "fair price" as determined by competition. Option 2 is lower.
Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value (but that's a whole other thread...).
Illegal activity of people in a free market isn't really an argument against the concept. I think even with the Enron's of the world, it's pretty clear that government management leads to more corruption, rather than less. Government-controlled methods usually don't have effective checks or balances, as the collapse of the Soviet Union on all levels helps demonstrate.
The final paragraph seems to be arguing my case, so I'll leave that one alone...
And with that, I'm out!
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)
I read somewhere (can't find the ref, WSJ maybe) that California might have avoided its electricity shortage last summer simply by painting the roofs of all public buildings white.
I would advocate solar cells and solar water heating systems mandated for all public buildings, and make a tax incentive to home owners to install them on new or existing properties. Add to that fuel cells in the basement to store excess power for use at night or in cloudy weather. (It should be noted that, contrary to common belief, solar roof systems do work in cloudy weather.)
Every house should be able to coast for a few days on stored power during a blackout.
Remote towns and rural residences should make maximum use of wind, solar, and hydro power to mitigate the costs of transporting electricity from distant plants.
I'm surprised Mr. Bush did not announce a package of tax incentives to make these things a reality. But, I suppose that he takes a corporate, big oil point of view; simply swap hydrogen for petroleum and keep the existing infrastructure.
A tax incentive for hybrid gas-electric cars would be nice, too. Cut oil consumption and solve so many other problems: dependence on nasty Arab dictators, greenhouse pollution, etc.
Restart was way too slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Since deregulation, there's no one to blame, of course. The invisible hand of the market is supposed to do it all. Generating companies, transmission companies, and retail delivery utilities are all separate organizations now.
It's not really economic to have reliable electric power. Would you pay 20-30% more on your power bill for 99.99% uptime vs. 99.9% uptime? That's about what it costs.
What would have happened? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, given that we already had a grid much larger than the area where the power went out, and automatic safeguards kicked in on a lot of its connections and limited the area of the blackout... If the rest of the world had connections to our grid too, I think what most likely would have happened would be a blackout of the same size we did see, or just a little bit larger. Big deal.
Hmmm... decentralized backup? (Score:3, Insightful)
In my home town (pop. 325) the power often goes out in the winter. When it does, most of the time they get the big old diesel generator up and running and the town has power again within an hour or so. Day-long blackouts are really rare, even if it takes them that long to find and fix the downed line.
Is there some reason why cities can't have relatively local (say, block by block) emergency backup for things like power?
Or is it just habit, or maybe just being cheap?
I doubt the folks in Downieville [mapquest.com] have more money than the folks in [big city of your choice].
Think about reliablity... (Score:5, Insightful)
The power system is much more critical then the internet. Without power, people can get stuck in elevators, AC goes out, the cellular phone system can go down, etc.
Another problem that showed up in the power system is that companies like Enron were, with no equivocation, bandits. They actually fucked with the California power system in order to extract better deals from the state, along with the well-known securities thieving they pulled off.
Any attempt at power deregulation should also require a much, much better standard for open-ness and honesty from the companies. Peoples lives are actually at state here and leaving our power grid in the hands of criminals is not a very good plan.
And we also need to design a much more fault-tolerant grid system as well. It's just ridiculous that one fuckup can shut down the entire east coast, especially 40 years (or whatever) after the exact same thing happened...
Re:The Internet model (Score:5, Insightful)
you mean like phone service? since they've privatized phone service in Ontario I have yet to see any improvements on rural lines. It costs WAY too much to lay lines over such a large area, and there aren't enough people to provide the necessary returns. The same would be true for electricity.
Electricity generation and distribution has been privatized in Ontario (albeit only one company "owns" the infrastructure: Hydro One) and as I understand it many of the states affected by this blackout have a similar system in place. Hydro One has not increased generation capacity significantly in recent years, and it has several nuclear plants down for maintenance right now...I have no idea what's going on in the US system.
Note that this did not help (though I won't suggest it hurt just yet). I think once the Ohio system went down we basically saw a simple case of overload on the rest of the system, which took things down. The overload was partially due to a lot of use -- it was a HOT day, but also due to a lack of generation.
What *should* have happened is bits of the grid should have been shut off, but instead the plants went down, causing a cascading effect. Note that this is all conjecture on my part as I don't have all the facts I'm sure.
Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value
Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.
Also, what about water, etc? Seems to me that like water, electricity has become a basic necessity. Yes, it is possible to live without, but probably over 99% of people use electricity on a daily basis and cannot function without it. Roads, education, and (in Canada) health care all fall into this category too. The role of the government in a democracy is, among other things, to provide the basic necessities so they are available to everyone at a fair price. For a government to not have regulations and some control over the electricity distribution system would simply be negligence imho.
monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
monopolies destroy competition in the market and when that happens a market economy fails to be the most efficient which invariably leads to problems
Re:The Internet model (Score:1, Insightful)
A more practial reason is that your puny generator of a few kilo watts would die a horrible dead trying to deliver the giga watts required to bring voltage and frequency within spec on the grid.
What about compatibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Electricity must be ubiquitious (Score:2, Insightful)
"It is now common knowledge that if all countries in the
world switched to nuclear power, we would run out of
material to power them in just a few decades "
And I'd like some data to backup this piece of troll work.
I need:
1) estimates of what is in the ground that hasn't been mined.
2) how much material is now in circulation
3) how much "waste" material, such as U238, can be converted into fissionable plutonium for further energy production?
4) Please list as many nation estimates as possible, and give the sources of your data for each nation.
5) authenticate those sources.
Pls Thx
TurboD