Inside the Haywire World of Beirut's Electricity Blackouts, and the Struggle Faced By Residents To Keep Their Lights and Wi-Fi On and Gadgets Charged (wired.com) 115
Blackouts are common in the Lebanese capital, forcing energy consumers to pay whoever can get them power. Wired looked at how the residents of Beirut keep their lights on -- and their gadgets charged -- in the face of the rolling blackouts. From the report: Electrical power here does not come without concerted exertion or personal sacrifice. Gas-powered generators and their operators fill the void created by a strained electric grid. Most people in Lebanon, in turn, are often stuck with two bills, and sometimes get creative to keep their personal devices -- laptops, cell phones, tablets, smart watches -- from going dead. Meanwhile, as citizens scramble to keep their inanimate objects alive, the local authorities are complicit in this patchwork arrangement, taking payments from the gray-market generator operators and perpetuating a nation's struggle to stay wired.
Lebanon has been a glimmering country ever since the 15-year civil war began in 1975, and the reverberations from that conflict persist. These days there is only one city, Zahle, with electricity 24/7. Computer banks in schools and large air conditioners pumping out chills strain the grid, and daily state-mandated power cuts run from at least three hours to 12 hours or more. Families endure power outages mid-cooking, mid-washing, mid-Netflix binging. Residents rely on mobile phone apps to track the time of day the power will be cut, as it shifts between three-hour windows in the morning and afternoon, rotating throughout the week.
Once called the Paris of the Middle East, sometimes the region's Sin City, Beirut's supplementary power needs are effectively under the control of what is known here as the generator mafia: a loose conglomerate of generator owners and landlords who supply a great deal of the country's power. This group is indirectly responsible for the Wi-Fi, which makes possible any number of WhatsApp conversations -- an indispensable lifeline for the country's refugees, foreign aid workers, and journalists and locals alike.
Lebanon has been a glimmering country ever since the 15-year civil war began in 1975, and the reverberations from that conflict persist. These days there is only one city, Zahle, with electricity 24/7. Computer banks in schools and large air conditioners pumping out chills strain the grid, and daily state-mandated power cuts run from at least three hours to 12 hours or more. Families endure power outages mid-cooking, mid-washing, mid-Netflix binging. Residents rely on mobile phone apps to track the time of day the power will be cut, as it shifts between three-hour windows in the morning and afternoon, rotating throughout the week.
Once called the Paris of the Middle East, sometimes the region's Sin City, Beirut's supplementary power needs are effectively under the control of what is known here as the generator mafia: a loose conglomerate of generator owners and landlords who supply a great deal of the country's power. This group is indirectly responsible for the Wi-Fi, which makes possible any number of WhatsApp conversations -- an indispensable lifeline for the country's refugees, foreign aid workers, and journalists and locals alike.
Ridiculous (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Ridiculous (Score:2)
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Tesla's energy solutions have never been about the best product for the best price, they've been about having the Tesla name on it. Tesla is a cult, like Mac, where the capabilities of the system are irrelevant, the price is irrelevant, but you have to have it. It works for them in the car space because there are no competitors, but in solar and batteries there are tons of competitors doing the same thing for a lot less money.
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I drive an S. There is not yet a competing vehicle to the S.
The 3 has a single competitor, the Bolt, but it's not a very strong competitor.
There are a bunch of other electrics, but it would be hard to call any of them competitors to any of Tesla's current offerings. That is quickly changing, but we're not there yet.
I'm not one of those idiots who think that "electric" is a category like "pickup truck", "sports car", or "suv" are categories. Vehicles that actually complete with each other are similar types o
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Cheapest? You need to look around more! A stack of lead acid batteries is pennies on the dollar in comparison. And the only downside is weight, something that doesn't matter for stationary applications.
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A stack of lead acid batteries
...is not going to last long. I've included that in my calculations in the past.
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The ones powering our local phone exchange have been going strong for over 50 years. Lead acid batteries last far longer than lithium ion. There's a reason lead acid is still the go to for telcos.
What do you expect? (Score:3)
Re:What do you expect? (Score:5, Informative)
English wiring is actually far superior to the US, and has a few slight advantages over the rest of Europe.
For one, we're on 230V domestic, not 110 - which means no need to have two-phase power in domestic use for heavy loads. The really heavy appliances like showers and cookers might need wiring directly into the breaker panel, but it's still single phase all over. We also have sockets with a few built-in safety mechanisms - an internal fuse in the plug so every appliances gets it's own fuse, rated to the appliance, and the sockets have a safety shutter mechanism which is keyed to the earth pin on the plug - if that pin isn't in the socket won't open, so you can't stick a fork in it.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, in the UK, you can get electric kettles that work far faster than any equivalent in the USA.
13A@220V delivers a lot more power than 15A@110V
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You can use UK kettles on a US 220V 15 or 20 amp outlet, and they can easily be ordered on Amazon. Just use an air conditioner outlet or convert one branch circuit in the kitchen to 220V at the panel (2 hots, ground, no neutral, 220V outlets).
Put a US 220V plug on the kettle. The kettle doesn't care whether it's getting 220V at 50 or 60Hz, it's just a big resistive load.
Re: What do you expect? (Score:5, Informative)
Do British plugs or outlets ALSO contain GFCI or AFCI protections? Likewise, are British appliances allowed to take for granted that hot & neutral are correctly polarized, or do they have to assume the two *could* plausibly be reversed & design accordingly with double-chassis isolation?
If British applianes (like most American appliances made prior to ~1980) are allowed to assume that correct polarity is guaranteed & 'neutral' really IS 'neutral', connecting one to an American hot+hot+ground 220v outlet (using a hacked power cord) could be quite dangerous, especially if the outlet's 'ground' was less than ideal. In the US, at least, it was once common for appliances to take correct polarity for granted & expose things like chassis screws that *could* become energized if polarity were reversed by a miswired outlet & ground didn't work properly (or the consumer used d 3-to-2 adapter & didn't bother to connect the ground to anything... which was almost ALWAYS the case).
In continental Europe, they were *never* allowed to make assumptions about polarity, and always had to assume the worst & isolate it accordingly. But because British plugs *had* to be grounded & (afaik) were illegal for anyone besides a licensed electrician to work on, I can definitely see manufacturers in the UK being allowed to take a correctly-wired outlet for granted.
Moral: if you rig up a plug to connect a British device to an American 220v outlet, MAKE SURE the outlet's ground connection is FLAWLESS, and strongly consider putting a GFCI somewhere between the device & panel (so it will instantly break the circuit if ANY current is detected flowing to ground). Because to a British device that assumes 'neutral' REALLY IS 'neutral', an American 220v outlet is going to connect the wire that the appliance ASSUMES is 'neutral' to a 'hot' wire *regardless* of how the outlet is wired (because in the American 220v outlet, BOTH wires are 'hot')
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Great explanation. This is the spirit of old Slashdot - helpful and competent advice to keep people from killing themselves.
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Except it hasn't. (Fun fact - the Scandinavian countries are not socialist.)
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Most British sockets do not contain GFCIs - we call them RCDs. But there are exceptions - sockets for use in high-risk areas do indeed have built-in RCDs. We also have polarised plugs. All connectors have a protective earth too, but not all appliance cables use it. A UK kettle will always have any metal parts in contact with the water connected to that protective earth, in case of an element fault.
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If your really lucky. The breakers cost about 20x the sockets. You can wire a GFCI as the first socket in a chain to protect the whole circuit. Good luck finding it, if you don't already know.
I knew an old man who's back patio was out of power for six months. That GFCI socket was behind shelves in the garage on the other side of the house. Near the panel. I found all the others first.
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A neutral conductor carries the unbalanced current of the ungrounded conductors. A typical British branch circuit has no neutral. It has an ungrounded conductor and a grounded conductor. On British or American equipment, bonding the chassis to either conductor is both dangerous and expressly forbidden. You might be referring to the old American practice that allowed using the neutral of 240V 3-wire as a grounding conductor. However, that is a real neutral and should have little to no current on it.
Re: What do you expect? (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure that American electrical safety codes prior to sometime before 1970 allowed non-insulated chassis screws with ungrounded (but polarized) 2-blade plugs. One of my grandmothers had a popcorn popper (Magic Chef, I think) that would give you a nasty shock if you touched anything metal, including the screws fastening the bakelite handle & feet to the metal body. Ditto for my other grandmother's TV (color 26" console, bought sometime before I was born or sentient)... if you touched a screw on
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Are you sure about that? Current in the earth line typically indicates a failure and some appliances require a neutral because the earth pin is not connected.
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Re: What do you expect? (Score:1)
In the UK, any exposed metal in an appliance must either be connected to earth or double-insulated from live. Neutral is the return path. Appliances without external metal parts aren't required to have an earth connection.
Re: What do you expect? (Score:2)
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You have never used a microwave oven to heat water ?
It's very nearly the perfect solution.
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Were you being sarcastic? Because using a microwave to boil water is pretty much the worst solution.
1. It's slow. Typical domestic microwave is 1kW.
2. You have to watch it -- no automatic shutoff when the water boils.
3. In addition, in the UK, it's very slow. A 1kW microwave doesn't compare to a 3kW electric kettle.
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Have you ever tried it ?
A 1kw oven will boil a cup of water in roughly a minute. It's perfect because water is what absorbs microwave radiation and turns it into heat when you cook with one. So the transfer efficiency is very high.
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So the transfer efficiency is very high.
As opposed to a resistive heating element in a kettle that magically loses heat?
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No as opposed to a resistive element that heats the air and the pot as well as water.
I realize in the other subthread you are bound and determined to prove you don't understand heat transport but you should at least read a little before branching out to make a bigger fool of yourself.
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Because it's not submerged in the water ?
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-... [madehow.com]
You are thinking of an immersion heater.
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I see you are still hurt because you didn't know nearly as much as you thought you did.
Would you like to learn about the heat capacity of steel heating elements versus a microwave tube ? Or perhaps power transfer functions for a 240 volt circuit vs a 3KV + system ?
I'd be willing to teach but it seems you already know everything.
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Would *you* like to learn about the ~60-70% magnetron efficiency? :D I bet this trumps whatever imaginary issue you have with resistive heating.
It would if you weren't heating an entire kettle instead of just a 350 ml of water.
But here lets go empirical, you are arguing the tea kettle is faster, it takes my microwave 90 seconds to heat a cup of water to boil. How long does it take your tea kettle ?
I expect you are going to lie again https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org] so try for something that's not quite so obvious or better yet. Go out and learn a little about this subject.
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So your claim is that boiling water with a 1kW (input power) microwave is faster than a 3kW electric kettle. LOL.
You do realize that you don't have to fill an electric kettle to use it, right?
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So your claim is that boiling water with a 1kW (input power) microwave is faster than a 3kW electric kettle. LOL.
You do realize that you don't have to fill an electric kettle to use it, right?
No my claim is it takes a 1.2 kw microwave oven 90 seconds to do it. You can check this yourself
How long are you claiming it takes your tea kettle ?
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How about 55 seconds [amazon.co.uk]?
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Or this one [argos.co.uk]. 45 Seconds.
Your 90 seconds in the microwave isn't looking so good now, is it?
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Actually it is
You have never used a microwave oven to heat water ?
It's very nearly the perfect solution.
Seeing as the tea kettle is using more power to do the job. ~=180 KJ as opposed to the microwaves ~108 KJ to do the same job.
But then again that really shouldn't come as a surprise when every molecule of water acts as an antenna to absorb the microwave the radiation
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And now you try to move the goalposts.
Pathetic!
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And now you try to move the goalposts.
Pathetic!
Oh my you must be really specially abled, to say quoting my initial comment is moving the goal posts.
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English wiring is actually far superior to the US
You can say that until you get up in the dark one night and step on a British plug left lying about.
US residential supplies are not two phase. It's single phase with a center tap. Heavy loads are connected across both service legs, getting a 240V supply. General purpose branch circuits are connected to the center tap for 120V. The lower voltage is a trade off in terms of safety and appliance life. Higher currents (for the same power) result in more heating of conductors and high resistance connections. But
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US supplies are two-phase. Two hots, 180 degrees out of phase. Three-phase is 120 degrees out of phase, so on. Keep dividing 360 by the number of phases.
Now, what's CALLED two-phase in the US really isn't. It's half of a four-phase system, with two wires 90 degrees out of phase.
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If you mean our 240V power, it's actually one sixth of a three-phase system, with two wires 180 degrees out of phase, and is thus fairly similar to a single phase in Europe (except, obviously, that it is at 60 Hz instead of 50Hz).
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He means that as far as most US consumers are concerned, it is split-phase 240 volts AC with two hots, a neutral, and a ground.
It should not be called two-phase to avoid confusion with the actual two-phase legacy system which are still in use in some places where the phases are at 90 degrees.
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The correct term is split-phase.
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The US doesn't have two phase. It has single phase (residential use) which is center tapped so you can get 120/240 volts. 240 volts for high power items (hot water, heating, etc.) and 120v for everything else (safer and more efficient).
Electrical code in the US requires a safety shutter on 120v sockets. Fuse at central box is more efficient than located on each socket and has the same functionality. English plugs are a joke. Massive enough to power the Frankenstein monster but waste of space, weight and mat
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You're not allowed to touch any of it... but in practice, no-one ever respects that law in their own home.
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Thats due to an older, over used outlet that SHOULD be replaced
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Also, the UK sockets and plugs also stay firmly together - when I am in the US my apple charger often ends up at 45deg and the live prongs are half exposed
Yeah the US is the other end of the spectrum, everything there looks flimsy as hell... though I do like their slim pattress boxes for switches: ganging multiple switches into one box makes a compact package that looks attractive.
Here in NL we're somewhere in between: safe plugs (most of it German designs) but only the fixed house circuits are fused. And no, a lamp cord does not need to be 16A rated according to our code. Neither does a 3 gang extension cord... which is where some of these fires are com
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They are both complete systems that can't be taken in parts-- with a single voltage you end up with higher fault currents and arc flash hazards, so additional safeguards are needed like the fuse in the UK plug. But, the lack of step-down transformers for larger buildings means less space is needed. I much prefer the US 480V to the ROW 380-400V, as it reduces voltage drop and provides more distribution flexibility. (The Canadians take it a notch higher.)
But, the utilization future will be 24VDC. It just mak
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I'd go for 48V rather than 24V if I was doing that. Lower loss, smaller cables, and there's a great deal of telecoms and networking equipment already designed for 48V, which means mass-produced power supplies. But it's not going to happen, because you'll never be able to convince domestic users to throw out all their appliances and buy new ones. Plus there are a few appliances - refrigerators, air conditioning, cooking - which will never be able to take 48V at any sane current, so you'd just end up running
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True, but how often do you see brushed DC motors now? Most are brushless. They have become cheaper to make than brushes - a cheap controller chip costs less then the mechanics of brushed commutation.
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Realistically we'll do neither, we'll all move to some version of USB. I'm already seeing it built in to many wall outlets, and seeing many devices that use USB for power despite not using any form of data connection.
It may not be the ideal solution, but we rarely do what's ideal, instead we go where momentum takes us.
As for higher current devices, that's not really an issue as most of those devices need their own dedicated circuit by code anyway, so those specific devices can be higher voltage without affe
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And that's where the momentum part comes in. Once almost all devices use USB, it makes sense for those voltages to be distributed within a home. You'll start to see centralized power supplies and low voltage wiring in newer homes because it will be cheaper and it will be good enough.
We were never going to see an overnight adoption of a new power distribution model, anyone pushing for that is delusional. That's also why we'll never see the ideal model, because nobody can make the world change that way. But o
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You'll never see 5V wiring through the home to sockets, for a very practical reason: Line drop. A fast-charge USB device draws two amps - you try to run that through fifty meters of cheap cabling, you're going to be getting quite a bit less than 5V at the socket. What you might see, though, are wall-embedded USB power supplies: You already see lots of sockets here in the UK that incorporate a little USB port, but the wall wiring is all 230V behind it. I doubt those power supplies are built to very high stan
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Same argument as saying you'll never see 120v on the wiring in houses because they use several kilovolts on the distribution outside between transformers. Complete and utter nonsense. Several houses share a transformer now, and in the future several outlets will share a USB power supply, and for the same reason, it will be cheaper and more efficient.
Sure you can't use the same cheap wire that you currently have from the outlet to your smartphone to run fifty meter wires in the wall, but that doesn't mean yo
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Several houses share a transformer now, and in the future several outlets will share a USB power supply, and for the same reason, it will be cheaper and more efficient.
It will not be cheaper and more efficient because of higher copper losses and poorer regulation.
The poorer regulation will require an impedance transformation at the USB socket and if that is included, then it might as well be an AC to DC conversion avoiding the whole problem.
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There's nothing magical about 5v that makes it not travel great distances. It works great over long distances just as any other voltage does, you just have to engineer the wiring appropriately. One central power supply is way cheaper than several dozen, and the wiring will be way cheaper too. It also happens to be far more energy efficient.
Builders go to great lengths to save pennies per job, this will save hundreds of dollars, they will do it. The only question is when.
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Well I guess we better all switch to 14000 volts within the house, because only high voltages can possibly be efficient ever. For that matter why stop at 14,000 you obviously need a few million volts. Nothing else can possibly be made to travel any distance at all.
How about you get back to me once you have some experience with copper wiring ideally in a power transmission role. Because so far the stuff you're spouting is complete laughable nonsense
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It is easier to have a Class 2 power supply at 24V than going the Class 1 48V route. It will start out with things like lights and usb chargers. Kitchens will hold out for a long time, but everything else is fair game.
Re: What do you expect? (Score:2)
1980s English wiring is actually far superior to the 1950s US, and has a few slight advantages over the rest of Europe.
There, fixed that for you. Half of what you say applies to both countries.
In terms of safety, the primary difference between US and UK is that UK's higher voltage means a higher level of hazard. Therefore, they apply more safety measures. As another said, it's fuses all the way down. In the US, you can touch a 110 wire, jerk your hand away, and just get back to working. I know old timers
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English wiring is actually far superior to the US, and has a few slight advantages over the rest of Europe.
... alongside a bunch of wacky English eccentricity like ring mains (created to save copper after WW2, and an endless source of entertainment since then), massive clunky individually fused plugs for which you never know what sort of fuse was swapped in as a quick fix when the original one blew (as opposed to relying on MCBs and GFCIs at the power board), and lots of other fun things.
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You can feel a loose wire nut when you put it on. Hire better workers, yours don't care at all. Likely all fucked up on the job.
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All the land in all the countries listed by GP were part of the Ottoman _empire_. AKA Turkey. It lasted till the end of WWI.
My comment (Score:1)
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Exactly what I wondered about when I saw this story. It's not just Nigeria, there are huge swathes of the world where electricity is a luxury. Why on earth is this news?
Accurate (Score:5, Informative)
I was just in Beirut last month â" this article is spot on. Worse is outside of Beirut, where the official electricity is only on for about 3 hours per day, and gray market providers serve the other 21 hours, at a much higher price. One girl told me her family spends $400 USD/mo just for a few lights and occasional A/C in one room, and while there are some very wealthy families in Lebanon, there are far more people barely scraping by.
The three biggest problems are: 1) The constitutional mandate for equal representation from each major religion, and the lack of cooperation therein to create new infrastructure projects.
2) Entrenched corrupt interests in government. Dynastic families control the three most powerful positions, and they have entrenched interests in preserving the status quo, profiting off the failures of government by providing for-profit services in the private sector.
3) Iran and Saudi both use Lebanon as a proxy, exercising and influencing soft and hard power in the region. They each pour money into the country, funding fundamentalist teaching and intolerance, and ratcheting up the tension. There *is* a sense of both comraderie and war weariness amongst most Lebanese, which has probably prevented another civil war, but until Lebanon stands on her own, she will continue to be vulnerable to this undue influence from neighbors in the region. Which is a shame, because culturally, historically, and geographically, itâ(TM)s one of the most remarkable and beautiful countries Iâ(TM)ve ever visited.