What caused the power outages?

[Karsten]

Originally posted by: B00ne
I would really like to know why you guys across the ocean fail to manage your power. I cannot even remember having a power outage ever (well yeah once for a few minutes when I was a child,but that was when we still had communism here in the East).

So how come your power companies fail to provide the power by demand? Or is it that Americans excessively waste power that power companies cannot keep up with building power plants? Or maybe electricity is too cheap over there and that is why eveybody goes overboard with those A/Cs - overloading the momentary capacity of the electricity production?

Ah well at least you guys are used to those things, I would have freaked out...

Think about it. How big is the US?! How big are the countries in Europe?! I am from Germany and yes... I hardly ever seen any kind of power failure growing up. That has many reasons... Germans are ANAL and we have triple backup for everything. But the biggest thing is we are roughly the size of Florida and a bit of Georgia. Well... that kinda makes it a whole lot easier to handle things.
Now that the European Power Market is more and more combined things are getting a bit more reliant on other countries. I wouldn't be surprised if you see some power shut down in Germany sometimes in the next 10-120 years because some french dude tripped over a switch in a Nuke plant in southern France!

 

[FoBoT]

a mouse got into the flux capacitor in poughkeepsie

 

[KenGr]

It looks like it's going to take a bit of time to sort all this out but the basic problems are that as power demands have increased over the years, we have solved it by putting a higher and higher stress on the transmission system. Because it's very difficult to site power plants near population centers (NIMBY), the plants are increasingly remote. Also, it's been easier to buy power from Canada than to build in the US. There is no national plan or any economic incentive to build transmission lines beyond the minimum requirements.

Although it appears the grid is well protected, it is biased toward not damaging equipment rather than keeping power on. Therefore, the grid disconnects on indicated failures. When power plants are taken off the load, they have to shut down. There are plants you can "keep warm" but huge power plants don't "idle" at low power. AS a result, it takes a long time to bootstrap the system back up.

What we need to do is rethink the system. We need to build more redundancy into the transmission system, build plants closer to the loads and probably rethink the protection systems to bias them toward early interruption of power to smaller areas, to limit the impact.

 

[Insane3D]

They made improvements to the power grid since the big outage in the 60's. One of the things they changed was to make the grids segmented so it wouldn't pull down everything. Up here in NH we didn't lose any power because they quickly disconnected us from the NY grid before it took us down. It's not perfect yet, but that outage forced some improvements.

 

[Hooligan]

it was bush's fault

 

[Pliablemoose]

Note to self, never admit to wrapping that squirrel in aluminum foil & turning him loose

 

[rudeguy]

I remember a couple years back here in michigan...a major company in the area (amway) lost power and was shut down for a day or so...they finally traced the problem...a squirrel had chewed through some line at one of the plants...knocked out power to the whole area. Needless to say that was one crispy squirrel.

 

[isasir]

A Canadian squirrel caused it.

 

[cavemanmoron]

Originally posted by: cavemanmoron
i was 7 in 1965

i thought that this was not supposed to happen again. :|

They need to put the hydro power plants back online,
and build more of the small ones,
we have a lot of small waterfalls that could be used for hydro power,that are Not being used

more solar power with battery backup too.

i still say its bullcrap,that this happened;

I think we should have more hydro plants,where there are dams/waterfalls.
why waste all that energy?

What happened to all the wind power plants,that were supposed to be built?

How about an inexpensive solar powered system,as a backup for our houses?

SOme 12 volt deep cycle batteries,a few decent sized UPS's,and some solar collectors?

Bah, :|