big blackout

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Nov 2006 12:36:05 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Nothing happened here. :-)

You missed the important point... all Europeons will be issued a battery that runs on red wine ;-)

...Jim Thompson

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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

the rumour mill has that Genome powered up a protoype for the first time, just before the blackout

martin

Interesting, but when you look at electricity consumption your average Brit. actually uses less energy than you average German.

Perhaps British people are just more honest when filling in surveys?

Country kWh per person per year

Iceland ISL 26,947.4 Norway NOR 25,594.9 Sweden SWE 16,021.0 Finland FIN 15,686.8 Luxembourg LUX 15,192.3 Belgium BEL 8,271.7 Switzerland CHE 8,025.6 Austria AUT 7,418.9 France FRA 7,401.4 Germany DEU 6,852.4 Netherlands NLD 6,658.9 Denmark DNK 6,492.3 United Kingdom GBR 6,171.3

data from:

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We know that it wasn't his water heater.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Now, where are those Europeans who were bragging this couldn't happen to them?

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Well, the good old UPS stayed quiet here and that wasn't because the batteries where dead... But you do make a point: the big power distribution networks need improved management and more redundancy.

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HAHA, if the yanks had this sort of powercut, it would take 3+ days to sort out, in the EU it was just for a few hours

martin

You seem to be having more massive failures than the US, though.

After that line that runs through Canada, and back to the US failed a few years ago, some people on this newsgroup were bragging that you would NEVER have these kinds of failures in any European country.

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duh, blame the Canucks.......

Anyway it's the magnitude of the failure that counts, this was just a lack of news day, 2 or 3 hours.at max In the US it would have been 3 days blackout while you payed the lawyers (with brown paper envelopes) to blame Clinton for the 1743 flu epidemic in Malaysia

martin

Where did I blame Canada? I said it was related to that part of the grid that had a loop that ran THROUGH Canada. Areas were quickly restored, but it took a while to tie all segments back to the regional grid.

The failure was traced to Ohio, but it was about two decades after I moved away. ;-)

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In article , Michael A. Terrell wrote: [....]

but ... but ... none of the power for europe goes through Canada so they couldn't, could they?

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That has nothing to do with their comments about our "Out of date and poorly maintained grids", does it?

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Compressor for the inflatable doll?

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Anyway, the problems that caused the blackout (equipment failures and computer and operator control system problems) were not in Canada, they were in Ohio.

There were six distinct violations of NERC policy by FirstEnergy which were the direct cause of the massive blackout (see pdf page 33 of the full report). The initial trigger was failure (due to inadequate maintenance) of the Harding-Chamberlin 345kV line in Ohio.

Ontario was actually importing small amounts of power (compared to the

24,000 MW total consumption) from Manitoba, Quebec, New York state to the East and Michigan to the West. The Ontario grid got pulled down along with the rest of the Northeastern power grid.

See pdf page 70 on the full report for the power surges over the few minutes before all the lights went off.

full report from the task force:

Hydro One's interim report:

There are a lot of logistics associated with startup and shutdown of nuclear plants (where a lot of Ontario's electricity comes from) and that didn't help. Bringing the grid back up had to proceed from isolated islands of remaining power. Most of the system worked as designed. All the nuclear reactors shut down safely. An oil refinery complex about 15 miles from me had to go into emergency shutown, causing an explosion that I could hear easily. Took about a week to bring it back up again.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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You must understand that the Third World, like the EU, doesn't understand the difference in magnitude. After all, their whole country is the size of my backyard, covering it with a power grid and maintaining it isn't nearly as hard to accomplish.

Anybody have any guesses as to how much they save by linking say France and Germany? What is the cost of an event like compared to a day of electricity?

I'm slightly surprised that Spain and Italy were tangled up. I thought there were mountains in the way which would make it hard to install big transmission lines.

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These numbers show the total consumption in each country divided by the number of inhabitants so in case of Iceland and Norway where both countries have a low number of inhabitants and a lot of heavy industry that consumes vast quantities of energy (aluminium smelters etc) it appears that the people in these countries are using a lot of energy where indeed they might really be much lower on the scale if the industries are not figured in.

That's it! Blame Canada!

For those of you who are just tuning in:

Cheers! Rich