[sdiy] WAY OT: US power failure - Was: Giga-Ohm Resistors--Where?

[Magnus Danielson]

From: Ian Fritz <ijfritz at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [sdiy] WAY OT: US power failure - Was: Giga-Ohm Resistors--Where?
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 18:11:31 -0600

> Larry --
> 
> Great post!  Thanks for taking the time to put it together.

I agree! I *really* enjoyed it and I hope to see more of that.

> It sounds like what you are saying is that the outage could have been due 
> entirely to natural dynamic instabilities inherent to the system.  I've 
> been wondering lately if this would be possible.  With such a large coupled 
> non-linear system it seems to me that it would be quite difficult to ensure 
> stability under all possible perturbations.

Actually, back in 1983 something similar happend in Sweden, where a single
fault caused a hell of a lot of Sweden to go powerless. It happend as I went
out of the subway to visit my fathers office... I didn't notice the powerout
until I entered the building. Oh, ah, anyway... at that time it was a
distributers point which broke down and started a similar tripping of wires.

I think the lack of redundancy is the problem, not enought wires to handle
single (or even multiples) of errors. In the telco world redundancy, FITS, MTBF
etc. is calculated on alot, even for networks. But how is the power industry
doing it?

> The news that has been getting press attention (what little of it there is) 
> appears to be focused on human error --  operators not contacting each 
> other properly because of malfunctioning computers was the last I read.

When you don't know what hit you - blame either human errors,
computers/communications or better yet - both!

That you could have avoided it by thinking in advance and invested to handle it
people find a scape-goat which is totally irresponsible. For a moment there
they even tried "blame it on the Canadians" ;O)

(Having a sister in Canada I don't like that implication.)

> And all the fuss about "decaying infrastructure", etc!  If what you seem to 
> be saying is true, then more reliable equipment in and of itself might not 
> help, unless the basic method of stabilization were also improved.

>From what I read, the "line redundancy" is a major issue here, and not just the
equipment at the power-distribution/interconnect stations. I just assume that
transmission line redundancy is more expensive than interconnect stations
(which I assume isn't for free either).

> Could you tell me, how long might a 0.1% frequency deviation 
> last?  Sometimes my VCO frequencies do not reproduce at the same 
> temperature.  And my homemade counter works off the line frequency.  (There 
> -- now we're on topic).

I thought the on-topicness where on just how many (home) studios lost their
hum that day! You must recall that we are speaking to the devil here, who is
sneaking up at us making us dependent on the hum while we beleive we need the
power.

> Best regards, and thanks again,

Cheers,
Magnus