Quick thoughts...

[darrelx]

I find it hilarious that "Earth Hour" last week coincided with several power grid failures. I guess activists didn't realize that if the power grid doesn't have somewhere for the power to go to, it has to shut down generators to avoid a meltdown... It melted down. If the people organizing and participating in "Earth Hour" by turning off all their

Comments

[vulpesrex]

Loss of load does NOT result in system power failure! In fact, shedding of load, planned or unplanned, is what circuit breakers do, to protect against excessive current damaging the transmission system. When load is heavy and one delivery path fails - usually due to interruptors opening stressed lines - remaining feeders have to bear the load; if you were at capacity on those paths to begin with, unless the load itself is reduced, you get a cascade where all paths feeding that load will fail.

Whole cities have been "dropped" without damage to the generating apparatus before; and I don't think that "Earth Hour" participation was that heavy, or widespread.

More than 60% of Electrical power consumed in this country is by Industry, from traditional heavy industry to Office Towers to markets and small businesses; the Next biggest user is Government, at all levels; Then Agriculture, primarily for Irrigation and crop drying or processing. THEN comes residential home use, with about 15% of the total, and that is during peak afternoon hours in summer, the rest of the time it is 8 to 11%.

Just where were these Grid-failures, anyway? Did they happen to be anywhere in the vicinity of those regions hit by River flooding or Tornados and attendant thunderstorms last week?

Or is this just another pseudo-fact from "Blog-Space", with no specific details like names of utilities, or names of Public Spokesmen for those same utilities?

C'mon, Darrel, you KNOW better than this! Electrical transmission isn't like a conveyor belt or an aquaduct! I've SEEN steam and hydro turbines being brought on and off-line, it's a matter of matching phase first more than anything else, and then control of the exciter field. Power companies have "peaker plants" essentially on "spinning reserve", admittedly wasting mechanical energy produced by steam, heat energy that is lost forever, until they are needed and switched in or out of the grid at a few moments' notice. There is the waste - the need to keep it spinning and in-sync, even when you aren't putting electrons into the grid, so that when you DO need to match the load, you are good to go NOW.