Is our electricity distribution system getting less reliable? Yes and no:
If you look just at day-to-day operations, nothing much has changed. Power outages are slightly worse, but only by a little bit.
But when you count "major events," the duration of power outages has nearly doubled over the past decade or so. Why? Is it because:
- Major events have become more common?
- Major events have become worse?
- Our power grid is less able to handle major events?
Major events have indeed become more common. They've also gotten worse, but again, it's unclear if the events themselves are worse or if the electric grid is less able to handle them.
We need more data.
It seems this country has done little to protect the distribution system of water, electric and gas. This is becoming a must.
2/3 agree. The gas grid shouldn't be protected--it should be phased out.
Don't phase out gas until there's better methods of heating houses in areas with cold winters. Heat Pumps don't cut it for really cold areas.
Fortunately, most of the country isn't areas with cold winters; we should electrify buildings everywhere, but we can focus on the warmer areas first.
I guess you and I have a different definition of cold. I consider USDA zone 7 and below to be too cold for a heat pump. I'm sure technology will figure out a way to get things even better, my buddy's house with a heat pump installed about 2016 was way better than the cheap townhouse rental I lived in at college in 1987 but it was still a bit too cold and drafty for my taste.
Well, don't worry--if we all keep using gas for heat, eventually, nowhere will be particularly cold.
If it was drafty, your problem wasn't the heat pump, it was the lack of air sealing and insulation.
The draft was coming out of the vents, the air wasn't warm so the house was chilly even the "newer" heat pump in a brand new addition to a 100 year old house that had been lovingly restored by my buddy.
They worked like a honey in the Boston area. I assume you're talking about Maine or the Midwest.
Old, poorly-maintained infrastructure + climate change = more and longer outages. Getting the infrastructure bill passed last year was a good start on improving the situation, but it's going to take a while before we see the benefits. All I know is I'm having a generator power inlet installed this year so I can at least keep my appliances running with a portable if there's an outage in my area.
Have you looked into getting battery pack (maybe coupled with solar panels) instead? Generators are godawful for air quality, and noisy.
We live on a really shady, heavily forested lot, so no solar panels for us. Long-term plan is to get a Ford 150 Lightning. That can power your house for a couple of days fully charged.
We got a pretty entertaining presentation from a guy who worked for a green power outfit. a few years ago. That was one of his little tidbits. His follow-on was: "No matter how much you want solar energy, if you live in the deepest, darkest woods in the center of the enchanted forest, you aren't getting any."
Yes, and yes.
Trimming trees to prevent power outages costs money. So do it less often and just hack away at the tree. More down lines to be repaired? Still cheaper than full scale tree trimming--and it's not like that will cost you business.
The electrical infrastructure was also designed for different conditions. It needs to be rethought--both to handle distributed power generation as well as weather extremes.
One of my pet gripes is the city will go around and cut down trees as soon as they get big enough to look nice, then, two years later, they finally get around to planting it's replacement, which will look scrawny and weedy and insufficient for twenty years, if it lives that long, and the minute it gets past that and starts to look like a real tree --bang they murder it.
In our area the power lines, etc, are underground. Greatly reduces power outages, especially compared with nearby neighborhoods with poles and wires.
The idea that a natural disaster will leave hundreds of thousands, or more, people without power for weeks, or months, is an abomination. A giant federal program to bury all the electric lines would solve the problem entirely.
omg, that would cost a lot of money! cries the pretend-to-be-panic-stricken.
Yes, it would. So what? It would employ a huge number of people all over the country for a long time. Exactly the kind of stimulus we dream of.
And the end result would be of great benefit to society and the economy.
And while they're burying those things maybe they could bury some kind of next-gen fiber optic cables along with them.
Fiber optic hasn't changed in the past 25 years. What has changed is the multiplexing capabilities -- splitting light into tinier channels of wavelengths. Nonetheless, in North America, there's a growing amount of dark fiber -- https://bityl.co/B1zP -- because companies are laying down fiber in anticipation of huge growth for demand.
Dark Fiber --the only breakfast cereal that comes on xBox.
😁😁
When I first heard the term "dark fiber" it referred to secure fiber optic cables for use by the military and intelligence agencies. That was in the late 1980s. The backup power at the node I visited was all racks of lead acid batteries.
In that case we can just claim that as a cost savings and go ahead with the electric lines.
But the fiber is overbuilt in some areas and missing in others. My area has a ton of dark fiber but one county over the western half has almost none.
If we do this, please remember to call Diggers Hotline when doing any measure of yardwork.
I live in Maryland, and we had a bad wind storm this weekend. Our electric went out at 2 pm Saturday, came back on Sunday at noon. 22 hours. When they built this and many other communities around our beltway, they built in sections, and the electric hookup was in sections. So 10-20 houses (or as little as 7, in my case) were connected, then another subset connected to it. When a storm rolls through, Excelon wants to make the repair numbers look good, so they work from the most homes out to the least. That leaves many of the beltway homes like ours last, because we may have 10 houses in a neighborhood of 450, or two sets of 10, not the full 450. When a derecho went through a few years ago, Excelon held community forums, and the beltway communities complained about the long repair response time.The upshot of the forums was Excelon putting money up to both trim trees and consolidate lines. The consolidate lines has gotten short shrift. I think investment in improvements of existing infrastructure is in order.
We moved out to WA in 2000 to a neighborhood under construction. The first power outage we had a couple of years after moving in created a checkerboard pattern - every other house lost power on several streets. A later power outage created an inverse of the first checkerboard. The developer had basically run one major powerline in from the east and one from the west and done the every other house connection thing. That went on for quite a few years until there was a major hospital complex built at the west end of the plateau we were on. The planners for the complex took a deep look at the grid they were being offered and basically said (politely) "stop playing around - put in a real grid solution with fully redundant connections AND a big f*$cking emergency generator installation or the deal is off!"
All of a sudden we stopped having significant outages.
We're now further up north in WA. Going on 3 years. We've had one outage of a couple of hours duration, a few flickers, but we're certainly doing better than our first years in our old place. We've got the exterior power port in the side of the garage and an emergency generator too. (Which reminds me - time for a test run...)
I'm in Baltimore, and yes, for years BGE ignored tree trimming. When the derecho hit a few years ago, we were without power for 6 days. Since then, tree trimming has been more of a priority--they've trimmed trees in my alley twice in the past 7-8 years. But I think part of the problem has been that the power companies, like all industry, has been mainly interested in short term profit and not long term results.
I'm in Baltimore too, but there are very few large trees in our area. We have had a transformer blow on occasion, but that's generally just a one or two hour outage. The worst we had to deal with, in the 14 years I've lived here, was a planned outage of eight hours (so BGE could work on upgrading the infrastructure) followed the next day by an unplanned outage because they screwed up the work and had to redo it-- some people were getting shocks from their power outlets!
In Florida we had a five day outage after a weak hurricane went through and knocked a neighbor's tree down onto the power lines.
Strange that Kevin (or whoever aggregates the data) omits the power crisis of 2001 in California and also the Texas event of 2021. Those were pretty serious and were caused by letting the "free market" run wild and by resisting rational national energy policy. One predictable result of putting Trump and/or Republicans back in power nationally is that we will have more of this kind of power crisis. Although Trump promised a major infrastructure effort, absolutely nothing was done during his administration, so we can expect that electrical infrastructure will also be neglected in future Republican governments.
Here in Northern California (I live in Sonoma county) frequent and sustained power outages have become concomitant with, and sometimes caused by and causing wild fires. Climate change and lack of proper maintenance of the electrical grid are both to blame.
I hope you survived the awful fire in Santa Rosa several years back. I worked in the Kmart that burned down in my youth. It was amazing that both large hospitals in town had to be evacuated.
I live in Solano County, and we had a huge fire in the west side of the county several years ago. Every city in the county except mine had their power turned off for days due to the fire.
Thanks. Survived the fires. Fire season is always a challenge.
I live in Texas and can attest that our great state is doing its part to increase the number and duration of outages through a very ingenious two-part plan:
(1) islanding our grid from the rest of the country (thereby preventing Texas from suffering under the bootheel of FERC reliability requirements applicable to cross-state grids! And all it costs us is the ability to sell our cheap wind energy to other states and/or draw on their power when our grid fails!) and
(2) cleverly avoiding paying generators for both energy (the kwh they sell) and capacity (the ability to dispatch when called upon), thereby removing any incentive for system reliability!
Now, some malcontents will point out that this leaves the Texas grid extremely weak and vulnerable, since we're on our own, and since no generator is incentivized to invest in hardening their systems against extreme weather events that might preclude dispatch. But, all that means is that if the grid goes down--like it did last year, killing 300 people, when a couple of days of freezing weather shut down all the gas pipelines and froze all the coal piles--it's because the market willed it or something!
Anyway, frequent power outages and the occasional deadly ERCOT collapse are a small price to pay for Texas's electric rates being almost a full 9% less than the national average! That's literally dozens of dollars in savings per household!
I checked my own electric power rates back as the TX debacle was in full swing. They claim that their electricity rates are low - if you don't mind interruptions and the occasional massive price gouging for electricity NOT to be delivered to you. Fixed rate power is actually more expensive in a lot of TX power plans that what we pay in Whatcom county WA - 9.1 cents/KwH. A quick scan of power rates in TX shows plans ranging from 10.1 to 13.4 cents/KwH.
Totally agree, although Whatcom County WA is not a good example of national rates--electricity in Washington state is about the cheapest in the country, because of all those giant hydro dams you have.
We're getting an increasing amount of wind power in the mix - the passes through the cascades and the eastern slopes are great for wind turbines. A lot of new housing developments up here in Whatcom are being built with solar panels by default as well.
Even in our older neighborhood (most houses built around 2006) several houses have pretty good spreads of solar panels. We're seriously considering a solar installation when it comes time to replace the roof (if we have good enough exposure).
Come on. Milton Friedman established years ago that doing any maintenance today that can be put off till tomorrow is wrong. Better to use the money to reward the stockholders and the executives. As Jack Welch demonstrated at GE, and Conduit/Stonecipher/McNerney at Boeing, it is misguided to somehow think the customers are more important than the stockholders and executives.
Yup. Shareholder value (and Executive Bonuses!) are the most important Corporate value!
Customers? No
Workers? No
Community? No
Milton Friedman, Jack Welch and the designers of Boeing 737 Max: my megaheroes.
I like your list but would add the Deepwater Horizon.
Traditional management: "Well this well has certainly been a bitch. Lots of problems, and now we are way behind schedule and way over budget. We need to be extra careful closing this thing out so it doesn't bite us in the ass."
Modern management: "Well this well has certainly been a bitch. Lots of problems, and now we are way behind schedule and way over budget. We need to find more short cuts to finish this thing fast and cheap".
Slightly off topic… this is why a carbon tax would be a disaster.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/business/europe-power-gas-bill.html
“To ease the burden of the high prices, the government in Berlin reduced by half an energy surcharge on bills aimed at funding the country’s transition to renewable sources of power, and plans to phase it out by the end of next year.
But industry leaders say that is not soon enough. Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks. For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”
And this is why there will never be a solution to climate change. No one will put up with the transition costs. No politician can survive the backlash.
"And this is why there will never be a solution to climate change. No one will put up with the transition costs. No politician can survive the backlash."
I wish you could time travel 20 or 30 years into the future.
I am time traveling into the future, but I'm only going sixty minutes an hour.
So, Europe didn't create a carbon tax years ago which would have helped reduce dependence on a commodity controlled by an unfriendly foreign power. And now they're paying the price for that lack of foresight. And your conclusion is that we should continue with that lack of foresight.
"According to one analysis, the United States has more power outages than any other developed country. Research by Massoud Amin, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Minnesota, found that while people living in the upper Midwest lose power annually for an average of 92 minutes, those in Japan experience only 4 minutes of blackouts per year. In a comparison by the Galvin Electricity Initiative, the average utility customer in the U.S. spent more time with their lights out than eight other industrial countries."
Source: https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/why-us-lose-power-storms/
That's one reason why I say Solar IS Civil Defense. A couple of square inches of PV panel can provide enough power for light and communications and charge up other batteries too. That's what is needed in case of emergency and disaster and also entry level electricity for the bottom billion.
At retail costs, now, 2/21/22, solar lights and chargers cost about $10 on up, retail. I'm thinking we all might need something like that soon.
And uh, how much for the batteries? How long will they last at what power level? The absence of that and the use of "a few square inches" has the amount of solar panels needed tells me you're not a numbers sort of person and quite possibly anti-nuke as well.
To be fair, a numbers sort of person would also probably be anti-nuke. The only fools building nukes in the U.S. are Southern Company, and their two new units at Vogtle are are coming in at a whopping $30 billion for just 2.2 GW of capacity (or at over twice the original cost, and seven years and counting late) (on capital alone, that puts the levelized cost of energy well north of $100/MWh, which is insane for a mature tech like nuclear).
Nukes aren't particularly great for system reliability, either, since they are not flexible--you can't ramp them up and down, and since individual units are colossal, you have a gigawatt-scale hole to fill when you do have to take a unit down (either for maintenance or malfunction). And if you are concerned about civil defense, like gmoke apparently is . . .
For my money, I'd rather see investment in scalable renewables and battery storage throughout the grid instead of incredibly pricey nuke megaprojects.
As a former "nuke curious" person I have ultimately had to accept the obvious: no one appears to be able to build a reasonably price nuke plant.
I do have to comment on why nukes are inflexible to operate. It is not that they are inherently inflexible, but rather that the majority of their expenses are fixed costs paying off their construction. In comparison operating costs (fuel and labor) are negligible. Hence the desire of nuke operators to run their plants flat out as often as possible to make the financials look better.
I'll tell that to the French next time I'm visiting.
To be fair, you don't sound like a numbers person either. Numbers people know all about the intermittancy and storage problems attendant to 'alternative' energy. They also don't say squirrel! whenever this comes up.
TL;DR: Saying that 'nukes are expensive too in no way detracts from the observatioon that alt. storage is far more expensive, in fact, for all intents and purposes undoable.'
Oh, and BTW, one obvious tell is that you're steadfast in your refusal to criticize this fellow, which you should have done if you wanted even a shred of credibility. Not a good look on someone who claims to be a numbers guy.
In my area of northern California, a "major event" can be wind gusts in double digits which is enough lose connection to PG&E's long neglected grid. PG&E's "solution" is for everybody to buy batteries and, for solar owners, pay PG&E an additional $8/KW/month of capacity for the privilege of being connected to the grid. The PUC, naturally, thought that was completely reasonable until the solar industry raised hell, but it will probably still happen. Somebody has to pay for burning down entire towns and it sure as heck isn't going to be PG&E;s investors and C* executives.
This is AA battery power. You can go up to 6 volt batteries as Enersol did with their solar work in the Dominican Republic and Honduras in the 1980s and 1990s or 12 volt auto batteries as many people do around the world when they don't have access to the grid.
My $10 solar light and charger has worked well for close to 5 years now. My bedroom solar lights are going on 15 years. Haven't had to replace the rechargeable D batteries in them yet.
Be my guest and run those numbers.
So, not light for the whole house and not power for communications. Which was your initial claim. When you're reduced[1] to "it's enough, essentially, to power one of those outdoor lights for a night", you're not making a case for PV's.
[1]And those lead-acid auto batteries? They're run off of a hell of a lot more than 'a few square inches' of solar cells.
"According to one analysis, the United States has more power outages than any other developed country. Research by Massoud Amin, an electrical and computer engineer at the University of Minnesota, found that while people living in the upper Midwest lose power annually for an average of 92 minutes, those in Japan experience only 4 minutes of blackouts per year. In a comparison by the Galvin Electricity Initiative, the average utility customer in the U.S. spent more time with their lights out than eight other industrial countries."
Source: https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/why-us-lose-power-storms/
Hey, anti-vaxxers!
Covid destroys your nuts and shrinks your dick,
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgmb97/covid-19-testicles-damage
and --that's why you're hoping everyone else gets it?
cld-
Thanks for the set up.
After DECADES of trying to make our homes and buildings energy efficient through tight seals, non opening windows and HVAC systems that recirculate air rather than bring in fresh we get COVID and everyone wanted to open a window or three
Now we note we have power outages and here we are - AGAIN - talking about energy efficiency! Good grief.
OTHER random thoughts-
Given that sea level is going to rise a foot by 2050 - a scant 30 years from now you darned sure better NOT put underground utilities in sea coast communities. Forget that idea.
My local tree Nazi (city tree person) told me I couldn't cut down a tree on my property because it didn't meet the criteria of being classified as "dead" by some tree organization. I read the regulation and cut the first major limb off the tree and measured the hole in the center of the branch. I brought it to a local logging company and showed it to the foreman. He said "That tree is deader than snot". I cut the tree down myself and saved a 4 inch thick cutting from where I cut it. It had an 8 inch diameter opening or more that TWICE the required dead center to declare the tree officially dead. I took photo's with a tape measure to show the measurement. I got fined $250 and I fought the fine myself. The city backed down and removed the fine. I actually planted 3 trees to replace the one I had cut down, to boot. The city arborist was pissed, but I didn't care. The tree was dead and becoming dangerous.
We need to figure out where the electricity will come from AFTER our next Fukishima event. Given the 1 foot rise in sea level and the fact that we have 108 nuke power plants along the world's coast line WE WILL have another event if we leave them untouched. The Biden wind power farms off the coast is a great start.
Too many issues with very unique circumstances
But, hey we gotta ban CRT from our schools because it makes white folks feel uncomfortable - even though it's not taught in our schools
That 1 foot rise in sea level may be coming a LOT sooner than 30 years out. Scientists in Antarctica recently discovered a previously unsuspected phenomenon that is very rapidly attacking the "grounding lines" of the ice sheet in Western Antarctica. The grounding lines are the areas where the ice sheet is anchored to the coastline. Basically tidal movement is creating a pumping affect that is sending (relatively) warm water inland under the ground lines and rapidly weakening the anchor.
If the ice sheet breaks away, the on-land glaciers slide into the ocean can rapidly speed up. The glacier in question is the Thwaites glacier:
DButch-
The key to Thwaites is as you stated "if it all melts".
Losing the plug just means it has the ability to slide into the sea. Doesn't mean it will - although at that point I'd be packing up and leaving Wilmington NC no matter what.
Same with the Greenland Ice sheet. I think it was Dr Richard Alley who theorized that underwater melting could make the Greenland Ice sheet more vulnerable to slipping into the sea. Kinda like greasing the skids when launching a ship, so to speak.
After he proposed that theory some science group began mapping the topography of Greenland using ice penetrating radar waves. Turns out Greenland is shaped much like a bowl with hills and mountains at the edge of the continent. Water would still flow to the Atlantic but it wouldn't be this dramatic 6 foot rise caused by a massive ice slide of the entire Greenland ice sheet into the ocean. His theory however still holds that melting ice UNDER glaciers does act like a lubricant and can cause more rapid movement of glaciers.
The last time climate changed we DIDN'T have 8B people in the world and gasoline engines had not even been thought of back then.
We are in very UNcharted territory here
When the United States Government seriously considers moving the Federal reserve bank out of New York and plans to relocate Wall Street it will be far too late. (They should be planning it now)
The local power lines are underground here in Alberta (we have real winters) and so local blackoutsare very rare. It's more expensive initially but saves a lot in maintenance.
Speaking as someone in the utility industry, what most folks don’t understand is that we are, in most states, regulated. As in, large decisions on major capital investments are reviewed by politically appointed panels whose, generally speaking, primary directive is reducing costs to the consumer. Until that limiting factor is changed, and future climate costs are included, utilities are constrained. They, again, generally speaking, are more than happy to invest in new projects/infrastructure. It’s in their interest to do so.