6 ms·

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of On

by FpUser 7y ago

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)

runawaybottle 7y ago
From wiki The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region. How fragile we are.
makomk 7y ago
That was a cascading failure where the instability of part of the grid tripped protection systems intended to prevent damage to equipment throughout the rest. The individual regions making up that grid were perfectly capable of operating independently, possibly with reduced capacity, even after the blackout. What they couldn't do is remain operational whilst unexpectedly being cut off, because that caused transient unbalances between generation and load. I'm pretty sure there's no failure of a small number of transformers that would leave the US as a whole, or any large chunk of it, without power for a prolonged period. There are probably scenarios where it could trigger a cascading failure where protection devices shut down the rest of the grid in order to protect the other equipment from imbalances caused by the failures, but that alone is not going to lead to 12-18 months of blackouts and the death of 90% of the US population.

6 ms·

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of On

by FpUser 7y ago

runawaybottle 7y ago
From wiki The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region. How fragile we are.
makomk 7y ago
That was a cascading failure where the instability of part of the grid tripped protection systems intended to prevent damage to equipment throughout the rest. The individual regions making up that grid were perfectly capable of operating independently, possibly with reduced capacity, even after the blackout. What they couldn't do is remain operational whilst unexpectedly being cut off, because that caused transient unbalances between generation and load. I'm pretty sure there's no failure of a small number of transformers that would leave the US as a whole, or any large chunk of it, without power for a prolonged period. There are probably scenarios where it could trigger a cascading failure where protection devices shut down the rest of the grid in order to protect the other equipment from imbalances caused by the failures, but that alone is not going to lead to 12-18 months of blackouts and the death of 90% of the US population.