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Power surges in Britain caused by millions of people making tea [video]
- pixie_ 14y agoIt begs the question why can't the operator watch a computer that does the operator's job for him. Is split second power allocation really done better by a human? Note I'm not suggesting computers are perfect operators, just less error prone.
- itcmcgrath 14y agoJust a note: 'It begs the question' doesn't mean what I think you think it means.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago1. if a statement or situation begs the question, it causes you to ask a particular question It's all very well talking about extra staff but it rather begs the question of how we're going to pay for them. -- Cambridge Idiom Dictionary, 2nd ed.
- AgentConundrum 14y agoYes, but that's not what the phrase originally meant. Its usage has changed over the years to the point where things like your source consider the new version to be accurate. However, there are many - including myself for a time - who still fight to preserve the original meaning. I stopped doing it when I realized that a) English is a fluid language, and b) some people - again, possibly including myself - simply liked to correct people to show off.
- jamesaguilar 14y agoYes, and we originally said things like thee and thy. And thy meant my, or some crap like that.
- FxChiP 14y ago"Thy" meant "your". Close enough!
- dakimov 14y agoHoratio, thou art a scholar!
- qu4z-2 14y agoAnd then y'all started talking to each other in plural all the time. (OK, so 'you' was used as a formal singular for a long time too, but I like my version better)
- robocat 14y agoI really love y'all and you'ze - because the grammatical construct exists in other languages such as Spanish. Those words are used by some English speaking cultures because they are useful. I wonder of the usage is emergent (independent rediscovery), or a cultural meme transferred from another language?
- noonespecial 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou Another fascinating journey on the good ship Wikipedia.
- davekinkead 14y agoAs a philosophical term of art, 'Begging the question' is a logical fallacy whereby the conclusion of an argument is just the restatement of the premise(s). Commonly however, it is used to mean 'raises or leads the question'. Whether the common usage is correct or not depends on which side of the descriptive/prescriptive language fence one sits on. (A matter totally off topic)
- jamesaguilar 14y agoI am aware of its philosophical meaning. But normally one does not correct someone's usage of a word if that usage is in the dictionary, even if it might not have been fifty years ago, except if the topic under discussion is philosophy or logic.
- IvyMike 14y agoNotably, it does not mean what the logical grouping of those words would mean: "begs for the question to be asked". Of course, I believe I've seen "begs the question" used correctly exactly never, and there's an obvious need for a pithy idiom for "begs for the question to be asked", but we don't really have one. This once again awakens my suspicions that the English language is an elaborate practical joke. And I say that as a native speaker.
- bcoates 14y agoIt's just a way of filling time and distancing yourself from the question. Irregardless of pendantry about the definition you usually improve your sentence by just leaving it out.
- eric_h 14y ago"Irregardless of the pedantry[...]" I'm just going to assume that's intentional irony. Genius.
- philwelch 14y ago> and there's an obvious need for a pithy idiom for "begs for the question to be asked" "raises the question". Educated people saved the word "irony" once, "begs the question" isn't gone yet.
- IvyMike 14y agoThe misuse of "irony" is another one of those situations that seems to show that there's a missing word in the English language. To take one specific example from Alanis, (yes I'm going there), there's something peculiarly funny about "ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife" in a way that wouldn't be if you had "ten thousand turtles when all you need is a knife". I think we needed a word for "bittersweet happenstance", and people wrongly latched onto "irony".
- rbehrends 14y ago
- politician 14y agoI hate this trivially predictable response. Similar to observations of Betteridge's Law of headlines, "begs the question" corrections just seem like HN karma pumps.
- pixie_ 14y agoI don't give a shit about karma.
- TamDenholm 14y agoThis is exactly what i was thinking, even though the finish time of Eastenders might not be what the BBC says it is, its not like it would be hard to write a program to listen for the "Dun, dun dundundunduuun" and turn up the power.
- polymatter 14y agoThat's probably too brittle a solution. Eastenders ads, other programs etc. could conceivably play enough of the Eastenders theme tune to trigger unnecessary power surges.
- TamDenholm 14y agoWell it was a half sarcastic comment but theoretically you'd only have to have it active when the program is live, i'm sure theres some kind of computer system at the BBC that tells you whats on air at the time even if its unscheduled.
- kintamanimatt 14y agoThere probably isn't and the UK has more than just the BBC!
- enneff 14y agoI don't know. I haven't heard of any major outages as a result of this guy not doing his job properly, and if it's just the one guy... why replace him with software? It doesn't seem worth it.
- TamDenholm 14y agoWell i'm a typical software geek, if i see something that can be automated, i cant help but think of a way to do it, not saying that everything should be, but it almost always crosses my mind.
- cperciva 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- polymatter 14y agoIf you're paying for an operator anyway, you may as well get him to do the job rather than spend all that money on a computer and have the operator watch the computer. The operator is likely to need rotating in a watching job like that too, further increasing costs (I believe CCTV operators need to be rotated every 20 minutes, but that may be misremembering). Unless you're suggesting that people can trust the computer to do it unobserved then there is little value in having the computer there. Which is a case, I might agree with. My first thought is I would absolutely love to have that job. I'd pay to have that job. Then I could optimise the hell out of it.
- scaphandre 14y agoI'm sure it is at least partly automated, but showing a computer screen doesn't make for as much drama on TV.
- alan_cx 14y agoCan you take a computer to court if something goes wrong? The British tabloids need some one to blame, and a computer isn't that photogenic. It has to be a human scape goat.
- patrickyeon 14y agoThis also happens in Canada, but synchronized to hockey games (predictably). http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushed_at_once_Edmonton_water_gold_medal_hockey_game/ http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushe...
- hackerboos 14y agoI once heard that the surge happens during the break of Coronation Street.
- greenyoda 14y agoIn the U.S. we have this water demand spike at half-time during the Super Bowl.
- maxerickson 14y agoThe big difference there is that there are thousands of separate water systems meeting the demand.
- critium 14y agoTo the sounds of several million toilets flushing!
- chris_wot 14y agoWembley Stadium has 2,618 toilets. Think about what happens during halftime...
- hellgas00 14y agoYou can actually view electricity production on an hour by hour basis in Ontario. After a big game finishes in Ontario, there is generally a spike in the production of electricity. http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricit...
- 14y ago
- sippndipp 14y agoJeesh I'm so happy that I'm a rails engineer. How can I follow him on twitter?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- afandian 14y agoUnique British problem caused by tea. What must you Americans think of us? (is it true that Americans don't have enough power through the mains to boil a kettle?)
- jdminhbg 14y agoThat's not true, although it does take a little longer here than in the UK. Mainly, we just prefer coffee.
- jvehent 14y agoAnd pop-corn machines...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- scaphandre 14y agoIs that tongue-in-cheek? Of course they can boil a kettle. It does take ages, though. Conventional kettles seemed to take perhaps twice as long to boil in CA than in UK. Boiling water at 230V,13A in the UK is going to be much faster than 120V,15A in the US.
- wglb 14y agoUm, no. Heating rate is a function of wattage, not voltage. EDIT: my error. I neglected to notice the amps shown and just picked up on the voltage.
- vineel 14y agoI thought some clocks used the frequency of the power grid to keep time. How are they reliable if it keeps fluctuating so much?
- lkbm 14y agoFrequency as in the alternating current alternates direction fifty times a second (or sixty in some countries), not as in power usage is consistent throughout the day. This didn't change the frequency. (Disclaimer: I haven't finished watching the video yet.) EDIT: Oh, snap. Seriously? You're right, I'm wrong. Sorry.
- greenyoda 14y agoAt least in the U.S., they deliberately adjust the speed of the generators so that the frequency averages 60Hz over time. They may lose a few cycles during periods of high demand, but they make up for it later. The clocks in my house that are driven off line voltage are very, very accurate over the long term; I only need to adjust them when daylight time changes. (This is much more accurate than my wristwatch or my car's clock, which need frequent adjustment.) Since I don't have to set my alarm clock or time my cooking with split-second precision, this works out well.
- Mindless2112 14y agoThey do. Most likely the frequency is adjusted during night hours (when there is less fluctuation) such that the average comes to 50 Hz (or 60 Hz in the US). (See [1].) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_clock#Accuracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_clock#Accuracy
- wglb 14y agoThey do. Over a day, they end up getting the clock back to the proper time. Keep in mind that in a complex power system (any modern system in an industrial company) that there are multiple interconnected power-generating elements. The difference between a motor and a generator is simply a function of the relative phase. that is to say, if there are two interconnected generators operating, the one that is slower will draw power from the other proportional to the relative phase angle between the two. The story told is oversimplified, as they are only noting one particular type of event (turning on kettles at the end of a TV program), whereas in any complex interconnected power system, there are events that are much less predictable. I suspect that in lots of systems that it is much less manual than the video shown.
- mrb 14y agoThe demand is increasing by 3 gigawatts in less than 5 minutes, right at the end of a popular TV show. The operator who oversees the whole grid has a TV to be able to watch the show, to know exactly when it ends and be prepared. That is insane. The demand for the whole country is ~40 GW on average. That's an 8% increase in 5 min.
- thaumasiotes 14y agoactually, what strikes me as insane in that summary is that the end of a popular TV show might not occur at a fully predictable time. Barring preemption, I think of TV shows as occuring with clocklike regularity, and even with preemption, it's more common for the interrupted show to make like nothing happened and just air the parts that would have been showing then anyway, than to air over an altered time period. Is british TV so different? Why does the operator need a TV to know when a show will end?
- supergauntlet 14y agoPerhaps he wants to know when most people will leave? While a show might end at the hour mark, the important bits will end at different locations near the hour mark, and he might need to judge when viewers would be most likely to stop watching?
- scrumper 14y agoThe best example is sporting events. I mentioned half time in the Cup Final in another comment: there's a referee-determined amount of injury time added to each half of the game, then that is subject to the ref (who is, as is required by the job, blind) bothering to check his watch. It's impossible to point to a given five minute window when the game will end. And yes, British TV is pretty different, at least on the main channels. Over-running programmes will push everything else out to start later, rather than simply starting five minutes in. TV shows - even in the USA - start all over the place, they are absolutely not 'clocklike' at all. So bad even TiVo has a hard time getting it right.
- rtkwe 14y ago
- josscrowcroft 14y agoThis is hilarious, had me searching for the post date to make sure it wasn't a late-picked-up April Fool's joke.
- nandemo 14y agoDoes that mean that Brits use electric kettles, or they use regular kettles but stoves are mostly electric (instead of using gas)?
- finnw 14y agoElectric kettles. Regular kettles are not popular here (I had difficulty finding one a few years ago)
- waqf 14y agoWhat you call a "regular kettle" is to us a hilarious archaism.
- saraid216 14y agoAmerican versus British language is like that in general.
- lmm 14y agoBut Americans do seem to speak as though their ways were universal, more than other nations. I remember a Canadian who worked near the border expressing her amazement at being asked "do you take normal money?"
- saraid216 14y agoAmericans, to an absurd degree, are rabidly ethnocentric. I'm not sure why this is; I think it has to do with being the major superpower during the global information explosion era. I'm speaking as an American myself: I have a very hard time, despite being conscious of it, not thinking of all things American as a baseline for normalcy. I know, intellectually, that American dialects stagnated for centuries after being imported from Britain and eviscerated by Webster, but I still think of "colour" as a foreign and exotic spelling.
- eru 14y ago
- JosephRedfern 14y agoVery interesting. I live just a few miles from the Dinorwig hydro plant that is mentioned and have been on a tour. It's and incredible feat of engineering - if ever you get the chance to go there (or somewhere similar), I'd recommend it.
- bluepaper 14y agoAbsolutely, I live quite near by to and highly recommend it to anyone interested, I've been a few times now, and would quite like to go again. For those who are interested: http://www.fhc.co.uk/ http://www.fhc.co.uk/ There's Ffestinog further south too, but there isn't a tour around that like the one at Dinorwig.
- afarrell 14y agoI'm a bit surprised that they are using Hydro power to handle the extra demand, given that natural gas turbines generally are easier to locate close to urban areas. However, their marginal costs are lower. I'm more surprised that this is done manually. In the US, or at least in New York State, this is a market system and scheduling is done by a big 'ol linear program. It takes the supply curves from power plants, the amount of energy required by each region, and the constraints imposed by the physical limits of power line capacity, and solves for the lowest overall cost required to power New York State. To be more detailed: For a given region, the algorithm schedules the lowest-cost sources first and keeps adding higher and higher cost sources until it reaches necessary generation capacity. Then, everyone is paid the same rate as the the marginal watt that just got scheduled. As a consequence, sources of power which cost money to shut down, like nuclear plans, will actually bid negative into the market to ensure they are scheduled. This is followed by low-marginal-cost plants like hydro dams. Then coal, which is relatively cheap. Then natural gas which is more expensive (or at least was before fracking) but the turbines for which can respond quickly. This actually happens twice as they run this market once the day before based on predictions and then run an adjustments market in real time. IT is actually possible to sell power in the day-ahead market and sell it in the real-time market without owning any generation capacity and do arbitrage. Another way to do arbitrage is to build two reservoirs and pump water to the higher one at night when power is cheap and then generate hydro power during the day when power is expensive [1]. You can also use flywheels or batteries. There are also markets for ancillary services like standing by ready to generate electricity or decrease generation with a few seconds' notice. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim-Gilboa_Hydroelectric_Power_Station http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim-Gilboa_Hydroelectric_P... Source for the rest of this: I interned at the New York ISO four years ago. Read more here: http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_markets/energy_market/index.jsp http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_ma...
- scrumper 14y agoThing with Britain is that pretty much everywhere is close to an urban area. The National Grid is truly that: national. Hydro comes online instantly, faster even than gas. It's perfect for these unique-to-Britain spikes. The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict, but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're talking about. I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer. The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a major city on Thanksgiving.
- kaliblack 14y agoThe thing that stands out to me is how inefficient kettles are in terms of power usage. Is it a simple case of more power equals shorter time to boil? Is there a more efficient way to turn electricity to heat?
- solox3 14y agoKettles are pretty efficient. Good kettles have tungsten heating elements. Even so, it takes so much energy to heat water because of its ridiculous specific heat capacity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity#Metrology.2C_the_measurement_of_heat_capacity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity#Metrology.2C_the_...).
- kaliblack 14y agoThanks for the information. I guess it's that I can't comprehend the scale required to make that much of an impact. It's easier (for me) to think at the single unit.
- batiudrami 14y agoOf all the types of energy, it's easiest to turn other types of energy (such as electricity) into heat. That's why, when converting amongst other kinds of energy (such as light, or motion), a side effect is often heat (and things getting hot which don't need to be is a sign of an inefficient process). Essentially the kettle just converts electricity to heat (very efficient) which heats the element inside the kettle which is transferred to the water surrounding it via conduction (also very efficient). There's almost no wasted energy, and you know that because the area around the kettle does not get hot. Kettles do use a lot of energy because water requires a lot of energy to heat up - in fact it's among the highest of all substances (the measure of this is called the heat capacity or specific heat - the amount of energy to raise an amount of a substance by one degree Celcius/1 Kelvin. If you want to be more energy efficient at boiling water, put only the amount of water you need in the kettle, rather than boiling extra, but obviously this is not a solution when scaling electricity infrastructure. edit: I should note that Kettles are not completely efficient - there is still some energy loss (for instance, through resistance in the wiring in the kettle, and heat conducted to the kettle itself or radiated to the surrounding air).
- trainthis 14y agoOne gobby bloke in my flat would take the lift and run out for his bits and bobs -- that spanner would come back after a fortnight with a hold-all and straight away put the kettle on, then have an ice lolly.
- DigitalJack 14y agoWhat did the power draw have to do with the frequency?
- greenyoda 14y agoThe frequency of an AC generator depends on its speed of rotation, and an overload can slow it down.
- robocat 14y agoThe main buffer for immediate sub-second changes in load is the rotating inertia of electricity generators (e.g. spinning turbines). When the total power load of the network exceeds the power generation, the immediate load is taken from generators and they slow down. Alternatively if the total load drops, the turbines speed up as they have more mechanical power pushed into them than is being absorbed by the network. You might think it would be easier to droop the Voltage (lower the load), but for a variety of reasons it works out much better to let the frequency drop (e.g. system frequency can be reliably measured over sub-second periods, frequency is the easily measured everywhere on the network independent of phase, simple control systems before there were electronics). The whole network relies on this for control purposes. If a network goes out of synchronisation, very very bad things happen - designing for big electricity is true engineering :) e.g. hundreds of millions of people go without power for many hours e.g. design failures in substations and commercial loads can explode due to ginormous power changes!!!
- DigitalJack 14y agoExcellent response, thanks!
- spikels 14y agoReminds me of the apparently fake story that large numbers of people simultaneously flushing their toilets during breaks in the Superbowl damaging sewerage systems. I wonder if some kind of evil flash mob could bring down the grid by having everyone turn on all their power hungry appliances at the exact same time.
- snowwindwaves 14y agoyes they could bring down the grid that way. as you can see a million people turning on their kettles at about the same time is something that must be planned for. If it happens unexpectedly, it is unlikely the generation would be ready to be dispatched fast enough
- J_Darnley 14y agoIf you want to make a flash mob big enough to do that you would need to post the information publicly. Then I think there's a good chance of word getting back to National Grid who could then plan for it. The only thing they wouldn't know then is the size of the demand.
- Cogito 14y agoI don't know enough about the English power market to draw comparisons, but I'll outline a little bit about how the Australian NEM (National Energy Market) works and how it deals with situations like this. My understanding is derived primarily from an old house mate who did his electrical engineering honours around the NEM. A while back the various disparate energy grids in Australia were more-or-less unified into one big grid (well, a few small grids with intercouples), the NEM was established, and the newly formed company NEMCO tasked to govern it. The NEM is a bidding market, where various energy providers (and interestingly consumers, more on this later) provide bids detailing how much energy they are willing to provide and at what cost. These bids are placed, I believe, at least one day in advance though they can be revised after being placed. If a providers bid is successful, its output gets adjusted automatically by the NEM to fulfil the quota allocated to it (note: "NEM" is used to describe both the market and the computer system that manages it, as far as I can tell). The providers will be paid whatever the current 'spot-price' is, regardless of the original bid price. The spot-price is determined by, essentially, greedily consuming the cheapest energy possible until demand is met. Demand is met when the frequency lies within an acceptable bracket (around 50Hz). So a coal power station with high base-load capacity will place low bids for the majority of its capacity, to ensure that it gets picked first when demand is being met. It costs a lot of money to turn a station like that off, so they price their bids accordingly. Gas turbine engines have extremely low start and stop costs but their operating costs are significantly higher. These turbines will price themselves so that they get turned on only when demand is high and the spot-price has increased accordingly. During some heatwaves in the summer the spot-price can increase to thousands of dollars per megawatt/hour and it is extremely profitable to have a diesel generator hooked up to the grid to take advantage of precisely these situations. I mentioned before that some consumers will place bids. The realities of power generation mean that a station shutting down can be a long and expensive process. They need to ensure that someone is buying their electricity so that that doesn't happen. Typically this comes in the form of a brokered agreement with a large consumer, such as an aluminium smelter. The smelter agrees to buy a large amount of energy at a certain price (the details are a bit fuzzy to me) and the station ensures that they never drop below minimum load. The thing is, there is a point where the difference between the spot-price on the market and the brokered purchase price is larger than the value of the aluminium that can be smelted with that energy. When this happens, the smelter shuts down its smelting operations and sells the energy back to the market instead. Now its not so simple as the greedy algorithm I outlined before, for precisely the same reasons as brokered deals happen - physical and political constraints. It's an incredibly complex job to schedule power station ramp-ups and ramp-downs while still balancing the load, but for the most part it's handled by the NEM. It takes into account renewable energy quotas (what my house mates thesis was on), maintenance shut-downs, water supply (for hydro stations) and much more. One thing in particular that I found interesting was the cost of transporting the energy. There might be tariffs on intercouples between states, but the main cost is actually the distance the energy has to travel. You can't simply turn a coal power station up when a town in the middle of the desert has a power spike, as the attenuation between those two points (well, the closest station that has excess capacity as a result of the increase) means the demand isn't met. Instead, a diesel generator near the town might need to be turned on, which can be very expensive. The grid has a number of way to mitigate issues like this, but it's still very interesting. The point is, a well written system makes this market work efficiently, but the domain of the problem is still huge. The (mostly) free market takes care of many of the load balancing issues, however human intervention seems unavoidable because there are simply so many things that can go wrong. [Edit] NEMCO is now called the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and their website is at [0]. It has lots of good stuff to look at for the interested. In particular [1] has lots of nice details about the history and structure of the Australian Energy Markets. [0] http://www.aemo.com.au/ http://www.aemo.com.au/ [1] http://www.aemo.com.au/About-the-Industry/Energy-Markets http://www.aemo.com.au/About-the-Industry/Energy-Markets
- dakimov 14y agoFor me it just screams for the question what if that guy will not keep up or just will go to the bathroom? Power outage on the national scale? Frankly that story just blew my mind, all that seems so ridiculous in its hilarious epicness, but very thought provoking. And of course what I did first is checked was not it an April's Fool Day joke. Also the main property of stereotypes is that they often come out to be true. Great post.
- eru 14y ago> Power outage on the national scale? Just brownout. The hydro will come online a few seconds later.
- aj700 14y agoYou can monitor the UK National Grid inputs and transfers, sales, demand etc. in almost real time here http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php You need flash, I've never got this page to work in Chrome, but it works in Firefox
- tomd 14y agoI wrote a slightly frivolous one-page app which scrapes National Grid frequency data: http://www.caniturniton.com/ http://www.caniturniton.com/ Someone used its API (/api/json) to make a load-sensitive kettle: http://elsmorian.com/Projects/CarbonKettle http://elsmorian.com/Projects/CarbonKettle
- olympus 14y agoI'm not sure I understand why the spike happens. Is there some etiquette that says you must wait until the T.V. show is finished before you may start making tea (why not switch the kettle on during a commercial break)? Also, is tea in the evening really that popular? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I'm not a tea drinker and I live in the U.S.
- pidg 14y agoThere aren't commercial breaks on the BBC, it's funded by an annual license fee, so programmes generally run without interruption. And yes, tea is that popular. In my office, each person will typically drink 3-4 mugs of tea during the day. Many people continue with at least two mugs when they get home.
- olympus 14y agoThanks for that. Now I need to find out if they are cutting Top Gear and Dr. Who short on BBC America to make room for the commercials...
- waiwai933 14y agoI don't know about Top Gear, but Doctor Who is cut on reruns. It is broadcast in its entirety, albeit interrupted by commercials, on first showings (which means it runs long by about 15 minutes).
- jsight 14y agoAt least w/ Top Gear, they definitely are.
- Dylan16807 14y agoNot only do they chop segments out of Top Gear they also cut out all of the original music.
- alexkus 14y agoEach "hour long" episode of "24" was only 45 minutes when it was broadcast on the BBC.
- rurounijones 14y agoif you can find it the BBC documentary "the secret life of the national grid" (3 episodes) is a fascinating look into the history of the UK National Electricity Grid EDIT: You can find it on youtube if you do a search.
- dhruvbird 14y agoEC2 for power!!
- jacques_chester 14y agoAnd the circle of analogies is complete. Cloud computing: it's just like your utility! Utilities: just like cloud computing!
- thrownaway2424 14y agoNevermind the grid, that guy in the video has not just one but several bitchin' keyboards.
- peterwwillis 14y agoIf the power grid in the US drops to 57HZ, we're all boned. Fun fact: Texas is the only state in the union with it's own power grid independent of other states. It is literally the only state that could successfully secede from the union.
- sethrin 14y agoSorry, you mean Alaska and Hawaii have some sort of connection to the rest of the grid, and Texas does not? Or do you mean that Alaska and Hawaii are not states in the union? Maybe you mean 'most of Texas' and 'only state in the contiguous US'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection The part of your comment relating secession merits no response.
- peterwwillis 14y agoSorry, I didn't clarify. Hawaii's energy needs are 90% based on imported oil. If they seceded, they'd go dark. While Alaska certainly has the ability to make money off its oil, most of its heating, power and other needs is actually provided by diesel fuel. Add to that the fact that most of the jobs are either government or military related and other industries in the state rely heavily on government subsidies, the state would probably find itself in a real predicament if it cut off contact with its pimp.
- caf 14y agoWithout doing even cursory research, I'm still prepared to bet that Hawaii has its own grid :)
- snowwindwaves 14y agothe islands are not interconnected. Hawaii has 7 grids.
- brc 14y agoWell, not really. Most European countries are interconnected and EU aside, could easily operate as independent states.
- caf 14y agoThe opposite effect happens once a year in Australia, when factories across the country down tools for 10 minutes to watch a horse race, resulting in a large drop in aggregate demand over a short time period.
- jacques_chester 14y agoThank you for avoiding the cliché.
- icambron 14y agoThe fundamental issue here is that it's hard to store electricity, so that demand has to be met in realtime. This kind of problem should fade away as cheap grid-scale batteries become available in the next decade.
- arankine 14y agoBack in high school, i visited the JET nuclear fusion project in Oxfordshire, they told us that they have to plan fusion experiments so they don't coincide with the end or commercial break of a soap, due to the tokamak requiring (i can't remember the exact figure) ~1 - 5% of the national grid's output.
- timthorn 14y agoYes, and even then they've stored massive amounts of energy in a couple of very large concrete flywheels to supplement the NG's output.
- EEGuy 14y agoStepping down from aluminum smelter load levels, consider the comparatively low power demands (orders of magnitude less) of modern lighting and electronics. There's some interesting geekiness to be found in their power demand under varying line voltage. Voltage-regulated "inverter technology" electronics can, ironically, behave less "linearly" under adverse supply voltage conditions than resistive loads such as incandescent lighting and electric kettles. Electronically-ballasted fluorescent lighting, CFLs, computer power supplies, VFD motor drives, "inverter technology" microwave ovens all electronically regulate their current draw inversely against voltage supply changes. Voltage goes down, current draw goes up, power demand remains ~relatively~ constant. So when a brownout (voltage sag, not an outage) comes along, to some extent, these "well regulated" devices hide it from the user. You might not see a "brownout": The electronically ballasted fluorescent lights don't dim so much -- or at all --, your laptop computer keeps running fine if the sag doesn't drop too much, and any DC-powered fans won't necessarily slow down so much or at all. But maybe you heard a universal motor somewhere slowed down. Or maybe the lit-up display area on your old CRT monitor (is anyone still using those anymore?) shrinks 10% then comes back. You hear your computer's desk-side UPS click in (if it has a relay, cheap ones do) then back out but don't see the lights dim. I've seen and heard this and found it rather jarring. The term "brownout" may become an anachronism (perhaps it has already), not because brownouts don't happen anymore, but because they don't dim the room lights anymore. To see how much variation a small "non-dimmable" CFL will tolerate, I just put one on a variable transformer and lowered the line voltage gradually from normal (120 Volts) downward. Here's what happened: o It lost very little brightness until about 60-some Volts o Below that threshold, it just turned itself off As a device user, this is what I'd expect of a "well-regulated" device that runs on mains (grid) power. But I don't imagine such "well regulated" loads make grid dynamics marginally easier to control under the severe conditions which lead to voltage sags. Probably not much worse though, considering all the heavier loads a grid must support.
- robocat 14y agoI wonder if this is offset by industrial loads that are integrated into the network to drop their loads within milliseconds or short timeframes? Large server farms that do offline processing can instantly turn off large loads without problem e.g. Youtube background video processing. India has perverse loads too: "Microtek, an Indian company that specializes in selling power backup inverters, claims to have 100 million satisfied customers.". I have read of the same thing happening on water networks, where individual households connect pumps to the the public water supply to suck water when pressure drops too low (supplier can then only restrict rate rather than control pressure, and customers at end of line go without!). Many Inverter loads have a bigger problem in that they often only suck current at the peak and nadir of each voltage swing (Volts), leading to an ugly non-sinusoidal current waveform (Amps) with odd or even harmonics. Networks add large expensive HV equipment to reduce harmonics. Networks also charge large industrial users more if they have bad current waveforms (either harmonics, noise, or power factor).
- henrikgs 14y agoThe volume slider on the BBC player goes to 11. Brilliant.
- kokey 14y agoI don't know why they say it's unique to Britain. I've visited a hydro station in South Africa a few times where they've shown me that surge, and South Africans have fewer television channels to choose from.
- andrewmccall 14y agoI think it's the sheer size of the surge in demand that's unique. It's 1.5-1.75 million kettles going on at almost exactly the same time. With 25 million homes in the UK that's 6% of them suddenly wanting another 1000w of electricity.
- leoc 14y agoMost UK households have upgraded to 3000W electric kettles by now, I'd guess.
- rmc 14y agoThere are some interesting consequences of this. I heard about a "Earth Hour" or something, a campaign for people to turn off their lights (or something) for a hour (or minute) to use less power. However unless the National Grid can plan for how many people will do it (nigh on impossible), they'll probably wind up wasting power, and more people can be used preparing for everyone to turn things back on, resulting in Earth Hour/Minute actually use more power than if they'd done nothing.
- Swannie 14y agoYes. This goes around every year Earth Hour comes up. It's a 1 hour shut down. If people actually did this, then yes, the coal power would stay on. Some would be stored (pumped hydro), but most will be burned off. National Grid do have very good prediction, as per this (old) video.