The Nitty-Gritty of the Grid

There are times when news reports can scare the living daylights out of you. Like the recent one that says that Chinese and Russian hackers have invaded the US electricity grid and are ready to shut it down in the event of a war.

Well, first of all, there is no single American grid worthy of the name! It has been the continuing concern of energy experts that rules put into effect with the start of deregulation have ignored the physics of the grid.

Former utility executive, John A. Casazza and many other experts have stated that the key error in the new rules was to view electricity as a commodity rather than as an essential service.

Commodities can be shipped from point A through point B to point C, but power shifts affect the entire single machine system (the “national grid”). As a result, increased long-distance trading of electric power would create dangerous levels of congestion on transmission lines where controllers did not expect them and could not deal with them.”

This gets worse when independent producers go on line from random locations determined by economics rather than physics.

CHEER UP: guess what we have? The grid connections in CHINA: the interconnections both AC and DC between the Northeast, North China, East China, Central China, South China and Tibet. We know the sizes, voltages, frequency and interconnections. Hello!

And furthermore, we have analyzed the impact of the electricity grid connection between, - are you ready?- JAPAN and KOREA – on the potential energy network in Northeast Asia (where China is already active).

Returning to our own backyard, it would not be incorrect to say that we haven’t needed hackers to shut down major portions of our “grid.”

In addition to the “big blackouts” of 2003 and 1965, in 1974 a million Canadians lost power; 1977 the famous NYC blackout; 1989 a geomagnetic storm caused Hydro-Quebec to leave 6 million people in the dark for 9 hours; 1991, a powerful windstorm caused power failure affecting 1 million customers from Iowa to Ontario; 1995 A hurricane called Opal killed 59 people and shut down power to 2 million customers across eastern and southern North America; 1996, the Western Intertie (grid) buckled under high summer heat and the resulting cascading power failure hit nine western states and parts of Mexico – 4 million customers without power.

There were many more:
1996 -2 more: Washington, Idaho power out up to 2 weeks
1998-3: California, Central US 4 Million
2000-1; 12 months of regular failures California
2003-3: including the Big One-50 Million
2004: 5 Million, Florida
2005-6; 1.3 Million FL, ½ Million St Louis, Long Island NY
2006-6; Ontario, Delaware, Quebec, Buffalo, Southern Louisiana
2007-5: Missouri, Texas to Atlantic Canada, NYC, ½ Long Island NY Oklahoma to Nebraska over 1 Million
2008-8: California, Quebec, Calgary, Miami, Hurricane Ike 7.5 Million TX to NY
2009-2 : so far – Kentucky, Toronto Hydro

MR PRESIDENT – THIS NEEDS IMMEDIATE ATTENTION –
NOT BECAUSE OF SPIES
BUT BECAUSE OF OUR OWN BUILT-IN WEAKNESSES.