by McKayDavis on 10/11/19, 12:11 AM with 301 comments
by TeMPOraL on 10/11/19, 6:19 AM
One day some years ago, the university administration thought, "why are we wasting money keeping power on, running lights and aircon and God knows what, when the buildings are vacant?". They soon turned that thought into action, and when a long holiday break came, they just shut off the power to the buildings as soon as everyone left for the day. About a week later, the PhD I mentioned and his co-workers came back to the lab, saw some droplets on the glass, and almost had a heart attack.
Turns out, after a week of being without aircon to dry and warm it, the air was just about to cross the dew point threshold, and if it did, it would kill the optics on a million-dollar research laser they recently got installed.
I hear that since then, they're a little bit less pound-foolish.
by whyenot on 10/11/19, 4:48 AM
by twblalock on 10/11/19, 3:25 AM
Silicon Valley Power serves many homes in addition to large companies including Intel and Nvidia, and they do so with lower prices and better quality of service than PG&E. I will be very unhappy going back to PG&E if I move to another city.
Electrical utilities don't need to be a government-granted monopoly like PG&E, which combines the worst aspects of government-run and private-sector business. Silicon Valley Power proves there are better ways to run electrical utilities.
by noodlesUK on 10/11/19, 2:41 AM
by quotemstr on 10/11/19, 2:56 AM
This whole situation represents a loss of "social technology". Just as material technology is a bag of techniques for organizing matter into useful configurations, social technology is a bag of techniques for organizing people for a useful purpose. When a society loses a technology, be it material or social, it loses a capability. It becomes unable to do what used to come easily to it. For 120 years, California was able to keep the lights on. Now it can't. How is anyone supposed to not see this situation as a kind of foreboding regression?
This new power grid unreliability is far from the only example of our struggling to do something that came easily to us 20, 30, or 40 years ago. We've definitely lost something, although it's hard to pin down exactly what.
by ChuckMcM on 10/11/19, 5:15 AM
I really wish the PUC wasn't captured, otherwise we might be able to fix this problem.
by ethanpil on 10/11/19, 6:17 AM
Just like our sales tax rates, income tax rates, our gas prices (due to taxes), sanitation costs, ad nauseum. We pay excruciatingly high rates for everything, and get mindbogglingly low returns for the money.
CA gov. and utilities are a textbook case in poor management and government out of control.
Where does the money go?
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
by mikorym on 10/11/19, 7:13 AM
But in terms of experiments, if you want your MSc or PhD then you better make sure that you can go a couple of days without power to the grid.
If you are in a rural area, especially a previously "white" area as the pre-1994 NP government called it, then you need to have your own > 5000 L water tank. The town where I went to primary school had 9 days without water or electricity a year or two ago. Probably half of the town (it's a small town though) never have water between 9PM and the next morning since they simply turn of the pumps (whether there is electricity or not). The government officials also steal water to go sell for $1 per 100 L to areas where there is no running water.
You can think of it as a kind of osmosis between previously affluent areas and areas that had been mud huts. If you think of it that way it doesn't sound that bad, actually, but I think the net position is not the issue, the real issue to me is the corruption and apathy within the government and the rate of improvement. Africa should be ahead of China in economic growth if you look at the youth percentage and potentially massive workforce.
If you want to completely redesign an entire country's power grid and make it 100% solar/wind, then South Africa is the perfect candidate. That is if you could forget about politics for a moment.
by egdod on 10/11/19, 4:20 AM
If you have specimens that you cannot afford to have warming up, it’s inexcusable that you don’t already have a backup power source.
by claudeganon on 10/11/19, 3:21 AM
by atonse on 10/11/19, 2:00 AM
by legulere on 10/11/19, 4:54 AM
Source: https://www.vde.com/de/fnn/arbeitsgebiete/versorgungsqualita...
by cwhittle on 10/11/19, 5:54 PM
by StanislavPetrov on 10/11/19, 6:17 AM
by secabeen on 10/11/19, 10:20 PM
Even then, one of the sources did describe that they have an e-power plug in their lab, for the -80 freezer. That's pretty much how it's supposed to be. If they have additional important fridges, those should also be plugged into e-power.
I'm sure it's possible there are some labs at Berkeley that may be compromised in backup power, there are a lot of old buildings and infrastructure there. That still doesn't mean that that experience is common, just that the people impacted are complaining loudly. Most research labs may be totally fine, and just waiting for things to come back.
by pvaldes on 10/11/19, 2:19 PM
Temperature of ultrafrozen samples raised to -75 Celsius and years of hard work and a collection of DNA reference samples for agriculture were about to vanish
by dannykwells on 10/11/19, 1:37 PM
by Mathnerd314 on 10/11/19, 7:27 AM
Clearly it's a big inconvenience but they're not in danger of losing any grants.
by fyfy18 on 10/11/19, 5:14 AM
In the UK there is National Grid Electricity Transmission plc, which as the name suggests is responsible for the transmission infrastructure across the country. They are a publicly traded company, and the parent company owns electricity & gas distribution in the UK, and some in the US. There are then smaller companies who are responsible for maintaining more local infrastructure (as I understand it's still owned by National Grid, but they are responsible for fixing and upgrading it).
As a consumer you can choose to buy electricity from a long list of companies, and easily switch between them. All that happens is a different company collects your meter reading and they send you a bill. A lot of these companies also own generation facilities (e.g. SSE, who are also publically traded) while some are just resellers (e.g. So Energy).
by gwbas1c on 10/11/19, 1:59 PM
Portable generators are so inexpensive that I'd think an institution like this could just keep some in a shed or garage, and shlep cords through windows for extended outages. I bought a top-of-the-line tiny Honda Inverter generator so I could keep my wife's breast milk frozen in case of an extended outage, but even something half the cost would be good enough to run a refrigerator.
But, even then, if you plan for it, backup generators and Solar + Battery are very affordable!
I recently installed a Powerwall purely for backup. Because I have solar, it's slightly more expensive than a standby generator, but with no maintenance or fuel I suspect it'll be a wash within a few years. (Backup generators need expensive maintenance every year.)
Even Generac bought a Solar + Battery company because they know they can't compete, and their solution is nicer than my Powerwall! (The Generac solution includes a critical loads panel inside of it, unlike Powerwall where the critical loads panel is outside.)
by dmode on 10/11/19, 3:38 AM
by lawrenceyan on 10/11/19, 3:31 AM
by dekhn on 10/11/19, 12:32 PM
and the answer is.... individual PIs optimize for the easy case (that power stays on), not the disaster recovery scenario. There is no SRE thinking at the individual PI level.
by bavcyc on 10/11/19, 10:07 AM
Power Companies circa 1900 there were lots of power companies, I've seen pictures of urban areas where there were multiple circuits run on poles, how many companies tried to serve a certain area, I do not know. Through lobbying investor owned utilities (IOU), or in most cases a single IOU gained the rights to serve an area exclusive. IOUs concentrated, for the most part, on serving dense load concentrations. As such the US Govt implemented the Rural Electrification Act, so low density areas could be served. The 2 types of electric utilities are public power (municipal, REA, RUS, PPD, UD, etc) and for profit (IOU's typically). In most cases, the IOUs give something to the government in exchange for the IOU providing service exclusively, it might be a tax or it might be free street lights. Municipals tend to subsidize the local government in some way, either through returned dollars or free power (street lights, buildings, traffic lights). IOUs typically have a defined rate of return and are supervised by a governing entity of some sort.
Vegetation Management The recent SERC compliance meeting had a good presentation on vegetation management from the utility perspective and another on enforcement trends. In my opinion a lot of the issues in the W US is the result of the policy 'no fire is good', the sand pile game I think illustrates the issue where the longer sand keeps from falling results in a larger collapses (see Yellowstone fire). Since the late 1980's the issues with not burning has been known, I had an ecology class where if I recall correctly that was discussed for a couple of days. Tree trimming and clearing out undergrowth is done on a regular basis when the utility has an easement, but especially in urban areas folks tend to plant trees too close to power lines or even worse encroach on the easement with buildings. Most utilities patrol transmission lines at least once a year if not twice or monthly, sometimes this is aerial and other times it is feet on the ground walking the line. As an aside, the NESC governs clearance of electric lines to stuff and how stuff should be built; the RUS has publications on line design if you want to read about it.
Distribute Generation The electric grid in the US is divided into 3 areas, Eastern Interconnect, Texas and Western Interconnect; they all function essentially the same. If I have a generator connected to the grid, it has to synchronize to the grid before closing the breaker. If it is done correctly then there is very little mechanical stress on the generator, if done incorrectly then there is a large amount of mechanical stress on the generator. One mis-operation I know about involved the A and B phases being swapped during a re-wind, when the generator was closed in at commissioning it had a large bang/clunk and the breaker opened immediately. The generator then had to be examined, i.e. taken back apart, to figure out what went wrong and if it could be put back into service.
If I have a generator partially supplying a facility (this can save a lot of money for an entity) and a fault happens on the grid then my goal is to protect the generator, so the generator will either shut off or island the facility while shedding load above the generator's capacity. This happens very quickly. One instance I know of, the urban area was supplied by transmission (aka remote generation), a 30 MW generator was the closest source, the utility had a fault because equipment misoperated and the generator was suddenly trying to supply all the power to that fault such that the generator protection operated and islanded the facility. It was no issue to close the grid interconnect back in (once it was ensured it was safe to do so) but the facility had to shed load to keep the generator running without causing electrical issues to load and damaging the generator.
Once a facility is islanded and running on its own generation the phase angle is a don't care until it is time to synchronize back to the grid. As long as the facility can shed load to maintain frequency (there is a NERC standard on Under Frequency Load Shed if you want to read about it) and not ruin equipment by having a power quality issue. During dynamic studies for system stability, it can be observed that a generator will diverge from the system frequency phase angle but not trip off because it is isolated from the grid which requires verification that isolation is happening and the protection scheme will indeed work that way on the actual system.
My observation is that most facilities, data centers and other processing facilities (refineries) tend to be the exception, concentrate on first costs when designing their electric infrastructure. It is possible to design a resilient system but it has a cost and it will not be utilized 100% until something goes wrong. And if you are doing research then that can be an issue as you may lose a large amount of data due to the power going out or possibly being sensitive to transients on the system, e.g. a switching operation on the transmission system affects the end user equipment. Even if you have redundant systems (and/or power supplies) it is possible to have single point of failures on your system. As well if you have enough local generation to supply your load, it may be more economical to not run 100% of your generation as the market price for electricity is cheaper than your cost of production (and there are folks who don't like idle assets, not realizing the greater benefit is not using it or only having to use it infrequently).
One other aspect of distributed generation is the automatic separation of the DG when loss of voltage is detected on the grid side. Utilities do not want voltage on their system if they have an outage due to worker safety (and other reasons). Utility crews in hurricane areas will typically investigate if they hear a generator running when the power is out to an area to ensure it is not back feeding the distribution line. As a reminder keep your feet together if you are near a downed power line and hop away, or even better don't go near downed power lines.
by mensetmanusman on 10/11/19, 2:19 AM
by proee on 10/11/19, 2:56 AM
by driverdan on 10/11/19, 2:00 AM
by TomMckenny on 10/11/19, 3:02 AM
Likewise the 2000 crisis where LA's DWP customers had power when PG&E did not.
Although I'm sure it makes me a "socialist" for pointing these things out, it almost seems that having private monopolies in utilities is a bad idea
by exabrial on 10/11/19, 2:24 AM
by unethical_ban on 10/11/19, 4:11 AM
Uncharacteristic edit: Why the downvotes? It must be because you took the comment seriously and think the sentiment grossly naive, or heard the skepticism and thought it unwarranted?