I'm glad I cold help! My husband answered your questions with probably more info than you needed, but here is what he said:
1. Where would outages happen? A brief background first. The “power grid” is actually many, many smaller grids (or networks) that have some degree of interconnection. There is currently (no pun intended J ) no way to store the electricity produced by a power plant, regardless of whether it is hydro, coal, nuclear, solar, or whatever. The inputs of power to each grid must match the power taken out (including the loss due to resistance in the wires, etc). One way to think of a grid is a dam (or other water source) connected to a network of pipes or irrigation ditches – if more is taken out than is put in, not only do some consumers not get what they need, but because of a loss of water pressure, some parts of the system cease to function! Going back to the electrical grid, the interconnections allow operators (humans or automatic programs) to transfer power from or to other grids/sources, or to sever the connections to prevent failures from spreading. (If you want to research more details, try www.bpa.gov, the Bonneville Power Administration’s web site.)
So, with that in mind, a “mass” outage would require those safety measures to be overwhelmed in some way. In the case of California’s rolling blackouts a few summers ago, it was a combination of increased demand (air conditioning, higher population, etc), with both real and contrived supply shortages. The operators had to keep the demand in line with the supply, or the whole system would have collapsed. For an entire state to completely lose electricity, the “local” power generation would have to be shut down, as well as the lines that connected it to other states’ grids (since they have to be able to carry a huge amount of electricity, those connections are expensive to construction and therefore there are not an excess of them).
2. What could cause that? I could spin all sorts of doomsday scenarios, so here are a few examples.
a. Electro-Magnetic Pulse. This was a favorite scenario to imagine during the cold war. Anyway, a large, atmospheric atomic blast would either destroy the electrical distribution infrastructure directly or induce a current to overwhelm and destroy grid components in a huge area.
b. Solar storms. Storms on the sun send drastically increased streams of charged particles toward the earth, which damage or destroy sensitive electronics.
c. Terrorism. Deliberate damage/destruction of power generation facilities and grid interconnections.
d. Corporate greed. Just look at what Enron did. They were trying to create an artificial shortage so that states would have to buy from them at very inflated prices. If, while they were manipulating the market, some real accident or event occurred, the entire system may have failed.
e. Incompetence/stupidity. When the price of copper went up in recent years, there was a rash of thefts of electrical wiring, transformers, etc., both in inventory and in use. There are those who would be happy to have all the coal-fired power plants (or nuclear, etc.) shut down immediately, consequences be damned.
3. You are right that it depends on the reason the power was out. Here, we had a very severe wind storm in late 2006. I think 90% of our customers were without power. Due to round-the-clock efforts by our crews (and any other crews that we could borrow or hire), that number was down to about 20% (or 6000 customers) within 72 hours. The rest were without power for a week or longer. From an operations standpoint, the crews have to be able to do the repairs safely (so if your scenario involves a natural disaster, war, etc, the start of repairs might be substantially delayed). Also, the backbones have to be repaired first (the high voltage lines). As far as priorities go, hospitals, public works (roads), police and fire have to be restored first. I hope you get the idea.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2009-11-06 03:42 am (UTC)1. Where would outages happen? A brief background first. The “power grid” is actually many, many smaller grids (or networks) that have some degree of interconnection. There is currently (no pun intended J ) no way to store the electricity produced by a power plant, regardless of whether it is hydro, coal, nuclear, solar, or whatever. The inputs of power to each grid must match the power taken out (including the loss due to resistance in the wires, etc). One way to think of a grid is a dam (or other water source) connected to a network of pipes or irrigation ditches – if more is taken out than is put in, not only do some consumers not get what they need, but because of a loss of water pressure, some parts of the system cease to function! Going back to the electrical grid, the interconnections allow operators (humans or automatic programs) to transfer power from or to other grids/sources, or to sever the connections to prevent failures from spreading. (If you want to research more details, try www.bpa.gov, the Bonneville Power Administration’s web site.)
So, with that in mind, a “mass” outage would require those safety measures to be overwhelmed in some way. In the case of California’s rolling blackouts a few summers ago, it was a combination of increased demand (air conditioning, higher population, etc), with both real and contrived supply shortages. The operators had to keep the demand in line with the supply, or the whole system would have collapsed. For an entire state to completely lose electricity, the “local” power generation would have to be shut down, as well as the lines that connected it to other states’ grids (since they have to be able to carry a huge amount of electricity, those connections are expensive to construction and therefore there are not an excess of them).
2. What could cause that? I could spin all sorts of doomsday scenarios, so here are a few examples.
a. Electro-Magnetic Pulse. This was a favorite scenario to imagine during the cold war. Anyway, a large, atmospheric atomic blast would either destroy the electrical distribution infrastructure directly or induce a current to overwhelm and destroy grid components in a huge area.
b. Solar storms. Storms on the sun send drastically increased streams of charged particles toward the earth, which damage or destroy sensitive electronics.
c. Terrorism. Deliberate damage/destruction of power generation facilities and grid interconnections.
d. Corporate greed. Just look at what Enron did. They were trying to create an artificial shortage so that states would have to buy from them at very inflated prices. If, while they were manipulating the market, some real accident or event occurred, the entire system may have failed.
e. Incompetence/stupidity. When the price of copper went up in recent years, there was a rash of thefts of electrical wiring, transformers, etc., both in inventory and in use. There are those who would be happy to have all the coal-fired power plants (or nuclear, etc.) shut down immediately, consequences be damned.
3. You are right that it depends on the reason the power was out. Here, we had a very severe wind storm in late 2006. I think 90% of our customers were without power. Due to round-the-clock efforts by our crews (and any other crews that we could borrow or hire), that number was down to about 20% (or 6000 customers) within 72 hours. The rest were without power for a week or longer. From an operations standpoint, the crews have to be able to do the repairs safely (so if your scenario involves a natural disaster, war, etc, the start of repairs might be substantially delayed). Also, the backbones have to be repaired first (the high voltage lines). As far as priorities go, hospitals, public works (roads), police and fire have to be restored first. I hope you get the idea.