Alec Cameron said the following to MIKE ROSS on the subject of
Power Factor in DC cc (25 Jan 98  17:34:18)
 AC> On (22 Jan 98) MIKE ROSS wrote to Elvis Hargrove...
 -> Ice Storm of '98 refugee.
 MR> What gave everyone here such a shock was the realization of their utter
 MR> dependance on electricity for their very survival. Some 80% of homes in
 MR> the greater metropolitan area depend for their heat on electric power
 AC> And my geriatric cousins in Derbyshire, winter of 1990/91 almost died
 AC> in a one week long power cut, because their GAS cooking and GAS central
 AC> heating and GAS hot water service, were all AC- dependent thru hi tech
 AC> microprocessor controllers etc.
 AC> After two days, the Social Service health visitor showed them how to
 AC> use matches, to light a gas cooker top burner.
No kidding, had to show them how to rub 2 sticks together all over
again, eh? Yes, we all felt a little like that around here lately. A big
city tends to make its inhabitants into  docile, and passive captives.
Hmmm, I heard that said of TV in prisons, strange resonance there, eh?
 MR> The sensible policy of using more locally distributed electrical
 MR> generation had been bulldozed aside
 AC> To criticize now those changes, is being parochial and wise after the
 AC> event. The modern use of a few huge plants very far away, has made
 AC> electricity so cheap.
I don't disagree that massive generation far away can be cheaper but it
is undeniably more vulnerable. Boy, did we ever just learn it the hard
way! After the 3rd week without power, it now looks like some folk still
won't get power for yet another 2 or 3 weeks.
It is utter devastation in the power grid. Miles and miles of downed
lines. Whole lanes of pylons crumpled like they were merely match sticks.
We received a record of about 4 inches (100mm) of ice accumulation in
the worst areas! The pylons were only rated for 2 inches (47mm) max. The
rest of the country uses 1/2 inch (12mm) as the max. The linesmen who
came up from the USA all said they've never ever seen anything like it.
 AC> I guess that if your ice storm occurrences are frequent, then
 AC> diversity of supplies [gas distribution, multiple transmission paths,
 AC> disaster planning] would be more cost effective than re- siting with
 AC> lotsa wee generators. And for the greenies, fifty units of 10MW
 AC> probably deliver ten times as much poison per person, as one unit of
 AC> 500 MW.
Multiple transmission paths would have failed. Fossil fuels would have
been a better choice in retrospect. Actually, Montreal is on an island
around which flows one of the largest rivers of this continent: the
St.Lawrence river. This is a mighty unused hydro potential flowing by.
 AC> The freezing and consequent breaking of overhead lines, can be
 AC> minimised by circulating current between substations. This was once
 AC> done in UK on city railways, to avoid track switches from freezing. Now
 AC> they use LP gas burners.
 AC> The circulating current trick, involves putting line transformer
 AC> tapchangers deliberately out- of- step so that sub A fights sub B. Thus
 AC> a 3 am load of say 100 amps might be supplied by each trannie loaded to
 AC> 1000 amps: 1000 amps thus heats the wires and  melts ice, but 900 of
 AC> those amps are circulating from sub to sub. No revenue from those amps.
Yes, but it would still be cheaper than the 2 billion dollar damage
figure not to mention the grid which now must be rebuilt almost from
scratch. Actually, nobody knows why burning the lines wasn't done.
Probably everyone in charge was out to lunch on this one. I'm sure it
had already been done in the past. Perhaps too much automation makes
everyone complacent and forget how to react to situations which can
arise.
... Ice Storm of the Century refugee.
--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30
---------------