Power Failure “Order of Magnitude” Quiz
According to the NY Times today, the outage was caused by a “reversal of the power flow”: “huge amounts of electricity that had been moving east over the Great Lakes …was suddenly sucked back,” overloading power lines and causing power plants to disconnect themselves. “Dozens of power lines and about 100 power plants” were affected.
Your question this morning is: How long did it take for these 100 power plants to go off line? Some facts that may help you: Light travels at something like 188,000 miles per second. The blackout affected 9,300 square miles.
Answers that are within an order of magnitude will be considered correct. Winners will receive permission to skip reading a weblog of their choice for one week.
Use your mouse to select the seemingly blank space between the two X’s below to see the answer.
X ——- 5 minutes ——- X
Answer: 9 seconds
“This whole event was essentially a nine-second event,” said Michehl Gent, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council, or NERC, a private, standards-setting organization that oversees the transmission system.
As for why it happened, he said, “the final verdict could be months away.”
Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-blackout16aug16,1,2865480.story?coll=la-home-headlines
It took 9 seconds for the lines to fail but 5 mins for the power plants to go offline, according to the NY Times today: “The series of failures began about 4:08p.m., and was over within roughly five minutes. The failures were triggered by a few seconds of tremendous instability in energy flows.”
I think i know the cause. I think we saw the the electrical equivalent of the collapse of the Verazano Narrows bridge — a suspension bridge in the Washington State’s Puget Sound that fell during heavy winds.
In that case, the bridge started swaying in the wind, as designed. But the swaying turned into a standing wave that increased in amplitude because of the steadiness of the wind. The amplitude increased until the bridge tore itself apart.
I think something similar happened with the electric current. For nine seconds we saw oscillations in amplitude wilder than seen by any bridge.
The reason? Competitive pressures have placed incredible tension on the electric grid. They naturally sqeeze out excess capacity, thereby increasing the tension on the grid. The solution? Reduce the tension on the grid.
I suggest that the Federal government offer power interruption insurance, just as it currently
offers terrorism insurance. That monitizes the risk and creates an incentive for government to develop
policies that truly will reduce the electric tension.
electric grid reversal? you suppose one of your close associates has been speaking in code? not, of course, to imply any wrongdoing by someone whose vocabulary and keyboard stamina so far surpass my own. just a thought is all.
Here’s are report that details some events prior to the nine second event:
Ohio Lines Failed Before Blackout
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/nyregion/17GRID.html
It also cites a force that could have been the source of a harmonic standing wave:
“But a report by the Electric Power Research Institute proposes that warm weather could have played an important role, though an indirect one. When a problem causes voltage to drop, a lamp or a television might dim, but when the voltage rises again, the appliance returns to normal without a notable increase in power consumption.
“Air-conditioners, though, work differently, and they account for a huge proportion of summer electricity use. Air-conditioners have electric motors that slow down when voltage drops. The motor’s response is to draw significantly more power, trying to resume its usual speed.”