Electricity Apocalypse Soon? 576
mindriot writes "Heise's awarded online magazine Telepolis has published a nice article (English / German) discussing the ongoing series of power blackouts (after the U.S. blackout, London, Scandinavia, and other incidents, the most recent victim being Italy). 'The blackouts bare the Achilles Heel of our "information society" ,' the article states, and sees the recent events as a precursor to a possible massive on-line blackout. As society becomes more and more dependent on information and power networks, the failure of a single wire or the interruption of a satellite uplink can become a major issue and form a great vulnerability. As the article explains, market liberalization, globalization and plain ignorance could endanger our infrastructure to a very discomforting extent." Free markets cause power blackouts?
Re:Electricity Apocalypse! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Important not to jump to conclusions (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, each turbine (there will be 30 or so in total) requires a 400 cubic metre concrete foundation. Now, 1cu.m. of concrete weighs 7 tonnes. Making 1 tonne of concrete releases 1 tonne of carbon dioxide (damn slashcode, no >sub<tag). That means that casting each foundation will release 2,800 tonnes of CO2 (again, imagine the "2" subscripted), a total of 84,000 tonnes of CO2. That doesn't include the exhaust gases from the machinery used to dig the founds. And that's only for the founds, never mind the cast concrete masts that will be built.
Nuclear power isn't actually that dirty, you know. If fast breeder reactors were researched a little more, we'd have good, relatively clean, power stations. Although, at the moment, combined cycle gas turbines take the prize.
Re:Basically, yes. (Score:5, Informative)
When I worked for the local "Electricity Board" here in the UK, we had some 20 linesmen almost permanently employed cutting and trimming trees which threatened the overhead lines. There were still faults but these usually only occurred in extreme weather conditions.
Nowadays I hear there are just 2 staff allocated to tree cutting in our region - and one of those is the supervising engineer......
PS. Checking an old bill, I find that I pay the same per month now as I did almost 5 years ago.
Re:The London Blackout.... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know where you got that idea from but it's completely wrong. London Underground ran their own power plant for nearly 100 years before they closed it last year [tfl.gov.uk] and went onto mains power. Bad (or unlucky) call. The report on the power failure [nationalgrid.com] is instructive reading on how a combination of circumstances can break what should have been a quadruply redundant system.
It annoyed the hell out of me that even here in London they reported a "London Blackout!" over the top of footage of a brightly lit evening street focusing on an entrance to a tube station (lit) with a flashing emergency sign (powered by electric not hampster power).
Sure, they don't have many feeds into the Tube power supply, so there were areas of London with power but no Underground trains. And once you've decided to evacuate, you can't switch the power back on without electrocuting a few commuters. You have to cold restart by clearing the whole system.
Re:Free markets cause power blackouts? (Score:2, Informative)
apocalypse (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The London Blackout.... (Score:3, Informative)
Moderators, please check facts before moderating. I can assure you that the London blackout was not a caused by or confined to the London Underground. It covered most of South London, plus the entire Underground system. Moreover the blackout happened at rush hour and on a system carrying nearly 6 million people a day, that results in a lot of people stuck underground in darkness.
No, it wasn't on the same scale as the US and Italy blackouts but the reason for that is largely because the UK's infrastructure was better able to contain the fault to a small area. The US and Italian outages were caused by small incidents that rapidly snowballed as one network failure caused another to overload and fail, and so on. In London, a similar small incident was confined to one area of the network.
Re:Free markets cause power blackouts? (Score:1, Informative)
Exactly zero former or current Enron employees have been convicted of fraud related to the California Energy crisis (they have been convicted of playing shell games with Enron cash flow). What Enron did in California (price gouging) was unethical certainly, but legal. The California crisis was a case study in a bone-header state government's attempt at "regulated deregulation" compounded with a legitimate shortage in electricity generation (thanks to the BANANA crowd, Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). The main reason the rolling blackouts stopped in CA is that there a couple of more power plants have come on line since.