Electric Politicians

[FastNed]

I don't know about you, but my B.S. Detector is going off, I'm hearing loud bells and seeing flashing "TILT" signs! When the politicians start pointing fingers and claiming "It's Canada's fault, no it's America's fault" then the only thing I'm sure of is that there is a real problem and the politicians are attempting to shift the blame. Let's cut through the political B.S. and Corporate "CYA" and take a look at what we do know.

And let's skip the technobabble and jargon and talk about it in English (sorry Quebec) which we can understand. We know our safety systems work pretty good. Our circuit breakers worked because we did not have transmission lines melting in the air; our neighborhood transformers and sub-stations and our power generators did not short circuit and blow up or melt down. Like that GFI plug you're supposed to have in your bathroom, when something went wrong, the circuit tripped and disconnected. When that first domino went over, the load shifted up a step and when it became too much to carry that also tripped. So within about three minutes about a third of the Canadian American Power Grid automatically disconnected. That is exactly what it is designed to do and we owe large thanks to the professional power generation people because a small electrical problem did not burn down our interconnected house.

Yea but - but me no buts about the fact it takes time to bring everything back up and working. This is not Murphy's Law, International, Canadian or American Law at work it is rather the law of physics/electricity. It takes a lot of power to get from zero to sixty, lots more than just cruising at sixty in overdrive. So when they attempt to power back up, every refrigerator, every lightbulb, air conditioner & motor is screaming "GIMME POWER" and wanting to go sixty MPH. The power generators have to be cranked up fairly close to MAX to handle zero to sixty in a nanosecond! And the longer power is out, the longer they have to deliver that max peak power until the fridge gets the food chilled, the AC cools the house and all your light bulbs heat up and coast at sixty. Oh, did you forget your TV and stereo were on when the power went out? Ooops, more power needed.

It does tell us, though, that we need to pay more attention to our local area networks. We need better planning, as difficult as that may be, so that as our local and/or regional power disconnects, we kick back on in our local/State or regional areas while disconnected from the interstate/international grid. Well, you never can tell if your disaster plans work until you have one and we are fortunate that this was an inconvenience, albeit a large one, but still and all only an inconvenience.

We know a few other things as well from this: as in so many other things, we are and will remain interconnected and interdependent. The border and Canada and America are lines and colors on a map and have no validity where our quality of life is concerned.

We now have an international task force looking at what occurred; Energy Secretary Abraham from the US and Canadian Natural Resources Minister Dhaliwal from Canada. There is one problem with this obvious from the start. Dhaliwal was one of the Canadian Politicians running off at the mouth and bad-mouthing America. Bureaucrats being bureaucrats, everyone on the American team will be well briefed about this and candidly, expecting more of the same from him. So this task force has a built in short circuit before it even begins. Does not give me a warm feeling that they are going to play well together.

[Craig Read]

Politicians should be fired, better I would like to see some public hangings regarding this fiasco.

Utility companies are gov't regulated and controlled and have failed to deliver the basic foundation and fount of modern society - energy.

Ontario was warned for years about its archaic systems. Source generators and transmission lines were inadequate and this was public knowledge. Energy experts drew up plans to correct this and were ignored. Ont. Hydro is bankrupt and nothing was done to correct that. Price caps were instituted and guess what - usage levels soared.

Hmm. Surprise suprise. 'Free' Energy gets consumed and Eves appears 'shocked and surprised' that the energy grid failed.

Time to Go Ernie. Go knit some socks you incompetent ninny.

Take the other statists with you. Yeah gov't knows best ?

Best on how to steal private property and waste it.

[Neal.F.]

Unless Dalton (his own worst enemy) hands the election over to the PCs, (unlikely but not impossible), Eves is a dead man walking.

The ideal outcome will be a castrated Liberal minority, that will last just long enough for the Tories to replace Eves with Flaherty, and purge the "progressive" wing, and get back to the common sense revolution, which can begin anew after the shelf life of @ 2 years for a minority govt. expires.

[Craig Read]

That would be a blessing. Eves and his merry band of home makers, crying for the old and poor, need to be tossed. I will vote for Howdy Doody McGuinty to send the Tories a clear message, and i dare say, lots of others will do the same. The Energy mess in a normal gov't would require the beheading of the Energy Minister. I have not seen Baird since this mess started.

I have not heard a single coherent plan or comment from the Tories on how to FIX the system.

No details on how to prevent this from occuring or what they propose to do, to rebuild 1950s technology.

What a farce.

What will happen is probably 2 commission inquiries, the conclusion that all is okay, and that we overreacted.

Plus they will ask us to xcc ski to work during the winter and not to wash our clothes.

[Neal.F.]

I would vote for Giuseppe Gori's Family Coalition party, to send Oilcan Ernie a message: You hang the social conservatives out to dry, they'll remind you that the PCs can't win without them.

You'd have to have hold a knife at my children's throats to convince me to vote Liberal for any reason....

Vote Liberal as a protest & your vote will be interpreted as supporting the Liberals' culture of death social policies and their suicidal economic ones. A vote for Family Coalition, and you let the Tories know WHY you didn't vote for them.

[Craig Read]

True, good advice. I might just write in Mickey Mouse on the Ballot. Since we live in Disneyland where we are the best, the greatest the most wonderful er ah except for the energy system, the fact that you can't get an operation or a doctor, high taxes, er high debts, broken immigration....I figure that Mickey would be a good representative.

[Neal.F.]

But Mickey Mouse already is on the ballot! he leads the Liberal Party!

[Craig Read]

Damn, i forgot. I got McGuinty mixed up with Howdy Doody Well the best we can hope for is like you said a Lib minority, Flaherty in the saddle and Howard Hampton confined to a mental hospital [publicly funded of course], somewhere.

[FastNed]

Well, the first thing disclosed is that these various Electric Companies and Public Regulatory Agencies don't know what time it is. Despite all of the computer programs which log on and synchronize computers to the National Clock, few, if any, had the right time. When electrical events are measured and triggered in nanoseconds, failure to synchronize time measurement displays the "local" thinking which is a major part of this systemic failure.

Forensic pathologists will have full employment for months discovering the number of local problems which combined to create this cascading collapse. Their initial challenge in determining what was cause and what was effect will be to determine the real sequence of events. 'Fast' Company says we shut down because 'Slow' Company overloaded us - but when the time records are coordinated to exact time, 'FastCo' shut off first and shut down 'SlowCo'. CYA Politicians and Electric Co. Execs' will have a field day pointing fingers in every which direction attempting to claim the problem belongs to someone else. The actual root problem is one which has been recognized but unresolved for quite some time. Power generation is local, under the control of local politicians and regulatory bodies, and our electrical grid is International and thus forced to dance around a multitude of self-serving local issues. There exist no mandatory interstate or international standards which trump local control and regulation. We have a power system which is half slave and half free.

A one word description of the problem is NIMBY! - people want power when they flick the switch but put that dirty power plant somewhere else. If we have to have "just a few" transmission towers to bring in the juice, we'll accept that but not some dirty power plant. I was surprised to discover that contrary to my expectations, New York State is a net exporter of power and is not sitting there sucking up 'my' power. They actually generate more than they use which was a real surprise. We all have our prejudices and mine was all wrong.

Our International Power Grid evolved because electric demand follows the sunset; as the sun sets, people turn on the lights, the A/C and their stoves to cook when they come home. As the sun moves West, demand increases for a while then subsists and it was less expensive to send excess power West than to build plants in each and every time zone to meet than momentary peak. From simple beginnings come the complexity of todays Grid. People demand more power than they generate locally and the transmission grid is todays solution.

The final trigger to this cascading failure was Ontario. What is not known is if Ontario was a major part of the problem or simply stuck in the middle of one. Why is that an unresolved question?

By accident or by intent, we ended up with a loop in our International Grid and Ontario was in the middle of that loop. Think of the American Mid-West as holding onto Ontario at the Western end with the left hand and the Eastern end with the right hand. When the left hand got burned, it released its hold and in a nanosecond, the power reversed direction attempting to meet Mid-Western demand via the other end of the loop and hammered the right hand in the East which let go and then everything shut down. The Eastern right hand suddenly was hit with double the maximum power and properly let go! We would have had melting power lines and transmission plants blowing up if it had not. The power in Ontario, reversing direction and suddenly going West to East triggered the shutdown. We had a head on collision in the fast lane with both vehicles going 90 MPH.

The major question remains was Ontario just someone in the middle or is there a systemic failure here. Without prejudging anything, we do know that such power reversals do occur and that in the ordinary course of business, such things are considered and systems created to prevent them so a legitimate question exists. Did Ontario drop the ball or was this event so massive, so catastrophic that it could not have been prevented? That question needs to be addressed.

[Craig Read]

Technology on both supply and demand sides, needs to be employed.

There is no excuse not to deploy technology that takes a system off the grid in case of a general failure somewhere else. Local, regional generators and other techniques exist to do this. The current Stalinist system in Ontario prevents and denies needed investment at any level. It is doomed without reform.

Ontario's stalinist response is akin to someone cutting off their arm due to a shoulder pain. There are more intelligent ways to manage the energy grid than 'all or nothing' surgery.

Reminds me of the doctors during the US Civil War - cut off all limbs no matter what the disease.

Very intelligent.