OT: Don't mess with my AC

**donaldpatten** · July 17th, 2011, 12:23 AM

We had a freak 15 min storm that took out our power for five days. No internet , TV , A/C , cook on the barby, two refridgs/freezers full... all thrown out. We have a hillside ranch with city water & sewer, so we could use the water on the upper level but not on he lower level. Over 800,000 people were out of power. One tree came down on a xformer. It shorted out and caught on fire and sending the Hi Voltage ( 5kV ) down the 240v line, destroying all the electrical panels, and whatever else was in the path. Being without power is humbling

Don

**bfish** · July 17th, 2011, 09:37 AM

Originally Posted by mah

Beware, Bfish, you are venturing toward the Dark Side where economists ignore the laws of physics.

What's wrong with the electric grid? - The Industrial Physicist

Very informative, thanks Marshall. That puts a lot of things into perspective. Primarily;

"...the key error in the new rules was to view electricity as a commodity rather than as an essential service."

The robber barons of a century ago were novices compared to the greedy bastages that own the law today. It would seem the lesson learned from Enron was that to keep it from being a problem again we merely needed to make it legal. (Contain the rant Brad, let it pass...)

Back to frequency... My previous numbers were an understatement. Actually;

"In the Eastern Interconnect, a 30-mHz drop in frequency reduces power delivered by 1 GW."

With that in mind, it would seem that any loosening of grid frequency standards will result in the kind of grid instability that causes devastating brownouts/blackouts long before we would notice an audible error in our turntables or tape drives.

Originally Posted by donaldpatten

...Being without power is humbling

Don

Yeah Don, it certainly is. For some reason though, I can accept the occasional outage due to trees or equipment failure, but when it happens so some Wall Street types can buy (another) vacation home I get really p'd off.