Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Power Out(r)age

It’s a Monday evening and our neighborhood has been without electricity since Saturday afternoon.  60 knot gusts and 7 inches of rain washing away a recent 15 inch snow have conspired to uproot trees from their saturated platforms and snap power lines in a perfusion that I suspect would have many a Baghdad resident nodding in irony.

Unlike many, we are on relatively high ground so flooding isn’t an immediate concern. We have ice and have emptied the refrigerator into coolers; we have a gas stove, batteries, candles and the prospect of less than a week before we return to the 21st century.  It is not freezing (high 40’s at night), so a few extra blankets easily suffice.  In general the situation gives us pause in contemplating the trials of those who endured the real catastrophes of New Orleans, Port-o-Prince, and Concepcion (not to mention Baghdad).

I retrieved from the garage a ceremonial log from my decades ago stint as Scoutmaster—12 “Scout Law” luminaries in augured holes serving as a candelabra on my dining room table as I write this with a flair pen on a yellow legal pad.  I notice that the “Reverent” icon has consumed the most fuel (perhaps I am looking at the back and it is “Trustworthy” that is in danger of extinction) and am tempted to ponder that significance.  Nonetheless, we are grateful that our circumstance is one, from any perspective, of minor inconvenience not peril.

Surveying the carnage this afternoon, I noted the impatience of some of my neighbors at the progress of recovery by the local utility.  (What is the opposite of NIMBY, I wonder?)  We have been told not to expect reconnection to the grid before Tuesday at the earliest, and more likely Thursday. A quick mental calculation yields that in my little corner of the world there are approximately 40 trees down replete with their sparking ganglions (property of Consolidated Edison).  A crew of three can probably clear the debris and affect reconstructive surgery for each in what—four hours?  That would take one crew (or equivalent in shifts) working ‘round-the-clock six days to complete the task.

“So why just one crew?” whine the YBMINs (You Bet Mine Is Necessary).  Well, this little enclave of probably less than 2500, makes up 1% of a city of a quarter million.  I cannot imagine that there are more than 200 crews engaged in this enterprise locally.  A week’s time frame seems logical to me.

I have this unpopular sympathy for the utilities.  I have done some consulting work with them in the past—not with the corporate suits, but managers and operators of generating stations—back when utilities actually generated power, not simply maintain the distribution system and, in increasing rarity, collect the bills.   Deregulation has wrought a mad paper chase where A generates, B transmits, C collects and D wheels and deals in contracts where virtual power from anywhere is delivered to consumers somewhere else and the fees get sorted out in some back office in Mangalore.

Long before I learned that Enron was doing illegal stuff, I was firmly convinced that they were doing useless stuff.  Their commodity trading in this sphere created nothing, transmitted nothing, and maintained nothing (except paper).  Enron was not a “utility” any more than an HMO is a hospital—considerably less so in fact.

Consider that the generation & transmission of electric power is unlike any other producer-consumer enterprise in that there is no inventory buffer to the supply and demand dynamic.  And unlike almost any other service, there is zero turn-around tolerance.  Even phone calls have a dial tone interval—and heck, the only prayers that are answered instantaneously are the ones with a “no” response, but you even don’t know that for a while.

The incremental increase in power demand when you press that button on your electric toothbrush must be met instantaneously by increased torque of some prime mover at some generating station in concert with the thousands of others on line.  Grid operators have historical (time of day, day of the week/year) and weather related demand data to “plan” in ballpark figures, but the management requires perpetual and instantaneous adjustment—think air-traffic control on steroids.  It takes an amazingly robust system to work at all.

This why wind and solar power, asynchronous with demand, can never be the principal energy sources—absent a breakthrough in storage technology which will not be cheap.

And in the flickering candlelight I stare at the hibernating 200W chandelier above my head and muse that the little electrons in that branch cable are sitting there waiting for that push from the voltage gods.  I calculate that they never have and never will move more than .005 mm from their present position in their entire lives (albeit back and forth over that hair breadth distance 60 times a second when on duty).

Such a geek.

PS  Power returned Tuesday night; in plenty of time not to miss a second of March Madness.

 

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