US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M • Hacker News Board

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#111

Post by sethjgore » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:21 AM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #106

flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

Nobody competent? I think I'd be quite competent, thank you very much.

no need to take it personally.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#112

Post by floatingatoll » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:22 AM UTC

IAmEveryone wrote: post #95

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

assuming you can sell them for 100x what you paid That would be a dangerous assumption. Price is a good method of discriminating between who wants something and who needs something. But just try and raise prices during a pandemic and there will be 1) laws and 2) calls of "price gouging". If The Event really happened I bet that any transformers would be taken by the state/feds within 24 hours. And such an action would…

Never has there been a better time to find evidence on this particular debate... Here's a relevant search of Google News: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&biw=1265&... Choice headlines include: PPE suppliers accused of 'blatant profiteering' as prices inflated by up to 825 per cent. Cost of PPE soars due to price gouging, surge in demand ... Protective equipment costs increase over 1000% amid ... Th…

The comparison isn’t exact.

The entire US nation needs 30 HV transformers in total and there is essentially no competition for those resources within the US, leading to an extremely illiquid market based upon a good that cannot be easily moved and can be easily seized with force.

PPE demand is measured in millions per day, is a resource in high demand by both nation and non-nation entities, and cannot as easily be seized by force as each unit item is the size of a dollar bill (and shipments can be protected, etc).

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#113

Post by vwcx » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:23 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #109

twomoretime wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate). The vo…

As a DC resident, it does feel really frustrating, at a time when the nation's politics feel especially important, to not even have a representative to speak with/pressure. Especially when the chief argument against DC statehood has been that it'll tip the Senate to the left. BS.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#114

Post by flipgimble » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:24 AM UTC

twomoretime wrote: post #100

flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

You're right that nobody is blameless. But we can't abandon everyone to destructive whims of the minority. In the US only about 23% of the possible voting public won the last presidential election.

It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#115

Post by PhantomGremlin » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

pupdogg wrote: post #108

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 90% number seems really hard to believe. Not to me. The real number could be even higher, at least for the USA population. Without electricity, here are just a few things that come to mind: 1) no water to your house. Have fun drinking out of the nearest river. There won't be a hospital you can go to when you get cholera or dysentery or heavy metal poisoning. 2) have fun using a chain saw (you do have one?) to ch…

I can understand your negative perception on such situations but do you honestly believe that wind mills will come to a screeching halt with such outage? No, I’m not implying that they will power the entire nation but I have a hard time believing that those small sunsets of folks will also not have power.

Most commercial windmills would come to a screeching halt. That's because they feed into the grid. They're designed to feed into a fully functional, working grid. If the grid is broken then having random power inputs into it won't work. There would be no way to control the grid under that scenario.

Windmills that e.g. farmers and other rural people install on their property would probably be OK. It should be easy to disconnect them from the grid and have them power local equipment. But without some sort of energy storage, it would be dangerous to try to operate on just windmill power. Too variable. Most equipment wouldn't deal with it very well.

But there is one other strong positive I forgot to mention. PV power. That's becoming more and more available. Such a massive change in just the last few years.

PV would let pockets of people do well. Also, having something like a Tesla car or Powerwall, coupled with rooftop PV, would be a game changer for those people. A setup like that could do pretty well if decoupled from the external power grid.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#116

Post by dannyw » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:43 AM UTC

glangdale wrote: post #104

redis_mlc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some states like CA were prepared CA has a stockpile that was allowed to deteoriate due to budget cuts. So the initial impression was that we weren't prepared, but then we reassessed the situation and gave away at least 500 ventilators to other states as we felt more confident. Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. You can see that in th…

> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many hav…

It’s not just the Stanford study: antibody studies everywhere, from New York to Sweden to Italy are showing similar results.

The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions.

The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd immunity estimates (75%) is not an order of magnitude.

No, we don’t have herd immunity, but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.

And actually, at this rate we’ll get to herd immunity before a vaccine is found. Maybe the lockdown breakers are ironically the ones that (1) saves the economy (2) ends the corona pandemic.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#117

Post by macintux » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:47 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #116

glangdale wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many hav…

It’s not just the Stanford study: antibody studies everywhere, from New York to Sweden to Italy are showing similar results. The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions. The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd…

> but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.

You don’t think that has something to do with the fact we drove our economy off a cliff by asking (or forcing) people to stay home?

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#118

Post by madengr » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:56 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #88

_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 90% number seems really hard to believe. Additionally, from the referenced article: > There is no published model disclosing how these numbers were arrived at, nor are we able to validate a primary source for this claim. Testimony given by the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, while expressing similar concerns, gave no estimate of the deaths that would accrue from a prolonged nationwide grid collapse…

> That 90% number seems really hard to believe As context, I spent three years driving right around Africa, and before that two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I've seen my fair share of collapsing infrastructure (Congo... Mali... Sudan, etc.) and what happens in just a few days without electricity. In less developed countries the impacts are actually much less than they will be in our developed countries, be…

You the guy with the YouTube channel?

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#119

Post by james-mcelwain » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #116

glangdale wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many hav…

It’s not just the Stanford study: antibody studies everywhere, from New York to Sweden to Italy are showing similar results. The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions. The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd…

I'm not sure the criticism is just "hypothetical." My roommate just received an antibody test and was told by the provider that the error bars are so wide on positive results that it's basically only useful to confirm that you haven't had it. Maybe they're just hedging, and sure that's anecdotal, but I think we need more evidence before drawing a strong conclusion. I hope you're right.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#120

Post by Fricken » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #109

twomoretime wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate). The vo…

You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.