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

#131

Post by jbay808 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:07 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #128

Fricken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted. Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and b…

Perhaps we can say, you got the leader that a large number of your countrymates deserved?

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

#132

Post by makomk » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:11 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…

Yes, and the evidence is that the US government has been seizing people's stockpiles of PPE and paying what they think the market price is: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/nyregion/brooklyn-coronav...

The only reason suppliers can get away with profiteering and price gouging is that ultimately, most of them aren't based in the USA and so there's no way for the US federal government to get their goods without either paying the price they demand or starting a war.

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

#133

Post by JoshuaDavid » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

steve19 wrote: post #102

roywiggins wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be all Word of God, but Nassim Taleb does not consider COVID19 a black swan at all. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is... It's not a black swan because everyone with half a brain could say that there would eventually be a global pandemic respiratory disease. H1N1 was technically one, it just happened to be mild. We thought there was going to be one in 1976 and raced to vaccinate every…

Are any black swans going to be black swans in hindsight? Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities. You say anyone with half a brain anticipated it. I didn't. Did you buy 500k N95 masks and put them in a warehouse? Knowing someone will happen is easy. I know for…

> Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities.

The response to this pandemic has actually worried me quite a lot on this front, because it seems likely now that anyone who stockpiled PPE at pre-pandemic prices and tries to resell during the pandemic at a price high enough to justify their initial investment will be accused of price gouging and possibly have their stockpile seized.

Which has the effect that nobody has an incentive to build a reserve of things that will be useful in a future crisis, even if that crisis is foreseeable.

So yeah, it's easy enough to say "I think there's at least a 5% chance per year of an event which results in at least 10 million people who will want to buy a portable generator" (which is 10x the amount normally sold in a year). I genuinely do think that's a true statement, and it would imply that the number of generators currently being produced would need to be at least 50% higher to meet demand averaged across all times rather than typical times, which is a pretty big difference in a pretty big market. Normally when you think you know something the market doesn't, you can bet against the market by investing in whatever the market is undervaluing, and if you're right you make money. In this case, I'm not sure how you would go about doing that. Investing in companies making generators doesn't increase production. Buying generators and leaving them in a warehouse risks your stockpile being seized in the case where you were right about the risk. I'm honestly not sure how I would go about putting my money where my mouth is here.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #128

Fricken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted. Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and b…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by s5300 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen)

In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy.

Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country.

Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?

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

#136

Post by makomk » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #28

csecdaemon wrote: post #2

While I don't disagree that transformers... let alone key transformer.. are critical. By disabling 9 transformers you cannot take down “THE GRID”. You could certainly cause havoc and perhaps take down sections of a grid, perhaps a large one such as new york city. But these would be localized. While ensuring that critical components are local and available is important much of this is being done in the energy sector.…

There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)

That was a cascading failure where the instability of part of the grid tripped protection systems intended to prevent damage to equipment throughout the rest. The individual regions making up that grid were perfectly capable of operating independently, possibly with reduced capacity, even after the blackout. What they couldn't do is remain operational whilst unexpectedly being cut off, because that caused transient unbalances between generation and load. I'm pretty sure there's no failure of a small number of transformers that would leave the US as a whole, or any large chunk of it, without power for a prolonged period. There are probably scenarios where it could trigger a cascading failure where protection devices shut down the rest of the grid in order to protect the other equipment from imbalances caused by the failures, but that alone is not going to lead to 12-18 months of blackouts and the death of 90% of the US population.

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

#137

Post by cameldrv » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:37 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…

OK right. Let's look at that NY data. If you figure you need 75% to get herd immunity, and we have 20% in NY, we need 3.35x the current number of infections to get herd immunity. Of course there is also overshoot but let's forget about that.

24,708 people have died in NY so far, but we'd need 82775 to die to get herd immunity. That's about 1% of NYC's population. Of course, NYC's population is a lot less since so many people left the city as this was getting started, and it also takes a while for many hospitalized people to lose their fight with this disease, so the 24,708 is an undercount. It also undercounts excess mortality.

Still, if we neglect all of that, you're looking at 3 million Americans dead in order for your strategy to work.

After we sacrifice the 3 million, we don't even know what the immunity will look like. Our experiences with other coronaviruses are not all that promising. People may be reinfected within months.

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

#138

Post by JSavageOne » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

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…

The problem is largely the democratic system itself. The average U.S. Senator spends 2/3 of their time fundraising during the last 2 years of their term. Half of Congress are millionaires, their salaries are in the 95th percentile ($174k/yr), and they receive world-class healthcare. The electoral college means Trump and Bush get elected despite losing the popular vote. We're limited to a two-party system because third-party votes count for nothing, limiting the spectrum of ideas. American satisfaction with their own government is ~34%.

What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available".

For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc.

We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive.

Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century.

EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?

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

#139

Post by Animats » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

s5300 wrote: post #135

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…

Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen) In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusio…

That's the plot of "Atlas Shrugged".

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

#140

Post by makomk » Mon, May 04, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #22

How much should we worry about this? http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk... was prepared by Lloyds of London after the 2012 detection of a large solar flare by a satellite in interplanetary space. (That one missed the Earth.) Their estimate was $600 billion - $2 trillion dollars of damage from an event that happens roughly once ever 150 years on average. Therefore the amortized cost of this r…

According to that document, it cost the Canadian government over a billion dollars just to mitigate a substantial fraction of the risk in one province. It talks about them installing protection devices to reduce the risk of damage - just reduce, not completely eliminate - on a thousand of the most at-risk transformers. I don't think having the ability to replace 9 transformers is going to help much here.

Sure, the failure of the correct combination of 9 might be able to shut down the grid. That's only likely to happen as the result of a direct, human-planned attack - any disaster would inevitably have to destroy more than the minimum to get a correct combination, probably including a whole bunch of smaller transformers. And crucially, destroying just those key transformers alone wouldn't be enough to stop the grid from being restarted - the generation infrastructure is distributed locally throughout the grid, so even if regions couldn't be reconnected they could operate independently with reduced reliability and capacity if necessary. In order to cause a massive months-long blackout that killed 90% of Americans, any event would have to destroy a whole bunch of local, distributed infrastructure, and stockpiling a handful of transformers would not be enough to replace that.