Only in California do you have to pay twice as much as the average on electricity and also deal with these blackouts. Thanks environmentalists...
Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
301–310 of 357 posts
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nothing gets put underground That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If t…
How does climate interfere with burying power lines? Germany's bad weather is only slightly less of a stereotype than the lack of humour and , and all residential power lines are underground. Even the long-distance lines are moving underground lately.
UK as well, we bury all (well technically damn near all) our sub-station to residence cabling and we are a wet country.
Power outages are a once ever few years or more thing.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#303Why does Texas not have these power problems? They have their own separate power grid and in my lifetime I can’t remember ever having rolling blackouts due to demand spikes.
It seems like California suffers from policy problems rather than technological ones.
Why doesn’t California embrace nuclear power? Traditionally most of France’s power has been nuclear and it has worked fine for decades. Interestingly the initiatives to switch to renewable energy specific excluded nuclear and hydro. Politics seem to get in the way of good policy. Rather than pleading to conserve power, why not generate more of it? When people are starving, the solution isn’t to tell everyone to eat less, but to produce more.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's clear not enough is being invested in schools, in particular the science curriculum.
Enough is being invested, it is just being spent extremely poorly. No country gets less per dollar on education than the US. A good start would be supporting school choice so the public school's monopoly and cost structure can be challenged.
Literally every other country in the world has a fully public education that does just fine.
I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.
Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#305as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure. Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote mo…
I am a technician for xfinity in the bay area and NIMBYism a huge part too I would say. Huge portions of Mill Valley especially on and around Mt Tam had such bad poles and vegetation. Only the last 3 fire years did anything. But literally nothing gets approved besides exact replacement. Nothing gets put underground, or rerouted because (as I understand it) mostly NIMBY groups. And I believe ATT ultimately owns most o…
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid
I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.
I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.
There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.
“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#306The headline says it leaves experts stumped, the body of the article makes it clear that it was largely because three natural gas plants were shutdown in what seems to be an effort to build political support for extending the operating life of older natural gas plants.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#307as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure. Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote mo…
> as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.
That's a nice story, except as the article notes it wasn't distribution but generation that was the problem. Not a shortage of installed capacity, but shutdown of four (one wind apparently due to conditions, and three natural gas apparently voluntarily by the operators) plants.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh god...Marin NIMBYism is really crazy when it comes to that stuff. And there's a lot of conspiracy theory / 5G type stuff that goes on as well. Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there).
> Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there). As someone who lives in Marin I’m not sure where you got this idea. Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired. They probably paid less than 300k for their home.
> Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.
64.1% of those in the county 16 or older are in the labor force. Most people living in Marin County are not retired.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/marincountycali...
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a technician for xfinity in the bay area and NIMBYism a huge part too I would say. Huge portions of Mill Valley especially on and around Mt Tam had such bad poles and vegetation. Only the last 3 fire years did anything. But literally nothing gets approved besides exact replacement. Nothing gets put underground, or rerouted because (as I understand it) mostly NIMBY groups. And I believe ATT ultimately owns most o…
Oh god...Marin NIMBYism is really crazy when it comes to that stuff. And there's a lot of conspiracy theory / 5G type stuff that goes on as well. Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there).
There is a lot of mysticism around electromagnetism, but I wouldn't want to live under a high voltage line either.
But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.
Re: Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they're not entirely wrong about the 5G. I understand many in this forum won't agree with me. From https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no... > We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe > The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National T…
"so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. " Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email. https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-09-lindsey-graham-never-sen... In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on t…
Hmm, I was selling and installing a lot of Cell Phones in Silicon Valley in 1983 (C-Tell Cellular, Santa Clara), and we had an office in Sacramento that was doing even better than I was sales wise.
To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.
To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"