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California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

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Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#101

Post by ghufran_syed »

lostlogin wrote: post #21
lisper wrote: post #2

The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

> 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-( It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.

The Russians may have had a little help:

"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.

"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."

https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how-ameri...

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#102

Post by eigenvector »

dredmorbius wrote: post #55
edge17 wrote: post #29

Where is all the load coming from? Aren't most of the office building (in the Bay Area) empty rightnow due to Covid?

As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy store as with fuel and far more energy distribution as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with far more connections. Not only must the Grid make pow…

Your comment is completely correct in general, but I'll add that based on the information released by CAISO for this incident, it appears to have been caused by insufficient generation capacity to meet demand at the state level, not constraints on specific transmission or distribution circuits.

CAISO declared insufficient operating reserve (the generation capacity that is available to quickly ramp up or down to match load and generation), which forced them to drop load to get back within safe operating margins. It's better to do this than let the system get into an insecure state where a forced outage may cause cascading failures.

---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: 202002424 POSTED: 2020-08-14 18:38:00 ---------------------------------------------------------------- CAISO Grid STAGE 3 System Emergency Notice [202002424]

The California ISO hereby issues a CAISO Grid Stage 3 System Emergency Notice effective 08/14/2020 at 18:36 through 08/14/2020 at 23:59.

Reason: California ISO is Reserve Deficient.

Refer to the ISO System Emergency Fact Sheet (http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmerge...) for additional detail.

The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources. Maximum conservation efforts are requested.

Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.

Monitor system conditions on Today's Outlook (http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx) and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#103

Post by chaostheory »

edge17 wrote: post #28

Strange reporting that people were "believed" to have been blacked out. We lost power yesterday in Sunnyvale from 5-9pm. Very interested in more info on the "hundreds of thousands" because it seems like the cuts were fairly limited. There was enough power to keep the fridge running but thats about it.

Lost power in the north peninsula from 9pm-12am. A warning would have been nice. We signed up for notifications via text, and we didn’t receive any.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#104

Post by eigenvector »

What happened?

The power grid must not only have sufficient generation capacity to match load, it needs some extra - called spinning or operating reserve. This ensures security - the characteristic where the grid is resilient to any single failure. Because load is not normally controlled (i.e. people can turn loads on and off without permission from the system operator), the system needs to be able to respond to that as well as contingencies like a line or generator trip.

Imagine, for instance, that you're fully maxed out on generation with no reserve, and one generator trips offline. You will now need to trigger emergency load shedding very, very rapidly (within seconds) to arrest frequency decline and a cascading, wide-area outage.

So you carry a margin of operating or spinning reserve, essentially generation that is available to very quickly ramp its output up or down in response to system conditions. When that margin starts to get eaten away by lack of capacity, you can do controlled load shedding, where you remove loads that have been already marked as low-priority to get some of your margin back. By doing this, you can avoid uncontrolled load shedding, which would have worse consequences.

Official notice from CAISO:

---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: 202002424 POSTED: 2020-08-14 18:38:00 ---------------------------------------------------------------- CAISO Grid STAGE 3 System Emergency Notice [202002424]

The California ISO hereby issues a CAISO Grid Stage 3 System Emergency Notice effective 08/14/2020 at 18:36 through 08/14/2020 at 23:59.

Reason: California ISO is Reserve Deficient.

Refer to the ISO System Emergency Fact Sheet (http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmerge...) for additional detail.

The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources. Maximum conservation efforts are requested.

Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.

Monitor system conditions on Today's Outlook (http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx) and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/Notifications/AWENoticeL...

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#105

Post by wcarron »

Apocryphon wrote: post #82
cipher_system wrote: post #10

I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.

You'd think with the reduction in traffic there's all sorts of extra space and time for fixing old infrastructure.

Personally, I have seen that happening on freeways around me. Less in side streets, but still, I've noticed an uptick in roadwork

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#107

Post by makomk »

Steltek wrote: post #93
dredmorbius wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy store as with fuel and far more energy distribution as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with far more connections. Not only must the Grid make pow…

Residential solar once posed the opposite problem: generating power during the day in suburbs where it wasn't being consumed nor could it be transported to areas of high demand. If our current problem is higher daytime residential demand, maybe power companies can stop fighting residential solar initiatives now?

As I understand it, the problem was evening demand, not daytime and that's probably also the real reason why all the empty office buildings aren't helping - most people would probably be out of the office and back home by them. If anything, residential solar makes this problem worse both by making non-solar generation less financially viable and causing a sharp increase in demand for it during the evening as the sun goes down.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#109

Post by nemo44x »

scarface74 wrote: post #67

Why is this only happening in California?

It’s a huge state with a lot of people with a massive heatwave covering a lot of it.

It’s easy to rag on California lately but it’s still American’s living there and I feel bad for them.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#110

Post by vondur »

mpweiher wrote: post #34
cobookman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period. 1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

> most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black out Name one? I've never experienced (or heard) of one in Germany, for example, during my lifetime. And of course it's not "rolling blackout", but "rolling blackouts", plural.

This is more specific to California, not the US as a whole.
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