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California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

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Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#21

Post by lostlogin »

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.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#22

Post by heavyset_go »

refurb wrote: post #7
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? :-(

That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's. And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt). And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

And inequality is up since the 70's, as are housing, health care and cost of living expenses, while wages have remained stagnant for nearly 50 years.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#23

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Majromax wrote: post #8
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue here isn't that the California power grid has deteriorated, but that there's an extraordinary heat wave. I don't think it's fair to tie this into a grand decline narrative.

A robust infrastructure should be able to handle surge loads. This isn't an extraordinary heat wave after some other natural disaster has directly damaged the power grid; it's that the grid as designed and built can't handle this load. It's hardly conclusive for a "grand decline" narrative, of course, since this is just one anecdote for an entire society.

I think you're misunderstanding how power grids work. There's no way to stockpile large supplies of power like you can with food and water; to first order, all electricity that's produced today has to be consumed today. So it's an impossible task to have enough capacity available for arbitrary demand surges. It's not just a matter of shoveling coal in the furnaces twice as fast or drawing down the local power reservoirs.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#24

Post by TedShiller »

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? :-(

The Indian reservation part is true. Most Americans have never set foot in one. If you want to see what it's like, I recommend driving through the South Dakota reservations. But be prepared for a shock of sadness. They feel like different countries entirely.

It has been great to see the support in recent months for equality among all races in the US. But I wish we would also see more explicit support for Native Americans, for their suffering and their genocide. They are a group that has been exploited, victimized, and stolen from as much as any other group in America.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#25

Post by Lammy »

refurb wrote: post #7
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? :-(

That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's. And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt). And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

Go back to the ‘50s and ‘60s and you can actually see things change. California voters put the brakes on infrastructure projects starting in the late 1950s, for example, like the 1959 anti-freeway San Francisco Supervisors vote. It all made sense to me once I learned about the Second Great Migration, a topic that strangely wasn’t taught to me at all by American public school curriculum.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#26

Post by manquer »

khuey wrote: post #14
Majromax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A robust infrastructure should be able to handle surge loads. This isn't an extraordinary heat wave after some other natural disaster has directly damaged the power grid; it's that the grid as designed and built can't handle this load. It's hardly conclusive for a "grand decline" narrative, of course, since this is just one anecdote for an entire society.

Do we really need to pay for an electric grid that can handle a once every 20 year load?

Grid yes , maybe not the power plants themselves. Typically in robust networks you have good interconnects to neighbours you can purchase power from .

Also robust grid which enables selling back to the grid would have helped, such extreme hot weather goes in hand with solar generation

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#28

Post by edge17 »

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.

Re: California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001

#30

Post by jazzyjackson »

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? :-(

People like to dismiss this by pointing to the shiny parts of America, but every city in the world has good and bad neighborhoods. The surprising thing about corrupt countries is the wealth inequality -- the political class is full of grifters who pocket the contracting fees and the citizens who are supposed to be recipients of government services are wondering why the highway has been under construction for the last 5 years. Or the bullet train in California. Billions of dollars are disappearing with barely a track bed to show for it. I'll quote this NYT piece.

"“Approximately two dozen other countries have found H.S.R. feasible, including Uzbekistan,” she said, referring to high-speed rail. “And there is no reason it can’t be done here.”"

The government collects and spends trillions of dollars, and most of that is wealth transfer to contractors, much less value reaches the ground, where much of the country is dotted with emptied out farm towns and improvised shelters. If you don't believe America looks the way some see it, take a cross country train, you go through everybody's back yard that way.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-28/californ...

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