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Strategies & Market Trends : Winter in the Great White North -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Charters who wrote (4963)	8/17/2003 11:45:34 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8273

One more thing. They say that a fourier-like singularity and resulting ricochet of transmission failures caused the glitch, and the resulting system imbalance was unrecoverable because the combo of computer run auto-stations and manuals went into an imbalance of load recovery that fell behind and thus went one way into shutdown. This they say could be cured by going to all thyristor swiches instead of mechanical, the latter which are ye slowe at 1/6000 of second shunt time. Hydro thought of going all thyristor about 20 years ago, but it remained experimental. The mechies handle large amps cheaper capex wise. Cost to go all silicon and better software to lightning-optimally-switch the system to redundant lines? 100 billion system wide. Will it be done? hmmmmmmm..... 'v Course with redundant transformer, line capacity, generation capacity and better uber-system design, coupled with software optimization grid wide, -- and probably the we could keep the mech switches -- and system wide failures would be much less likely by up to 5 to 10 times. The key that the utilities will not pay for? Redundancy. No one can agree on how much is too little or too much. What they found in Britain? Go to private utilities and power gets cheaper, and maintenance is better. Unlike the same concept in railroads. Ontario Hydro is public, sells power below cost, is undermaintenanced, undergenerated and basically bankrupt. 20 billion in debt. No wonder our power is so cheap. (Lowest rates in NA) They are giving it away. That is what they say. Others say a combo of a gen set at Mohawk burning, a lightning strike, and a fire in a nuke in Pennsylvania might have done it. Or more likely? Someone threw a wrong switch at a trannie station. Unlikely? No, likely. There is no protection against a major system operator error. There is no failsafe procedural built in. People throw wrong switches and mistakes can be made. Bringing generators on line at Hydro used to be done by matching a manual switch to a timing light in synch with grid phase. It worked well. But you can throw a wrong switch in a generator station and explode a bus, or send a generator through a wall. It has been done. EC<:-}