Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Swift who wrote (3028)	12/24/1998 10:30:00 AM
From: jwk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9818

Yes. And I agree with you about it not being computer intensive at the generation site. The area of concern includes everthing between the turbine and your light switch....or furnace blower motor. The system is designed to work around traditional problems and failures caused by plants going off line, local/regional storm damage, etc. The questions behind my concerns have more to do with challenges to the system from at a level not traditionally dealt with which occur might in a relatively compressed period of time and are potentially spread over a broad region. An an area of about 2 square miles in Fort Collins, Colorado was shutdown for an entire weekend last summer by a kid having girl problems. He dealt with this stress by monkeywrenching a couple of neighborhood sub-stations. It wasn't just that one kid with an attitude wa able to take out the power to hundreds of homes and businesses, but also the fact that it took them so long to get power restored -- beautiful weather and a fully functional infustructure for all necessary resources readily at hand with no other distractions or demands. Check the reports on the recent San Francisco outage. It was caused by human error, BUT a series of failures in a fail-safe back-up system allowed the outage to spread to whole Bay region. Again, mild weather and a regioanl infastructure capable of total support for all necessary resources. And, it took them several hours to bring things back on line. Might it have taken them even longer to get the power back under control had the power grid they were trying to tie back into been having a bit of the flu itself? I don't know. But, it seems me that simply saying that turbines spin and the juice pours out is not a realsitic assesment of the challenge of keeping the power on to everyone everywhere, or of getting power re-established quickly if protective breakers have bumped an area off line.