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I had a conversation with my dad about this last weekend and I wasn't quite right on this. He's a utility cost consultant and just so happened to take a tour of the facility I was talking about. He said it was pretty cool - reminded him of what NORAD is supposed to look like: high security, underground, and set up like a war room with big displays in the front of a theater shaped control room.Originally posted by Nereid
... and If PECO (a.k.a. 'the white knight'?) saw it coming, why couldn't the same sort of control systems be installed elsewhere?
The name escapes me right now and I can't find it on Google, but its not just PECO - its a joint effort of a number of power companies in PA - the PA power cooperative or something like that. Basically, it monitors a portion of the grid and allows the companies to transfer energy between them. Supposedly people from other countries (and the DOE) are studying it as a model for how to control a power grid.
In any case, yes, other people could have done the same thing as this control center did and pulled the plug on their sections of the grid. No one wants to do that though - if you're First Energy (the company that started the cascade) and you have a choice between blacking out your part of the grid and trying to get it from the adjacent parts, what are you going to do? It was too late for them either way, but in a failed effort to help themselves (and by others trying to help them), they let the failure spread. So maybe its just a matter of upgrading the decision making process (the people) to deal with that type of situation.
Doubt it. Certainly the government is looking at the issue, but we all know how effective they are. The thing in PA exists for economic reasons - it makes it easier for the companies to swap power. Its only a biproduct of that that it is such a good grid control station.If there's one thing engineers are good at it's solving problems, often very creatively. Russ, do you know if a tiger team of top engineers has been tasked to look at solving the 'grid failure' problem, with broad terms of reference?
For that phone analogy, its the same and its not. For one thing, the phone system runs at a fraction of its capacity. And when it does get filled, they have the same sort of problems as the power grid has - calls don't go through, systems crash, etc. Usually though, its like wimms said - you just drop a few calls. And think about your cell phone: what kind of absolute reliability do you have, ie how often do you get a dropped call or call that doesn't go through. Imagine if the power grid had the same (lack of) reliability. It would be crippling. Despite things like the NY blackout, the reliability of power grids in the western world is absolutely extrordinary.