The Oil Drum

When the power system goes down (permanently), I'll miss electric light, the Internet, telephone service, and running water, but shucks, that is just the way the cookie (or society) crumbles.

Note that in 1900 few Americans had running water or any of the other nonessentials that we take for granted.

Now, if we get lucky and blackouts are not going to be permanent, then perhaps I'll be able to keep the one luxury I'll really miss after TSHTF, namely long hot showers. Short warm showers using solar heat are an O.K. substitute, however. Or maybe I'll build a traditional Finnish sauna.

My impression from the grid failures in Sweden is that each large grid failure has resulted in three reactions. Better maintainance, that then often slides in some other area after a few years. More interconnects to add redundancy, some of that overcapacity is then lost as electricity use grows. And better automatics for icelanding of the grid and house turbine running of powerplants to make rebuilding the grid much easier.

It seems like the system has constantly become better in three steps forward one or two steps step backwards way. I expect this cycle to be repeated. Each addition require brain power and not much energy compared to the previus investments or the power the system distribute since the basic infrastructure is sound.

And if the whole grid goes down there is of course a plan for restarting it from a situation with no running powerplants. Its not a perfect plan. For instance in the analysis done after a large failure it was discovered that important switch yards had too few hours of emergency power to manover the remote controlled switches etc. So more accumulators, emergency diesles and larger diesel tanks were added. The abandonment of much of the civil defence has probably left some things lacking. On the other hand do manny municipial combined heat and power plants trust the central grid less and is both ecouraged and willing to add black start and icelanding equipment. In my home town we got a pair of marine diesels used as peak district heating and power plants that also can be part of the local grid and supply the slaghterhouse and McDonalds hamburger patty factory with power and steam. We got our burgers on UPS  :-) (Partly, we had a better system during the cold war. )

This also ought to work for continent sized grids. Why destroy an efficient system when it can be made more resilent? There is no conflict between running it as a whole and taking care of the parts. You only need to react in an intelligent way each time the system breaks down and reality tells you what is wrong with it.