BTW: Thanks for the HTML lesson Dog Gone. Your help shall not go unrewarded. :-)

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 02, 1999

Answers

Okay, this is nice. But how about telling us what URL it is attached to... :_

-- xj (sandpine@juno.com), December 03, 1999.

sorry: came from a link from y2ksafeminnesota

to

Power Grid

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 03, 1999.

hmm: Let me try that first link again!

sight@edge. of no-where), December 03, 1999.

something VERY weird happening to posts! entire middle of that last one missing!

What am I doing wrong?

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 03, 1999.

y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 03, 1999.

Map Explanation

if this posts right .... net acting WEIRD tonight!

Each of the black lines represents a primary high voltage transmission line. These lines interconnect power plants and feed electricity to individual communities. Along them are what are known as Power Transfer Stations which reduce the several hundred thousand volt carried on the primary high voltage lines by about a factor of 10 or so to secondary transmission lines.

Secondary Transmission Lines interconnect neighborhoods, subdivisions, and rural customer routes within the community. Local Power Distribution Substations along these lines then transfer the power to the usually 440-1500 volt Electrical Distribution System.

Transformers on the Distribution Lines drop this to the 220 volts that feeds your home thru the Service Drop.

-- hiding in plain (sight@edge. of no-where), December 03, 1999.

The North American Grid is the boraders of each state outline, as a High Power Electrical Transmission Line kowns neither boarder or country. Thereby the electrical grid can bypass any county , rural ares or the entire state itself. If you find that I am in error, drop an e-mail my way

-- Nod Oninac (toadsuckk9@cyberback.com), December 03, 1999.

We're screwed!

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 03, 1999.

If somthing goes wrong it will be easy to figure out and solve.

Yeah, right. ;-)

-- cgbg jr (cgbgjr@webtv.net), December 03, 1999.

It's not the something that goes wrong, but the "somethings" we need to worry about, like dozens of utilities all at once!

Any of you electrical guys know how this works? Do the utility companies actually "balance" the load between them, and is that why there could be problems if some go "off the grid"?

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 03, 1999.

The primary reason I have posted this map on my website is that it gives an immediate and highly visceral lesson on the improbability of operation of the power grid by manual methods. This has implications for other complex critical systems as well, such as banking and telecommunications. Below is where I found out about this map; a gentleman on a Y2K listserv to which I belong circulated it among the various members.

"From: Stephen McGehee

The next time you hear someone say that the power grid can be run manually, pull up the following web page and watch the expression on their face.

http://www.weathergraphics.com/dcw/dcwpowe.gif

This is a map of the US power grid. It's also useful to get an idea of population density.

--------------------- Stephen McGehee Adjutant Software http://www.adjutant.com scm@adjutant.com"

I am glad that my posting this map on my website is being useful to some fellow GIs in the evolution of their views on Y2K.

www.y2ksafeminnesota.com

-- MinnesotaSmith (y2ksafeminnesota@hotmail.com), December 03, 1999.

There's no way any entity could have checked the embedded chips!

-- Paula (chowbabe@pacbell.net), December 03, 1999.

What you are looking at:

Actually its a lot more then the main Grid. Sorry but there arent THAT many 500 KV and 345 KV lines in the country. What you are looking at is the main and sub grids. And I suspect some distribution lines in places too. If there were that many big lines (followed in turn by the distribution lines) you wouldnt be able to see the sky where the image is the blackest. Remember the image that you are looking at is showing where the wires are. I.E strands of aluminum cable. Aint no embedded chips in them. If you showed a similar map of the US highway system would you then wonder how it could be made Y2K compliant? How many embedded chips are in pavement?

Yes Hawk we know how it works. It is partly correct to say we balance the load. Its more like the flows are balanced.

Sorry Minnesota but it can and is run manually. Every single one of those stations that hiding mentioned have manual controls in them. As Ive said before: Computers only came into the power business about 20 or so years ago. So how was it all done before that? 

Paula, yes we could because there arent as many as you think. Mostly everything (switches, transformers, etc) are all electromechanical.

-- The Engineer (The Engineer@tech.com), December 03, 1999.

Engineer,

Ok, I have an idea, but I don't know much about how the grid works, so I won't be offended if you want to tell me how stupid it is.

Just for a temporary period of a few weeks, let's say we take each time zone and divide it into quarters. Instead of being an hour time difference, each "subzone" would be 15 minutes. The public can ignore this, it only would apply to the electric utilities.

So, let's say over the next couple weeks, each utility moves their clock forward according to their subzone. Then, on New Year's Eve, instead of an entire one-hour zone of these utilities hitting the rollover simultaneously, there would only be about one-fourth as many, every 15 minutes.

Wouldn't this help to ease the shock to the grid system, since a lot less utilities would be likely to dropp off the grid simultaneously? Then when it is all over and they have everything under control, they simply set their clock back to the normal 1 hour time zones.

Am I missing something here, some reason why this wouldn't work? Call me stupid, I don't care, I figured it might be worth a shot.

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 03, 1999.

Hawk,

I wont call you stupid.

Its important to know what you know. But its even more important to know what you dont know.

What you propose could sort of work. But it would be complicated and my guess it would cause more problems then it would solve. I think the mistake here is thinking that all time, as opposed to timing, has to be all together. If you take a close look at the map you can see that some lines run across two time zones. The equipment at one end is set to its local time (lets say Eastern Standard Time) and the other end is set to its time (Central Time in this case). But everything is still synchronized to 60 HZ. In another example some of the old GPS receivers required a manual change (usually a thumb wheel adjustment on the rear of the receiver) every year to get them to agree when Daylight Savings time began and ended. However we dont pay people overtime to go out to substations a 2:00 AM on Sunday mornings twice a year. Usually it was whenever the operator got around to it. And to further complicate things Arizona doesnt change to DST so part of the year they are on the same times as Utilities in CA and part of the year they arent.

The time that you set most equipment to is just a time that it uses to record data.

The timing that is important is to make sure that everything is in synch at 60 Hz and that the timing in how the equipment operates is correct.

-- The Engineer (The Engineer@tech.com), December 03, 1999.

Thanks Engineer. Oh well, that's the extent of my Nick Cromwell ideas at the moment. I guess we're still screwed!

-- Hawk (flyin@high.again), December 03, 1999.