Admittedly it was a British TV documentary so there might be some propeganda going on.
It also said that Britain is the only country in the entire world that has sudden massive power demands, because of Eastenders (when it finishes everone turns the kettle on, which results in a mega power spike) There is a man who is employed to watch eastenders and then adjust power supply to meet demand.
In my entire life (all 29 years of it) I can never remember a single power blackout in Britain. I once went to France for two weeks, and witnessed a LOT of blackouts. I was told this was common in France.
How often (if at all) do power blackouts happen in your country?
And because this is in GQ - Is it true that Britain has ‘the most advanced’ power management in the world?
That sounds like the urban legend here in the US about major city water authorities having someone on standby on Super Bowl Sunday to…do something, I guess when everyone flushes the toilet at the end of the first half and at the end of the game.
I don’t know the answer but blackouts are rare in the U.S. as well except we tend to get more violent weather than you do (violent thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms etc.) That causes powerlines to fail in some areas and cause blackouts but I don’t know if that is an actual technological problem. They just have to be repaired by line crews as fast as possible and they usually do a good job although sometimes the devastation can be so bad that the power could be out in isolated areas for a week or more. The only way around that would be to bury all powerlines and that simply isn’t cost effective to make the understatement of the year.
California sometimes does rolling brownouts or maybe even blackouts during unusual conditions and that is a design or capacity problem but it doesn’t happen frequently. I think the terms have to be defined. I can easily believe that Britain has more uptime than any other country but the U.S. and Canada have much bigger electrical grids that do pretty well even under most adverse conditions.
Don’t get me started about India where 3/4 of my coworkers are. They seem to think that losing electricity a time or three a day makes it a good one.
Let’s see. We live in Northern California. We had a power outage in January, because of this huge windstorm–a lot of fences and trees fell down, and even though most of our power lines are underground these days, the outages were huge. Some people way outside of town were in the dark for several days–ours was back on by the next morning, though. IIRC there were also some pretty major lightning strikes–a big tree a few blocks away exploded.
We haven’t had rolling blackouts for a few years now, and I’ve never experienced it anyway; I think we’re on the same grid as the hospital or something.
Other than that, losing power is quite rare for us. Every so often we’ll get a quick off/on during a big storm, but I can’t remember ever losing power for hours like we did in January–not since we moved here 8 years ago. That was a really exciting storm.
When I was a kid in Bakersfield power outages were a lot more common, back in the 70’s. Always storm-related AFAICR.
I’m sure they have soap operas in other densely populated parts of the world, so I am sceptical about the EastEnders theory (even if it we discount the fact that its ratings have plummeted recently ;)).
Hmm, sorry I suddenly realise this is GQ but I can tell you the same thing used to be said even before “Eastenders”, using "Coronation Street " instead.
Do you **specifically **mean power cuts that are due to spikes in usage and shortage of supply? About that, I wouldn’t know. I have certainly experienced unpredicted power cuts that did not seem at all to correlate with bad weather. Admittedly, not often, and not for a while. It’s actually all right if what you were going to do next is go and walk on the beach, then you get to go to the pub and it is suddenly obvious which beers are on electric pressure :D, then you get to wander around to find any place that can cook dinner for you, if your flat is all-electric. I’m sure this is typical of most “developed” (or want of a nicer word) countries, and that your experience in France was atypical.
Ah, just a minute now - why would there need to be a fella employed to watch “East Enders”? Wouldn’t it be enough to do some high-magic research like reading the television schedules? Now I know why the electricity prices are groing up, if the companies are employed men just to watch telly. Huh!
Ack, yes, good point. I didn’t say tea candles 'cos for some reason I thought that wouldn’t be understood. “Nightlights”, of course, makes even less sense. Sorry! I did mean little flat Teekerzen things. I’m suffering from a bit of brain-melt after spending a few days with my mother. :smack:
Of course, I suppose there are also those round battery-operated stick-on-the-wall lights too … grrrr. Let’s just hope for no power cuts so that I won’t need to work out what I mean. Thanks to Paul Parkhead for translating.
Why does ol Blighty need electricity? The beer is served warm, and the toast stone cold?
Better to say that England is the most advanced nation in NOT needing power!
I work in the emergency call centre for two of the power distribution regions in the united kingdom. (IIRC there are fourteen distribution regions, though the same company may own more than one. Not sure I’m allowed to go into specifics of my own so I won’t.).
I’m essentially an unskilled telephone clerk, and most of my knowledge has been picked up by informal chats with the various skilled engineers or accountants (heh) that run the business. So I may be wrong in anything that follows, but off the top of my head :
I’ve never heard anyone try to compare our power management system to anyone else’s.
It certainly is true about the sudden surge in power demand after Eastenders, but it’s the load caused by people turning on taps to fill the kettle, and flushing toilets, which puts demands on electric motors that run the pumps in the water distribution system.
There’s a whole team of people that predict electricity demand, studying things such as weather, and the TV guide. You cannot store electricity in the network, and all the generating stations take time to spin up to producing more electricity, so if there’s a sudden big step increase demand there won’t be enough to go round for a short time. I’ll ask one on the control engineers what happens then, next chance I get…do they drop the voltage all over or just switch out sections of the grid til supply capacity catches up? Also, as Struan pointed out, there’s at least one emergency hydro plant like Dinorwig which can go from idle to outputting a LOT of power VERY QUICKLY for a very short time, intended for times when we get caught with our pants down.
-My memory is very vague on the details of this next bit but I’m sure enough of the mechanics and I hope it’s interesting enough to include: There’s a system in place whereby all the distribution companies put in estimates for electricity demand, possibly to the National Grid (The company that owns and maintains the extremely high voltage network that that distributes power all over the country to various points within each local distributor). Now, each company pays a certain price for each block of units. If they find nearer the time that they have underestimated, they can buy capacity from another company that may have too much, but of course they will be paying through the nose for it. If they pay for more than they can use themselves or sell, then tough. Big money to be made or lost here. Not sure what happens if everyone underestimates.
“Blackouts” : By blackouts I presume you mean failure on the 11kV system which will typically happen when one 11kV circuit (“leg”) out of a “primary” substation is tripped due to damage to or failure of something on that circuit. The 11kV circuits will supply a bunch of local substations, which in turn supply the 415V “main” that runs down your street. So when the 11kV circuit trips a bunch (maybe 10-30, finger in air numbers here) of substations go dead. Typically 1000-2000 customers. Some areas are more prone to failure than others, typically overhead wires are more vulnerable than underground, but overhead problems are usually quicker to fix.
There is a lot of redundancy built into the network at this level, ie if the network breaks at one point we can “backfeed” it by making a connection to another part of the network and feeding power back up the break from another direction. We have a great deal of remote switching capability now and are adding to it all the time. Still a lot of switching is done manually as the engineers drive around switching points and alter the high voltage connections under instruction from control engineers in the control room. Bottom line is we usually get most or all supplies back on within three hours regardless of the problem, then possibly unlucky customers in the immediate area of the fault may be off for repair duration or maybe several hours while we get big-arse generators out there and connect to individual substations.
Some areas hardly ever have a 11kV power cut, whereas some are very prone to it. Largely down to areas with a lot of overheads being more vulnerable, or in some cases ageing equipment overdue for maintenance or replacement.
-a 33kV fault is extremely rare. It’s entertaining when it happens as our wallboard can go from 10 lines free to 50 customers queueing in a second =). Since a 33kV fault will take out a number of PRIMARIES (each with maybe 10-30 local substations on each one of several (est average 3-6) 11kV circuits) all 33kV lines are duplicated and if we lose one the most you will likely know about it is a brief dip in power as it switches to the secondary circuit.
I’ve rambled for a bit, in the hope that at least some of the above is mildly interesting. Caveat again: I am NOT an engineer so I may be off-beam in some of the specifics, sorry. Pretty confident about the principles though.
No seriously, the guy at the main national grid control centre was watching the telly waiting for Eastenders to finish, wondering what the spike was going to be (due to many millions of electric kettles being switched on). He was issuing commands to various hydro stations to spin up, and when one of them was having problems he had to request a step up over the connector from France.
I worked on a computer project with a consultant who had been involved in major projects for electricity authorities in the UK. Without actually absorbing any of the technical detail he gave me the impression that the running of the grid and all the predictive analysis was way beyond anything we do with utilities in Australia. He almost seemed wistful that he had come back here.
He also saw Brian Lara get his 501* while living in England.
As demand exceeds supply, the system frequency will tend to drop in response. The system operator has a number of tools at his disposal to try to restore the balance. The first is to instruct some generating units to increase their output. For example, there may be some simple-cycle gas turbines which have been operating at low load (e.g. a 100 MW turbine that has been running at 20 MW) for just this purpose. This is called spinning reserve, and the system operator pays a fee to the generator to provide this service. As a rule of thumb, such a unit may be able to increase load at a rate of 10 MW/minute. Pumped storage plant like Dinorwig is used in this way, but it is not just for emergencies - it’s a useful and routine way of generating electricity cheaply at night and making it available the next day during the evening peak. The operator may also be able to import electricity from a neighbouring grid via an interconnector.
Secondly, the operator can manage the demand by reducing the voltage. If this is done beyond certain limits, the customers’ lights will dim and it will be experienced as a “brownout”. This is more typical of developing countries.
Only as a last resort will the operator switch out sections of the grid. In fact, I’m not even sure that it’s possible, in the timeframe we’re talking about. It’s more likely, in the event of such a severe imbalance, that portions of the grid would “switch themselves out” due to failure of components.
For a long time the same thing happened in Ireland with The Late Late Show (and still does to an extent). As soon as the (2nd IIRC) break happened, electricity demand spiked severely.
That’s the point - surely such TV-related power surges happen in all developed countries? I don’t see how “Britain is the only country in the entire world that has sudden massive power demands.”
