I’m a Brit living in Georgia and we certainly have way more power outages here than in England, but they all seem to be weather-related: thunderstorms mostly and the occasional ice-storm.
It does seem odd to me that in an area with many trees, the electricity supply is often provided through overhead cables. So when a thunderstorm brings down a tree, or an ice-storm brings down thousands of trees, they take the power lines with them.
Emphasis mine: that, no way.
The immense majority of power outages I’ve lived through have been caused by conditions beyond the company’s power: tornados (Miami), ETA bombs (my home town in Spain; the main power station used to be a favorite target for “pups,” terrorists in training). I’ve heard of power outages in Spain caused by too high of an overload during too long, or fires in transformers, but never suffered one of them in person and they’re unusual enough to be front page news during weeks.
The point was about electric kettles causing the spike. How many other countries have a heavy electrical appliance that draws that much current on a TV schedule?
A friend of mine who worked as an engineer for the UK National Grid once told me the biggest surge in demand of the entire year was at half-time during the FA Cup Final. Virtually the entire nation puts the kettle on simultaneously.
Because we need a stove to warm the beer and a fridge to cool the toast.
Bloody Yanks, not thinking of these things. :rolleyes:
They need advanced power management so their ubiquitous and invasive surveillance never goes offline maintaining their strict nanny state because terrorists kill children for satan every waking moment of our lives.
The timing is critical… TV schedules are not accurate enough.
(Bolding mine)
Ah, now, that’s something I ought to have asked some time, so it’s good the answer turns up in Lobsang’s thread. Yes, that happens occasionally, and now I will know that it is **actually **a sign of a problem being fixed rather than a precursor of a problem to come. So, when the light dips in power for a couple of seconds, it doesn’t help if I remind myself where torch (flashlight) and candles are and then glare meaningfully at the light for a minute hoping to to operate the electricity by telepathy? Dear me, I feel so useless now. 
Rambling? Nope - bloody good answer, I thought, TPWombat. I love the wide range of members’ special areas of knowledge on the Dope, and I know I’m going to come back to this thread for reference next time I hear about power surges after telly programme X or Y.
Lobsang, this is an interesting thread, although I’d like to take you in a time machine to the early 1970s - then you’d see, or perhaps see only very dimly, power cuts a-plently.
Yeah, fair enough. 
That was a wee bit tongue-in-cheek, I suppose. And it must be a fairly rotten job, really, watching “East Enders”.
I share your scepticism but for different reasons.
The episode of Eastenders attracting the greatest power surge was broadcast on 5 April 2001 (Who Shot Phil Mitchell) at 2290MW. The National Grid equates an 1800MW surge to 720,000 kettles being switched on at the same time. Using this Kettle Index, a 2290MW surge is equivalent to 914,400 kettles. However, I could have sworn that the engineer on duty (or it may have been Andrew Marr) was anticipating 1.75 million kettles being switched on at the end of the episode featured on the programme. Please correct me if I am wrong, otherwise I suggest that someone has screwed up the Kettle Index by a factor of 1.91.
This National Grid site also features the top ten power surges of all time. The World Cup Semi-final (West Germany v England 4 July 1990) at 2800MW is #1 on the list.
OK, but TPWombat suggested it was more to do with the demand on the pumps in the water distribution system. Now I know we are supposed to like our tea in this country, but nevertheless I would imagine that in other countries they experience a surge in non-tea-related water usage at the intervals during or after popular TV programmes.
Britain’s power management issues may well be different from those of its European neighbours because it seems from this map that Britain’s grid is fairly loosely coupled to Continental Europe’s (compared to the strong interconnections between the other European countries).
Also the equivalent event to a 2.5 kW British tea kettle being switched on would be a 5 W German fridge lightbulb being switched on, when a beer is taken out.
Water use definitely also spikes in other countries (e.g. in Germany there is a lot of micturition effected just before the 20 o’clock news and at halftime in a popular football game) but it is my impression that in a lot of towns water pressure to end users is mostly maintained by gravity (e.g. in my town there is this water tank in a city quarter that’s some 150 m higher than most of the city.) Also on my Sunday walks I often come on municipial water supply tanks on hillsides above towns, almost never on ones down in town. Further, water distribution to end user is usually effected by the same town-owned utility company that also distributes electricity to end users, and these utilities pay very dearly for peak load bought from the transmission grid as opposed to base load, so they have every incentive to smooth out the town’s electricity consumption e.g. by not running the water top-up pumps at an inopportune time.
Dunno. I think it would be my mum’s perfect job.
Britain’s grid is not at all coupled to that of Continental Europe - the England-France interconnector is a high voltage DC link, so the two grids are completely independent.
It’s also a little misleading to talk of a “British” grid - there is such a bottleneck between the Scottish transmission system and that of England and Wales, that it is more helpful to think in terms of an English and Welsh grid, interconnected with Scotland and France; and a Scottish grid, interconnected with England and Northern Ireland.
Wasnt there that big cascade blackout in the USA that revealed things were a wee bit dodgy as far as overall infrastructure went?
Was there a huge upgrade after, or was it blown out of proportion?
Otara
Really? There are a huge series of high tension lines running south. The grid controller in the programme mentioned above was asking Scottish hydro plants to bring turbines online to cope with demand. That doesn’t sound like a transmission problem to me. If you know better, please tell!
It’s a limitation. There are 3 lines (2 at 275kV and 1 at 400kV) linking the Scottish transmission system (operated by Scottish Power) and the England-Wales transmission system (operated by National Grid Transco). Until 2005 these were two separate wholesale markets, and the link was known as the “Scotland-England interconnector”. Since 2005 there is one wholesale market (“pool”) on the island of Great Britain, so the term interconnector is not used.
The most recent figure I heard for the total capacity of the Scotland-England interconnector is 1600 MW (though it may have been strengthened since then). For comparison, the France-England interconnector has a capacity of 2000 MW.
Note that the actual location of the bottleneck limiting the capacity may be remote from the actual interconnection point (in this case, in the north of England).
The direction of flow across both “interconnectors” (Scotland-Northern Ireland and Scotland-England) is generally out of Scotland, as cheap (hydro and nuclear) electricity is exported into more expensive electricity markets.
If you want to see the National Grid real-time demand you can view it here . The page also shows how much power is being imported from France and Northern Ireland.
Note.
At the moment the graph seems to be offline, but it should be showing live data soon.
Strong interconnections that resulted in a continent-wide blackout when a German cruise boat manoeuvring cut a power line a couple years ago.
I’ll comment that when hibernicus and I went to the Dinorwig Pumped Storage station (remember that trip, Hibby?), we saw a video which was very much focused on the use of their power for supplying simultaneous kettles being switched on.
