gary north poses some pretty interesting questions

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does anyone want to give it a go? just answer the following questions posed by gn and we can lay this whole debate to rest.

regardless of what dick mills thinks gary north does have his phd... he may not have all the answers but he certainly asks some pretty comprehensive questions.

http://www.prorege.com/north/5083.html

-- Anonymous, June 19, 1999

Answers

Marianne,

I can't answer all of GN's questions, and I don't believe anyone can when they would need to have comprehensive and sometimes confidential information from every electrical utility in the USA. However I can give some generic answers to some questions, and can answer some with respect to our own generating stations.

"1. You say that in theory the grid can stay up if enough power plants stay up. But I guess it could go down if they all go down. Is that logical? So, how many of them have to stay up to make sure the grid stays up? I'll bet you've got a formula."

The number of plants that can fail without taking down the grid will depend on the total capacity of all plant that is connected at the time, the total demand on the entire system at the time, the proportion of the difference that fails, and the response characteristics of the governors of the remaining plant.

As an example: If the entire USA was only taking 1200 MW, (I don't know just what the total USA demand is, but I would guess around 200,000 MW), and this 1200 MW was being supplied by just 2 x 600 MW generators, then if either one failed, the grid would fail. However if the 1200 MW was being supplied by 3 x 600MW generators each operating at 400 MW, then any one could fail and the lost generation could be immediately taken up by the remaining 2. With a demand of 200,000 MW, and connected capacity of say 240,000 MW, then the USA system could lose up to 40,000 MW of generation and still be OK. It could probably lose a further 4,000 MW with a small drop in frequency and voltage, but at that point the system would become unstable and could be in a precarious situation. Perhaps Engineer or someone more familiar with the USA can come up with more accurate data for your grid.

"3. How long, on average, does to take to get compliant for a power company that supplies power to over a million people? Could you name one that has?"

I very much doubt that any employee of any power company would expose him/herself to the risk of making an official announcement that such company is compliant. However we have taken 2 years 3 months to be almost compliant. I will announce to this group when we have completed the last step, but I will NOT say that we are compliant.

"4. How many suppliers does a typical million-customer power plant have? Entergy has 40,000."

At a guess, I would say around 40,000.

"5. About what percentage of these suppliers can go out of business before a power generation facility has to shut? "

Probably around 200%. If one company can no longer supply then another one will be only too pleased to pick up the contract.

"6. What happens locally if suppliers of crucial repair parts are located in regions where power is off for over 60 days? Or is this in theory impossible? Maybe you have a formula."

If the parts are for crucial repairs, then they should already be on hand, and the maintenance outage would have been scheduled some time prior to needing the parts. If it is a major breakdown causing an unplanned outage, then don't think 60 days, think months or even years. We had a stator fault in a generator last February, which was finally fixed last month.

"9. How will power companies get paid if banking shuts down? "

By cheque, the cheques can be processed by the banks once they are up and running again.

"10. How will power companies pay programmers to fix their systems if banks shut down?"

See previous answer.

"11. If SCADA systems don't work reliably, how is power flow controlled by human monitors? How long does it take a million-customer power plant to train enough people to run these systems manually, 24 hours a day, for a month? Could you name a company that has done this? Or do you have a formula? "

Without Scada, Power flow is controlled and monitored by system controllers manually dressing a mimic bourd or single line diagram, and verbally passing operating instructions to operators at the substations. If traing from scratch, then it could take weeks or even months to train a single person. If retraining someone who is already a system controller, then it could take as long as 4 hours, but more likely no training would be required as they can already do it. I know that I could walk straight into a control center without SCADA and be controlling a grid within an hour. That hour would be taken up finding where the paper records on line data have been filed, what communications sytems are available,where the coffee machine is, etc.

"12. Where is the industry's manual on operating things manually?"

Industry's manual? We have a manual of procedures at each power station, but we would NEVER pass it on to any industry body.

"13. What percentage of the industry's revenues has gone into contingency planning to run systems manually in 1999? "

In our case.. NIL. Our controllers are manually operating right at this moment. It takes 40 seconds to walk from our SCADA control room to the manual control room and switch the station from "remote" to "attended", and each machine panel from "remote" to "local", and being able to carry out this function is part of all controllers training.

Well I haven't been able to answer ALL of these questions, but I believe I mave have assisted with some of them.

Malcolm.



-- Anonymous, June 19, 1999


And let's be honest here, these are "questions" only in syntactical form. Taken together, they constitute an exercise in disinformation. Discredit Mills with sarcasm, change the subject, make unwarrented assumptions, present distractions, imply that the vanishingly unlikely can be taken as a given, ignore actual test results, disinterr debunked notions as though they'd never died, and so on.

What North has done is the opposite of ask for information -- he is relying on our not knowing the information in order to build a case. North is an advocate, not an investigator. He's doing his best to paint a false picture, and his 'question' format is carefully constructed to mis-frame the discussion, and prevent us from focusing on what counts by distracting us. North has mastered every tactic in the Unethical Debater's Handbook.

-- Anonymous, June 20, 1999


Marianne - you wrote: "regardless of what dick mills thinks gary north does have his phd..."

So what? My buddy has a PhD in Anthropology, but I'm not gonna let him wire up my house.

I will accept - in the abstract - that GN's training as a historian *may* give him some analytical ability, but - come on - who are you going to believe when the discussion shifts to how the power grid works? Gary North or Dick Mills. Particularly, when it appears that one of the parties has a major axe to grind.

Mike

PS - Marianne: has an e-mail virus from Drew Parkhill rendered your SHIFT key inoperative?

-- Anonymous, June 20, 1999


Malcolm,

Industry's manual? We have a manual of procedures at each power station, but we would NEVER pass it on to any industry body.

Why's that? Just curious.

Thanks.

-- Anonymous, June 21, 1999


Cause Homer got a jelly stain on it...of course.

-- Anonymous, June 21, 1999


CL,

I was just wondering about your comment regarding jelly stains on Procedure Manuals. Is this something that has happened at your facility? Is it what keeps your company from sharing vital training and procedures manuals? I have heard that is happening, in fact we have a posting from a CT source that says so. Just in case you see your own outfit holding back on sharing procedure manuals information due to some jelly stains on it, I would recommend that you just *launder* that part and pass it right along. In the event you have to pass it thru your CIO section, that's OK too, since I know they are real good at *sanitizing* all their information before moving it into the mainstream. Whatever, just get that stuff in motion. Oh, and you might think about putting up some signs about eating jelly donuts around the puter keyboards, cause if it drips into the contacts it could start a runaway incident that could end up in a meltdown. I mean, who would know to look for jelly in the juice, when all those lights start flashing. Bound to be some serious human error there.

-- Anonymous, June 22, 1999


Lane,

The reason that we would never pass any of our procedures manuals on to anyone else is because they do contain quite a lot of sensitive information. The procedures covered in our manuals are more than just how to control a turbine manually, but contain many trading policies and procedures as well.

Malcolm.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 1999


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