Lightning stike leaves town without Electicity. The town can produce its own electricity, but when lightning struck an outside supply, the towns generators could not be started. They need outside electricity to produce electricity. Story at www.ljworld.com

-- White Rhino (rhino09876@aol.com), September 05, 1999

Answers

The ability to restart a plant without outside power is often refered to as the ability to perform a Black Start.

Many stations have backup generators to perform a black start however all do not. It would be interesting to know how many generation plants have black start capiblities.

In the SF blackout this year the generation stations near SF were knocked off by the Ground Fault, an were not restarted untill the Back bone of the Grid was reenergized, I suspect that they could not Black start.

This is a big issue if islanding becomes prevelent and some utilities get caught un aware......

-- helium (heliumavid@yahoo.com), September 05, 1999.

Hydro-electric can black start eithout any "outside" electricity. They turbines turning from the water creats the electricity used to start the power plant. Cool HUH?

Love where I live

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), September 05, 1999.

Chery,I know where i live are hydropower can not start up threw turbines.They have a diesel generator and then when out of gas they go to battery packs for a while,now those battery packs have been charged by the hydro currently,but put it this way Shasta Dam can not turbine start. Where are you getting your info?Just wondering!

-- y2kme1 (y2kme1@hotmail.com), September 06, 1999.

You would ask that wouldn't you? I cannot remember where I have that information~~Somewhere in this computer. I do remember being relieved hearing it though. If I run into the info though, I will post it.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), September 07, 1999.

The ability of hydro plants to black start may depend on them opening the gates. They might use small auxs. to help in that, though it can be done manually. Sometimes the problem isn't black starting but synching to the grid.

-- The Engineer (The Engineer@tech.com), September 07, 1999.

All nukes have backup generators, the gas turbine plants (both oil and natural gas fueled) are almost all capable of "self-starting" (depending on their individual control and sensor suite) provided "support services" like lube oil, cooling water, control oil/control hydraulics, and starting air/starting power (for the starting motor are available and controllable remotely. Thus, although the gas turbione itself can theorectically be "self-starting" to serve as a peaking load power supply, whether any given turbine can come up from black conditions depends on local conditions.

Diesel gen sets are all capable of self-starting, if they are designed to be the backup generator on site. They use air pressure to start, for example, and lube oil is driven from a crankshaft-driven pump so as soon as the diesel turns over, the lube oil and fuel oil are fully pressurized. Few coal and oil-fired fossil plants have backup generators, and no fossil plants are required to have them regularly tested, so emergency procedures are likely to be done "on-the-fly."

Not a reason fo roptimism.

-- Robert A. Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (cook.r@csaatl.com), September 07, 1999.

For those of you concerned about "black starts", and other power supply problems, I recommend that you got to http://www.albany.net/ ~dmills/y2ksub.htm. There you will find what I consider the most complete, unbiased description of the whole electric power system in regards to y2k.

I found it enlightening, reassuring in some ways, and frightening in some ways.

Al

-- Al K. Lloyd (all@ready.now), September 08, 1999.