Snipped from http://sangersreview.com/ Friday, October 22, 1999. Patrick Shannon is News Editor. The essay is Jim Lord's "A Graceful Scenario".

This is a good place to mention the latest essay on Jim Lord's website. Here he discusses "a possible strategy for the nation's electrical utilities which might have protected against a widespread collapse of the nation's power grids. It involves breaking the existing grids up into several hundred smaller grids (called 'islanding' or 'decoupling'). The idea was to isolate problems preventing their spread across the entire system... It is now unlikely this strategy will be used in any systemic, centrally managed way. The industry, its major trade association (NERC) and the government are too solidly committed to their 'all is well' position to allow for any large-scale contingency planning of this sort. Some individual power generating facilities are making plans to 'unplug' themselves from the grid in case of problems but the concept is not widespread at the moment."

I mention this here because, according to electrical expert Rick Cowles, "(E)very electric company has some really large commercial loads- a steel mill,... an oil refinery, a large production facility, big office buildings, (or a chemical plant of some sort? P.S.) (on)... interruptible contracts. In other words, they pay less money for their power because they allow the electric company to cut them off if there isn't enough power to go around or if there's problems. ... They're the first loads to go when there's a power shortage... (O)ne of the... strategies that they're looking at right now is cutting off those interruptible loads. They would do this (to keep) a problem in a refinery or something (from) introducing a fault into the transmission network or taking more power than is available."

The point that Mr. Lord makes is that "Large, complex systems require a graceful shutdown to prevent damage to expensive components. You don't just turn the power off at a steel mill, a chemical manufacturing plant or an aircraft carrier. If you do so, there are many systems that will suffer damage. Just like your car doesn't like being put into park before you come to a complete stop. Some critical systems even have backup power to keep them running long enough to either restore power or shut them down in the proper fashion. The power companies could dictate a shutdown schedule to most of their large, interruptible customers. Such a mass shutdown would have to be carefully managed to prevent disturbances to the grid. Accordingly, the shutdown process would have to be spread out over some time period, as much as several weeks in areas with many interruptible customers. After the date transition, the process would be reversed and there will be a graceful restoration (called a 'reboot') to normal operation as the condition of the grid will allow. The reboot period will also have to be carefully managed and will likewise take several weeks..."

PDF Document: 10/22 A Graceful Scenario

-- Anonymous, October 23, 1999