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

-- Critt Jarvis (critt@critt.com), October 23, 1999

Answers

Can someone stear me to PDF download? It used to be that whenever I went to a PDF document, there was a download. Now when I click on a pdf document it just downloads the file and I cannot open it. Thanks,

Taz

-- Taz (Taz@aol.com), October 23, 1999.

Jim's ideas are reasonable and I thought about a year ago that there might be an attempt to do a 'graceful shutdown' nationwide. It doesn't look like the politics of the situation will allow this. My manager has called this 'group think' which means that the group can not address scenarios outside of the preapproved 'acceptable' discussion. No one dares mention the obvious 'what if things go wrong'. So we probably will not see Jim's suggestions played out expect at the 5 or 10% of plants and utilities where the management is really on the ball. The rest will simply wait until there are problems and then react to them.

-- ..- (dit@dot.dash), October 23, 1999.

Some of these areas that may shut down are small cities and. Our little city just spent $1mil on generators and fuel tanks. We have a population of 5k. The city officials were told the grid will not go down because they will cut off small cities like us to keep it up. If they thought that is was only a 3-7 day problem why would they spend that kind of money.

-- Andre Coltrin (andre@caselaw.com), October 23, 1999.

Taz, maybe you need to re-install Acrobat Reader. You can get it here:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html

-- biker (y2kbiker@hotmail.com), October 23, 1999.

The companies and users that must do a phased shutdown to prevent damage to equipment are going to be in big and expensive trouble if they try to stay in operation and are shut down suddenly without warning to to surges, outages, and breakdowns in the distribution system. It would be in the best interest for these companies to do a shutdown that they can control so that they are not shutdown suddenly in a manner that damages their equipment. If refined petroleum become as limited and expensive as it now appears, the disruptions caused by this will cause layoffs, bankruptcies and inflation so that many people will not be able to afford to buy what they need, this will cause a recession or depression and people will be worse off as a result of unintended consequences.

-- Moe (Moe@3stooges.gom), October 23, 1999.

Any significant islanding of electric suppliers will destroy the pipeline and rail systems, which must have uninterrupted power over the large areas that they serve. Die now, or die later.

-- dave (wootendave@hotmail.com), October 23, 1999.

The graceful shutdown strategy has some flaws when it comes to some of the industries used in the example. Steelmills, those which operate blast furnaces in particular, cannot shut down.

If the continuous process is stopped for any reason, a blast furnace must be completely rebuilt. Seems that the firebrick used to build the furnace will crumble if allowed to cool. Also related to steelmaking, coke ovens have similar problems if allowed to cool down.

Certainly there would be similar problems in other metals processing industries, aluminum and copper come to mind. And it has been previously reported that if oil refieries are shut down the restart period could extend into months. Other kinds of petrochemical plants are likely to have the same sort of long-duration refurbishment as part of restart requirement.

So now what can be done? Here we have some circumstances where industries involved are forced to try and make it through rollover in full operation. And if they make it through, how long before they decide to shut down because they have no customers to recieve the product they've made or their suppliers fail them due to a Y2K failure?

WW

-- Wildweasel (vtmldm@epix.net), October 23, 1999.

WW, I see your point, and I know that computer related snafus have caused catastrophic damage to an industry that 'cannot' shut down (ie New Zealand smelting plant) but I do not understand how an industry that depends upon electricity for critical production AND is on an interuptible contract would not have backup power capabilities for at least several days. It sounds like corporate suicide otherwise.

Of course, beyond several days (read 6-10 days), all bets are off.

-- OR (orwelliator@biosys.net), October 24, 1999.