How Power Blackouts Work
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2024
- Exploring the protective systems that keep the power grid from self destructing.
We usually think of the power grid in terms of its visible parts: power plants, high-voltage lines, and substations. But, much of the complexity of power grid comes in how we protect it when things go wrong. When your power goes out, it’s easy to be frustrated at the inconvenience, but consider also being thankful that it probably means things are working as designed to protect the grid as a whole and ensure a speedy and cost-effective repair to the fault.
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Writing/Editing/Production: Grady Hillhouse
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This is the final video in the series on the electrical grid for a while. Watch them all here: ua-cam.com/video/v1BMWczn7JM/v-deo.html
Would be nice to have more 👍🏻👍🏻
Thanks a lot for the very insightful series! I can't wait to learn something else!
Great series. Would you consider a series on transportation infrastructure?
Can you do a video on why PG&E can’t keep the power on whenever it gets breezy in California? I have zero doubt that you could explain it better than irate customers on Nextdoor (which is about all we get out here since the full explanation won’t fit in a 30-sec sound bite or a PR tweet).
@@OtherTheDave Yeah, that might be a timely P.S. to this video series....! 🤔 And good luck out there! ⚠️😬👍
Here in South Africa they turn the grid off for fun.
Eskom has left the chat
^yup. Don't you love when ur house burns down, you get a new one, and it doesn't have power half the time? Cause Pacific Gas & Extortion does
lolll
Maybe that's some malfunction of this famous South African ability of conjuring lightening? :D
Don't worry, they do it in the Philippines as well. We sometimes joke about it as 'a manager's kid playing with the main power switch'.
"Idk how much a car that never breaks down would cost" About $1500 on craigslist for a 1994 Camry.....just sayin.
got a 97 civic that'll challenge that lol
I have a gold 1994 Camry that just rolled over to 390,000 miles. Can confirm.
The best is the Previa though. 750,000 miles on the engine and it's still got resale value
My gold Camry is approaching it's 20th birthday and everything is still working. Just keep the oil fresh and they'll go forever
Lol I thought of my 94 Camry as soon as he said that
The visual demonstrations really help communicate your point. Great vid as always.
Last year a storm knocked over trees and wreaked havoc in my area. The next day I went out to see what was up and I saw a large branch laying across the transmission wires and was on the ground at the other end. I almost walked up and tried removing it myself, then I reconsidered and called the emergency line. They told me not to touch it or even go near it. When the Lineman finally arrived, I was talking to him and he flat out told me if I had touched that branch, I would be dead. It was grounding out power lines. That shook me up. I couldn't believe I was actually going to grab it. I thank my stars that I listened to my inner self warning me. This is a cautionary tale. If you see it, leave it. If you're in your car and can't get out, don't even try. As soon as you open up your door and place your foot on the ground, you just let the current, which was being isolated by the rubber tires, have a path to ground. Through YOU!
2-17-2021 in DFW Texas. Snow storm for the pass three days. Therefore I’m watching and learning.
This has got to be the best engineering channel on UA-cam. Props, Bradey.
I'm lucky - I live on the same block as a fire station, so on the very rare occasion of power failure, mine comes back on pretty fast.
lol...I love how you have googly eyes on all your equipment!
I had a power blackout last night...this helps a lot with future black outs
I live near the Jersey Shore, not far from NYC. And our weather often includes wind storms, ice storms, and flooding, and small-scale power outages are common. And I can't use the internet without electricity! So I phone the power company's "outage hotline" to report it, and they give me an estimate of when it will be fixed -usually it's finished well before that time. But it seems to me that the utility could use drones to make a map of places where trees have big branches hanging into the wires, and send crews to remove the branches and make the power line more protected. Of course the cost of electricity will go up if they do that...
My landlord loaned us a generator after Sandy, when the power and phone and internet were down for five weeks. My furnace uses an electrical circulating pump, and of course there's computers and TV and my rice cooker and the coffee percolator. I rent this place, but if I owned it, I'd have a Generac installed.
An excellent point at 6:20, almost! I believe you meant to say, “These are all types of managed failures where you have some loss of service *AS* the cost of protecting the rest of the system.” Dang. Missed it by that much. 🤣 Thank you for another great video. We all appreciate the time you put into making them.
I would love to heard your take on upstream protection devices such as hydraulic/electric reclosers and disconnect switches. It’s definitely more in depth that this video but USP’s are such an important part of the grid and are an unsung hero!
What would happen in my tiny home town was that the first snowflake of the year would touch the ground. some jerk off in a lifted dual back tire truck would then sense it and instantly go spinning off the road and shear off the one power pole going to the whole town for most of the heart of winter.
This is the best channel I know
7:38 These guys are disassembling artificial Christmas tree, not doing the power line maintenance XD
As a medical professional I can relate the blackout with the protective mechanism called syncope that we evolved to avoid permanent shutdown of critical bodily systems. I will never look at blackouts the same way again. Also my appreciation for all my engineer friends working at power supply industry just increased a bit.
Thank you Sir ! It's very easy to understand now 🙏👍
Feb 14 2021. Texas was minutes away from a black start during freezing cold temperatures.
Most irritating is when power goes out when you are out of apartment, so when you want to get home again, the RFID tag don't work in the door because of... the RFID reader dont have power so you can't unlock the front door. You have to wait until power comes back, or a neighbour exits so you can "tailgate" in to the stairwell.
Great video, and thanks for a new outlook on power loss situations!
The algorithm really has a dark sense of humor these days
“dark”
i saw it
For the record transformers on the power grid typically have a 12 month lead time. I used to work for a company that produced transformers 🤘
I love how he showed us the UA-cam Gold button without making a separate video showing it off like other youtubers।
Another great video Grady! Keep it up, love your content.
A fun video would be to do the calculations for a pumped hydro facility. With Lake Erie being the upper reservoir and Lake Ontario being the lower. A mere 6 inches is a trillion gallons with a height difference of 300 feet it would be the biggest battery in the world by several factors. While the politicsof both the shoreline owners and it being an international border might be insurmountable to ever get done. It would make a great video to do the calculations for electric generation and the practical engineering for sizing & construction of tunnels, penstocks & transmission lines.
Ever thought about writing a book? There is so much we don't know about the everyday world around us - power, water, sewerage, roads, buildings, transport, etc...
The madlad actually did it
Here it's because it's too hot and someone looks at the power lines funny. And everyone using their power at once to protect the grid. This week we had wild weather and fire so the electric company had the lines on "trip", I think.
But it's cool to know what else happens.
And this is why I have my own solar backup. Because there's no guarantee that the grid will be back up quickly. And solar is a lot cheaper than it used to be
A relay is not a sensor! It is an electrically controlled switch. It needs a separate external sensor and circuit to operate.
Satisfactory players know what a black start feels like :D
Can you do an episode on how EMP's work? Thanks!
Ah.
Today isn’t about engineering to last.
Companies hire engineers to engineer an item down to the last plug nickel- obsolescence.
We all should appreciate the pole dancers that risk their lives to keep us happy.
And on my birthday. thanks!
Power plants need power to start, so how did the first power plan start? With hand-cranking starter or lead acid batteries?
Good sir
Can you please make a detailed video on how Dams work!
How you go from blackouts to cooking just like that lol
Pg&E could sure present this to California
I've got a question for anyone who sees this comment.
Where I live in Sydney Australia, everyday at 10:01 pm ish our lights flicker. Often there are more flickers at 10:16 and 10:31 too. What might cause this?
Edit:
Culprit found
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak
It takes several days to turn a coal power station on and off. So they can't just turn it off overnight. Power companies have cheaper rates at certain times and send out signals to automatically turn on things that aren't time sensitive like hot water cycinders.
City's with more modern grids than Sydney (cough cough) have smart meters that change the price on a half hourly basis.
Wonder if this will ever get read
2:55 Provo Canyon Wind Turbines.
I'm watching this with a blackout going on
@2:30 I'm looking at you, PG&E.
Do you still need ground wired for your electric meter? Since mine got removed but I still have electricity
"Hide solar panels under oceans" 😂
I know birds are fine because they are only on 1 wire. But is it the same for a human if they are hanging on the 1 wire from their hands but swing their legs up and grab with their feet also making an arc? Would the power going through you be too much?
Picture at 8:07 is from Timisoara, Romania :D
An OM606 engine can last up to 3 million km according to some (it's a 90's diesel engine by Mercedes). Or semi truck engines if you don't mind the increased demand on fuel, they can last over 3 million km typically. But a car that would NEVER break down... that would be impossible. I mean like... for it to have a super smart computer which could melt metal that you throw in so it can then replace broken parts and whatnot... that would take up FAR too much space and it would be WAAAY to impractical XD Therefore, there will ALWAYS be cars that need to be repaired at least a couple of times.
I’m here because I live in Texas
Why was Toronto the thumbnail? Is my city that nice :-)
That look great for a cooking engineer
The concept that there is a single grid and it needs to be centrally managed is the flaw here. As much as practical, power should be generated near where it is consumed.
In theory, yes. In practice, there are a lot of differences that would have to be managed. When I lived in Phoenix there was a neighborhood that had an early microgrid, connected to the distribution by a transformer. It was in the news when the transformer was becoming unreliable, there was no replacement available, and the alternative came with a price tag just short of a million dollars. I never heard how that turned out.
WE NEED SOME JAN MICHEAL VINCENT'S FOR THESE ZONES
We haven't had a blackout in many many years, the last one must be pushing 10 years ago now and that was caused by someone crashing their car into something important.
How do power blackouts work? Well, if you live in South Africa, the answer is "often."
Nice demonstration with the 4 led’s
its a great demonstration that deserved a better explanation for the voltage rise.
Not a very realistic one though: you can see the power supply is in constant CURRENT mode (6:53, the CC LED is on), which means it will do whatever it takes to shove down the current meant for *four* resistors down the remaining *three* , basically by raising the voltage until that happens. It wouldn't do that *at all* in its normal, constant *voltage* mode. In real life, the voltage applied to three lightbulbs in your home does definitely not go up just because you've turned the fourth one off (or more exactly it does so negligibly little).
Now, it's certainly possible that the power grid can have some sort of equivalent phenomenon going on in specific situations, but how or why that would happen was certainly not explained here at all.
True, the voltage is constant, but the current rise is what does the damage. In combination Primary/Distribution substations some circuits have inductors because the primary transformers can (for a few cycles) put out enough current to melt and fuse circuit breaker contacts together. The inductor resembles a tube, and is designed such that normal load currents pass through, but a massive overcurrent fault will cause a huge counter-EMF (backpressure wave opposing current flow) in the inductor stopping any spikes from the primary transformers dead in their tracks.
@@AttilaAsztalos When I turn off my electric kettle at home, I can see the lights going brighter for a few milliseconds
@@AttilaAsztalos but that demonstration was exactly what happened when the 2003 outage happen. One line goes out and all the power (or current) that pass on that line had to be distributed to another line, which subsequently went out because to much power (current) and in few moments all northeast were out of electricity
"Loss of a service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system" well that is a different perspective
That's why major public services and big business had their own emergency power supply, though.
Look at it this way: Do you want to lose power for one or two days or 2 months? Designing systems to go off grid or fail, before the powerplant does is essential, to not have power for the next 2 months. If the generator in a power plant gets damaged, that plant usually isn't working for the next 6 months. Also shedding large power consumers, like steel arc furnaces and so on is faster than starting up a gas turbine.
@@JainZar1 or the electric companies can start doing their jobs and stop being greedy and put there lines underground in forest areas and not have the fire/blackout at all.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 If your place is anywhere near San Andreas fault, then putting your cable underground is... rather suboptimal. They should have done more maintenance, though.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 there will always be blackouts. In my experience, ground cables break more often than hanging power lines, usually because someone didn't check the ground before digging. Also, ground cables don't get cooled of by wind, so they are more prone to melt during heavy load.
Grid protection is my job. It's really about shutting down before stuff breaks. If you have a blackout that lasts for less than a day, we've definitely done our job. If it lasts for a week, we might have missed something important.
If nobody even tried to do our job, expect at least a few fires, and probably a transformer explosion. The full cost to replace everything that was destroyed will probably be a dollar amount of 6-7 figures, and take at least 6 months before it's up and running.
In 2003 at 3 AM Italy had a serious blackout that involved 56 million people. It was caused by a tree flashover on a 400kV line that supplies power from Switzerland to Northern Italy. The loss of the powerline triggered the two 40kV lines from France to trip as well, due to the sudden increase in demand. In 4 seconds GRTN lost control of the power grid, as a series of cascading events plummeted the entire Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily into darkness. As the grid frequency dropped below 47.5Hz a total of 7.5GW of distributed power plants went offline.
The blackout lasted for 12 hours, though some regions were affected by rolling blackouts for two more days. In Rome people were stuck in underground trains. All flights were cancelled, and a total of 30.000 people were stranded on trains. Police described the situation as 'chaos', though no major incidents occurred.
Though our little power outage was big for Italy it pales in comparison to the 2012 India blackout, which involved 9% of the world population.
also in 2003, the US northeast region suffered a massive blackout for much the same reasons, though the initial line failures took place over about two hours, with the final cascade of power plant shutdowns taking less than five minutes.
Italians are well known for electronics, especially in cars.
nice comment, thanks
You'd think a tree, much less the ground itself is a really bad conductor, but that's 400000 volts. And electricity is known to jump, even in thin air. It's probably a good idea to get rid of any trees anywhere near high voltage lines. This is also why hospitals have self sufficient generators that can last I think up to a week, or until they're out of fuel.
This is why we need underground lines. More reliable, safer and less environmental impact.
You missed the opportunity to say "this may come as a shock" in the beginning
yeah thats sad
Blackouts are when the darkness escape the powerplants and cover the cities.
seems legit
100% Fact'nt
Hm.. And here I was thinking that blackouts were just negative electricity that radiate darkness from bulbs instead of light. Ya learn something new everyday!
Hi yes hello that’s fucking OMINOUS thank you.
Are there ever; "whiteons of dark?"
Huh, I've never thought of blackout as a safety feature, but it really is. Thanks for an insightful video!
Most "alternatives" to it probably include some sort of terrifying electrical fire and/or melting of things.
Uhm, sound like when a surgeon dealing with a gangrenous thumb cuts off the arm above elbow. And a leg. Just to be safe. Long live engineering!
Here in California, PG&E has been doing rolling blackouts to try to stop fires around CA. It’s not done what PG&E said it would but it seems to have lessened the intensity. It’s not as bad as last year but still bad.
I'm happy in Factorio all I have to do when blackout occurs is to take few stacks of coal to restart it and expand my coal mine.
When I first played Factorio, I kept thinking "this is too easy, I wish real life was like that"
@@buttonasas Then you become quickly overwhelmed by the size of your growing factory and before you know it 3 years have passed and you still haven't sorted out your iron shortages
@@Ryanisthere Still easier than Real Life. 🤣🤣🤣
Use burner inserters on the boilers to keep them functional even during a power outage.
@@quadrplax
What is a burner inserter?
"When the power goes out it probably means things are working as designed to protect the power grid as a whole."
Unless you live in certain areas of California, where it means the power company has neglected maintenance for so long that they don't dare keep the power on because it will start more wildfires.
A power line transformer exploded in spectacular fashion once near my house one night when I was living used to live by a redwood forest. Luckily for the neighborhood it was the middle of winter and this was before we had the big drought. I don't think redwoods are able to easily catch fire. I'll give the unnamed most hated utility some credit though, they got the transformer replaced in a day.
No matter how it starts a fire shouldn't be able to spread into a major disaster like it can in California. Controlled burns, and other fire management, should be used to isolate different areas so the amount that a fire can spread is much more limited. It's easy to just blame PG&E for everything, but the problem is much more complicated then that. You shouldn't have a system where something like a carelessly thrown cigarette butt can lead to a major disaster.
California is like the Well Yes but actually No meme.
what hasn't been mentioned is that the calif leadership in their infinite wisdom told PGE to start investing millions in renewable energy and so deferred maintenance became the word of the day. Along with the watchdog agencies that were in bed with PGE and the powers that be, blackouts are an unfortunate reality.
Maybe if the hippies let people do their job and cut down trees to manage the forest it wouldn't happen
I can simultaneously:
1. definitely respect the engineering aspects of blackouts and the safety it brings
2. be utterly frustrated at the years(/decades?) of mismanagement and shunned preventative maintenance that lead to them being required
Ideally, grids and systems should be replaced regularly (they transmit HUEG amount of energy, some material deformation and decay cannot be avoided), but changing these stuff are costly, and sometimes you run into problem like 'these stuff didn't made anymore' or 'nobody really knows how these works', which is ultra sucks.
Travis Johnson : Ontario Hydro learned a major lesson during the Ice Storm of January, 1998. Since then, they are much more diligent about keeping trees away from local power lines. They always had been pretty good about the major high voltage distribution. “Next Door”, in Quebec, they learned that there was a limit to how much weight a transmission tower could hold. . . and when one collapsed, it would pull down several more. It took more than a month to restore power to some areas.
I never experienced a blackout in the 33 years of my life (in a small and "overdeveloped" nation though).
@@Peter1986C I hate the word "overdeveloped." It sounds like we had enough innovation and we need a few steps back when people were dying of preventable diseases or people were living worse than we do today. "Overdeveloped" really sounds like some form of scare tactic that primitivists would say.
Preventative maintenance can't prevent everything, and it's never been expected to.
If you see a power system with constant blackouts for no discernible reason, that might indicate a failure to do preventative maintenance. If, for example, the entire state that that power system has been in for decades turns into a tinderbox underneath all of the power lines, normal rates of failure suddenly become catastrophic events that cost human life.
My coffee machine: short circuits
Nuclear power plant: *explodes*
Nah, at worst it would just damage the generator, the actual reactor would be find. Though if the rest of the local grid went down they have to start the diesel generators to keep the coolant running.
@@TheAkashicTraveller just a joke on the content of the video, but yea I get it. Cheers!
Karibe Madhura
Cmon you could’ve given him a whoosh
@@Zeckmon3 I thought its kinda becoming too overused lately
@@karibemadhura442 it was overused the first time it was used
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“Hey guys I’m back what happened while I was away”
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Love when it does this
Zach Phillips I heared once that here in germany the powergrid (the control tech of the grid) trys 3 reconnections after a short happened before finally shutting down
Woah! You guys didnt even stretch the video 10 minutes, immense respect for this channel.
Easy when you have a sponsor
The 10 minutes are only required to have mid-roll ads. If you don't use them, you don't need the 10 minutes mark. I see people everywhere accused of the "OMG 10 MINUTES" and they don't even use mid-roll ads.
what are this "ads" you are talking about ^^
@@Zpajro ads that play during the video. You don’t need to hit 10minutes to have a video before the video, but it has to be atleast 10 minutes in order for ads to play during the video
During the North East blackout of November, 1965, the “chichen and egg” issue was addressed by by interconnecting a large group of employees’ cars to provide startup power for a plant in Connecticut (might have been Massachusetts) , that plant kickstarted the North East grid back to life. The process was described in an article in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact,
Sometimes I ride around on my bicycle, trying to figure out where all the interconnections of the local power structures go. Keeping track of that must be a major cartography job!
Thanks fir the great video!
I see there is someone else still alive that remembers that blackout. I was in Pennsylvania at the time and we intermittently lost power for a few hours. Quite the mess for the upper East coast. As I remember at least one very large generator was destroyed trying to keep the lights on in NYC. It took a few years to get it replaced. 11-20-2019.
I remember that like it was yesterday!!
Did they use the car batteries to provide excitation current to the (power plan) alternator? That makes the most sense.
@@jrmcferren There is a huge amount of control circuitry that has to be up and stable before a plant can be on line, and (depending on the fuel) everything needed to start it. A few years ago a power plant I supported had an intermittent failure in a charger on the battery bank that controlled one of the turbine units. The alarms for that charger were disabled, but the message was not relayed to the next shift. Overnight the batteries gave out and things went wrong, ending with lack of lubrication to the rotor bearings. The generator spun down with no oil and the expected results.
I was living about 40 miles from Philadelphia and all we had was a momentary brightening of the lights in the house and everything went back to normal. It wasn't until the 11 o'clock news that we found out about the power outage. And New York City was burning. Looting was out of control. We talked about that in school over the next few weeks.
I asked my best friend (an engineering student) why Practical Engineering is such a good youtube channel. He answered: "Because they skip the banging your head on the wall phase".
Who's here from the winter storm in Texas? My power just went out due to a rolling blackout
Damn it you caught me!
🙋🏽♀️
On June 16 2019, here in Argentina, there was an operational error with a 500kv transmission line wich led into a massive blackout leaving the entire country and parts of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil without electricity for at least 13 hours...
Look up the 1998 north American ice storm.
That was me 2 weeks ago in Texas. However, we went 72 hours.
Never understood cascading failures until now. Suddenly it makes perfect sense. Thanks, Grady!
look up the timeline of the 2003 northeast blackout. an alarm system failure meant operators were unaware of changing conditions, allowing things to deteriorate . the first failure occurred at about 2pm, then more occurred with increasing frequency until over 200 power stations were forced to shut down in
When the customer didn't turn it off and back on again, tech support short circuits a substation
Noorquacker can you explain what you mean?
@@legominimovieproductions At the risk of ruining a joke by explaining it, whenever you call your cable/internet company's tech-support because of a problem, they always tell you to simply switch off the machine (usually for 30 seconds, or so-- which is probably just an arbitrary number, but sounds smart to a layman), then switch it on again, which reboots everything. The gag here is, that instead of having you switch your one machine off/on to fix a minor problem, the tech-support guy does that to the entire power grid, just to fix your cable-box/router. It's akin to the "overkill" metaphor of using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
@@pcdm43145
Dude, by using a sledgehammer on a fly you could easily miss the fly !
Use a nuclear bomb - 100% guaranteed success rates at getting rid of flies in your area.
@@cezarcatalin1406 I like the way you think, my friend.
"It's the only way to be sure."
ua-cam.com/video/B9aM4rH692M/v-deo.html
I could already tell how impractical all those suggestions were, but you still got me pretty good at "hide the solar panels under the ocean!" 🤣
I have a bunch of lineman friends and wish that more people understood this, "loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system"
He said it wrong though my friend 😔
Would you rather lose power for a day or two or for half a year?
Maybe we ought to have more means of generation and storage of electricity, on smaller scale
I enjoyed this video. I spent many years configuring the computer system that monitored a small portion of the grid here in Virginia.
Thanks John👍🏻
John Nelson not all heroes wear capes
@@sgb4798 But they ALL wear spandex.
Relay tech?
@@circusmime No. For a while I configured the SCADA side of mainly Cooper Form6 reclosers and designed the user interface on this organizations SCADA.
I always look forward to your early videos. Amazing video as always 😉
Clawboss?
yes
Hey its the bus guy, right on.
As a power protection engineer I can say this was a good ten minute explanation. Well done! You should have been sponsored by a company from the industry though.
Honestly in a lot of ways I'm glad he's not as the corporate pressure might distort the meaning or general applicability of his videos.
I'm happy he has sponsors at all so he can continue delivering this quality content.
Why should he have been? Why would it matter? That is like saying the ads during the Super Bowl should be by football or sports related companies.
Recommended to me right after the entire texas blackout.
UA-cam has a dark sense of humor
Just got recommended this video and that's all I can think about.
Literally the worst thing I have gone through.
It's dark because of the blackout.
"and shuts off the circuit"
Most non competent electricians here will just replace the breaker with a bigger one
i use six inch nail
@corey Babcock nine imch thats 225mm imight bw.wrong but im sure we domt have them in uk
Isnt that how a house fire start
@@robertbennett2796 yeah
In Venezuela we suffer from daily blackouts due to the lack of maintenance, inexperienced workers and the government stealing millions of dollars destined to the improvement of the grid. Major projects have been announced and never finished. One of the blackouts affected the whole country for about 5 straight days consequence of a fire in a substation (a substation in the middle of nowhere with no maintenance for years), the government blamed the U.S for the blackout (Electromagnetic Pulses Attack).
Same reason that Costa Rica was in such desperate condition after the hurricane that swept it clean. money was going into pockets instead into maintenance. And people wonder why the US is reluctant to give them more money without guarantees it will go for infrastructure.
Corrupt government and blames the u.s for it's bullshit....
I'm pretty sure the only way of causing a large EMP like that that we have is to detonate a nuke at high altitude. That would be quite difficult to miss.
@@TheAkashicTraveller It'd also be pretty hard to make people believe that you didn't just break **international** laws.
Sad your corrupted government dont care about their people
Grady: I don't know how much a car that never breaks down wold cost...
NASA: about $865,000,000 for two of 'em (voyager 1 and 2 total mission cost to date)
Also Spirit and Opportunity $1,000,000,000 for the pair. Lasted way past their warranty.
Ford...
@@9HighFlyer9 90 day warranty take it or leave it.
15 years later
Oppy: "my batteries are low and its getting dark"
Press F to pay respect: F
Fords aren’t reliable.
I would ask any Texas people if they are here, but then again I remember they have massive blackouts atm
I’m here ...... now. 😩🥶
Thanks for the video. As a Protection and Control Technician for a large Transmission company, I appreciate the simplified explanation of the "zones of protection", as well as the whole video. I never have a good way to explain what I do for a living to people, and next time that happens I'm going to reference this video!
You've got a new subscriber in me.
Loving those googly eyes on that oscilloscope!
The other recent large USA outage due to a cascade failure was in 2011, when San Diego, Orange County, parts of Baja California, and the surrounding deserts all tripped offline due to an incorrect maintenance action in Arizona. It even caused the San Onofre nuclear generating station to scram and isolate.
I’m in Houston and it’s 14 degrees and the power has been off for 24 hours
I am absolutely NOT grateful for this blackout lol
This video should be retitled How to not be Texas
Barbados! I'm from and live there. Was really weird seeing that footage in one of your videos. We're actually having major power issues now.
Yeah, had me looking at it twice was kinda weird for real.
I bought my house in early 2015, located in the woods. For the first 3 years we lost power a lot, sometimes several times a month and always for at least a couple days. I realized it was always happening in the same area due to large trees falling down or branches that needed to be trimmed. I put in several complaints to the utility company and they finally did some work. We have only lost power 3 times in the last 2 years. Of course that was after I installed a generator hookup for the house lol.
it be like that sometimes
Says it all doesn't it. The bloody customer has to install their own power generation just to get adequate service.
Privatising energy creation and distribution was a mistake.
Very rural locations have all sorts of reliability problems that sometimes have no solution. The lines may pass over a number of jurisdictions and not all will have clear policies for right of way maintenance. In some areas it is a serious crime to cut trees without going through immense red tape.
Power lines are exposed to weather...
Me: Laughs in UK.
Not all in the UK are underground only those areas OWNED by the Nation Trust
The difference is my home state is 93000sq miles ALL of GB is the same at 93000sq miles. Size matters. So come back when you include all of the EU then we will be talking apples to apples.
@@tysleight I'm not critical of your Nation just critical of your belief that what your power company tells you is in Your interest or there's I live in a country that before the French cut off a Kings Head for Lying to the people and yet your happy to take your service company as not screwing you over ?
Lassi Kinnunen California has been politically mismanaged for years leading to it being like a third world country
@@bryansmith1920 more numbers just for apples to apples CA has a land mass of 163,000sq miles population density of 253 per sq mile, GB is 671 per sq mile or more than double.
My current electric rates are $0.09 kwh when I lived in London it was in USD was $0.29 kwh also 90% of the power in my state is renewable and has been since way before the Eco trend. So not bashing just trying to keep stereotypes from proliferating
When the grid goes down I'm the only one with the lights on for miles and miles.
I’m currently learning about the telegraphers equations and characteristic impedance of transmission lines. It’s good to take a breath and review the big picture with these videos.
It's even better when you are so interested in what you're learning that when you take a break, it's to learn more about the subject! That's when you know you choose the right career path!
The telegraphers equation refers to signal transmission lines, not power transmission lines. It's an unfortunate case of having the same name for different things. Signal transmission lines are lines such as coaxial cables, microwave wave guides and telephone lines, now almost obsolete.
I had to learn that in1980. Today: Fiber Optic Time Domain Reflectometry.
I couldn’t help but hear this video’s sponsor as “HellaFresh”... My mistake! 😆👍
6:20 "These are all types of managed failures where you have some loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system"
Shouldn't that be "types of managed failures where you protect the rest of the system at the cost of some loss of service"?
To clarify a term you used: a blackstart resource is one that can start on its own and doesn't require outside power. Every utility already has a blackstart resource identified and plan to power up substations and generation plants along the way.
Wow
Thanks for explaining this
I needed this for an assignment
Lol. At 75, I’m long past needing anything for an assignment. But I love this stuff; I don’t want to die as an ignoramus 😉
Yeah it's easy to forgive most power outages. But I wouldn't expect pg&e customers to be very forgiving. Seeing how a lack of maintenance around their lines has been causing massive fires and instead of fixing the problem they're just randomly cutting off power.... Which sounds like it's not even mitigating the fire hazard.
And really I think that there's plenty of justification for being upset about the general lack of maintenance getting done on the infrastructure in this country. And that's not the engineers' fault... It's austerity policies and greedy capitalists.
4:30 JESUS what is that guy holding on to? :O
épinards & caramel it looks like they are adding a “tap” to the line. (Probably for a line potential device of some sort, lower down and out of the picture). He is prepping the tap to keep it in place. He wraps Armor Rod around the conductor on both sides. That stuff he is holding is the Armor Rod.