How Power Blackouts Work 

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! ⚠️😬👍

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'.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

yeah thats sad

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

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.

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

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?

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?"

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

Look up the 1998 north American ice storm.

That was me 2 weeks ago in Texas. However, we went 72 hours.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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“Hey guys I’m back what happened while I was away”

*power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* *power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* *power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* 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

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." ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-B9aM4rH692M.html

I've never been at a generating station when the load was unstable - it must have been awesome!

Clawboss?

yes

Hey its the bus guy, right on.

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.

Damn it you caught me!

🙋🏽‍♀️

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.

That's a realistic perspective. Reliability is expensive, not only in upfront costs but in wider margins. In North America NERC dictates minimum margins but those truly are minimums. "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" (Dirty Harry)

Yeah, had me looking at it twice was kinda weird for real.

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.

Bro I live in San Antonio Texas, and I’m trying to understand the science behind these rolling blackouts. From my simple minded understanding from watching these videos, I think I figured it out. The rolling power outages that we are experiencing are comparable to a overload protection device. There’s so much demand coming from the customer, that if the demand is met It could overload equipment and cause equipment failures across the city. So the demand needs to be reduced to protect from an overload of equipment, so electricity can be dispersed efficiently right ? What I don’t get is that there’s already been equipment failures and there’s not enough electricity to match the demand. Since there’s not enough electricity to spread, then overload shouldn’t be a problem, so why are we having the rolling black outs ?? I’m probably wrong about all of this but I’m trying to understand.. Wait, i think I maybe getting it now. If they don’t do the rolling blackouts customers would be receiving electricity randomly, and I’m guessing that could cause power surges, which could lead to overloads of equipment, but if they control it, that solves the problem..

@@anthonyvasquez7050 so from what I saw on the news and what I learned in school (and experience in a freezing climate), the rolling blackouts in your region are made so that people are able to have some power to charge batteries, heat their homes etc. Why you have these are because of equipment failure and TERRIBLE planning. For exemple in the army or in hospitals you have 2-3 backup plans for everything, 2 pumps when you need 1, double the hot water heater etc. What I'm saying is the utility companies dint plan for a storm like this so now pipes are frozen, generators a seized up etc. They should have planned for a 150f day as well as a -50f day. But they dint. Lastly, and sadly, texas wants to be indepandent. So you are on your own. Look up a map of the north american power grid and you will see texas as no connections to another state that could help pick up the slack. Now we wont get into the politics of this but in a purely electrical stand point this was highly stupid of them. Now people are freezing and no one that was prepared for this can help you guys because of the energy independance. So those are my understanding of whats happening. Sorry you guys have to go thru this and I really hope you get out of it safe. Good luck bud!

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 😉

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’m here ...... now. 😩🥶

Stephen Rowley ... hey as long as he’s at it, we might as well have him throw in a little distance protection with hybrid single pole tripping too. ⚡️⚡️⚡️

“dark” i saw it

To my knowledge all Inverters must check regulary (multiple times a second) if the Grid is still online and if its down the will stop feeding immediately. (they do this afaik by not feeding for a millisecond and checking voltage if i remember correctly).

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

Come to Flagstaff, Arizona. Being a dark sky city, I can walk outside my home and see the Milky Way with ease.

In Italy also nationwide blackout in 2003. It was a mess

@Harry M Depends on what were damaged and how the fail-safe works. If what damaged is something major (like main transmission from major electric producer) them automatically major area would get blackout. If the failsafes were all something like single-use fuse, then repair them would take time anyway.

Ahaha the 1998 ice storm had 8 year old me learning how to make fires, build shelter and hunt deer with my bare hands. (Not really but that was some war-of-the-world shit and i learned how important gas stoves were)

Harry M because the sudden loss of a load causes the generators to speed up and things shutdown for over frequency. I don’t know what their limits are but my solar gear calls anything >60.5hz an error and shuts down.

good

@@edwin3928ohd How the hell is that good?

@@peter0976 because it lasted no more than half a day.

That's what you got when big power plants are located 1000km away from the biggest load center. All you need is a tree to short the circuit and voila, half of the island had a blackout

isn't java in Minecraft?

they could do double duty by being wave motion generators. Two for one.

@@AffordBindEquipment *Under* the ocean

@@NoNameAtAll2 I bet some boffin has figured out how to use them under the ocean. Whether it's cheap or not is another matter.

@@NoNameAtAll2 "under" is not defined; to be grammatically correct, these would have to be on the ocean bottom for the panels to technically be "under" the ocean. But my comment was a joke, which means "not to be taken seriously". But I have seen where wave generation is "under" the waves so as not to be beat to death by the constant bashing. Also, tide generators.

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.

@2009G8Gxp I live here in austin and the amount of companies that are closed at night with no one working and they still have all of their lights and AC on is astonishing. If anything, your statement towards me is laughable at best.

@2009G8Gxp So flipping a light switch and turning your thermostat to an equilibrium wont have any effect on the power grid at all. HMMMMMMMM How bright are you my guy? Turning off lights and AC units doesnt mean cutting the main power breaker to the building.

@2009G8Gxp considering I work with electronics and electricity in my industry, I think I have more of an idea of how businesses work at night than you do considering I'm the one of very few people that enter these buildings at night. The only thing that's 24/7 are server admins, security, and janitorial. That's hardly even a 20th of the entire force working in these buildings on a day to day basis. These rich fucks can set their thermostats to 73 degrees at night and no one will complain I promise you. Yet you want to come at me and say I don't know how the world works. Buddy I work in the areas and topics were talking about! You really wanna attempt to school me on something I do on a day to day basis?

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

Try not getting all your info on other countries from television, eh?

I live in the 5th largest city in the us and I could not tell you the last time I remember the power going out.

Hahaha you dont live here in Argentina.. We have power outages every summer..

Well, if you hadn't shut down all the nuclear plants, maybe your power wouldn't be going out.

Secound :(

@@plarek1 Third ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)