Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

London had to close its subways as temperatures hit 117 F (47C) on the subway system forcing its closure. New York City has an ongoing power failure. Seeming set off by high temperatures and high demand, over 80,000 folks in NY City will be without power for up to a week more (NY Times, 7/23/06).

According to the Times article, things have gone from bad to worse in terms of restoring power to New Yorkers. It reads like a scene out of "Day After Tomorrow." First a heat wave knocks out various transmission lines as usage goes up. A partial fix and rerouting stresses other lines as usage continues over peak. Severe thunderstorms come one after another, knocking out more power, but also flooding the tunnels carrying the power lines. Repairs stall, and lines brought up go back down. Meanwhile those without power swelter and show up at emergency centers.

The CEO of Con Edison (the power company for NY City) says it all:

"He said that 10 of the area's 22 network feeder cables — each carrying 27,000 volts of electricity to neighborhood transformers, which step it down to 120 volts for household use and pass it along through secondary lines branching out to homes and businesses — went down in an unprecedented series of failures whose cause remains unknown.

“It was really a very extraordinary event, something that I’ve never seen before,” Mr. Burke said of the failure.

The network, he said, is designed to let Con Ed lose two such feeder cables during peak demand and still preserve service in the area, which is bounded by the East River, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Newtown Creek.

But with 10 feeders out, he said the utility had to either shut down the entire network, cutting off power to 115,000 customers in northwest Queens (some 400,000 people), or try to preserve the network by asking major power users to cut their demands, and by reducing voltage on the system.

The decision was made to try to preserve the network and service to most of the customers by using only the 12 undamaged feeder cables, Mr. Burke said. But doing so put extraordinarily heavy demands on the vast latticework of low-voltage secondary lines — more than they were designed to take — and many burned out, causing blackouts that spread to about 25,000 customers (some 100,000 people)."

Indeed, I am not surprised that MR. Burke has not seen anything like the current situation, but he (and we) are likely to see much more of this. It is clear that the national power grid, which was already challenged by growing demand and lack of infrastructure upgrade, was not designed for the kinds of demands a chaotically changing climate will bring. The news from the UK shows that they too have designed infrastructure incapable of meeting what will be the norm of a warming world.

Long term loss of electric power is a disastrous side effect of global warming. It is accentuated by the fact that modern society is totally dependent on that electricity for day to day survival.