I cannot recall a single power outage in my home city that lasted longer than ~three hours. And even those "couple hours" outages are extremely rare, much less than once a year I would wager.
According to the statistics, the expected unavailability in my country is around 0.002 - 0.003 %. That's hardly something I would describe as a "normal thing" that "can happen at any time". That's a really rare thing.
The "SAIDI" value here is under 15 minutes. Meanwhile the median SAIDI of the US is ~1.5 hours. That still doesn't sound like a common thing.
> Tesla factory unlikely to lose power even if most of Fremont does because of agreement with PG&E
https://twitter.com/PBRStreetGang7/status/118178393541343641...
( disclaimer: might be usual twitter humbug https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-crowd-sourced-so... )
I mean, I'm used to IT in general, and security in particular, being treated as a cost hole and given as skimpy as budget as possible and then some until something breaks. But at least that's more intangible, and I guess from a cold hold MBA point of view it's not as if most places are really punished that hard for security breaches unfortunately. But power loss and having valuable work/material lost every year seems like it should be more tangible.
It's hard to imagine a better advertising campaign for those products.
What ever happened with Bloom Energy? they don’t get much press. https://www.bloomenergy.com/
Not saying there aren’t other options, just the one most businesses have opted for, and has the best ‘vendor’ support (plenty of fuel companies to deliver, rental agencies to arrange the delivery, and companies that Veratis that setup the building side needs)
Sadly you need to plan for these well in advance and be willing to sink significant resources.
Washington University uses about 376,394 kWh/year. [1] That's about 7,841.54 kWh/week. Washington pays about 13.1 cents per kWh for power [2]. Running on the electric grid alone this would cost $598.59 per week. This isn't what they pay though, because they offset much of this usage with renewable energy like solar panels.
That would take a 50kw generator to power. Assuming they don't power all systems during a blackout they could probably get away with a 25kw generator. For argument, let's assume a 50kw generator full load would probably use about 4.0 gallons of diesel fuel per hour. [3]
At $3.64/gallon for diesel [4], at 4.0gallons/day, for one week the university's fuel cost would be $2,446.08.
To recap, the university would spend $2,446.08 to generate electricity they could purchase for $598.59 from the electric company during a 7 day blackout at full capacity.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/25-of-the-most-energy-ef...
[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/averag...
[3] https://www.dieselserviceandsupply.com/Diesel_Fuel_Consumpti...
UCB has a 26MW gas turbine.
The 376,394 kWh/year is the savings they got from going to low wattage bulbs.
"Throughout the rest of the campus, the school has completely replaced their lights with more energy efficient, low wattage bulbs that save an average of 376,394 kW hours per year in energy" [1]
And your prices are from the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria municipal area, not the St. Louis area in which Washington University St. Louis is located.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/blog/25-of-the-most-energy-ef... #7 on the list
[2] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/news-release/averag...
> Throughout the rest of the campus, the school has completely replaced their lights with more energy efficient, low wattage bulbs that save an average of 376,394 kW hours per year in energy. Their overall lighting plan has saved more than 20.6 million kilowatt hours in total.
GIGO
I’m guessing the problem is in the capital cost of having a generator system installed. Getting procurement, university real estate/capital projects, a general contractor, and any deans/admin involved to build the system.
I have just assumed that all science buildings had backup generators by default. Movies may have tricked me. I think all hospitals are required to though, which makes sense why the researcher moved his metabolic stuff to UCSF
One day some years ago, the university administration thought, "why are we wasting money keeping power on, running lights and aircon and God knows what, when the buildings are vacant?". They soon turned that thought into action, and when a long holiday break came, they just shut off the power to the buildings as soon as everyone left for the day. About a week later, the PhD I mentioned and his co-workers came back to the lab, saw some droplets on the glass, and almost had a heart attack.
Turns out, after a week of being without aircon to dry and warm it, the air was just about to cross the dew point threshold, and if it did, it would kill the optics on a million-dollar research laser they recently got installed.
I hear that since then, they're a little bit less pound-foolish.
He was newly appointed as the supreme leader at this automotive plant. Uncertainty was high, this being 2007, so people were let go, and costs reduced with any means possible. So he went into production and one day decided that it is too cold in the storage area. He orders his people to increase the temperature with a few degrees since that would save tons of money. People protest, he hears only "blaa-blaa", and his request is implemented.
A few days later, it turns out that barrels upon barrels of chemicals in the storage area needed to be kept under a certain temperature. So the stuff solidified and it was now only good for the dump site. Out to garbage the chemicals went, new stuff was ordered, production was stopped until the new stuff arrived and temperature was restored back to normal after that.
https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
Often the most important comments in a codebase are signs on such fences, preserving hard-won knowledge of pitfalls in software and human processes.
Edit: If a Uni has a multi-million dollar laser, it should have a few thousand dollar backup generator!
They have backup power which can get them through any expected power outage. They don't have unlimited backup power that would be able to get them through a "apocalypse" or major terrorism scenario where the world is ending and power will be out for more than a week. Preparing to survive an apocalypse or major terrorism incident is possible. Build all facilities a mile underground with a self enclosed ecosystem. Might cost trillions, but can be done.
PG&E has intentionally deployed, at short and inadequate notice, what is equivalent to a terrorist attack on west coast infrastructure. No one prepared for or expected that scenario. Past events have shown that PG&E management are sociopaths who intentionally engaged in mass criminal negligence which resulted in dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of property damage. Even under the oversight of a captured court, they continue with their games.
If there is any sanity left in California, the USDOJ would bring the executives who deployed this plan and the judge who signed off on it under terrorism charges. If any deaths occur as a result of these antics, it should be capital charges.
This. If you've got a multi-million dollar experiment, gee I dunno make sure you're in a building with a generator?
"hey Mr. Government, I know you gave us that multi-million dollar DARPA reserach grant, but uh, someone hit a telephone pole drink driving on the weekend and, uh, power was out for several hours and uh yeah, that 2 years of research, uh, we gotta start all over can we have some more funds please?"
However when you have a laser system it's not as simple as having a backup generator. When the entire building power is affected, the AC system stops working, and all your nicely aligned optics become unaligned. If you fix them at that time, then when the AC restores, you have to realign them.
There are hundreds of externalities that affect productive state of the art research.
> Also, how important can these experiments be (in CA) if they don't have sufficient backup power at a university??
How important can freedom from fires be if they don't dig trenches for power lines in critical areas?
A nation is a social construct that California could certainly fit into. Hell, Jerry Brown called it one. Examples of nations: Palestine, the Kurdish nation, Tibet.
The legal construct is called statehood. States can bind themselves into larger legal entities by giving up some of their own rights. Examples include: the US federal government, the European Union, and the United Kingdom.
PG&E is big, but it doesn't cover the entire state. For example, much of San Diego is served by SDG&E, much of LA is served by SoCal Edison, and several larger LA satellites like Riverside (~400k pop) have their own city-managed power utilities.
edit - I'm looking this up and having trouble finding evidence of this outside of AB 1980 (proposition to break the state-sanctioned monopoly and allow competition among energy suppliers), which was from 1996
We tried nationalizing in Europe, within a capitalist framework: it just doesn't work. The TL;DR of 70 years of that experiment is that the State (gov and legis) is an extremely bad steward of any business endeavor; whereas lack of competition basically means no innovation and rent situations (it becomes sort of a tax in disguise to just hike prices or keep them stable when they should decrease).
Most unregulated big markets devolve into some kind of cartel after concentration, though, so that's yet another dead end after a 50-year cycle generally (telecom shows it well, TV as well, construction too).
What seems to work, for now, is a sort of regulated hybrid framework:
- networks and transport (of elec, data, whatever) is opened to a few companies, which can only sell access to said infrastructure to other actors, not market it to end clients.
- classic "operators" thus rent infrastructure capacity to these major actors and sell it to customers.
This allows very small actors to emerge (like "virtual" ISPs and telcos, we now have very small energy companies all over Europe). It's a recent development but these new startups provide great customer service and modern end/site equipment (easy to monitor, plug to some IS, etc).
The infrastructure caretaker status is typically "slightly public", with a non-profit mandate to maintain the infrastructure and develop it, using influx of for-profit investments by the operators, some citizen oversight, special status by law, etc. Basically, we try to make sure it costs as little as it should (it doesn't always work, rails are in a very bad situation for instance, and the caretaker is so deep in debt it's a failure, but the oversight of that dates to 100% public times with government-appointed CEOs).
TL;DR / conclusion: find the right medium between "private/unregulated" and "public/monopoly". Both are disastrous, but there are sweet spots in-between. Note that I have no idea how to pull off such change in the US, elec or telco markets are simply too entrenched / congress too corrupted it seems. We have that problem too but currently we're circumventing most democratic systems (whether citizen opinion or lawmakers corruption) by invoking the EU: “we must do it, no choice, it's EU law now”. That works most of the time and is the reason why the EU is so hated yet so quintessential. I'm not sure the Federal level would carry as much authoritarian weight in US States.
Most electric utilities in most states aren't regularly given insane contradictory legal directives that can only be reconciled by cutting power. This is not normal.
Once it does that, we'll come to appreciate their service as much as we appreciate the schedulekeeping of the MUNI.
But I wouldn't count on it :)
They can't afford another lawsuit like that one. They couldn't afford the one that already happened. So they are taking steps to prevent it.
All because of a law suit. Great job California.
At some places like MSSL we even had an onsite diesel generator becuase there were flight critical experiments going on all the time.
Many other faculties don't need that level of resilience so they don't bother. I'm not sure what the situation is for wider engineering or bio/chem. I imagine there are serious health and safety concerns for things like fume hoods that must be able to evacuate gases in the event of a power failure.
Berkely has a few generators though so I think these particular complaints are due to cost tradeoff decisions made decades ago and a general lack of foresight to predict the utility power completely shutting down.
Reminds me of something I saw shared here on HN https://cybersquirrel1.com/
>This map lists all unclassified Cyber Squirrel Operations that have been released to the public that we have been able to confirm. There are many more executed ops than displayed on this map however, those ops remain classified.
>Confirmation for all ops has been preserved by the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine whenever possible.
>"I don't think paralysis [of the electrical grid] is more likely by cyberattack than by natural disaster. And frankly the number-one threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels." - John C. Inglis, Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency 2015.07.09
Silicon Valley Power serves many homes in addition to large companies including Intel and Nvidia, and they do so with lower prices and better quality of service than PG&E. I will be very unhappy going back to PG&E if I move to another city.
Electrical utilities don't need to be a government-granted monopoly like PG&E, which combines the worst aspects of government-run and private-sector business. Silicon Valley Power proves there are better ways to run electrical utilities.
I’ve since left the Bay Area and now have SMUD. They come out every year to check brush and trees. This past summer they cut down a dying tree on the property at no cost. The arborist they sent out was extremely knowledgeable and didn’t mind that I took his time to ask about native replacements, etc.
Is Silicon Valley Power not a government-granted monopoly? How does their business model differ?
Statewide utilities are bloated and inefficient, and they abuse their monopoly power. PG&E acts like the only choices are to cause fires or turn off power when it gets windy -- it faces no pressure to find a better solution because there is no competition.
Small-to-medium municipal utilities that serve smaller areas can serve their customers much better, as Silicon Valley Power demonstrates -- if people don't like it they can move to a neighboring city. In contrast, PG&E is almost impossible to avoid.
California should give more cities and counties the ability to experiment with this model. Competition between municipal utilities is better than granting a single company a monopoly on a utility millions of people depend on.
In the 2000 blackouts the state forced us to have rolling blackouts out of “solidarity” even though we had access to plenty of power.
Unfortunately the phone system was sold off in the 60s, the cable plant in the 90s, and the animal shelter a few years ago. Short sighted.
This whole situation represents a loss of "social technology". Just as material technology is a bag of techniques for organizing matter into useful configurations, social technology is a bag of techniques for organizing people for a useful purpose. When a society loses a technology, be it material or social, it loses a capability. It becomes unable to do what used to come easily to it. For 120 years, California was able to keep the lights on. Now it can't. How is anyone supposed to not see this situation as a kind of foreboding regression?
This new power grid unreliability is far from the only example of our struggling to do something that came easily to us 20, 30, or 40 years ago. We've definitely lost something, although it's hard to pin down exactly what.
I'm not sure if public outcry was a factor in their decision to not follow through with the shutdown before, but you can bet that it isn't going to be a factor now.
The current outages are being triggered by similar weather conditions, https://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/fire_wx/fwdy1.html
The wind that shut grid blew at 10MPH. (Granted, it was forecast at up to 45MPH.) Did we not see winds of this strength during the 120 years* that we didn't shut down the grid over human coordination failures? If PG&E had to shut down the grid to avoid fire in light to moderate winds, it was because the people operating the grid were unable to coordinate the resources needed to operate safely under these conditions. What we've seen here is a breakdown of human systems that used to work reliably. We used to be able to operate an electricity grid reliably in moderately windy conditions. Now we can't. That should worry everyone.
* Yes, I know about Enron. That we've had two grid failures in 20 years due to human-coordination breakdown is a huge red flag.
Edit: phrasing, note that the winds were forecast to be stronger than what we ended up seeing
This seems to be the hindrance for most progressive changes in California. Housing is quite similar. I almost feel like some people are intentionally making the situation worse so as to provoke a far more radical change rather than allowing problems to be solved.
I'm finding it hard to put this idea into words in relation to a kind of 'civilization-scale', but the analogy is the disappearance of the 'killer instinct' after a certain time dominating some field of competition. Maybe not even that, just the blind spot of being the one sitting on top of the mountain.
Looking at how the winners are doing things in order to best them. Once you are the winner, the whole methodology flips on its head at the point of realization of 'we're now the best'. There's an amount of legacy baggage that comes along with it that's very hard to dispose of.
X got us to the top, so let's keep doing X forever since we've got our whole structure aligned to the methodology behind X. Inevitably, the things that made X the right answer at the time will slowly change, and that change won't be noticed, or accepted, until it's too late, and the entity doing Y ends up besting the entities doing X.
I'd say 70-90 years is starting to look like the 'world superpower' transition period.
Once infrastructure starts failing (bridges, apartment buildings, power grid) in ways that would get politicians fired and the responsible business directors given jail-time a decade or two ago, and yet none of these punishments is even considered likely in the current state of the world, then we're getting to the end-game. It's a failure on so many levels. It's the spiraling failure of 'X'.
The notion of collective good. The government may not have been drowned in the bathtub yet, but the idea that there's any higher purpose to humanity than maximized profit extraction for the rentier class appears to have won.
I really wish the PUC wasn't captured, otherwise we might be able to fix this problem.
Edit: this is not an anti-government rant. There is far more vegetation in the wildlands of California than is natural due to forest fire-fighting policy dating back 100 years.
Enron used the same tactic in 2000-2001. They took advantage of power laws to cause rolling blackouts in California in an attempt to raise prices.
Look how they turned out.
Just like our sales tax rates, income tax rates, our gas prices (due to taxes), sanitation costs, ad nauseum. We pay excruciatingly high rates for everything, and get mindbogglingly low returns for the money.
CA gov. and utilities are a textbook case in poor management and government out of control.
Where does the money go?
[1] https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
If you have specimens that you cannot afford to have warming up, it’s inexcusable that you don’t already have a backup power source.
This is not normal.
But most importantly, it's what didn't happen: the state of California did not bail out or grant PG&E immunity from these lawsuits. PG&E settled with the insurance entities and has since filed for bankruptcy protection, since the possible liability is larger than their market cap.
The blackouts are a way to minimize further risk and liability. But I would also guess that the intensity of blackouts is a not so subtle middle finger by the utilities to the state government for its resigned treatment of these issues.
Warmer yes, but dryer definitely not. Earlier in the summer there is still moisture left over from the previous rainy season. By mid fall it is much dryer, and the risk is increased by offshore winds coming from inland.
Because Jeffrey Skilling just got out of prison and he wants to hold California’s energy ransom for payment to a random bitcoin address
Source: https://www.vde.com/de/fnn/arbeitsgebiete/versorgungsqualita...
In the UK there is National Grid Electricity Transmission plc, which as the name suggests is responsible for the transmission infrastructure across the country. They are a publicly traded company, and the parent company owns electricity & gas distribution in the UK, and some in the US. There are then smaller companies who are responsible for maintaining more local infrastructure (as I understand it's still owned by National Grid, but they are responsible for fixing and upgrading it).
As a consumer you can choose to buy electricity from a long list of companies, and easily switch between them. All that happens is a different company collects your meter reading and they send you a bill. A lot of these companies also own generation facilities (e.g. SSE, who are also publically traded) while some are just resellers (e.g. So Energy).
I've always thought that there must be hidden pitfalls of selecting a different supplier, since National Grid would have the ability and incentive to tilt the playing field.
Likewise the 2000 crisis where LA's DWP customers had power when PG&E did not.
Although I'm sure it makes me a "socialist" for pointing these things out, it almost seems that having private monopolies in utilities is a bad idea
Although not as widely reported, SoCal Edison is also doing rolling blackouts in at-risk areas https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-10/l-a-face...
In particular, if you only take into account the revenue made on a given day vs the likelihood of a lawsuit and nowhere is economic damage accounted for, then you will turn the power off a lot more often and a lot more widely than you should.
Also, since SoCal Edison is geographically adjacent to the DWP but Edison is investor owned while DWP is municipal owned, I believe you are adding support to my point.
Uncharacteristic edit: Why the downvotes? It must be because you took the comment seriously and think the sentiment grossly naive, or heard the skepticism and thought it unwarranted?
While this combination is more likely in a desert, it's not true of all. For instance, the Salt River Project that oversees electricity transmission in Arizona switched to building underground lines in the 1970s. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/asked-answered/20...
But in terms of experiments, if you want your MSc or PhD then you better make sure that you can go a couple of days without power to the grid.
If you are in a rural area, especially a previously "white" area as the pre-1994 NP government called it, then you need to have your own > 5000 L water tank. The town where I went to primary school had 9 days without water or electricity a year or two ago. Probably half of the town (it's a small town though) never have water between 9PM and the next morning since they simply turn of the pumps (whether there is electricity or not). The government officials also steal water to go sell for $1 per 100 L to areas where there is no running water.
You can think of it as a kind of osmosis between previously affluent areas and areas that had been mud huts. If you think of it that way it doesn't sound that bad, actually, but I think the net position is not the issue, the real issue to me is the corruption and apathy within the government and the rate of improvement. Africa should be ahead of China in economic growth if you look at the youth percentage and potentially massive workforce.
If you want to completely redesign an entire country's power grid and make it 100% solar/wind, then South Africa is the perfect candidate. That is if you could forget about politics for a moment.
Even then, one of the sources did describe that they have an e-power plug in their lab, for the -80 freezer. That's pretty much how it's supposed to be. If they have additional important fridges, those should also be plugged into e-power.
I'm sure it's possible there are some labs at Berkeley that may be compromised in backup power, there are a lot of old buildings and infrastructure there. That still doesn't mean that that experience is common, just that the people impacted are complaining loudly. Most research labs may be totally fine, and just waiting for things to come back.
Temperature of ultrafrozen samples raised to -75 Celsius and years of hard work and a collection of DNA reference samples for agriculture were about to vanish
Clearly it's a big inconvenience but they're not in danger of losing any grants.
Portable generators are so inexpensive that I'd think an institution like this could just keep some in a shed or garage, and shlep cords through windows for extended outages. I bought a top-of-the-line tiny Honda Inverter generator so I could keep my wife's breast milk frozen in case of an extended outage, but even something half the cost would be good enough to run a refrigerator.
But, even then, if you plan for it, backup generators and Solar + Battery are very affordable!
I recently installed a Powerwall purely for backup. Because I have solar, it's slightly more expensive than a standby generator, but with no maintenance or fuel I suspect it'll be a wash within a few years. (Backup generators need expensive maintenance every year.)
Even Generac bought a Solar + Battery company because they know they can't compete, and their solution is nicer than my Powerwall! (The Generac solution includes a critical loads panel inside of it, unlike Powerwall where the critical loads panel is outside.)
and the answer is.... individual PIs optimize for the easy case (that power stays on), not the disaster recovery scenario. There is no SRE thinking at the individual PI level.
Power Companies circa 1900 there were lots of power companies, I've seen pictures of urban areas where there were multiple circuits run on poles, how many companies tried to serve a certain area, I do not know. Through lobbying investor owned utilities (IOU), or in most cases a single IOU gained the rights to serve an area exclusive. IOUs concentrated, for the most part, on serving dense load concentrations. As such the US Govt implemented the Rural Electrification Act, so low density areas could be served. The 2 types of electric utilities are public power (municipal, REA, RUS, PPD, UD, etc) and for profit (IOU's typically). In most cases, the IOUs give something to the government in exchange for the IOU providing service exclusively, it might be a tax or it might be free street lights. Municipals tend to subsidize the local government in some way, either through returned dollars or free power (street lights, buildings, traffic lights). IOUs typically have a defined rate of return and are supervised by a governing entity of some sort.
Vegetation Management The recent SERC compliance meeting had a good presentation on vegetation management from the utility perspective and another on enforcement trends. In my opinion a lot of the issues in the W US is the result of the policy 'no fire is good', the sand pile game I think illustrates the issue where the longer sand keeps from falling results in a larger collapses (see Yellowstone fire). Since the late 1980's the issues with not burning has been known, I had an ecology class where if I recall correctly that was discussed for a couple of days. Tree trimming and clearing out undergrowth is done on a regular basis when the utility has an easement, but especially in urban areas folks tend to plant trees too close to power lines or even worse encroach on the easement with buildings. Most utilities patrol transmission lines at least once a year if not twice or monthly, sometimes this is aerial and other times it is feet on the ground walking the line. As an aside, the NESC governs clearance of electric lines to stuff and how stuff should be built; the RUS has publications on line design if you want to read about it.
Distribute Generation The electric grid in the US is divided into 3 areas, Eastern Interconnect, Texas and Western Interconnect; they all function essentially the same. If I have a generator connected to the grid, it has to synchronize to the grid before closing the breaker. If it is done correctly then there is very little mechanical stress on the generator, if done incorrectly then there is a large amount of mechanical stress on the generator. One mis-operation I know about involved the A and B phases being swapped during a re-wind, when the generator was closed in at commissioning it had a large bang/clunk and the breaker opened immediately. The generator then had to be examined, i.e. taken back apart, to figure out what went wrong and if it could be put back into service.
If I have a generator partially supplying a facility (this can save a lot of money for an entity) and a fault happens on the grid then my goal is to protect the generator, so the generator will either shut off or island the facility while shedding load above the generator's capacity. This happens very quickly. One instance I know of, the urban area was supplied by transmission (aka remote generation), a 30 MW generator was the closest source, the utility had a fault because equipment misoperated and the generator was suddenly trying to supply all the power to that fault such that the generator protection operated and islanded the facility. It was no issue to close the grid interconnect back in (once it was ensured it was safe to do so) but the facility had to shed load to keep the generator running without causing electrical issues to load and damaging the generator.
Once a facility is islanded and running on its own generation the phase angle is a don't care until it is time to synchronize back to the grid. As long as the facility can shed load to maintain frequency (there is a NERC standard on Under Frequency Load Shed if you want to read about it) and not ruin equipment by having a power quality issue. During dynamic studies for system stability, it can be observed that a generator will diverge from the system frequency phase angle but not trip off because it is isolated from the grid which requires verification that isolation is happening and the protection scheme will indeed work that way on the actual system.
My observation is that most facilities, data centers and other processing facilities (refineries) tend to be the exception, concentrate on first costs when designing their electric infrastructure. It is possible to design a resilient system but it has a cost and it will not be utilized 100% until something goes wrong. And if you are doing research then that can be an issue as you may lose a large amount of data due to the power going out or possibly being sensitive to transients on the system, e.g. a switching operation on the transmission system affects the end user equipment. Even if you have redundant systems (and/or power supplies) it is possible to have single point of failures on your system. As well if you have enough local generation to supply your load, it may be more economical to not run 100% of your generation as the market price for electricity is cheaper than your cost of production (and there are folks who don't like idle assets, not realizing the greater benefit is not using it or only having to use it infrequently).
One other aspect of distributed generation is the automatic separation of the DG when loss of voltage is detected on the grid side. Utilities do not want voltage on their system if they have an outage due to worker safety (and other reasons). Utility crews in hurricane areas will typically investigate if they hear a generator running when the power is out to an area to ensure it is not back feeding the distribution line. As a reminder keep your feet together if you are near a downed power line and hop away, or even better don't go near downed power lines.
