California issues first rolling blackouts since 2001 (opens in new tab)

If only there were some precedent we could look to where huge numbers of people were out of work and the government killed two birds with one stone by employing a lot of them on major infrastructure projects. And what if those infrastructure projects, like improvements to roads, bridges and national parks, were largely outside and thus relatively safe even in today's climate of Covid-19.

It seems like we might go into a depression... if only that had happened before and we could draw on those experiences instead of dithering and arguing while people can't pay their bills.

Dare to dream, am I right?

> […] could be used to build and improve infrastructure.

But what about Infrastructure Week?

* https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/611389675/why-its-infrastruct...

* https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/donald-trump-infrast...

* https://theweek.com/articles/839005/all-infrastructure-weeks...

/s

> There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.

Well, at the federal level, there are two chambers of Congress and the Executive. Given that there's an election coming up in November, you may wish to do vote for the folks that you best think will change the situation.

Agreed. Instead of using cheap money to drive up asset prices it would be nice if it actually got used for something useful.

You'd think with the reduction in traffic there's all sorts of extra space and time for fixing old infrastructure.

Much of the bailouts you're speaking of are loans, not grants. The very large exception is the Paycheck Protection Program, which will in most cases become grants to small businesses.

Given the need to institute social distancing, this is the only thing which is keeping hundreds of thousands of small businesses alive. Without the PPP, and other loans to large businesses, we would be seeing tens of millions of permanent job losses.

Much of this money was not spent, it was loaned. And without it the lasting economic effects would have been catastrophic.

I too would like to see additional spending on infrastructure, and I think we can afford it, but I find myself frustrated to see it framed as bailout vs. infrastructure. These financial lifelines are meant to keep our economy treading water while we necessarily social distance. They're not to save corporations from excessive speculation.

Speaking as a socal Californian, infrastructure isn't the problem it's that most of the state hates confronting reality. We'd rather raise minimum wage arbitrarily than admit we have a CoL problem, we invest in bike lane expansions while leaving buses to fight cars for space in most parts of our cities because "omg bikes are so eco friendly and Europe does it", and for some reason we hate high density housing even though rent is on the rise everywhere. We were supposed to have expanded our energy infrastructure already to make more use of natural gas which might have alleviated the need for rolling blackouts but instead we of course chased green energy projects that let people in the politically connected affluent regions pat themselves in the back.

I’m guessing it shields local government from lawsuits. You’re right though, better alternatives to an investor owned utility would be a co-op or non-profit.

In a word, yes. There are plenty of smart people thinking about distribution management systems to control loads, manage local generation (household PV) and even use electric vehicles as an energy store to power the during periods of peak demand.

Supply authorities in my corner of the world (Australia) are planning this shift, but I can’t speak to the situation in other regions.

https://arena.gov.au/assets/2020/06/future-grid-for-distribu...

> Are these upgrades even in the planning phase?

I'm sure there are plenty of plans: the question is whether the general public is willing to deal with the cost.

PG&E (allegedly) delays upgrades:

* https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-07-31/pge-rebuts...

But this was supposedly allowed by (elected) regulators because they didn't want blowback from the electorate about larger bills:

* https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-caused-over-400-fires-in-2...

Air conditioning should be powered on site when possible.

In a different timeline we would have programs for zero interest loans for solar power installations with payments managed through the power company (trading paying for power to paying for the loan to generate the power).

Lost power in the north peninsula from 9pm-12am. A warning would have been nice. We signed up for notifications via text, and we didn’t receive any.

I find it strange that a town with multiple high-tech fortune 500's can't power itself. This begs several questions on adequate management of taxation at the local level, and corporate interest in their own community's ability to support them.

It depends on how your system is hooked up. Some will cut out when the line power drops off, as a way of protecting line workers who might be working on what they think is a unenergized line, so they aren't surprised by the power your system puts on the line.

Others are designed with an automatic shunt that will still allow you to draw power as long as you are generating it.

And some require you to manually flip a switch.

You'd know if you had it, because it's an expensive design option that's very rare. If you didn't ask for and pay for it, you don't have it.

Some solar inverters can do it without batteries. But if a cloud passes over your panels you might get near zero watt.

I lost power but don’t have a Tesla. Your tip doesn’t help me.

As with other impacts of shutdown and quarantine, shifts in demand and consumption patterns can mean that infrastructure isn't able to supply electricity to where it's specifically needed. It's been pointed out that electricity is not storable --- it's less an energy store as with fuel and far more energy distribution as with a transmission or driveshaft, but with far more connections. Not only must the Grid make power available when it is needed, but it must do so where.

Peak daytime demands in urban cores, offices, and factories is different from peak demands in residential exurbs, purely on distribution, even if quantity is comparable.

There's a heat wave up and down the entire western US. Everyone from San Diego to Seattle is at home running their A/C if they're lucky enough to have one.

I wonder if the climate control units in office buildings have even been switched off when not in use.

I know that nobody turned off the one in our office when we were away from it for 6 weeks during the NZ lockdown.

It’s not remotely managed and we are not allowed to touch it so someone from the company that owns the building would have had to go and do that, and then come back later to turn it on again. And maybe some of the other businesses in the building are essential and have workers? No idea.

Probably was never going to happen.

I’d guess that cooling a single office building is probably more energy efficient than cooling one hundred houses.

How is the decision made as to who loses power first? Coolest area?

> I have never seen anything like this

How long have you lived in the Bay Area? I just checked the forecast, and it's not Pacifica your talking about (thank goodness, that would be really awful). Inland from the ocean such heat waves do occur.

And what's worse is that all the buildings are built assuming highs in the 80s that were typical 40 years ago, and zoning and permitting makes them uneconomical to replace.

What? This happens every year - always.

Get a window air conditioner or portable air conditioner... makes life much bearable for those days.

Those were for fire safety, not because of excess load on the electrical grid.

Build some nuclear power stations and you'll fix both. While you're at it build a breeder reactor and feed it with stored nuclear waste to both produce new fuel for other stations and reduce the amount of radioactive waste which needs to be stored as well as the period for which it needs to be stored.

The only solution is having enough generation and storage capacity for p999 or p9999 events. The grid ends up being beneficial because you can pool resources rather than balkanizing them.

Your Tesla Powerwall can probably keep your AC running for a couple of hours, but it costs $7,600. We're better off using economies of scale to our advantage.

Almost nobody has solar power that can serve through a grid outage, so emphasis on "slowly".

Even if you had the plants I'm not sure how you'd run them - it's not exactly an unskilled task.

Infrastructure is 50+ year investment and everywhere in the country has been slacking in development. Given the growth of the bay area and the increase in hot weather due to global climate change the system gets exacerbated because it's going out of spec.

The fact that it has been as robust (in delivery, not hazard) as it has for the last 20 years is a testament to its strength.

When we didn't have power in Iran for 2 hours I used to think it's such an atrocity. It never happened for more than 5-6 hours though.

I had power outage in LA for ~17 hours last month.

I don’t know what’s the big deal is. A couple hours of outage for a few households for once a decade event is not reflection of anything

That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's.

And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).

And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.

> The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals.

Americans have been saying this about their own country for decades. Many people see the worst in their own. And if anything I think the outlook was more pessimistic than now in the 80s, and even more than that in the 70s.

Realistically, for all its faults, the US is still where I'd aspire to live for best opportunity and quality of life if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.

Starting? Either that was an attempt to not bruise the egos of patriots, or you just haven't been paying attention.

Here is how these conversations go:

Someone will make comparisons to the worst countries in the world to rationalize why America is number 1 in a race nobody even entered into. Instead of comparing it to 21st century developed nations. Rinse, repeat.

Follow by:

Could those developed countries have made those advances without the US subsidizing and helping de-risk the cost of their defense? Shrug

Does it makes sense for the US to allocate budget towards said defense while its domestic infrastructure flails? Shrug

Does the structure of the US contribute to this separation of foreign policy and domestic policy? With the broke states responsible for and failing at handling their own affairs, with the well funded Federal Government maintaining consensus by not getting into state affairs, forcing it to use its budget abroad on pet projects? Shrug

Does an actual budget really matter when the world has an infinite demand for dollars meaning that the US really could fund any domestic project and its external hegemony? Shrug

Are those developed countries' taxes really that high in comparison to what everyone in the US pays for anyway? Which country specifically? In many cases where high populations of Americans actually live, no it is very equivalent and Americans get the short end of the stick. Shrug.

People like to dismiss this by pointing to the shiny parts of America, but every city in the world has good and bad neighborhoods. The surprising thing about corrupt countries is the wealth inequality -- the political class is full of grifters who pocket the contracting fees and the citizens who are supposed to be recipients of government services are wondering why the highway has been under construction for the last 5 years. Or the bullet train in California. Billions of dollars are disappearing with barely a track bed to show for it. I'll quote this NYT piece.

"“Approximately two dozen other countries have found H.S.R. feasible, including Uzbekistan,” she said, referring to high-speed rail. “And there is no reason it can’t be done here.”"

The government collects and spends trillions of dollars, and most of that is wealth transfer to contractors, much less value reaches the ground, where much of the country is dotted with emptied out farm towns and improvised shelters. If you don't believe America looks the way some see it, take a cross country train, you go through everybody's back yard that way.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-28/californ...

I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.

I’m seeing this sentiment expressed more and more, and it seriously concerns me. If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.

This isn’t blind patriotism. Seriously if you are feeling like the US is becoming a “3rd world country” see if you can quantify it in some way. What is deteriorating, and how does that compare to other places in the world?

You do realize that most 1st world countries have experienced a rolling black of some sort in the same time period.

1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?

> 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(

It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.

s/US/California.

The US is decentralized (especially as it relates to electricity). Most of the rest of the Union is doing just fine.

The Indian reservation part is true. Most Americans have never set foot in one. If you want to see what it's like, I recommend driving through the South Dakota reservations. But be prepared for a shock of sadness. They feel like different countries entirely.

It has been great to see the support in recent months for equality among all races in the US. But I wish we would also see more explicit support for Native Americans, for their suffering and their genocide. They are a group that has been exploited, victimized, and stolen from as much as any other group in America.

Maybe it just isn't possible with such a large population. On the other hand, US gives you the opportunity to become filthy rich and it probably helps that you have such a large population to use to your advantage (whether it be labor or customers).

Indian reservations are truly in horrific condition. I have spent many days in Navajo nation during my time in Arizona and it reminds of developing countries

America as an ideal has failed and anyone who wants to come here should think twice.

Every country has their problems, but years of neglect and backwards thinking on social, civic, and cultural “brick work” has led to this.

The civil rights movement was never carried through. The Cold War mentality of military spending on the ever present “boggieman” wasted tens of trillions of dollars of GDP. The vilification of taxes, civic and social programs while also the decades long trend of funneling money to the top. The dirty politics of special interests, limited access, lobbying and un-checked money in politics. The widening wealth gap in both fiscal and quality of living. The gutting and simplification of the educational system to focus on math and sciences instead of raising well-rounded emotionally intelligent young humans. The belief that shoehorning everyone into a college education and the crippling debt that comes with it. The complete lack of national infrastructural investment since the 1950s.

All of this leads to disillusionment. Especially when generations have grown up being fed this believe of “not in america”. Disillusionment leads to desperation, leads to anger, and hate, and scapegoating, to fake “christian” mega churches were people are scamed out of not only their money but the last tatters of their divinity.

Technology like the internet mixed with stunted critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and compassion form into a deadly cocktail that breeds and spreads conspiracy theories and delusions fed to us by our enemies directly into our living rooms, on cable television, on our computers, and into our cellphones. Very little of it vetted or touched by anyone. To be shared and re-shared on Facebook in fear to our friends.

And all of this wasted human potential at the cost of the only thing we all share. The Earth.

Donald Trump isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom.

The issue here isn't that the California power grid has deteriorated, but that there's an extraordinary heat wave. I don't think it's fair to tie this into a grand decline narrative.

The more terrifying fact is that the scenario described in the novel has already partially happened in the real world.

* New Clues Show How Russia’s Grid Hackers Aimed for Physical Destruction

> Russian hackers planted a unique specimen of malware in the network of Ukraine's national grid operator, Ukrenergo. Just before midnight, they used it to open every circuit breaker in a transmission station north of Kyiv. The result was one of the most dramatic attacks in Russia's years-long cyberwar against its western neighbor.

https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ukraine-cyberattack-power...

I read that book, it is good, there is a good presentation about how difficult it would be to do that in reality, based on the same source that the book used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjingj2473Y

The original is in german, the linked video is the english translation.

We import close to 30% of our electricity, which puts us in a bad spot if there's nothing to import.

It’s a huge state with a lot of people with a massive heatwave covering a lot of it.

It’s easy to rag on California lately but it’s still American’s living there and I feel bad for them.