Philanthropy during a national power failure: a snag

This is where a device with a 20000volt line to it only deactivated by a device you give each person to keep in their pocket would be useful of course. Its a bit like that flame thrower mounted in door locks of South African cars which only deactivates if you carry the correct key fob. Brian

When we had a week-long power failure here, one person ran an extension cord across a road surface.

Now, that's a neighbour :-)

That would either be power for something medical, or for a sump pump.

I was surprised just how well the cord held up.

If you're without power for a week, and running a genny off petrol, usually the people running that, complain about the cost of fuel. I gather this is not a cheap way to have creature comforts.

Transferring genny power to a battery, then to an inverter, would reduce the "idling" fuel of running a genny alone. But batteries are not cheap for this sort of thing, so again, pretty hard to save anything by being overly techie.

Municipal shelters set up during emergencies, normally have USB power for visitors to charge their phone. That helps avoid any "phone withdrawal symptoms".

Paul

I'm surprised your supplier didn't bring in a generator. That's what happened here a few years ago when a builder managed to damage our supply cable, 4 generators brought in - for 5 houses.

If the whole electricity generation and distribution network failed for more than

Be afraid...

If the whole electricity grid failed for more than two weeks there would be a huge death toll in the cities, and a complete loss of civil order, and probably rampant disease.

Even the stuff that runs on diesel, need electricity to run the diesel pumps.

Be even more afraid.

Climate change is *nothing* compared with the threat of renewable energy causing total grid collapse.

Amen.

My phone charges in about an hour. I'd just sit outside with it while it did.

Owain

Most of our events here, are weather related. If wires are down all over the road, the power has to go off until the situation can be made safe. And that can easily take a week, for storm damage.

Maybe 1% of the customers here, would own their own emergency generators and have transfer switches. And these generators are not usually all that big. You would not find a lot of 22kW generators in back yards. That's why the extension cord running across the road, was so unusual. There aren't that many generators to begin with.

The Telephone Company has a fleet of 20 foot and 40 foot generators (locomotive engines). I don't think I've ever seen a Power Company generator here (with their logo on it). When the city needed emergency power for the sewer pumping station, they just rented a

Paul

The cell towers would still have emergency power.

Telecom has a couple levels of power redundancy.

Mains water stays up (you cannot afford to stop pumping the water distribution). Even when our water plant was completely surrounded by flooding, the plant did not stop. It has at least three diesels that run all day long. The other plant is similarly equipped. All the boosters have diesels. There are something like 20 boosters or more, in the network. The only concern they had, is they could not get the chlorine supply to the plant (because the road was flooded). They were considering delivery by helicopter at one point.

Even the sewer system has backup power (sewage pumping). You can't stop doing that either. You might have to dump raw sewage in extreme cases (a treatment facility may not be able to afford a power source big enough to run it).

Society may be a sad lot, but not every bit of it is rotten. Some parts still function and are maintained.

Power failures are too common, for every bit of infrastructure to be left flapping in the breeze.

When the entire grid dropped here for three days, the citizens noticed none of the cell towers were working. It was that event, that got the regulators to light a fire under the telecoms, to put generators on the towers. That's how our towers got generators, not by design, but by "demonstrating gennies were missing" :-/ I guess that's how you do planning, is "by experience". At a cell tower today, if you look at the base, there's a large light, and that's the light on the outside of the genny shed. If service people drive up, they can see the shed while working there. There are typically no lights at all on the tower (clever, or what). Whereas broadcast radio towers (taller), all have red strobes on top.

Paul

The point is that backup systems are designed for a few days outage at most. More than a week and things start to get very messy.

Where I live, there's a tank farm with petroleum products in it.

But some of the details of that facility are a bit murky. The sales portal ("overhead rack") is out front, and there was some detail about it, or equipment in an adjacent office, not working when mains power was off :-) Silly stuff.

The farm itself, would need motive power at all times, for safety reasons. If there were signs a tank was rupturing, there might be a sudden need to move liquids quickly to another tank.

There is a rail line leading to the tank farm, which is how deliveries would be made.

The only questionable part then, is filling various vehicles, out front, from the overhead rack.

Paul

when we we on an emergency genny, someone came by to top up the fuel

Don't follow - how does renewable energy cause collapse?

people pushing the cars? Or horses?

The overwhelming historical evidence is that faced with the cessation of peoples normal ways of doing stuff, the majority don't adapt, they just die.

And where did he get the fuel? And how was it delivered?

Because its never there when you need it.

The more you put on the grid, without sufficient thermal or hydro plant to back it up the more liable the grid is to become unstable in terms of its frequency, and once that happens the renewable plant is designed to disconnect itself. And when it does that, huge sections of the grid become overloaded and they shut down too,

Everything trips out. Because design limits have been exceeded.

In message <uanbtg$24bhj$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, The Natural Philosopher snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid writes

Snip

Hmm. The sewage pumping station at the back of my farmyard had a *flood time* of 10 hours when it was installed in 1977. Perhaps less now with extra dwellings connected. The emergency backup is road tanker pumping.

The east Anglian fens require constant pumping. This is all done by electric pumps and because in general the pumps only need to run once in a while, there are no backups.

Once upon a time it was done with windmills, but these proved to be far more expensive and unreliable (who would have guessed) than the steam engines that replaced them and the diesels that came later, before the ease of electric pumps superseded all other technologies.

Nevertheless, in times of massive floods even these can't keep up and large areas of land are used as flood plains, to relieve the pressure on the dykes and levees.

Loss of electricity for two weeks in bad winter weather with excessive rainfall would result in huge parts of East Anglia being flooded, as happened in 1953.

Without artificial energy, the ability of the UK to support a population would be limited to around at most 5-10 million, most living in grinding poverty as effectively slaves working on the land. The rest would die in an appalling breakdown of civilisation, mostly in the cities.

That is the future the climate alarmists are driving us towards.

I installed one of those electric pumped drainage schemes, in the fens, many years ago. The guy who tended it, lived in an attached house, and he had begun his working life tending the wind pump. In time, that had been replaced with a pair of diesel pumps, then along came yours truly and installed electric pumps. Once the new pumps were commissioned, sadly the old guy passed away :-(