The electric grid is already extremely fragile. Its uptime is dependent on constant maintenance and repairs and many people on 24/7 standby to make more repairs in outages.
Its resilience is in the support network, not in the physical structures itself.
That support network building custom hardware in a GPS outage is that system functioning as expected. A GPS outage without a bunch of concerned humans doing everything they can to fix it isn’t going to happen.
Also on making sure that it is balanced all the time. The effort it takes to make sure that there's always input exactly as much energy as is taken out of the system is just staggering. And if only a few of the things needed to adjust it fail .. here comes the brown/blackout.
Most of the effort has been done in design. Rotating mass of generators is a nice self-correcting system, also the frequency is a near-zero latency signaling mechanism across the entire grid. Each participant can measure it and make independent decisions whether the grid needs more power or more consumption.
There is a lot of work that goes into predicting and commanding large participants and it's a complex system but some of the design is just beautiful in it's simplicity.
That's really interesting! I assumed that everybody would aim for a resilient system to reduce support costs, but you're saying the electric grid is built cheap & fragile and the cost of support is just an accepted part of it?
How come the support costs are cheaper for maintaining the electric grid than paying a bit more for hardware that requires less support?
You can't even outsource your support costs to a cheaper COL country.
Is it because the infra is subject to nature & thus always being degraded in all sorts of ways in all different environments?
Yes, once you realize even the ground you walk on is shifting cm's per year like a slow moving ocean, you see that nothing fits nicely in the world indefinitely with then precision needed for electricity infra.
There's a lot of slop in electricity infrastructure especially in those big towers with cable drapes of hundreds of feet.
Australia, the continent, has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last local mapping grid adjustment was made to GPS coordinates back in 1994.
That's about 2.7 inches a year .. that took entire regional electrical service areas along with it as a single unit with no stretching of cables.
In your scenario you need to find electrical works spanning a fault line, rigidly fixed to both sides, and built by Engineers (civil, mech, not software) clueless to drift .. like a steel bridge constructed without expansion joints to account for tempreture changes.
My whole point is that it is indeed incredibly reliable, but only because it is undergoing constant maintenance 24/7 by trained professionals.
Take the humans out of the loop and it falls over by itself very soon.
There is no situation where, say, one of its dependencies goes away and lots of smart people don’t engineer a fix ASAP. This was in response to someone expressing concern that the grid is dependent on GPS. It’s dependent on a lot of things, one of which is probably Home Depot. If any of those dependencies go away, we will re-engineer the dependency tree, because it’s not operating in a vacuum. It’s resilient and reliable because it is staffed and continuously engineered.
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The electric grid is already extremely fragile. Its uptime is dependent on constant maintenance and repairs and many people on 24/7 standby to make more repairs in outages.
Its resilience is in the support network, not in the physical structures itself.
That support network building custom hardware in a GPS outage is that system functioning as expected. A GPS outage without a bunch of concerned humans doing everything they can to fix it isn’t going to happen.
Also on making sure that it is balanced all the time. The effort it takes to make sure that there's always input exactly as much energy as is taken out of the system is just staggering. And if only a few of the things needed to adjust it fail .. here comes the brown/blackout.
Most of the effort has been done in design. Rotating mass of generators is a nice self-correcting system, also the frequency is a near-zero latency signaling mechanism across the entire grid. Each participant can measure it and make independent decisions whether the grid needs more power or more consumption.
There is a lot of work that goes into predicting and commanding large participants and it's a complex system but some of the design is just beautiful in it's simplicity.
That's really interesting! I assumed that everybody would aim for a resilient system to reduce support costs, but you're saying the electric grid is built cheap & fragile and the cost of support is just an accepted part of it?
How come the support costs are cheaper for maintaining the electric grid than paying a bit more for hardware that requires less support?
You can't even outsource your support costs to a cheaper COL country.
Is it because the infra is subject to nature & thus always being degraded in all sorts of ways in all different environments?
Yes, once you realize even the ground you walk on is shifting cm's per year like a slow moving ocean, you see that nothing fits nicely in the world indefinitely with then precision needed for electricity infra.
There's a lot of slop in electricity infrastructure especially in those big towers with cable drapes of hundreds of feet.
Australia, the continent, has shifted by 4.9 feet since the last local mapping grid adjustment was made to GPS coordinates back in 1994.
That's about 2.7 inches a year .. that took entire regional electrical service areas along with it as a single unit with no stretching of cables.
In your scenario you need to find electrical works spanning a fault line, rigidly fixed to both sides, and built by Engineers (civil, mech, not software) clueless to drift .. like a steel bridge constructed without expansion joints to account for tempreture changes.
Is it? How often do you experience outages?
It needs maintenance but it's incredibly reliable and resilient if you zoom back a bit.
My whole point is that it is indeed incredibly reliable, but only because it is undergoing constant maintenance 24/7 by trained professionals.
Take the humans out of the loop and it falls over by itself very soon.
There is no situation where, say, one of its dependencies goes away and lots of smart people don’t engineer a fix ASAP. This was in response to someone expressing concern that the grid is dependent on GPS. It’s dependent on a lot of things, one of which is probably Home Depot. If any of those dependencies go away, we will re-engineer the dependency tree, because it’s not operating in a vacuum. It’s resilient and reliable because it is staffed and continuously engineered.
That is as valuable a comment as humans are incredibly fragile as we need to drink water every day.
But fails to mention that we have a self healing immune system along with the background processing that makes sure we drink water every fay.