Can you do a video on why PG&E can’t keep the power on whenever it gets breezy in California? I have zero doubt that you could explain it better than irate customers on Nextdoor (which is about all we get out here since the full explanation won’t fit in a 30-sec sound bite or a PR tweet).
Not a very realistic one though: you can see the power supply is in constant CURRENT mode (6:53, the CC LED is on), which means it will do whatever it takes to shove down the current meant for *four* resistors down the remaining *three* , basically by raising the voltage until that happens. It wouldn't do that *at all* in its normal, constant *voltage* mode. In real life, the voltage applied to three lightbulbs in your home does definitely not go up just because you've turned the fourth one off (or more exactly it does so negligibly little). Now, it's certainly possible that the power grid can have some sort of equivalent phenomenon going on in specific situations, but how or why that would happen was certainly not explained here at all.
True, the voltage is constant, but the current rise is what does the damage. In combination Primary/Distribution substations some circuits have inductors because the primary transformers can (for a few cycles) put out enough current to melt and fuse circuit breaker contacts together. The inductor resembles a tube, and is designed such that normal load currents pass through, but a massive overcurrent fault will cause a huge counter-EMF (backpressure wave opposing current flow) in the inductor stopping any spikes from the primary transformers dead in their tracks.
@@AttilaAsztalos but that demonstration was exactly what happened when the 2003 outage happen. One line goes out and all the power (or current) that pass on that line had to be distributed to another line, which subsequently went out because to much power (current) and in few moments all northeast were out of electricity
In 2003 at 3 AM Italy had a serious blackout that involved 56 million people. It was caused by a tree flashover on a 400kV line that supplies power from Switzerland to Northern Italy. The loss of the powerline triggered the two 40kV lines from France to trip as well, due to the sudden increase in demand. In 4 seconds GRTN lost control of the power grid, as a series of cascading events plummeted the entire Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily into darkness. As the grid frequency dropped below 47.5Hz a total of 7.5GW of distributed power plants went offline. The blackout lasted for 12 hours, though some regions were affected by rolling blackouts for two more days. In Rome people were stuck in underground trains. All flights were cancelled, and a total of 30.000 people were stranded on trains. Police described the situation as 'chaos', though no major incidents occurred. Though our little power outage was big for Italy it pales in comparison to the 2012 India blackout, which involved 9% of the world population.
also in 2003, the US northeast region suffered a massive blackout for much the same reasons, though the initial line failures took place over about two hours, with the final cascade of power plant shutdowns taking less than five minutes.
You'd think a tree, much less the ground itself is a really bad conductor, but that's 400000 volts. And electricity is known to jump, even in thin air. It's probably a good idea to get rid of any trees anywhere near high voltage lines. This is also why hospitals have self sufficient generators that can last I think up to a week, or until they're out of fuel.
I can simultaneously: 1. definitely respect the engineering aspects of blackouts and the safety it brings 2. be utterly frustrated at the years(/decades?) of mismanagement and shunned preventative maintenance that lead to them being required
Ideally, grids and systems should be replaced regularly (they transmit HUEG amount of energy, some material deformation and decay cannot be avoided), but changing these stuff are costly, and sometimes you run into problem like 'these stuff didn't made anymore' or 'nobody really knows how these works', which is ultra sucks.
Travis Johnson : Ontario Hydro learned a major lesson during the Ice Storm of January, 1998. Since then, they are much more diligent about keeping trees away from local power lines. They always had been pretty good about the major high voltage distribution. “Next Door”, in Quebec, they learned that there was a limit to how much weight a transmission tower could hold. . . and when one collapsed, it would pull down several more. It took more than a month to restore power to some areas.
@@Peter1986C I hate the word "overdeveloped." It sounds like we had enough innovation and we need a few steps back when people were dying of preventable diseases or people were living worse than we do today. "Overdeveloped" really sounds like some form of scare tactic that primitivists would say.
Preventative maintenance can't prevent everything, and it's never been expected to. If you see a power system with constant blackouts for no discernible reason, that might indicate a failure to do preventative maintenance. If, for example, the entire state that that power system has been in for decades turns into a tinderbox underneath all of the power lines, normal rates of failure suddenly become catastrophic events that cost human life.
Here in California, PG&E has been doing rolling blackouts to try to stop fires around CA. It’s not done what PG&E said it would but it seems to have lessened the intensity. It’s not as bad as last year but still bad.
During the North East blackout of November, 1965, the “chichen and egg” issue was addressed by by interconnecting a large group of employees’ cars to provide startup power for a plant in Connecticut (might have been Massachusetts) , that plant kickstarted the North East grid back to life. The process was described in an article in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, Sometimes I ride around on my bicycle, trying to figure out where all the interconnections of the local power structures go. Keeping track of that must be a major cartography job! Thanks fir the great video!
I see there is someone else still alive that remembers that blackout. I was in Pennsylvania at the time and we intermittently lost power for a few hours. Quite the mess for the upper East coast. As I remember at least one very large generator was destroyed trying to keep the lights on in NYC. It took a few years to get it replaced. 11-20-2019.
@@jrmcferren There is a huge amount of control circuitry that has to be up and stable before a plant can be on line, and (depending on the fuel) everything needed to start it. A few years ago a power plant I supported had an intermittent failure in a charger on the battery bank that controlled one of the turbine units. The alarms for that charger were disabled, but the message was not relayed to the next shift. Overnight the batteries gave out and things went wrong, ending with lack of lubrication to the rotor bearings. The generator spun down with no oil and the expected results.
I was living about 40 miles from Philadelphia and all we had was a momentary brightening of the lights in the house and everything went back to normal. It wasn't until the 11 o'clock news that we found out about the power outage. And New York City was burning. Looting was out of control. We talked about that in school over the next few weeks.
The 10 minutes are only required to have mid-roll ads. If you don't use them, you don't need the 10 minutes mark. I see people everywhere accused of the "OMG 10 MINUTES" and they don't even use mid-roll ads.
@@Zpajro ads that play during the video. You don’t need to hit 10minutes to have a video before the video, but it has to be atleast 10 minutes in order for ads to play during the video
Look at it this way: Do you want to lose power for one or two days or 2 months? Designing systems to go off grid or fail, before the powerplant does is essential, to not have power for the next 2 months. If the generator in a power plant gets damaged, that plant usually isn't working for the next 6 months. Also shedding large power consumers, like steel arc furnaces and so on is faster than starting up a gas turbine.
@@JainZar1 or the electric companies can start doing their jobs and stop being greedy and put there lines underground in forest areas and not have the fire/blackout at all.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 If your place is anywhere near San Andreas fault, then putting your cable underground is... rather suboptimal. They should have done more maintenance, though.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 there will always be blackouts. In my experience, ground cables break more often than hanging power lines, usually because someone didn't check the ground before digging. Also, ground cables don't get cooled of by wind, so they are more prone to melt during heavy load. Grid protection is my job. It's really about shutting down before stuff breaks. If you have a blackout that lasts for less than a day, we've definitely done our job. If it lasts for a week, we might have missed something important. If nobody even tried to do our job, expect at least a few fires, and probably a transformer explosion. The full cost to replace everything that was destroyed will probably be a dollar amount of 6-7 figures, and take at least 6 months before it's up and running.
"When the power goes out it probably means things are working as designed to protect the power grid as a whole." Unless you live in certain areas of California, where it means the power company has neglected maintenance for so long that they don't dare keep the power on because it will start more wildfires.
A power line transformer exploded in spectacular fashion once near my house one night when I was living used to live by a redwood forest. Luckily for the neighborhood it was the middle of winter and this was before we had the big drought. I don't think redwoods are able to easily catch fire. I'll give the unnamed most hated utility some credit though, they got the transformer replaced in a day.
No matter how it starts a fire shouldn't be able to spread into a major disaster like it can in California. Controlled burns, and other fire management, should be used to isolate different areas so the amount that a fire can spread is much more limited. It's easy to just blame PG&E for everything, but the problem is much more complicated then that. You shouldn't have a system where something like a carelessly thrown cigarette butt can lead to a major disaster.
what hasn't been mentioned is that the calif leadership in their infinite wisdom told PGE to start investing millions in renewable energy and so deferred maintenance became the word of the day. Along with the watchdog agencies that were in bed with PGE and the powers that be, blackouts are an unfortunate reality.
look up the timeline of the 2003 northeast blackout. an alarm system failure meant operators were unaware of changing conditions, allowing things to deteriorate . the first failure occurred at about 2pm, then more occurred with increasing frequency until over 200 power stations were forced to shut down in
On June 16 2019, here in Argentina, there was an operational error with a 500kv transmission line wich led into a massive blackout leaving the entire country and parts of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil without electricity for at least 13 hours...
Hm.. And here I was thinking that blackouts were just negative electricity that radiate darkness from bulbs instead of light. Ya learn something new everyday!
@@buttonasas Then you become quickly overwhelmed by the size of your growing factory and before you know it 3 years have passed and you still haven't sorted out your iron shortages
I asked my best friend (an engineering student) why Practical Engineering is such a good youtube channel. He answered: "Because they skip the banging your head on the wall phase".
Thanks for the video. As a Protection and Control Technician for a large Transmission company, I appreciate the simplified explanation of the "zones of protection", as well as the whole video. I never have a good way to explain what I do for a living to people, and next time that happens I'm going to reference this video! You've got a new subscriber in me.
Nah, at worst it would just damage the generator, the actual reactor would be find. Though if the rest of the local grid went down they have to start the diesel generators to keep the coolant running.
As a power protection engineer I can say this was a good ten minute explanation. Well done! You should have been sponsored by a company from the industry though.
To clarify a term you used: a blackstart resource is one that can start on its own and doesn't require outside power. Every utility already has a blackstart resource identified and plan to power up substations and generation plants along the way.
I was working for Ontario Power Generation on the night of the 2003 blackout. We had to pick up the pieces and get our plant running again. The guys on the day shift experienced the event. Quite a thing to see, hear and feel 2000 megawatts of generation being sped up (frequency goes up) the reverse when the frequency goes down. All the protection worked and there was no damage to the equipment, personnel or environment. Great video, keep them coming.
I’m a kid from Acadiana, the heart of Cajun Louisiana. I was on a subway in Manhattan during the massive east coast blackout in August of 2003…had to walk 20 miles from downtown, across the Queensboro bridge out to Rockaway beach that day. Seeing the night sky over New York and the millions of people thronging the streets, and those who had made it home handing out water to those still trekking was an experience I will never forget.
I bought my house in early 2015, located in the woods. For the first 3 years we lost power a lot, sometimes several times a month and always for at least a couple days. I realized it was always happening in the same area due to large trees falling down or branches that needed to be trimmed. I put in several complaints to the utility company and they finally did some work. We have only lost power 3 times in the last 2 years. Of course that was after I installed a generator hookup for the house lol.
Says it all doesn't it. The bloody customer has to install their own power generation just to get adequate service. Privatising energy creation and distribution was a mistake.
Very rural locations have all sorts of reliability problems that sometimes have no solution. The lines may pass over a number of jurisdictions and not all will have clear policies for right of way maintenance. In some areas it is a serious crime to cut trees without going through immense red tape.
In Venezuela we suffer from daily blackouts due to the lack of maintenance, inexperienced workers and the government stealing millions of dollars destined to the improvement of the grid. Major projects have been announced and never finished. One of the blackouts affected the whole country for about 5 straight days consequence of a fire in a substation (a substation in the middle of nowhere with no maintenance for years), the government blamed the U.S for the blackout (Electromagnetic Pulses Attack).
Same reason that Costa Rica was in such desperate condition after the hurricane that swept it clean. money was going into pockets instead into maintenance. And people wonder why the US is reluctant to give them more money without guarantees it will go for infrastructure.
I'm pretty sure the only way of causing a large EMP like that that we have is to detonate a nuke at high altitude. That would be quite difficult to miss.
That's a realistic perspective. Reliability is expensive, not only in upfront costs but in wider margins. In North America NERC dictates minimum margins but those truly are minimums. "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" (Dirty Harry)
The other recent large USA outage due to a cascade failure was in 2011, when San Diego, Orange County, parts of Baja California, and the surrounding deserts all tripped offline due to an incorrect maintenance action in Arizona. It even caused the San Onofre nuclear generating station to scram and isolate.
*power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* *power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* *power has left the chat* *power has joined the chat* Love when it does this
Zach Phillips I heared once that here in germany the powergrid (the control tech of the grid) trys 3 reconnections after a short happened before finally shutting down
@@legominimovieproductions At the risk of ruining a joke by explaining it, whenever you call your cable/internet company's tech-support because of a problem, they always tell you to simply switch off the machine (usually for 30 seconds, or so-- which is probably just an arbitrary number, but sounds smart to a layman), then switch it on again, which reboots everything. The gag here is, that instead of having you switch your one machine off/on to fix a minor problem, the tech-support guy does that to the entire power grid, just to fix your cable-box/router. It's akin to the "overkill" metaphor of using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
@@pcdm43145 Dude, by using a sledgehammer on a fly you could easily miss the fly ! Use a nuclear bomb - 100% guaranteed success rates at getting rid of flies in your area.
I’m currently learning about the telegraphers equations and characteristic impedance of transmission lines. It’s good to take a breath and review the big picture with these videos.
It's even better when you are so interested in what you're learning that when you take a break, it's to learn more about the subject! That's when you know you choose the right career path!
The telegraphers equation refers to signal transmission lines, not power transmission lines. It's an unfortunate case of having the same name for different things. Signal transmission lines are lines such as coaxial cables, microwave wave guides and telephone lines, now almost obsolete.
That last part with the facilities needing power to start backnup is why i love hydro electric dams such as the ones here in Quebec. An extra thing I could add here in the protections are whats called Overload protections, where an equipment uses just a little too much current as per usual. This protection will detect (usually thru thermal protection where a little too much current for to long will trip the protection) a fault and protect equipment such as heating elements or motors.
Bro I live in San Antonio Texas, and I’m trying to understand the science behind these rolling blackouts. From my simple minded understanding from watching these videos, I think I figured it out. The rolling power outages that we are experiencing are comparable to a overload protection device. There’s so much demand coming from the customer, that if the demand is met It could overload equipment and cause equipment failures across the city. So the demand needs to be reduced to protect from an overload of equipment, so electricity can be dispersed efficiently right ? What I don’t get is that there’s already been equipment failures and there’s not enough electricity to match the demand. Since there’s not enough electricity to spread, then overload shouldn’t be a problem, so why are we having the rolling black outs ?? I’m probably wrong about all of this but I’m trying to understand.. Wait, i think I maybe getting it now. If they don’t do the rolling blackouts customers would be receiving electricity randomly, and I’m guessing that could cause power surges, which could lead to overloads of equipment, but if they control it, that solves the problem..
@@anthonyvasquez7050 so from what I saw on the news and what I learned in school (and experience in a freezing climate), the rolling blackouts in your region are made so that people are able to have some power to charge batteries, heat their homes etc. Why you have these are because of equipment failure and TERRIBLE planning. For exemple in the army or in hospitals you have 2-3 backup plans for everything, 2 pumps when you need 1, double the hot water heater etc. What I'm saying is the utility companies dint plan for a storm like this so now pipes are frozen, generators a seized up etc. They should have planned for a 150f day as well as a -50f day. But they dint. Lastly, and sadly, texas wants to be indepandent. So you are on your own. Look up a map of the north american power grid and you will see texas as no connections to another state that could help pick up the slack. Now we wont get into the politics of this but in a purely electrical stand point this was highly stupid of them. Now people are freezing and no one that was prepared for this can help you guys because of the energy independance. So those are my understanding of whats happening. Sorry you guys have to go thru this and I really hope you get out of it safe. Good luck bud!
TH-cam knows all things. 12 hour power outage today and a few hours yesterday. This kind of video never would have ended up in my feed. Was posted 11 months ago.
Grady: I don't know how much a car that never breaks down wold cost... NASA: about $865,000,000 for two of 'em (voyager 1 and 2 total mission cost to date)
When the electricity doesn't shut off, and there's a problem, you're in trouble. Last month, at my work, a power line broke during a windstorm, landing on a tree. Luckily, I was well away from it and had electrically resistant shoes because the fuse didn't break the circuit until the line fell onto the metal fence below it, generating a big arc. I ran screaming to the insulated safety of my car to call 911, but someone beat me to it, and the fire department arrived as I was leaving. It's very fortunate that everyone there knew about power line safety, and stayed far away.
Great video, thanks. Once, on a tour of the old Didcot power station I saw the last resort restart. The was a lead acid battery that could start a gas turbine engine which in turn generated enough power to run the coal handling machinery to light one boiler. This enabled the station to restart from cold and dark with the grid not energised. In theory this enabled everything to recover from a complete shutdown.
Fantastic. I am starting my new job in a grid company and your videos provide some very good basic knowledge easy to understand. Well done. Thanks a lot.
Argentinian here, on August we had a cascading blackout due to a 500kv line failure that outed all the country and even some cities of Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. It happened due to the interconnected system(Argentinian SADI) that couldn't handle the load when the line failed and the protections for under frequency started taking other generators offline until everything went black. Power where restored to almost every city in less than 6 hs
What’s worth mentioning is that now many households have their own generator (solar). So it’s absolutely crucial to have tightly unforced regulations around inverter’s behaviour during blackouts (aka anti-is landing). So. If you DIY an on-grid system and source your solar inverter from outside of your country, that inverter might not comply with your country’s grid connection regulation. What can happen is during blackout, your solar PV system may still be generating power which will electrocute people working to repair the blackout. You WILL go to jail for manslaughter.
To my knowledge all Inverters must check regulary (multiple times a second) if the Grid is still online and if its down the will stop feeding immediately. (they do this afaik by not feeding for a millisecond and checking voltage if i remember correctly).
In the mentioned blackout that hit the northeast taking out much of Ontario as well, it should be mentioned that Quebec was not affected. Why is that? Because Quebec (like most of Texas) isolates itself from neighbouring grids with AC::DC-DC::AC converters. This takes line frequency completely out of the equation and prevents systems on the Quebec side from being badly affected. It's naturally isolated to begin with by the DC "bridge". Instability on the US or Ontario side cannot "infect" the Quebec grid. The US grid would do well to set up similar "islands" to protect against regional failure spreads. Further, this would promote using more long distance HVDC transport of power which could help with the marketing of solar and wind energy.
Stephen Rowley ... hey as long as he’s at it, we might as well have him throw in a little distance protection with hybrid single pole tripping too. ⚡️⚡️⚡️
One thing that isnt mentioned, but is becoming increasingly important is the use of remedial action systems (RAS). I'm a control engineer specialising in RAS which span the UK transmission network; essentially these are "generation shedding" developed to detect line end open circuits (LEOs) and trip large scale generation such as windfarms and interconnectors. Based upon where this LEO occurs could mean the thermal capacity of a circuit/s is exceeded, requiring tripping of generation to avoid thermal damage to equipment. Furthermore, these systems look to maintain grid stability by countering frequency changes, to prevent cascade tripping events and large scale blackouts. When involved with commissioning support of these systems, I have seen protection relays for 1GW interconnectors armed and ready, even while working in the same panel which is as comfortable as it sounds hahah. Overall great video anyway!!
@Harry M Depends on what were damaged and how the fail-safe works. If what damaged is something major (like main transmission from major electric producer) them automatically major area would get blackout. If the failsafes were all something like single-use fuse, then repair them would take time anyway.
Ahaha the 1998 ice storm had 8 year old me learning how to make fires, build shelter and hunt deer with my bare hands. (Not really but that was some war-of-the-world shit and i learned how important gas stoves were)
Harry M because the sudden loss of a load causes the generators to speed up and things shutdown for over frequency. I don’t know what their limits are but my solar gear calls anything >60.5hz an error and shuts down.
The difference is my home state is 93000sq miles ALL of GB is the same at 93000sq miles. Size matters. So come back when you include all of the EU then we will be talking apples to apples.
@@tysleight I'm not critical of your Nation just critical of your belief that what your power company tells you is in Your interest or there's I live in a country that before the French cut off a Kings Head for Lying to the people and yet your happy to take your service company as not screwing you over ?
@@bryansmith1920 more numbers just for apples to apples CA has a land mass of 163,000sq miles population density of 253 per sq mile, GB is 671 per sq mile or more than double. My current electric rates are $0.09 kwh when I lived in London it was in USD was $0.29 kwh also 90% of the power in my state is renewable and has been since way before the Eco trend. So not bashing just trying to keep stereotypes from proliferating
Great video, good simple explanation of power system protection from all voltage levels. I work in the industry and and see this all the time. Really need the general public to understand the challenges of operating an electric grid. Lots of the time, people are frustrated because they do not have the perspective all the things going on behind the scenes. Hopefully videos like these will help with these issues.
6:20 "These are all types of managed failures where you have some loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system" Shouldn't that be "types of managed failures where you protect the rest of the system at the cost of some loss of service"?
Last year a storm knocked over trees and wreaked havoc in my area. The next day I went out to see what was up and I saw a large branch laying across the transmission wires and was on the ground at the other end. I almost walked up and tried removing it myself, then I reconsidered and called the emergency line. They told me not to touch it or even go near it. When the Lineman finally arrived, I was talking to him and he flat out told me if I had touched that branch, I would be dead. It was grounding out power lines. That shook me up. I couldn't believe I was actually going to grab it. I thank my stars that I listened to my inner self warning me. This is a cautionary tale. If you see it, leave it. If you're in your car and can't get out, don't even try. As soon as you open up your door and place your foot on the ground, you just let the current, which was being isolated by the rubber tires, have a path to ground. Through YOU!
@2009G8Gxp I live here in austin and the amount of companies that are closed at night with no one working and they still have all of their lights and AC on is astonishing. If anything, your statement towards me is laughable at best.
@2009G8Gxp So flipping a light switch and turning your thermostat to an equilibrium wont have any effect on the power grid at all. HMMMMMMMM How bright are you my guy? Turning off lights and AC units doesnt mean cutting the main power breaker to the building.
@2009G8Gxp considering I work with electronics and electricity in my industry, I think I have more of an idea of how businesses work at night than you do considering I'm the one of very few people that enter these buildings at night. The only thing that's 24/7 are server admins, security, and janitorial. That's hardly even a 20th of the entire force working in these buildings on a day to day basis. These rich fucks can set their thermostats to 73 degrees at night and no one will complain I promise you. Yet you want to come at me and say I don't know how the world works. Buddy I work in the areas and topics were talking about! You really wanna attempt to school me on something I do on a day to day basis?
Hi, um, California here. First off, may not want to discount the concern of fire when there is a fault. Power line faults have become a huge issue here when it comes to starting wildfires. Scores of folks have lost their lives and homes, those faults are no small thing here. In fact, it would be interesting to have a video that includes the impact of climate change and how providers are adjusting and scrambling to react. Locally, PG&E is saying that if they harden the grid and switch from wooden poles to steel poles that will reduce the necessity of a shutoff due to wind danger. But lots of folks locally think it's just cover because they're going bankrupt and they want a state bond measure to finance the new poles. Would be interesting to see the science on it more clearly.
@@NoNameAtAll2 "under" is not defined; to be grammatically correct, these would have to be on the ocean bottom for the panels to technically be "under" the ocean. But my comment was a joke, which means "not to be taken seriously". But I have seen where wave generation is "under" the waves so as not to be beat to death by the constant bashing. Also, tide generators.
épinards & caramel it looks like they are adding a “tap” to the line. (Probably for a line potential device of some sort, lower down and out of the picture). He is prepping the tap to keep it in place. He wraps Armor Rod around the conductor on both sides. That stuff he is holding is the Armor Rod.
I remember the big blackout that came with a fault on the Pacific Intertie (1996, I think). I'd long since developed the habit of driving out of blackout areas for a meal or movie while waiting for the power to be restored at my home. That time though, I drove all over the southern portions of the San Francisco bay area. The was almost no power for dozens and dozens of mile. But it was during the day so life went on. Later I learned lights had been out down into Mexico. It was a day the earth stood still - for a while. All because of a lightning struck tree fire in the Northwest wilderness and a grid protecting itself.
It’s crazy that I’m just seeing this video now. I work as a grid operator for a utility. Faults are an everyday occurrence on the distribution system. As you stated those faults are controlled by relays and breakers. Most soft faults such as a fused switch blowing won’t open a breaker and cause a circuit to be dropped. But hard faults such as primary line down or primary lines slapping together will open a breaker. The breakers are installed with multi shots. The breaker detects that fault then it opens the breaker, it re-closes the breaker after about 5 seconds. If the fault persists the breaker will open again and close after 30 seconds. If the fault is detected a 3rd time the breaker will relay out and it will stay open until we close it manually. I use pole mounted Re-closers within that circuit to isolate the fault and get as many customers within that circuit back on until repairs can be made. You are correct. The grid is a massive machine and it takes people monitoring and controlling it 24/7 365.
That's what you got when big power plants are located 1000km away from the biggest load center. All you need is a tree to short the circuit and voila, half of the island had a blackout
I really appreciate that both in this video and your video about road work. you address the fact that some things in life can be frustrating, but then you proceed to show us why such things happen in the way that they do. Great work on the channel!
Substation protection engineer here. Great video, I liked that you went into zones of protection as well. Im going to show these to all our new guys from now on
I hate to like diminish your own personal awesome by comparing you to other awesome people but I get such serious Phil Plaite vibes when I listen to you. And watching you. It's like you guys split form the same person, one went earth and other went stars.
This is the final video in the series on the electrical grid for a while. Watch them all here: th-cam.com/video/v1BMWczn7JM/w-d-xo.html
Would be nice to have more 👍🏻👍🏻
Thanks a lot for the very insightful series! I can't wait to learn something else!
Great series. Would you consider a series on transportation infrastructure?
Can you do a video on why PG&E can’t keep the power on whenever it gets breezy in California? I have zero doubt that you could explain it better than irate customers on Nextdoor (which is about all we get out here since the full explanation won’t fit in a 30-sec sound bite or a PR tweet).
@@OtherTheDave Yeah, that might be a timely P.S. to this video series....! 🤔 And good luck out there! ⚠️😬👍
Here in South Africa they turn the grid off for fun.
Eskom has left the chat
^yup. Don't you love when ur house burns down, you get a new one, and it doesn't have power half the time? Cause Pacific Gas & Extortion does
lolll
Maybe that's some malfunction of this famous South African ability of conjuring lightening? :D
Don't worry, they do it in the Philippines as well. We sometimes joke about it as 'a manager's kid playing with the main power switch'.
Nice demonstration with the 4 led’s
its a great demonstration that deserved a better explanation for the voltage rise.
Not a very realistic one though: you can see the power supply is in constant CURRENT mode (6:53, the CC LED is on), which means it will do whatever it takes to shove down the current meant for *four* resistors down the remaining *three* , basically by raising the voltage until that happens. It wouldn't do that *at all* in its normal, constant *voltage* mode. In real life, the voltage applied to three lightbulbs in your home does definitely not go up just because you've turned the fourth one off (or more exactly it does so negligibly little).
Now, it's certainly possible that the power grid can have some sort of equivalent phenomenon going on in specific situations, but how or why that would happen was certainly not explained here at all.
True, the voltage is constant, but the current rise is what does the damage. In combination Primary/Distribution substations some circuits have inductors because the primary transformers can (for a few cycles) put out enough current to melt and fuse circuit breaker contacts together. The inductor resembles a tube, and is designed such that normal load currents pass through, but a massive overcurrent fault will cause a huge counter-EMF (backpressure wave opposing current flow) in the inductor stopping any spikes from the primary transformers dead in their tracks.
@@AttilaAsztalos When I turn off my electric kettle at home, I can see the lights going brighter for a few milliseconds
@@AttilaAsztalos but that demonstration was exactly what happened when the 2003 outage happen. One line goes out and all the power (or current) that pass on that line had to be distributed to another line, which subsequently went out because to much power (current) and in few moments all northeast were out of electricity
In 2003 at 3 AM Italy had a serious blackout that involved 56 million people. It was caused by a tree flashover on a 400kV line that supplies power from Switzerland to Northern Italy. The loss of the powerline triggered the two 40kV lines from France to trip as well, due to the sudden increase in demand. In 4 seconds GRTN lost control of the power grid, as a series of cascading events plummeted the entire Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily into darkness. As the grid frequency dropped below 47.5Hz a total of 7.5GW of distributed power plants went offline.
The blackout lasted for 12 hours, though some regions were affected by rolling blackouts for two more days. In Rome people were stuck in underground trains. All flights were cancelled, and a total of 30.000 people were stranded on trains. Police described the situation as 'chaos', though no major incidents occurred.
Though our little power outage was big for Italy it pales in comparison to the 2012 India blackout, which involved 9% of the world population.
also in 2003, the US northeast region suffered a massive blackout for much the same reasons, though the initial line failures took place over about two hours, with the final cascade of power plant shutdowns taking less than five minutes.
Italians are well known for electronics, especially in cars.
nice comment, thanks
You'd think a tree, much less the ground itself is a really bad conductor, but that's 400000 volts. And electricity is known to jump, even in thin air. It's probably a good idea to get rid of any trees anywhere near high voltage lines. This is also why hospitals have self sufficient generators that can last I think up to a week, or until they're out of fuel.
This is why we need underground lines. More reliable, safer and less environmental impact.
I can simultaneously:
1. definitely respect the engineering aspects of blackouts and the safety it brings
2. be utterly frustrated at the years(/decades?) of mismanagement and shunned preventative maintenance that lead to them being required
Ideally, grids and systems should be replaced regularly (they transmit HUEG amount of energy, some material deformation and decay cannot be avoided), but changing these stuff are costly, and sometimes you run into problem like 'these stuff didn't made anymore' or 'nobody really knows how these works', which is ultra sucks.
Travis Johnson : Ontario Hydro learned a major lesson during the Ice Storm of January, 1998. Since then, they are much more diligent about keeping trees away from local power lines. They always had been pretty good about the major high voltage distribution. “Next Door”, in Quebec, they learned that there was a limit to how much weight a transmission tower could hold. . . and when one collapsed, it would pull down several more. It took more than a month to restore power to some areas.
I never experienced a blackout in the 33 years of my life (in a small and "overdeveloped" nation though).
@@Peter1986C I hate the word "overdeveloped." It sounds like we had enough innovation and we need a few steps back when people were dying of preventable diseases or people were living worse than we do today. "Overdeveloped" really sounds like some form of scare tactic that primitivists would say.
Preventative maintenance can't prevent everything, and it's never been expected to.
If you see a power system with constant blackouts for no discernible reason, that might indicate a failure to do preventative maintenance. If, for example, the entire state that that power system has been in for decades turns into a tinderbox underneath all of the power lines, normal rates of failure suddenly become catastrophic events that cost human life.
"Idk how much a car that never breaks down would cost" About $1500 on craigslist for a 1994 Camry.....just sayin.
got a 97 civic that'll challenge that lol
I have a gold 1994 Camry that just rolled over to 390,000 miles. Can confirm.
The best is the Previa though. 750,000 miles on the engine and it's still got resale value
My gold Camry is approaching it's 20th birthday and everything is still working. Just keep the oil fresh and they'll go forever
Lol I thought of my 94 Camry as soon as he said that
Huh, I've never thought of blackout as a safety feature, but it really is. Thanks for an insightful video!
Most "alternatives" to it probably include some sort of terrifying electrical fire and/or melting of things.
Uhm, sound like when a surgeon dealing with a gangrenous thumb cuts off the arm above elbow. And a leg. Just to be safe. Long live engineering!
Here in California, PG&E has been doing rolling blackouts to try to stop fires around CA. It’s not done what PG&E said it would but it seems to have lessened the intensity. It’s not as bad as last year but still bad.
During the North East blackout of November, 1965, the “chichen and egg” issue was addressed by by interconnecting a large group of employees’ cars to provide startup power for a plant in Connecticut (might have been Massachusetts) , that plant kickstarted the North East grid back to life. The process was described in an article in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact,
Sometimes I ride around on my bicycle, trying to figure out where all the interconnections of the local power structures go. Keeping track of that must be a major cartography job!
Thanks fir the great video!
I see there is someone else still alive that remembers that blackout. I was in Pennsylvania at the time and we intermittently lost power for a few hours. Quite the mess for the upper East coast. As I remember at least one very large generator was destroyed trying to keep the lights on in NYC. It took a few years to get it replaced. 11-20-2019.
I remember that like it was yesterday!!
Did they use the car batteries to provide excitation current to the (power plan) alternator? That makes the most sense.
@@jrmcferren There is a huge amount of control circuitry that has to be up and stable before a plant can be on line, and (depending on the fuel) everything needed to start it. A few years ago a power plant I supported had an intermittent failure in a charger on the battery bank that controlled one of the turbine units. The alarms for that charger were disabled, but the message was not relayed to the next shift. Overnight the batteries gave out and things went wrong, ending with lack of lubrication to the rotor bearings. The generator spun down with no oil and the expected results.
I was living about 40 miles from Philadelphia and all we had was a momentary brightening of the lights in the house and everything went back to normal. It wasn't until the 11 o'clock news that we found out about the power outage. And New York City was burning. Looting was out of control. We talked about that in school over the next few weeks.
Woah! You guys didnt even stretch the video 10 minutes, immense respect for this channel.
Easy when you have a sponsor
The 10 minutes are only required to have mid-roll ads. If you don't use them, you don't need the 10 minutes mark. I see people everywhere accused of the "OMG 10 MINUTES" and they don't even use mid-roll ads.
what are this "ads" you are talking about ^^
@@Zpajro ads that play during the video. You don’t need to hit 10minutes to have a video before the video, but it has to be atleast 10 minutes in order for ads to play during the video
"Loss of a service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system" well that is a different perspective
That's why major public services and big business had their own emergency power supply, though.
Look at it this way: Do you want to lose power for one or two days or 2 months? Designing systems to go off grid or fail, before the powerplant does is essential, to not have power for the next 2 months. If the generator in a power plant gets damaged, that plant usually isn't working for the next 6 months. Also shedding large power consumers, like steel arc furnaces and so on is faster than starting up a gas turbine.
@@JainZar1 or the electric companies can start doing their jobs and stop being greedy and put there lines underground in forest areas and not have the fire/blackout at all.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 If your place is anywhere near San Andreas fault, then putting your cable underground is... rather suboptimal. They should have done more maintenance, though.
@@emanuelgonzalez7213 there will always be blackouts. In my experience, ground cables break more often than hanging power lines, usually because someone didn't check the ground before digging. Also, ground cables don't get cooled of by wind, so they are more prone to melt during heavy load.
Grid protection is my job. It's really about shutting down before stuff breaks. If you have a blackout that lasts for less than a day, we've definitely done our job. If it lasts for a week, we might have missed something important.
If nobody even tried to do our job, expect at least a few fires, and probably a transformer explosion. The full cost to replace everything that was destroyed will probably be a dollar amount of 6-7 figures, and take at least 6 months before it's up and running.
"When the power goes out it probably means things are working as designed to protect the power grid as a whole."
Unless you live in certain areas of California, where it means the power company has neglected maintenance for so long that they don't dare keep the power on because it will start more wildfires.
A power line transformer exploded in spectacular fashion once near my house one night when I was living used to live by a redwood forest. Luckily for the neighborhood it was the middle of winter and this was before we had the big drought. I don't think redwoods are able to easily catch fire. I'll give the unnamed most hated utility some credit though, they got the transformer replaced in a day.
No matter how it starts a fire shouldn't be able to spread into a major disaster like it can in California. Controlled burns, and other fire management, should be used to isolate different areas so the amount that a fire can spread is much more limited. It's easy to just blame PG&E for everything, but the problem is much more complicated then that. You shouldn't have a system where something like a carelessly thrown cigarette butt can lead to a major disaster.
California is like the Well Yes but actually No meme.
what hasn't been mentioned is that the calif leadership in their infinite wisdom told PGE to start investing millions in renewable energy and so deferred maintenance became the word of the day. Along with the watchdog agencies that were in bed with PGE and the powers that be, blackouts are an unfortunate reality.
Maybe if the hippies let people do their job and cut down trees to manage the forest it wouldn't happen
You missed the opportunity to say "this may come as a shock" in the beginning
yeah thats sad
Never understood cascading failures until now. Suddenly it makes perfect sense. Thanks, Grady!
look up the timeline of the 2003 northeast blackout. an alarm system failure meant operators were unaware of changing conditions, allowing things to deteriorate . the first failure occurred at about 2pm, then more occurred with increasing frequency until over 200 power stations were forced to shut down in
On June 16 2019, here in Argentina, there was an operational error with a 500kv transmission line wich led into a massive blackout leaving the entire country and parts of Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil without electricity for at least 13 hours...
Look up the 1998 north American ice storm.
That was me 2 weeks ago in Texas. However, we went 72 hours.
Blackouts are when the darkness escape the powerplants and cover the cities.
seems legit
100% Fact'nt
Hm.. And here I was thinking that blackouts were just negative electricity that radiate darkness from bulbs instead of light. Ya learn something new everyday!
Hi yes hello that’s fucking OMINOUS thank you.
Are there ever; "whiteons of dark?"
I'm happy in Factorio all I have to do when blackout occurs is to take few stacks of coal to restart it and expand my coal mine.
When I first played Factorio, I kept thinking "this is too easy, I wish real life was like that"
@@buttonasas Then you become quickly overwhelmed by the size of your growing factory and before you know it 3 years have passed and you still haven't sorted out your iron shortages
@@Ryanisthere Still easier than Real Life. 🤣🤣🤣
Use burner inserters on the boilers to keep them functional even during a power outage.
@@quadrplax
What is a burner inserter?
I asked my best friend (an engineering student) why Practical Engineering is such a good youtube channel. He answered: "Because they skip the banging your head on the wall phase".
Thanks for the video. As a Protection and Control Technician for a large Transmission company, I appreciate the simplified explanation of the "zones of protection", as well as the whole video. I never have a good way to explain what I do for a living to people, and next time that happens I'm going to reference this video!
You've got a new subscriber in me.
My coffee machine: short circuits
Nuclear power plant: *explodes*
Nah, at worst it would just damage the generator, the actual reactor would be find. Though if the rest of the local grid went down they have to start the diesel generators to keep the coolant running.
@@TheAkashicTraveller just a joke on the content of the video, but yea I get it. Cheers!
Karibe Madhura
Cmon you could’ve given him a whoosh
@@Zeckmon3 I thought its kinda becoming too overused lately
@@karibemadhura442 it was overused the first time it was used
I enjoyed this video. I spent many years configuring the computer system that monitored a small portion of the grid here in Virginia.
Thanks John👍🏻
John Nelson not all heroes wear capes
@@sgb4798 But they ALL wear spandex.
Relay tech?
@@circusmime No. For a while I configured the SCADA side of mainly Cooper Form6 reclosers and designed the user interface on this organizations SCADA.
As a power protection engineer I can say this was a good ten minute explanation. Well done! You should have been sponsored by a company from the industry though.
Honestly in a lot of ways I'm glad he's not as the corporate pressure might distort the meaning or general applicability of his videos.
I'm happy he has sponsors at all so he can continue delivering this quality content.
Why should he have been? Why would it matter? That is like saying the ads during the Super Bowl should be by football or sports related companies.
I could already tell how impractical all those suggestions were, but you still got me pretty good at "hide the solar panels under the ocean!" 🤣
To clarify a term you used: a blackstart resource is one that can start on its own and doesn't require outside power. Every utility already has a blackstart resource identified and plan to power up substations and generation plants along the way.
I was working for Ontario Power Generation on the night of the 2003 blackout. We had to pick up the pieces and get our plant running again. The guys on the day shift experienced the event. Quite a thing to see, hear and feel 2000 megawatts of generation being sped up (frequency goes up) the reverse when the frequency goes down. All the protection worked and there was no damage to the equipment, personnel or environment. Great video, keep them coming.
I've never been at a generating station when the load was unstable - it must have been awesome!
I’m a kid from Acadiana, the heart of Cajun Louisiana. I was on a subway in Manhattan during the massive east coast blackout in August of 2003…had to walk 20 miles from downtown, across the Queensboro bridge out to Rockaway beach that day. Seeing the night sky over New York and the millions of people thronging the streets, and those who had made it home handing out water to those still trekking was an experience I will never forget.
I bought my house in early 2015, located in the woods. For the first 3 years we lost power a lot, sometimes several times a month and always for at least a couple days. I realized it was always happening in the same area due to large trees falling down or branches that needed to be trimmed. I put in several complaints to the utility company and they finally did some work. We have only lost power 3 times in the last 2 years. Of course that was after I installed a generator hookup for the house lol.
it be like that sometimes
Says it all doesn't it. The bloody customer has to install their own power generation just to get adequate service.
Privatising energy creation and distribution was a mistake.
Very rural locations have all sorts of reliability problems that sometimes have no solution. The lines may pass over a number of jurisdictions and not all will have clear policies for right of way maintenance. In some areas it is a serious crime to cut trees without going through immense red tape.
I always look forward to your early videos. Amazing video as always 😉
Clawboss?
yes
Hey its the bus guy, right on.
In Venezuela we suffer from daily blackouts due to the lack of maintenance, inexperienced workers and the government stealing millions of dollars destined to the improvement of the grid. Major projects have been announced and never finished. One of the blackouts affected the whole country for about 5 straight days consequence of a fire in a substation (a substation in the middle of nowhere with no maintenance for years), the government blamed the U.S for the blackout (Electromagnetic Pulses Attack).
Same reason that Costa Rica was in such desperate condition after the hurricane that swept it clean. money was going into pockets instead into maintenance. And people wonder why the US is reluctant to give them more money without guarantees it will go for infrastructure.
Corrupt government and blames the u.s for it's bullshit....
I'm pretty sure the only way of causing a large EMP like that that we have is to detonate a nuke at high altitude. That would be quite difficult to miss.
@@TheAkashicTraveller It'd also be pretty hard to make people believe that you didn't just break **international** laws.
Sad your corrupted government dont care about their people
I met a grid operator once and he told me that the reliability trade off was a balance of greed vs fear. I liked that way of putting it.
That's a realistic perspective. Reliability is expensive, not only in upfront costs but in wider margins. In North America NERC dictates minimum margins but those truly are minimums. "You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" (Dirty Harry)
The other recent large USA outage due to a cascade failure was in 2011, when San Diego, Orange County, parts of Baja California, and the surrounding deserts all tripped offline due to an incorrect maintenance action in Arizona. It even caused the San Onofre nuclear generating station to scram and isolate.
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Love when it does this
Zach Phillips I heared once that here in germany the powergrid (the control tech of the grid) trys 3 reconnections after a short happened before finally shutting down
When the customer didn't turn it off and back on again, tech support short circuits a substation
Noorquacker can you explain what you mean?
@@legominimovieproductions At the risk of ruining a joke by explaining it, whenever you call your cable/internet company's tech-support because of a problem, they always tell you to simply switch off the machine (usually for 30 seconds, or so-- which is probably just an arbitrary number, but sounds smart to a layman), then switch it on again, which reboots everything. The gag here is, that instead of having you switch your one machine off/on to fix a minor problem, the tech-support guy does that to the entire power grid, just to fix your cable-box/router. It's akin to the "overkill" metaphor of using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.
@@pcdm43145
Dude, by using a sledgehammer on a fly you could easily miss the fly !
Use a nuclear bomb - 100% guaranteed success rates at getting rid of flies in your area.
@@cezarcatalin1406 I like the way you think, my friend.
"It's the only way to be sure."
th-cam.com/video/B9aM4rH692M/w-d-xo.html
one of the VERY BEST , MOST BALANCED, REALISTIC channels on YT!!!
I’m currently learning about the telegraphers equations and characteristic impedance of transmission lines. It’s good to take a breath and review the big picture with these videos.
It's even better when you are so interested in what you're learning that when you take a break, it's to learn more about the subject! That's when you know you choose the right career path!
The telegraphers equation refers to signal transmission lines, not power transmission lines. It's an unfortunate case of having the same name for different things. Signal transmission lines are lines such as coaxial cables, microwave wave guides and telephone lines, now almost obsolete.
I had to learn that in1980. Today: Fiber Optic Time Domain Reflectometry.
Being an electronics engineering i really appreciate the way you have put all these things in 10mins. Kudos 🙏
Who's here from the winter storm in Texas? My power just went out due to a rolling blackout
Damn it you caught me!
🙋🏽♀️
Ive been trying to understand that 2003 power outage for a while and you explained it better than any other video I've seen in 5 seconds.
Loving those googly eyes on that oscilloscope!
That last part with the facilities needing power to start backnup is why i love hydro electric dams such as the ones here in Quebec. An extra thing I could add here in the protections are whats called Overload protections, where an equipment uses just a little too much current as per usual. This protection will detect (usually thru thermal protection where a little too much current for to long will trip the protection) a fault and protect equipment such as heating elements or motors.
Bro I live in San Antonio Texas, and I’m trying to understand the science behind these rolling blackouts. From my simple minded understanding from watching these videos, I think I figured it out. The rolling power outages that we are experiencing are comparable to a overload protection device. There’s so much demand coming from the customer, that if the demand is met It could overload equipment and cause equipment failures across the city. So the demand needs to be reduced to protect from an overload of equipment, so electricity can be dispersed efficiently right ? What I don’t get is that there’s already been equipment failures and there’s not enough electricity to match the demand. Since there’s not enough electricity to spread, then overload shouldn’t be a problem, so why are we having the rolling black outs ?? I’m probably wrong about all of this but I’m trying to understand.. Wait, i think I maybe getting it now. If they don’t do the rolling blackouts customers would be receiving electricity randomly, and I’m guessing that could cause power surges, which could lead to overloads of equipment, but if they control it, that solves the problem..
@@anthonyvasquez7050 so from what I saw on the news and what I learned in school (and experience in a freezing climate), the rolling blackouts in your region are made so that people are able to have some power to charge batteries, heat their homes etc. Why you have these are because of equipment failure and TERRIBLE planning. For exemple in the army or in hospitals you have 2-3 backup plans for everything, 2 pumps when you need 1, double the hot water heater etc. What I'm saying is the utility companies dint plan for a storm like this so now pipes are frozen, generators a seized up etc. They should have planned for a 150f day as well as a -50f day. But they dint. Lastly, and sadly, texas wants to be indepandent. So you are on your own. Look up a map of the north american power grid and you will see texas as no connections to another state that could help pick up the slack. Now we wont get into the politics of this but in a purely electrical stand point this was highly stupid of them. Now people are freezing and no one that was prepared for this can help you guys because of the energy independance. So those are my understanding of whats happening. Sorry you guys have to go thru this and I really hope you get out of it safe. Good luck bud!
Recommended to me right after the entire texas blackout.
TH-cam has a dark sense of humor
Just got recommended this video and that's all I can think about.
Literally the worst thing I have gone through.
It's dark because of the blackout.
This channel is doing something we sorely need- making science and engineering look cool - which it is. Kudos.
Wow
Thanks for explaining this
I needed this for an assignment
Lol. At 75, I’m long past needing anything for an assignment. But I love this stuff; I don’t want to die as an ignoramus 😉
The fact you are a civil engineer with this knowledge in electrical production system is amazing!!
Barbados! I'm from and live there. Was really weird seeing that footage in one of your videos. We're actually having major power issues now.
Yeah, had me looking at it twice was kinda weird for real.
TH-cam knows all things. 12 hour power outage today and a few hours yesterday. This kind of video never would have ended up in my feed. Was posted 11 months ago.
Grady: I don't know how much a car that never breaks down wold cost...
NASA: about $865,000,000 for two of 'em (voyager 1 and 2 total mission cost to date)
Also Spirit and Opportunity $1,000,000,000 for the pair. Lasted way past their warranty.
Ford...
@@9HighFlyer9 90 day warranty take it or leave it.
15 years later
Oppy: "my batteries are low and its getting dark"
Press F to pay respect: F
Fords aren’t reliable.
When the electricity doesn't shut off, and there's a problem, you're in trouble.
Last month, at my work, a power line broke during a windstorm, landing on a tree. Luckily, I was well away from it and had electrically resistant shoes because the fuse didn't break the circuit until the line fell onto the metal fence below it, generating a big arc. I ran screaming to the insulated safety of my car to call 911, but someone beat me to it, and the fire department arrived as I was leaving. It's very fortunate that everyone there knew about power line safety, and stayed far away.
I have a bunch of lineman friends and wish that more people understood this, "loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system"
He said it wrong though my friend 😔
Would you rather lose power for a day or two or for half a year?
Maybe we ought to have more means of generation and storage of electricity, on smaller scale
Great video, thanks. Once, on a tour of the old Didcot power station I saw the last resort restart. The was a lead acid battery that could start a gas turbine engine which in turn generated enough power to run the coal handling machinery to light one boiler. This enabled the station to restart from cold and dark with the grid not energised. In theory this enabled everything to recover from a complete shutdown.
I would ask any Texas people if they are here, but then again I remember they have massive blackouts atm
I’m here ...... now. 😩🥶
The visual demonstrations really help communicate your point. Great vid as always.
Grats on your 1M button!!
Fantastic. I am starting my new job in a grid company and your videos provide some very good basic knowledge easy to understand. Well done. Thanks a lot.
I’m in Houston and it’s 14 degrees and the power has been off for 24 hours
I am absolutely NOT grateful for this blackout lol
Argentinian here, on August we had a cascading blackout due to a 500kv line failure that outed all the country and even some cities of Chile, Uruguay and Brazil. It happened due to the interconnected system(Argentinian SADI) that couldn't handle the load when the line failed and the protections for under frequency started taking other generators offline until everything went black. Power where restored to almost every city in less than 6 hs
What’s worth mentioning is that now many households have their own generator (solar). So it’s absolutely crucial to have tightly unforced regulations around inverter’s behaviour during blackouts (aka anti-is landing).
So. If you DIY an on-grid system and source your solar inverter from outside of your country, that inverter might not comply with your country’s grid connection regulation. What can happen is during blackout, your solar PV system may still be generating power which will electrocute people working to repair the blackout. You WILL go to jail for manslaughter.
To my knowledge all Inverters must check regulary (multiple times a second) if the Grid is still online and if its down the will stop feeding immediately.
(they do this afaik by not feeding for a millisecond and checking voltage if i remember correctly).
Beautifully explained!
In the mentioned blackout that hit the northeast taking out much of Ontario as well, it should be mentioned that Quebec was not affected. Why is that? Because Quebec (like most of Texas) isolates itself from neighbouring grids with AC::DC-DC::AC converters. This takes line frequency completely out of the equation and prevents systems on the Quebec side from being badly affected. It's naturally isolated to begin with by the DC "bridge". Instability on the US or Ontario side cannot "infect" the Quebec grid.
The US grid would do well to set up similar "islands" to protect against regional failure spreads.
Further, this would promote using more long distance HVDC transport of power which could help with the marketing of solar and wind energy.
I'm an engineer and watch your videos over and over again. Thank you for sharing your priceless work!
Need a video on transient fault, delayed auto reclose and sectionliser
Stephen Rowley ... hey as long as he’s at it, we might as well have him throw in a little distance protection with hybrid single pole tripping too. ⚡️⚡️⚡️
I've never seen a more beautiful night sky than during that 2003 black out. i kinda want another one.
Come to Flagstaff, Arizona. Being a dark sky city, I can walk outside my home and see the Milky Way with ease.
When the grid goes down I'm the only one with the lights on for miles and miles.
One thing that isnt mentioned, but is becoming increasingly important is the use of remedial action systems (RAS). I'm a control engineer specialising in RAS which span the UK transmission network; essentially these are "generation shedding" developed to detect line end open circuits (LEOs) and trip large scale generation such as windfarms and interconnectors. Based upon where this LEO occurs could mean the thermal capacity of a circuit/s is exceeded, requiring tripping of generation to avoid thermal damage to equipment.
Furthermore, these systems look to maintain grid stability by countering frequency changes, to prevent cascade tripping events and large scale blackouts. When involved with commissioning support of these systems, I have seen protection relays for 1GW interconnectors armed and ready, even while working in the same panel which is as comfortable as it sounds hahah. Overall great video anyway!!
Sir make a video on rainwater harvesting system
I love how you always put topics in the context of fundamental engineering principals, such as balancing cost and reliability.
"and shuts off the circuit"
Most non competent electricians here will just replace the breaker with a bigger one
i use six inch nail
@corey Babcock nine imch thats 225mm imight bw.wrong but im sure we domt have them in uk
Isnt that how a house fire start
@@robertbennett2796 yeah
2-17-2021 in DFW Texas. Snow storm for the pass three days. Therefore I’m watching and learning.
"The blackout of 2003 that took out much of the US North East and Ontario"
**Laughs in Québécois**
In Italy also nationwide blackout in 2003. It was a mess
@Harry M Depends on what were damaged and how the fail-safe works. If what damaged is something major (like main transmission from major electric producer) them automatically major area would get blackout. If the failsafes were all something like single-use fuse, then repair them would take time anyway.
Ahaha the 1998 ice storm had 8 year old me learning how to make fires, build shelter and hunt deer with my bare hands.
(Not really but that was some war-of-the-world shit and i learned how important gas stoves were)
Harry M because the sudden loss of a load causes the generators to speed up and things shutdown for over frequency. I don’t know what their limits are but my solar gear calls anything >60.5hz an error and shuts down.
This should have been a mandatory watch for the grid execs in Texas.
Power lines are exposed to weather...
Me: Laughs in UK.
Not all in the UK are underground only those areas OWNED by the Nation Trust
The difference is my home state is 93000sq miles ALL of GB is the same at 93000sq miles. Size matters. So come back when you include all of the EU then we will be talking apples to apples.
@@tysleight I'm not critical of your Nation just critical of your belief that what your power company tells you is in Your interest or there's I live in a country that before the French cut off a Kings Head for Lying to the people and yet your happy to take your service company as not screwing you over ?
Lassi Kinnunen California has been politically mismanaged for years leading to it being like a third world country
@@bryansmith1920 more numbers just for apples to apples CA has a land mass of 163,000sq miles population density of 253 per sq mile, GB is 671 per sq mile or more than double.
My current electric rates are $0.09 kwh when I lived in London it was in USD was $0.29 kwh also 90% of the power in my state is renewable and has been since way before the Eco trend. So not bashing just trying to keep stereotypes from proliferating
Great video, good simple explanation of power system protection from all voltage levels. I work in the industry and and see this all the time.
Really need the general public to understand the challenges of operating an electric grid. Lots of the time, people are frustrated because they do not have the perspective all the things going on behind the scenes. Hopefully videos like these will help with these issues.
6:20 "These are all types of managed failures where you have some loss of service at the cost of protecting the rest of the system"
Shouldn't that be "types of managed failures where you protect the rest of the system at the cost of some loss of service"?
Last year a storm knocked over trees and wreaked havoc in my area. The next day I went out to see what was up and I saw a large branch laying across the transmission wires and was on the ground at the other end. I almost walked up and tried removing it myself, then I reconsidered and called the emergency line. They told me not to touch it or even go near it. When the Lineman finally arrived, I was talking to him and he flat out told me if I had touched that branch, I would be dead. It was grounding out power lines. That shook me up. I couldn't believe I was actually going to grab it. I thank my stars that I listened to my inner self warning me. This is a cautionary tale. If you see it, leave it. If you're in your car and can't get out, don't even try. As soon as you open up your door and place your foot on the ground, you just let the current, which was being isolated by the rubber tires, have a path to ground. Through YOU!
The algorithm really has a dark sense of humor these days
“dark”
i saw it
Your understandable explanation makes the inconvenience of a blackout seem quite reasonable plus rightfully essential for grid sustainability.
How Black Outs in Texas work: "I mean, I guess families can suffer for days if businesses have lights."
@2009G8Gxp I live here in austin and the amount of companies that are closed at night with no one working and they still have all of their lights and AC on is astonishing. If anything, your statement towards me is laughable at best.
@2009G8Gxp So flipping a light switch and turning your thermostat to an equilibrium wont have any effect on the power grid at all. HMMMMMMMM How bright are you my guy? Turning off lights and AC units doesnt mean cutting the main power breaker to the building.
@2009G8Gxp considering I work with electronics and electricity in my industry, I think I have more of an idea of how businesses work at night than you do considering I'm the one of very few people that enter these buildings at night. The only thing that's 24/7 are server admins, security, and janitorial. That's hardly even a 20th of the entire force working in these buildings on a day to day basis.
These rich fucks can set their thermostats to 73 degrees at night and no one will complain I promise you. Yet you want to come at me and say I don't know how the world works. Buddy I work in the areas and topics were talking about! You really wanna attempt to school me on something I do on a day to day basis?
Hi, um, California here. First off, may not want to discount the concern of fire when there is a fault. Power line faults have become a huge issue here when it comes to starting wildfires. Scores of folks have lost their lives and homes, those faults are no small thing here.
In fact, it would be interesting to have a video that includes the impact of climate change and how providers are adjusting and scrambling to react. Locally, PG&E is saying that if they harden the grid and switch from wooden poles to steel poles that will reduce the necessity of a shutoff due to wind danger. But lots of folks locally think it's just cover because they're going bankrupt and they want a state bond measure to finance the new poles. Would be interesting to see the science on it more clearly.
The solar panels under the ocean, that was a good one
they could do double duty by being wave motion generators. Two for one.
@@AffordBindEquipment
*Under* the ocean
@@NoNameAtAll2 I bet some boffin has figured out how to use them under the ocean.
Whether it's cheap or not is another matter.
@@NoNameAtAll2 "under" is not defined; to be grammatically correct, these would have to be on the ocean bottom for the panels to technically be "under" the ocean. But my comment was a joke, which means "not to be taken seriously". But I have seen where wave generation is "under" the waves so as not to be beat to death by the constant bashing. Also, tide generators.
The demo with the fuses in parallel was awesome!
4:30 JESUS what is that guy holding on to? :O
épinards & caramel it looks like they are adding a “tap” to the line. (Probably for a line potential device of some sort, lower down and out of the picture). He is prepping the tap to keep it in place. He wraps Armor Rod around the conductor on both sides. That stuff he is holding is the Armor Rod.
I remember the big blackout that came with a fault on the Pacific Intertie (1996, I think). I'd long since developed the habit of driving out of blackout areas for a meal or movie while waiting for the power to be restored at my home. That time though, I drove all over the southern portions of the San Francisco bay area. The was almost no power for dozens and dozens of mile. But it was during the day so life went on. Later I learned lights had been out down into Mexico. It was a day the earth stood still - for a while. All because of a lightning struck tree fire in the Northwest wilderness and a grid protecting itself.
Here in South Africa they introduce blackouts when they don't get permission to take more of our money
It’s crazy that I’m just seeing this video now. I work as a grid operator for a utility. Faults are an everyday occurrence on the distribution system. As you stated those faults are controlled by relays and breakers. Most soft faults such as a fused switch blowing won’t open a breaker and cause a circuit to be dropped. But hard faults such as primary line down or primary lines slapping together will open a breaker. The breakers are installed with multi shots. The breaker detects that fault then it opens the breaker, it re-closes the breaker after about 5 seconds. If the fault persists the breaker will open again and close after 30 seconds. If the fault is detected a 3rd time the breaker will relay out and it will stay open until we close it manually. I use pole mounted Re-closers within that circuit to isolate the fault and get as many customers within that circuit back on until repairs can be made. You are correct. The grid is a massive machine and it takes people monitoring and controlling it 24/7 365.
Yup.. on august 4 2019, half of java (Indonesia) had a 6-12 hours electric blackout
good
@@edwin3928ohd How the hell is that good?
@@peter0976 because it lasted no more than half a day.
That's what you got when big power plants are located 1000km away from the biggest load center. All you need is a tree to short the circuit and voila, half of the island had a blackout
isn't java in Minecraft?
I really appreciate that both in this video and your video about road work. you address the fact that some things in life can be frustrating, but then you proceed to show us why such things happen in the way that they do.
Great work on the channel!
This video should be retitled How to not be Texas
I was born and raised in as well in Pennsylvania. And I remember that 2003 blackout. It lasted days.
Substation protection engineer here. Great video, I liked that you went into zones of protection as well. Im going to show these to all our new guys from now on
Blackout, when electricity supply didn't work.
This: How blackout work
This was very simple, but helpful. Thank you.
le me learning about chebishev filters and i am tired of the word 'ripple'
As an electrical engineer specializing in controls, this is super interesting. Awesome vid!
"When the power goes out ..."
Most people in the civilized world get less than one outage in a decade, not all the time like the US.
Try not getting all your info on other countries from television, eh?
I live in the 5th largest city in the us and I could not tell you the last time I remember the power going out.
Hahaha you dont live here in Argentina..
We have power outages every summer..
Well, if you hadn't shut down all the nuclear plants, maybe your power wouldn't be going out.
I always take a long time to watch your videos , but when i do i love them , you really change my perspective of infrastructure.
"Reelees"
I loved that massive blackout. The summer night sky was amazing
I kinda wanna say:
They don't.
That's why it goes black.
I hate to like diminish your own personal awesome by comparing you to other awesome people but I get such serious Phil Plaite vibes when I listen to you. And watching you. It's like you guys split form the same person, one went earth and other went stars.
Being next to those live lines and helping to prevent faults and outages is the reason why I love my job. #lineclerance
Here in the Democratic People's Republic of California they shut off power for fun.