CLOSED!!Political Discussion - A Place to &quot;duke it out&quot; (7400+)

Top 1044. Aug 15, 2003 5:04 AM

» Fred2000 - What this country needs:

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A good tax cut. This would provide the money needed to build a modern electrical grid.

An energy policy. Apparently we didn't have one under Bush senior, Billyboy Clinton and we still don't have one. Someone call Ken Lay.

More recalls of our political leaders. What kind of Homeland Security do we really have if the lights can go out on 50 million people?

To realize that if we don't know what caused the power failure, we don't really know if terrorists are involved. The president's assurance that it was not terrorists could just be so much Pablum.

Did I say that the most important thing is, we need a good tax cut?

To realize that power failures in Iraq are the mark of an advanced power system.

-- posted by Fred2000

Top 1045. Aug 15, 2003 5:39 AM

» Fred2000 - Blackout Shows Vulnerability of Nation

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By LARRY MARGASAK
The Associated Press
Thursday, August 14, 2003; 9:27 PM

WASHINGTON - The blackout that turned out the lights for millions of Americans and Canadians on Thursday once again showed how the interconnected engines of modern life are vulnerable to massive disruptions.

Nuclear plants stopped running. People were trapped in subways and elevators. Planes were grounded. Traffic lights went out.

And, until they learned otherwise, those caught in the steam of summer asked whether America had been attacked again.

"It shows us we have tied together so many systems to build a high quality life, and that creates its own vulnerabilities," said James Gilmore, the former governor of Virginia and chairman of a terrorism panel formed by Congress.

The electric grid is perhaps the most vulnerable of the country's critical systems. Grids are interconnected and, unlike natural gas that can be stored, electricity must be produced in real time, when it is needed.

"With electricity, if there's a loss of a major transmission line or generator, the system can come under an unstable situation where there's too much demand and too little supply," said Tony Anthony, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an organization of shareholder owned electric utilities.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, energy secretary during the Clinton administration, said the blackout underscored the need for Congress to require national standards for the reliability of the electric power system.

-- posted by Fred2000

Top 1046. Aug 15, 2003 6:08 AM

» Fred2000 - Insana reports....

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Insana reports that by the time the London stock market closed yesterday, the price of one UK stock went up by ten times. Their product? Electrical power pretection equipment. Their connection? They are a subsidiary of am American company.

The London stock market closes at 4:00PM.

-- posted by Fred2000

Top 1047. Aug 15, 2003 6:25 AM

» Kirk - Schwartzenegger Signs Shultz for Team

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Schwartzenegger Signs Shultz for Team

Thu Aug 14, 9:48 PM ET

By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES - Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Thursday that former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz will co-chair an Economic Recovery Council for his gubernatorial campaign.

It was the second major announcement in two days for the actor. On Wednesday, the campaign said billionaire investor Warren Buffett (news - web sites) would be a financial adviser.

Buffett and Shultz will be joint co-chairs of the economic council. The appointments of Buffett, a Democrat, and Republican Shultz reflect the campaign's attempt to assemble a diverse and bipartisan team.

The campaign will soon have an economic summit, Schwarzenegger told reporters in brief remarks on his way into a San Fernando Valley middle school where he attended a commencement ceremony for an after-school program he's involved with.

It was Schwarzenegger's first exchange with reporters since he filed candidacy papers Saturday, and his first public appearance since attending a summer school program in New York on Monday.

"I'm a very astute businessman. I know exactly what I'm doing," Schwarzenegger said of his qualifications to govern California. He cited his involvement with Proposition 49, the after-school programs ballot initiative he successfully championed last year.

He also responded to comments earlier in the day by Arianna Huffington, one of his 134 opponents to replace Democratic Gov. Gray Davis (news - web sites) if he is removed in the Oct. 7 recall election.

With President Bush (news - web sites) arriving in California for a two-day visit, Huffington branded Schwarzenegger a "Bush Republican through and through."

"It doesn't matter what Arianna or anybody says," Schwarzenegger said.

Huffington also criticized Schwarzenegger for meeting with former Enron Chairman Ken Lay in May 2001 in Beverly Hills. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that Lay gave Schwarzenegger and other business and political leaders, including then-Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, a four-page plan detailing his solution to California's energy crisis.

"I don't remember the meeting," Schwarzenegger said.

"Do I remember all the meetings that I had in the last decade?" he said.

"Well you know that I'm not responding to any of those things because I would be crazy if I would," Schwarzenegger said. "To me the most important thing is that we move forward in a positive way. My campaign is a positive campaign that will bring the economy back, reduce the budget and teach the politicians in Sacramento that we cannot go and spend money that we don't have."

After the exchange, he went inside Mulholland Middle School, where he sat for about 25 minutes with students and parents, watching the commencement ceremony.

Schwarzenegger, who had attended at the request of a seventh-grader, talked to the group about the value of after-school programs. He left through a back exit without taking more questions from reporters.

Aides said Schwarzenegger will give more detailed program announcements and make more public appearances at a time of his choosing.

Shultz is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was secretary of state from 1982 to 1989 in the first Bush administration and previously served on President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board. During the Nixon-Ford presidencies, he was Treasury secretary from 1972 until 1974 and secretary of labor from 1969 until 1970.

Smart men attract even smarter men to work in key positions for them. I am very impressed with Arnold!

-- posted by Kirk

Top 1048. Aug 15, 2003 11:36 AM

» Laughman - Power Outage Traced To Dim Bulb In White House

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Power Outage Traced To Dim Bulb In White House

by Greg Palast

August 15, 2003: I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

It was like a committee of bank robbers figuring out how to make safecracking legal. But they dare not launch the scheme in the USA. Rather, in 1990, one devious little bunch of operators out of Texas, Houston Natural Gas, operating under the alias "Enron," talked an over-the-edge free-market fanatic, Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, into licensing the first completely deregulated power plant in the hemisphere.

And so began an economic disease called "regulatory reform" that spread faster than SARS. Notably, Enron rewarded Thatcher's Energy Minister, one Lord Wakeham, with a bushel of dollar bills for 'consulting' services and a seat on Enron's board of directors. The English experiment proved the viability of Enron's new industrial formula: that the enthusiasm of politicians for deregulation was in direct proportion to the payola provided by power companies.

The power elite first moved on England because they knew Americans wouldn't swallow the deregulation snake oil easily. The USA had gotten used to cheap power available at the flick of switch. This was the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt who, in 1933, caged the man he thought to be the last of the power pirates, Samuel Insull. Wall Street wheeler-dealer Insull creator of the Power Trust, and six decades before Ken Lay, faked account books and ripped off consumers. To frustrate Insull and his ilk, FDR gave us the Federal Power Commission and the Public Utilities Holding Company Act which told electricity companies where to stand and salute. Detailed regulations limited charges to real expenditures plus a government-set profit. The laws banned "power markets" and required companies to keep the lights on under threat of arrest -- no blackout blackmail to hike rates.

Of particular significance as I write here in the dark, regulators told utilities exactly how much they had to spend to insure the system stayed in repair and the lights stayed on. Bureaucrats crawled along the wire and, like me, crawled through the account books, to make sure the power execs spent customers' money on parts and labor. If they didn't, we'd whack'm over the head with our thick rule books. Did we get in the way of these businessmen's entrepreneurial spirit? Damn right we did.

Most important, FDR banned political contributions from utility companies -- no 'soft' money, no 'hard' money, no money PERIOD.

But then came George the First. In 1992, just prior to his departure from the White House, President Bush Senior gave the power industry one long deep-through-the-teeth kiss good-bye: federal deregulation of electricity. It was a legacy he wanted to leave for his son, the gratitude of power companies which ponied up $16 million for the Republican campaign of 2000, seven times the sum they gave Democrats.

But Poppy Bush's gift of deregulating of wholesale prices set by the feds only got the power pirates halfway to the plunder of Joe Ratepayer. For the big payday they needed deregulation at the state level. There were only two states, California and Texas, big enough and Republican enough to put the electricity market con into operation.

California fell first. The power companies spent $39 million to defeat a 1998 referendum pushed by Ralph Nadar which would have blocked the de-reg scam. Another $37 million was spent on lobbying and lubricating the campaign coffers of legislators to write a lie into law: in the deregulation act's preamble, the Legislature promised that deregulation would reduce electricity bills by 20%. In fact, when San Diegans in the first California city to go "lawless" looked at their bills, the 20% savings became a 300% jump in surcharges.

Enron circled California and licked its lips. As the number one life-time contributor to the George W. Bush campaign, it was confident about the future. With just a half dozen other companies it controlled at times 100% of the available power capacity needed to keep the Golden State lit. Their motto, "your money or your lights." Enron and its comrades played the system like a broken ATM machine, yanking out the bills. For example, in the shamelessly fixed "auctions" for electricity held by the state, Enron bid, in one instance, to supply 500 megawatts of electricity over a 15 megawatt line. That's like pouring a gallon of gasoline into a thimble -- the lines would burn up if they attempted it. Faced with blackout because of Enron's destructive bid, the state was willing to pay anything to keep the lights on.

And the state did. According to Dr. Anjali Sheffrin, economist with the California state Independent System Operator which directed power movements, between May and November 2000, three power giants physically or "economically" withheld power from the state and concocted enough false bids to cost the California customers over $6.2 billion in excess charges.

It took until December 20, 2000, with the lights going out on the Golden Gate, for President Bill Clinton, once a deregulation booster, to find his lost Democratic soul and impose price caps in California and ban Enron from the market.

But the light-bulb buccaneers didn't have to wait long to put their hooks back into the treasure chest. Within seventy-two hours of moving into the White House, while he was still sweeping out the inaugural champagne bottles, George Bush the Second reversed Clinton's executive order and put the power pirates back in business in California. Enron, Reliant (aka Houston Industries), TXU (aka Texas Utilities) and the others who had economically snipped California's wires knew they could count on Dubya, who as governor of the Lone Star state cut them the richest deregulation deal in America.

Meanwhile, the deregulation bug made it to New York where Republican Governor George Pataki and his industry-picked utility commissioners ripped the lid off electric bills and relieved my old friends at Niagara Mohawk of the expensive obligation to properly fund the maintenance of the grid system.

And the Pataki-Bush Axis of Weasels permitted something that must have former New York governor Roosevelt spinning in his wheelchair in Heaven: They allowed a foreign company, the notoriously incompetent National Grid of England, to buy up NiMo, get rid of 800 workers and pocket most of their wages - producing a bonus for NiMo stockholders approaching $90 million.

Is tonight's black-out a surprise? Heck, no, not to us in the field who've watched Bush's buddies flick the switches across the globe. In Brazil, Houston Industries seized ownership of Rio de Janeiro's electric company. The Texans (aided by their French partners) fired workers, raised prices, cut maintenance expenditures and, CLICK! the juice went out so often the locals now call it, "Rio Dark."

So too the free-market cowboys of Niagara Mohawk raised prices, slashed staff, cut maintenance and CLICK! -- New York joins Brazil in the Dark Ages.

Californians have found the solution to the deregulation disaster: re-call the only governor in the nation with the cojones to stand up to the electricity price fixers. And unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gov. Gray Davis stood alone against the bad guys without using a body double. Davis called Reliant Corp of Houston a pack of "pirates" --and now he'll walk the plank for daring to stand up to the Texas marauders.

So where's the President? Just before he landed on the deck of the Abe Lincoln, the White House was so concerned about our brave troops facing the foe that they used the cover of war for a new push in Congress for yet more electricity deregulation. This has a certain logic: there's no sense defeating Iraq if a hostile regime remains in California.

Sitting in the dark, as my laptop battery runs low, I don't know if the truth about deregulation will ever see the light --until we change the dim bulb in the White House.

Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Penguin USA 2003) and the worstseller, "Democracy and Regulation," a guide to electricity deregulation published by the United Nations (2003, written with T. MacGregor and J. Oppenheim).

-- posted by Laughman

Top 1049. Aug 15, 2003 12:34 PM

» lcha - Re: Power Outage Traced To Dim Bulb In White House

In response to message posted by Laughman:

Too bad about other areas but deregulation is working just fine in Texas. And even with every frickin air conditioner unit in the state running full time in the summer, our power grid is just fine too. And we have plenty of natural gas to feed the nice grid we have as well. Thank you, but the grid is all ours and we're not in the mood for sharing it right now.

Why is Texas in such good shape energy wise? Because we don't look at the energy companies in our state as the personification of evil. So we work WITH them, not against them. Energy is the lifeblood of life itself in this tech world and we fully understand that. Seems all the folks that DON'T understand that have the dim bulb.

-- posted by lcha

Top 1050. Aug 15, 2003 3:12 PM

» DellaO - Some Real Information About the Power Failure

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In a nutshell, no one knows the real reason for the failure, as of yet. But if you want to read some objective commentary, instead of knee-jerk Bush-bashing, this from the Boston Globe is very interesting:

Officials find few answers but grid's fragility
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 8/15/2003

Officials searching for the cause of yesterday's cascading series of blackouts were focusing on an apparent abrupt failure of several high-transmission lines near the New York-Ontario border, but by early this morning they still had no explanation of what had triggered the worst blackout in US history.

The widespread power failure that brought New York City, Toronto, Detroit, and other cities to a halt occurred despite nearly four decades of efforts by utility companies to prevent a repeat of a nearly identical outage that darkened the Northeast in 1965. The outages underscored long-running concerns about inadequate investment in the nation's power grid and more recent worries about its vulnerability to terrorists.

As power was slowly being restored by early last evening, officials were still trying to determine where the 345,000-volt lines failed and why. Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada first said the failure appeared to have begun with a lightning strike at a power plant near the St. Lawrence River, and Canadian officials later said it was a power plant fire. Later still, they blamed the events on an unidentified Pennsylvania nuclear plant shutting down. But US utility officials denied all of those explanations, saying that no such events had occurred.

Investigators were also considering the possibility of a simple overload because of heavy summer power demand for air conditioning and refrigeration. Federal officials said that terrorism did not appear to be involved.

Because the New York power grid is connected to the New England, Canadian, and Midwestern power grids, a sudden surge of electricity from neighboring grids to cover the failed lines apparently tripped the equivalent of massive circuit breakers. That in turn blacked out New York City and shut down several power plants.

With the power suddenly blocked from flowing to New York, it raced back into the adjacent grids, overwhelming transmission lines and substations and triggering still more blackouts over an estimated 9,300-square-mile area.

Yesterday's sequence of events resembled the November 1965 outage that began at a switch in a hydroelectric plant near Niagara Falls and rapidly blacked out cities as far away as Boston and Philadelphia.

The electric industry has spent millions over the years to prevent or minimize the risk that a single failure in one grid could disrupt neighboring grids. Efforts have been led by a group established in 1968, the North American Electric Reliability Council.

Yesterday's failure "clearly shows that the grid system didn't work the way it's supposed to," said Governor George Pataki of New York. "We had this Northeast outage back [in 1965], and it wasn't supposed to happen again. It has happened again. And there have to be some tough questions asked as to why."

A top New England power grid official said last night that 38 years of planning and technological efforts had failed and must be severely scrutinized.

"It's an event that was beyond our normal planning and evaluation criteria," said the official, Stephen G. Whitley, chief operating officer of Independent System Operator New England, the Holyoke organization that runs the New England power grid.

"We plan and operate the system so that you could withstand a single transmismission event or generation failure," Whitley said. "The system today was stressed by a contingency that was much greater than that, multiple elements out at the same time. This certainly isn't acceptable to us. We don't want this to ever happen, but it did, and so we want to find out why."

Whitley and other utility officials said the sequence of events that led in seconds to massive outages apparently began with failures of high-voltage power lines operated by National Grid USA's Niagara Mohawk Power unit that connect upstate New York and Ontario.

But Niagara Mohawk's president, William F. Edwards, said late last night that "we have no data that we've seen that would support that it was on Niagara Mohawk's system." Edwards said that Niagara Mohawk sustained no physical damage to any of its power lines or substations and that all outages in its region stemmed from "the proper working of protective equipment" designed to shut off power flows in emergency situations.

Widely televised scenes of smoke billowing from a Consolidated Edison power plant in New York City as the outage began apparently reflected the expected effects of an abrupt but planned shutdown of the unit, Pataki said.

Phillip Harris, president of PJM Interconnect, the mid-Atlantic power grid operator based in suburban Philadelphia, said that at 4:10 p.m. yesterday PJM operators saw a sudden jump in "electrical frequency" that normally indicates a large number of homes and businesses losing power. Almost simultaneously -- technicians are still trying to figure out what happened first -- power began flowing northward from New York towards Ontario. "We really don't know" what those events meant, Harris said.

Industry officials and political leaders said that yesterday's outage will probably focus public attention on a problem that energy officials have been trying to highlight for years: underinvestment in US high-voltage power lines, which convey electricity from power plants to city and neighborhood substations. While power demand in New England and the United States has grown by as much as 40 percent in the last decade, there has been a lag in spending on high-voltage lines and backup lines, in large part because building 100-foot-tall power lines is deeply unpopular with residents of areas that would be affected.

President Bush, saidlast night that one issue that needs to be considered is whether "the power grid needs to be modernized."

"I happen to think it does," he said.

Bill Richardson, the former US secretary of energy, and current governor of New Mexico, said, "We're the world's greatest superpower, but we have a Third World electricity grid."

Despite big advances in high-tech command centers running grids, Harris said, "most professionals in the business do recognize that the control devices on the transmission system are 30 and 40 and 50 year old technologies" that rely on mechanical switches closing off power flows. "There are some questions here about that equipment and about how [outages] cascaded so far." Others said that yesterday's events would also boost interest in so-called distributed generation systems, such as small fuel cells or diesel-powered generators that can meet the electrical demands of a single city skyscraper or neighborhood when the grid fails.

The New York and Ontario power grids are interconnected with multiple high-voltage lines, so that surplus electricity in one area can be sold to the other. New England has similar connections to New Brunswick, Quebec, and New York that can move up to 3,500 megawatts of electricity into New England, about one-seventh of the six-state region's total peak summer-day demand.

These interconnections were designed to make local power grids less vulnerable to disruptions during normal times. When a power plant or high-voltage line fails in the territory of one grid, they can instantaneously begin importing electricity from neighbors. But in the case of a spectacular failure, these interconnections make grids much more vulnerable to events that occur 500 or 800 miles away.

Whitley said that outages in New England were confined to southwestern Connecticut, because it is "the weakest part of the New England power system" from the standpoint of transmission capacity.

Phil Giudice -- an energy analyst and managing director of Enernoc Inc., a Boston company that sells distributed generation systems -- said, "All these interconnections in the systems, and the tight balance of supply and demand, means there is a certain amount of vulnerability."

Yesterday, with the failure in upstate New York, "there wasn't enough redundancy in the system to respond," he said.

Giudice said the blackout also reflects how electric industry investment has disproportionately gone into building new power plants over the past two decades, rather than on construction of transmission lines that would make it easier to move power around and cope with failures.

-- posted by DellaO

Top 1051. Aug 15, 2003 3:51 PM

» Lawhawk - Re: Some Real Information About the Power Failure

In response to message posted by DellaO:

The problems had nothing to do with deregulation, but some kind of problem that hasn't been determined yet. Niagara Mohawk (my former energy supplier) would be an easy target, but apparently they did everything they were supposed to. Same with ConEd and the other energy suppliers in NY. From the news reports here in NYC, the problem appears to have started somewhere in the Midwest or even in Canada (no deregulation there Laughman) and then spread towards the NY metro area and NY and CT.

It will take some time to figure out what caused the problem and more time to figure out how to prevent it from happening again, but there was some good news.

No riots in the streets. No looting. Not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, as simple as can be. People waited mostly patiently for ferries to New Jersey (myself being one of the multitude who sweated for 2 hours waiting for a ferry). Some offered free water or other drinks to their neighbors in line. Bars and stores opened up water stocks or even ice cream to passersby for free.

There was a lot of good will going all around. Did people wonder when the lights would come back on. Absolutely. Did they think it could be terrorism related? Sure. Did that cause panic? Nope.

-- posted by Lawhawk

Top 1052. Aug 15, 2003 4:42 PM

» Fred2000 - Scientists Had Warned of Weak Power Grid

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By DAFNA LINZER and JIM KRANE
The Associated Press
Friday, August 15, 2003; 6:01 PM

NEW YORK - Scientists and engineers with the National Research Council warned the White House and Congress about the vulnerability of the power grid as recently as November, saying nationwide weaknesses needed to be repaired - and fast.

Little has been done, despite a chorus of experts who've pushed since well before Sept. 11 to fix a grid that's riddled with threadbare links and plagued by chronic shortages.

"The power grid has not gotten much more than important conversations since Sept. 11," said Paul Gilbert, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which worked on the report for the National Research Council.

The report, "Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism," was issued in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, but it noted that the systems were "subject to increased stress even without the threat of terrorism."

The report urged the protection of key elements of the power grid and the creation of an updated system that would limit vulnerabilities to the flow of electricity.

"Technology should be developed for an intelligent, adaptive power grid," that would be able "to rapidly respond with graceful system failure and rapid power recovery," the report recommended. The report's authors shared their findings and recommendations with the White House and congressional committees last November, Gilbert said.

A day after the largest blackout in U.S. history darkened lives across the most populous swath of North America, power experts said the system's sorry shape appears to have been a surprise only to the unwitting consumers who relied on it.

-- posted by Fred2000