RE[2]: California power - its cold, its dark

[Joe McGuckin <joe () monk via net>]

Roeland,

I think you're confusing the California Aqueduct with the "Los Angeles 
Aqueduct". The LA Aqueduct's (designed by William Mullholland, 
constructed 1907-1913) gravity-flow contruction requires no pumps. 
It diverts eastern Sierra mountain streams from the Owens Valley and 
Mono Lake basin to reservoirs in the metro Los Angeles area.


Joe


Roeland Meyer <rmeyer () mhsc com> wrote:
> Thanks for the links guys. Now, here's the summary.
>
> 1) California power load is still 10,000 MW below peak delivery of last
> Summer.
> 2) Slightly over 1/3 of the generation plants are down for "maintenance".
> 3) There was an unplanned 500 KW outage, which was compensated for by
> shuting down the pumps of the California Aquaduct sytem temporarily.
>
> 1) Blame is being placed on the early and extra cold winter. However, a
> quick perusal of the Farmers Almanac shows that this is expected and no
> surprise, or shouldn't be.
> 2) The REAL blame probably rests on the head of the yahoo that allowed so
> many plants to go on scheduled maintenance at the same time.
> 3) Shutting down the aquaduct is real bad. Some of Bill Mullholland's design
> depends on siphon effect and if the siphon breaks it takes weeks of massive
> power usage in order to resore it. Ergo, they can't shut it down too long or
> it'll cost too much power to bring it back up. Leaving it down isn't an
> option, too many people depend on that water.
>
> It's looking more like a management screw-up and more people are begining to
> realize it. The deregulators were so busy deregulating that future usage
> planning was foregone. Forcing the local utilities to sell off their
> generators may not have been very smart either. Current power capacity
> scheduling was also bungled. The timing can only be either gross
> incompetance or Machiavallien cunning.
>
> Thank you all for the additional links. I was actually researching this
> since a few days ago. Some of us are preparing grounds for suit,
> independently, in the event that they start long rolling black-outs. We have
> six-hours worth of bats, so we should be okay. But, our clients don't.
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Nathan Stratton [mailto:nathan () robotics net]
> > Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 7:47 PM
> > To: Sean Donelan
> > Cc: nanog () merit edu
> > Subject: Re: California power - its cold, its dark
> >
> >
> >
> > On 7 Dec 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
> >
> > > Approximately one-third of California's power generating capacitiy
> > > is off-line.  The California system operator has called a "stage 3"
> > > power alert, requiring *interruptiable* customers be interrupted
> > > until 10pm tonight.  They are not instituting rotating blackouts
> > > of other customers at this time.
> >
> > Any word on the cause of the outage, did several reactors scram at the
> > same time or is this a transmission issue?
> >
> > > <>
> > Nathan Stratton                             CTO, Exario 
> > Networks, Inc.
> > nathan () robotics net                     nathan () exario net
> > http://www.robotics.net                 http://www.exario.net



--

Joe McGuckin

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