Rolling power outages hit Colorado

Brad White_34

Oh the humanity! :)

I suppose Weezbo and the Alaska crew probably think we are wimps though...

ME's point on energy distribution while disturbing is rather predictable. "Central Planning" on the 5-year plan, comrade...

[Deleted User]

Energy shortage? What energy shortage?

NEWS FLASH

Excel Energy of Colorado asked consumers today to conserve as much natural gas as they could today due to extremely cold weather. It seems that there IS a shortage of natural gas, allegedly caused by one of their suppliers well head becoming frozen, and they had to shut down some power plants today in order to conserve fuel availability for their customers who use natural gas for heating.

This shut down of electrical generating capacity caused a rolling black out, lasting for approximatley 30 minutes at a time. At times, approximatley 100,000 customers were without electricty. People were caught in elevators and on ski lifts. The power shifting caused a "trip" to interconnected grids, causing major power outages from Denver all the way west to Grand Junction Colorado, including Vail Ski Resort which was operating at maximum capacity today.

No outages are "planned" for tomorrow.

I guess maybe switching all of thier power plants from coal to natural gas wasn't such a good idea after all.

One thing about it that I'll bet they hadn't considered, when they start shutting down the electrical power to 100,000 people at a time, they also gained a WHOLE bunch of natural gas pressure too...

Boy, am I glad I don't work for the Public Utility Commission on Monday. I will bet their telephones will be SMOKIN'...

Conserve? We don't need no stinkin' conservation! We're in the MIDDLE of the gas belt:-)

WHOODA THUNK!

ME

GusHerb

I sure wouldn't turn my heat down its six degrees out!!!

Tony Conner

Most...

... people have absolutely no idea just how much fuel electrical generating plants eat. It's spectacular. I think that running these huge plants on natural gas or #2 oil is just nuts.

With the power off to 100,000 people, nobody is running washing machines or dishwashers, etc. The water use drops significantly. Again, most folks have no idea how much electical power is involved in getting clean water to them. It's not just one pump or one set of pumps pushing water down the pipe to their houses - there are a whole series of pumps & tanks in treatment plants as the raw water moves through them. These are pumps with BIG electric motors driving them. These treatment plants don't just suck up water - they also suck up vast amounts of electricity.

hr

A powerplant south of KC

is being refurbished by one of my customers. He is a welder for Babcock Wilcox the BIG boiler people. He tells me this 800MW plant consumes one train load of coal a day! Something like 100 coal cars.

I had no idea. That's just one coal fired plant in one city. Where on earth does all that coal come from on a daily basis. Blew my mind.

hot rod

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Tony Conner

Now...

... flip all of those tons of coal into BTUs. (Get ready to see a LOT of "zeros".) Now see how many cubic feet of natural gas that is.

And again - just one plant in just one city. Consider that 800 MW is not really all that big - I worked in a 2,000 MW station and there is another twice that size run by the same utility. Politicians keep talking about switching these all to natural gas, and/or building windmills. It's just not gonna happen unless we want to spend a lot of time in the dark.

GMcD

Exactly

The mass of spreading suburbia has no idea how energy intensive that lifestyle is. Everything from the embodied energy of all the infrastructure to carry services out to the beltlands, and then the gas used for the commute back into the city from the suburbs. It's just crazy. A lot of people recognize this non-sustainable lifestyle, but too much quick money is being made on development, and too many other interests want to maintain the sprawl. People are like spoiled 2 year olds when it comes to energy, and we haven't got a strong parent to discipline us and rein in the squander.

Henry Patterson Karis Heating and Air Conditioning

Weeeellllllllll....... I think the author of this article hit

the nail on the head. I especially like the comment about driving to the bathroom!!!

President Bush said in his State of the Union address this week that we Americans are "addicted to oil." He thinks oil "dependency" is a problem. Apparently he believes we should be burning wood chips or something instead.

No, thanks. I love my oil. For starters, I love my minivan. I love being in the minivan with the kids and using oil. (Actually, I prefer to be in the minivan without the kids.) I would probably drive to the bathroom if I could.

When I decided to move my family from the East Coast back to the Chicago area more than a year ago, one of my criteria for a new neighborhood was that I had to be able to walk to town. I have actually walked there precisely . . . one time. I didn't care for it much.

But, I do love that, here, I can get places fast.

It's all about time for me. Yes, I can walk to Starbucks in 10 to 12 minutes, but I can drive there in one minute. The library is about a 45-second drive, and the school 30. I'm not opposed to walking; I'm opposed to wasting time. I know, I know, exercise isn't a "waste of time," blah, blah. But if I'm going to exercise, I want it in a gym with a trainer bearing down on me. I'm not going to waste time just walking.

I also like a warm house in the winter and, for the record, an air conditioner set to "stun" in the summer, and lots of lights on in my home all the time. Apparently Bush now has a problem with such living.

But, there is no reason, except for price, for me to cut back on any of this. (I'm not even going to deal with the "greenhouse gas" argument here.) News flash: We have plenty of oil (and, of course, coal for electricity). Bigger news flash: We'll come up with more when we have to.

In particular, I could catalog just the known, recoverable oil reserves that will last us centuries. America is twice as energy- efficient as it was 50 years ago, and those gas lines at the pumps in 1973 were caused by our government rationing oil, not an oil embargo, which the Saudis lifted almost as soon as they imposed it.

But far more important is the understanding that oil is not a natural resource. For most of man's history, it was pretty much just black gunk in the ground. Occasionally it saw the light of day. The ancient Egyptians used it in mummification, and the eighth-century streets of Baghdad were actually paved with tar, derived from petroleum. But then it was pretty much . . . nothing -- until an enterprising fellow figured out how to distill petroleum in 1853. And then wow.

In other words, the natural resource is not the "stuff" -- it's the mind of man who is capable of turning "stuff" into something incredibly useful and valuable. Julian Simon was a brilliant economist who made just this point in his book, "The Ultimate Resource" (paperback, 1983). He took on the 1970s doom-and- gloomers, who said we were running out of everything except people. Instead, Simon showed that when we looked at man's amazing mind as the "ultimate" resource, then we could understand that natural resources were essentially limitless. As long as that mind is free, it will come up with answers.

So, hundreds if not thousands of years from now, if oil becomes too scarce and/or too expensive to extract, man's mind will come up with something else instead.

In fact, some of the greatest oil or oil-extraction discoveries in the past 50 years have happened when prices spiked, producing a need and an economic incentive to "dig deeper," so to speak.

That makes sense. The one thing that will cause me to cut back on my energy use is price. High prices are the most efficient way for the market to ration and produce viable alternatives to anything, which is why high prices shouldn't be artificially avoided (or imposed, for that matter), especially when it comes to energy.

But I will never cut back just because I'm worried about "using up a natural resource." The real resource is man's amazing mind. And I'm confident that when we need to, when it makes economic sense to, we'll come up with something a whole lot better than burning wood chips.

Betsy Hart is the author of "It Takes a Parent: How the Culture of Pushover Parenting is Hurting Our Kids -- and What to Do About It." She can be reached at www.betsyhart.net.

J.C.A._3

Sure we do Geoff,

It's called PRICE. When it smacks us all hard enough....we'll learn.

So many ways to save energy, such a minority even caring about it. COST is going to be the only way to enforce it. Hang onto your shorts folks. The price don't seem to be fallin' anytime soon. You've been warned! Chris

Bob Vennerbeck

one-a-day coal train

Last October 3 & 10th, New Yorker magazine had a pair of articles by the incomparable John McPhee - he spent some time riding one of those one-a-day coal trains, and it's an eye-opener about what we do to stay warm and well lit. I thought I could find a link to the content here on the web, but guess you'll have to go out in the cold and grab it at your local library...


Vbob

Another fan writes about McPhee
http://timbayly.worldmagblog.com/timbayly/archives/019045.html

hr

I hope you are being facetious, Hank (nm)



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GMcD

The scary thing is....

For every one person concerned with conservation for more that just "economic reasons", there are a thousand Betsy's. It's waste of time to try to educate people like that with the facts, they have a "belief" and "faith" that everything will be all right and there's billions of barrels of fossil fuel out there just waiting to be tapped. It just isn't so. There is more to life than just saving time and praying at the altar of money and self gratification.

Brian (Tankless)

I damn sure hope he's being facetious too.

High prices will be the least of his problems when the B-22 ice sheet melts that just broke away from western Antarctica. It's the size of Delaware and is 8 miles thick. Plus, it didn't take years to break off, it happened in a couple of WEEKS! It contains several hundred thousand cubic miles of water, and more are ready to break off.

Same thing is happening in Greenland. 1,500 out of 2,000 seal pups died (born on land) because their mothers couldn't find ice-flows to birth them on. You are partly responsible for that, Hank.

Sleep well.

BTW, I live 60 miles inland, but am still only 6' above sea level. Think about my daughter who loses this house when it gets washed away.

Brian.

High water & hurricanes will be the problem...but Hank doesn't seem to believe he's part of the problem.

I can't believe anyone can write that kind of drivel, and expect to be taken seriously.

Brian, in Swampland.

From 75* last week, to freezing rain tonight ???????

Weezbo

JUst made it Home ...whatta deal....

I have been chiring up radiant heating and cooling a long long time. I have some pictures for you buh none of them have radiant heating or cooling in them. theprice of gass is like 5.80 or so in Bermuda these days. alot of my older friends have passed on to a more certain reward,building is carrying on like there is no tomorrow. 400 sq ft going for 800 K..high rises and town houses ,condos cant be built fast enough...i am like well are you guys using the Rehau and Wirsbo for space conditioning Now? it depresses me as i have been rolling stuff by local companies there for decades....while comming home on the aeroplane this morning what looked like a whole state just Blacked out as i looked down on the well lit countryside...Wow.Thats Different ! thinks The Weezbo *~/:) then i read this..Ah Man ...the entire planet will be seeing some minor technicalities this comming decade...i Hope we are all over it and have some unified voice with which to present some solutions. Good night guys, i am a bit sleepy.

Ron Schroeder

Tankless

""High prices will be the least of his problems when the B-22 ice sheet melts that just broke away from western Antarctica. It's the size of Delaware and is 8 miles thick. Plus, it didn't take years to break off, it happened in a couple of WEEKS! It contains several hundred thousand cubic miles of water, and more are ready to break off.""

And when it melts where is it going? Nowhere, as displacement has already desided how much room that water is going to occupy, and the melting of that big berg should only help in the fight against Global Warming.

Just someting to ponder

Henry Patterson Karis Heating and Air Conditioning

NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!

I was responding to the post before mine. Lest you all think those are MY sentiments on the cause of the cost of fuel. I should have posted the article in quotes, I guess sticking the authors name at the bottom was not clarity enough. I am not a trehugger by any means, but I like to have my boiler and those of my customers "sip" oil. My usage for my 1,600 SF house was 250 gal for the last 3 months, and we had single digits this morning. The only parts of her article that I agree with is that most Americans are concerned with "how convienient is it for me" hence the driving to the bathroom. I take offence to her article just based on the fact that she is blaming President Bush for calling things as they are! Sorry if you thought those my ideas, guys...NOT EVEN CLOSE

Dave Stroman

Those rolling black outs helped in freezing one of my customers water main. When the water pressure dropped to zero in the house, the old Watts 9D leaked the boiler water out and dropped the boiler pressure to zero. I drained the boiler down enough to replace the 9D. Crap! Could not refill the boiler, the d--- water was froze. Went to the house next door the use their hose faucet to refill the boiler, crap!, their hose bib was froze. I was not a happy camper. Had to get my jet pump and pump some water out of the water heater to refill the boiler.

Dave in Denver

dennis500

crap

I am not going to have a bunch of sanctimonius wackjobs lecturing me and forcing me to live jammed into high density (read Shanghi) housing, standing obediently at the bus stop,etc. This is exactly the scenario the econuts are trying to force in ca.(your strong parent, huh McDonnell). You and old Al. Funny thing is these guys never themselves expect to have to live like that. That's why Kerry drives his three SUV's and the Kennedys and Cronkite fought the idea of an ocean borne windfarm miles out in the ocean from Martha's vineyard.

DanHolohan

Someone

asking you to move, lad?

Dean_7

energy

Interesting post especially about the ice shelf. It's pretty obvious that we as a species have not used the planets resources wisely.The thing is the planet itself doesn't care. About the only thing we will end up doing is to make ourselves extinct. There is nothing we can do to the planet that hasn't been done throughout it's geologic history by ice ages, magnetic field reversals, meteor strikes, tectonic plate movement (2004 tsunami as an example), vulcanism, and other natural forces. The key word here is geologic history. We will be extinct but the planet will fix itself in a few hundred thousand years. A blink in time for something 3 + billion years old. The thing is if we don't want to be extinct and leave something that our children can actually live in we need to conserve our resources and use them wisely.

hr

Thanks Hank

you didn't impress me as the mini van/ Starbucks type

hot rod

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Weezbo

Say,...Did i post something about controled vortex machines?

about a week or two ago?

if not i meant to do so.

i will go run look see if i can find the article....

Brian (Tankless)

Phew,

I'm glad you clarified that one, Hank. Sorry for my miss-aimed counter-attack. Please forward it to the real offender.

Brian, in the muggy, cold, humid, foggy South.

GMcD

Apologies, then

Sorry Hank- the way that post was written it looked like your own spin on things, and I have to admit having a few impure thoughts directed at you after reading it. Thanks for the clarification and I'll edit my post above to refer to the real author of the piece.

GMcD

Ahh ,but I do

I take the bus every day to work and even to meetings outside the office during the day. I take the BART when in SF or meetings down there. Cheaper and faster than driving. It's not a matter of being an "eco-nut" as you put it, it's about being responsible for my own footprint on the planet. Conserve and minimize. It still gets the job done, cheaper and more efficient too. As an engineer, it's my job to make things more efficient. I want to make sure my kids and their kids have something to look forward to 50 years from now, instead of partying on like there is no tomorrow.

dennis_kings

energy

I too have had the somewhat the same reaction as dennis to Mcdonell's post. I have lived in ca for along time and I do believe my lifestyle emphasises conservation as much or more perhaps than most (my wife says because I am cheap!) It is the attitide of the enviros that set me off. They through their lawyers filed lawsuits under every pretext possible to stop any freeway improvement even though federal funds had been granted for these very much needed projects. The traffic is a nightmare and that is exactly what they want. To force people onto the buses or into high density housing(that is what dennis spoke of). This is only a single example of what is going on here and will eventually come to you. I am an electrical contractor and a few years back was at a meeting on the construction of a large water treatment plant. The nat resources defense council's lawyers literally barged into the meeting and told us here is our list of demands (downsize it) or we will litigate litigate litagate until this project is so far behind schedule and so expensive nothing gets built. This is environmental extremism not common sense. The extreme environmentalists in ca operate, through thier lawyers as a shadow government. They have a holier than thou attitude that they and only they should run planet earth(read Mcdonnell's posts).