Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

58Brittle Powercommuters were stuck between stations without warning when a saboteurswitched off power to the central Stockholm subway.) 32 On 9 September 1981,when Lower Manhattan was suddenly blacked out, subways were able to usethe last bit of their fading power supply too crawl into stations, but three hundredpeople were stranded in various skyscraper elevators, and officials werereluctant to rescue some of them “because of fears that the elevators might goout of control in a sudden resumption of power.” 33An intriguing and little-known feature of the New York blackout is thatpart of a grid which operates at twenty-five cycles per second (mostly for railways),and most of a direct-current grid, were able to continue normal operationwithin the city while the main public grid, operating at sixty cycles persecond, crashed. This was possible because the two “oddball” minigrids—relics of the earliest days of the U.S. utility industry—did not depend on thesixty-cycle-per-second grid for synchronization and were easily isolated fromit. Unfortunately, they served such relatively small areas that they were notable to provide a bootstrap for recovery operations.Local standby generators generally worked well, maintaining operations atbridges and tunnels (most of which were normally powered from the NewJersey side anyway), hospitals, fire and police stations, and airports. (Flightswere suspended overnight, however, and thirty-two aircraft diverted, becauseobstruction lights on New York skyscrapers were out.) Surface transit worked,though some fuel had to be imported from New Jersey for buses. Subway officialscontrolled flooding by dispatching emergency pumps and compressors. 34Though most hospital emergency generators worked, four hospitals neededpolice emergency generators, and thirteen other establishments, mainly medical,needed emergency generators repaired. Con Ed dispatched eighteen ofits fifty portable generators throughout the city to run lifesaving equipment.Had the hospitals used their own generating plants routinely, as is common inEurope, rather than only in emergencies, they would have achieved higherreliability and obtained their heating and hot water as a virtually free by-product(Appendix One).The 1977 New York blackout nicely illustrates that the reasons modernenergy systems fail, and the reasons they are hard to restore, are considerablymore complex than appears from newspaper headlines. It is very much moreinvolved than simply blowing and replacing a household fuse. But even thisexamples does not fully capture some of the difficulties likely to arise in repairingmajor failures, especially if they damage major items of equipment orextend over a wide area. These problems of restoration, and the costs whichthe failure can exact from society, are the subject of the next chapter.