#hurricane katrina is just one of many examples and it's the biggest and most famous case of shit hitting the fan due to government neglect

[godsfavoriteasian]

If you're a leftist and you're reacting with joy about climate cause disasters devastate the South your racism and classism is showing.

The South In comparison to other regions of Amerikkka Is home to the poorest counties in the nation. The South is also home of a majority of Black on brown voters of color.

The South also has corrupt politicians both Dems and Republicans alike. Both parties offer no alternative other than capitalism and grinding impoverished and marginalized people into the dust (E.x. Hurricane Katrina).

Demonizing the South further alienates working class and poor marginalized people in the south. This especially affects Black and Brown people In the South who are often the target of yt supremacy in state sanctioned violence.

If one discounts the South and all the hard-working leftists who are fighting the good fight against capitalism and against far-right politicians and government authoritarianism, and yt supremacy. It emboldens & allows far-right and neoliberal People to Target marginalized people even more.

Cuz who do you think will be first affected by climate change cause disasters? Not the rich GOP and damn politicians who take vacays to Mexico when SHTF in their states. It's ppl in trailers, disabled ppl, ppl w/o cars, BIPOC, unhoused ppl who are going to be affected.

Let's be honest here, fascism is already here. This country was built as a settler colonial state on the genocide and labour f indigenous and Black people. Just because you're from the north or from the cities or from the West Coast doesn't mean you get to look down upon ppl.

[thefederalistfreestyle]

[. . .] Six years later, what started that night as Miranda’s ‘Hamilton Mixtape’ opened on Broadway as an utterly audacious hip-hop musical about the immigrant experience and the birth of America. That was in 2015. By 2016 ticket sales had passed the $100 million mark and Hamilton had become a cultural phenomenon percolating into everyday life from music to fashion to politics to classrooms. It was the smartest, most unobtainable ticket in town, had won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama as well as a Grammy and 11 Tony Awards. Seats were being touted for as much as $10,000. The show is to begin a London run in December, and there has been a stampede for seats at the newly refurbished Victoria Palace Theatre. Some tickets are rumoured to have already changed hands for up to £2,500 apiece, such is the excitement surrounding the biggest West End opening of the year. Sir Cameron Mackintosh, who is bringing Hamilton to the UK, is confident it will all translate for a British audience. ‘I didn’t feel it was any more American than Les Misérables is Parisian,’ he says. ‘It feels entirely contemporary. You realise that nothing much has changed – a bunch of American politicians fighting to create a country are not so very different from a bunch of American politicians fighting to run it now, or indeed our own British politicians.’ Yet the genesis of Hamilton predates the current global controversy about immigration, stoked in the US by the presidency of Donald Trump and by Britain’s Brexit vote. In fact it began back in 2008, when Miranda picked up historian Ron Chernow’s definitive 800-page biography of the founding father at an airport bookshop to read on holiday in Mexico. There’s a now famous picture of the composer lying in his hammock with his head buried between the book’s covers. ‘That biography is incredible,’ Miranda says. ‘It out-Dickenses Charles Dickens, the improbability of where this guy started from and where he got to. He was someone who, on the strength of his words and ideas, pulled himself from unbelievably humble circumstances to the top of the nation. ‘The second Hamilton writes a poem to get himself off the island, I was like, “Well, that’s very hip-hop.” To literally write verse that gets you out of your circumstances, verse that’s about how terrible your circumstances are. I mean, that’s everyone from Jay-Z and Marcy [Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, where Jay-Z grew up] to Lil Wayne writing about Hurricane Katrina. He transcends the struggle, and if you look at your favourite rapper, that’s most likely what they did.’ Miranda himself comes from a comfortable background in north Manhattan – though he is only one generation away from the hardship faced by many Hispanic immigrants. His father arrived speaking no English as a teenager from Puerto Rico, eventually rising to become a political consultant to New York Mayor Ed Koch. His mother, also originally from Puerto Rico, is a psychologist. He still lives in his native city, married to his long-time love Vanessa, a corporate lawyer, with whom he has a toddler son, Sebastian. He has been a musical polyglot since boyhood, as fluent in salsa, R&B and the Broadway tradition as he is in the hip-hop genre that has now made both his name and his fortune. So, for example, his early scene-setting song, My Shot, which establishes Hamilton’s brilliance and ambition, draws on Going Back To Cali by The Notorious BIG, the Rogers and Hammerstein classic You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught from South Pacific and, finally, a little bit of Busta Rhymes. [. . .] Unsurprisingly perhaps, Donald Trump has not been to see it. But he did get involved in a Twitter war with the cast after Brandon Dixon, who played vice president Aaron Burr on Broadway, addressed the then vice president-elect Mike Pence from the stage when he was in the audience. Referring to the cast’s ethnic diversity and the musical’s celebration of immigration, Dixon called on the Trump-Pence administration to ‘uphold American values’. This ambushing of a senior Trump administration politician caused a storm of controversy in the US, where Hamilton’s creation and successful run had been so closely aligned with President Obama’s time in the White House. The former president is, of course, himself the son of an immigrant. Whether the London cast will pull a similar move on any British politicians remains to be seen. So far the drama has been limited to fan fury over a start date that has been pushed back for the most prosaic of reasons: building work at the Victoria Palace, home to Billy Elliot for the past 11 years, has over-run. Due to begin in November, previews will now take place in December. The anticipation is building, and Miranda himself is among those who love the idea of Hamilton opening in Britain, the country whose 18th-century dominance of America gave way to the creation of a new nation, crafted by the hands of Alexander Hamilton. ‘The support we have received from our British fans has been incredible, he says. ‘I’ve been reminded of their love, which is just as our King George would want it to be.’   [. . .]

A hip-hop musical about an illegitimate dandy who helped America defeat George III and England? Yo, bro! As Hamilton lands in the West End, the show’s creator reveals how he turned revolutionary rap into Broadway gold (Daily Mail)

[gracespilkerr]

How To Become A Firefighter In Texas

A lot of people say that everything is bigger in Texas, and there are just as many asking how to become a firefighter in Texas.

This is a state that doesn’t do things by half way and this relates to their fire service and fire threats too. The threats here can be extreme from major fires in the cities, accidents in the highways and oil refinery explosions to all the naturally-occurring risks.

So, the state needs a big, bold fire service that is always ready to provide the help that people need. How can you be a part of the impressive Texas fire service?

How to Become a Firefighter in Texas

At least 18 years old

High-school education but preferably higher

US citizenship and local residency

A valid Texas state driver’s license

Physically fit

Of good character

If you’re the type of person who has been wondering how to become a firefighter in Texas, be prepared for a long hiring process when you apply.

There is quite a long screening process for applicants in Texas after they submit their initial application. If you’re unable to pass the many tests you’ll encounter you will probably not be able to proceed.

The first is the civil service exam that determines basic mechanical aptitude, reading comprehension and math skills. Each component has a grade and different departments will have their own expectations for a passing score.  (Click any of those links to go to our article explaining exactly what to expect on each section of the exam.)

Then there is the CPAT physical ability test. Again, this may vary between departments but it typically tests fitness, strength and flexibility over short time constraints. Those that fail here may not be able to keep up in major incidents with time pressures.

Finally, some will also subject applicants to a polygraph test. This has two purposes. The first is to highlight and lies about your application and history – such as residency issues or previous experience. The other is to get an idea of your moral character.

From there, you will also have to deal with background checks and firefighter interviews. It is a long process, but it has to be to separate out the best candidates for the job. Professionalism and a good nature here will go a long way.

Firefighting in Texas

As of 2010, 29.21% of the Texan population claimed to speak Spanish at home.

Therefore, it makes sense for Texas firefighters to take Spanish classes or at least keep up with their comprehension of the language. Doing so could make a massive difference in certain neighborhoods and communities.

There is always the risk that families in Spanish neighborhood will only want to converse in their native tongue in times of crisis. It makes things so much easier if you can communicate and reassure them in a way that they understand.

Language skills also help when it comes to outreach programs. It is easy to focus on the negative side of firefighting and all the risks to life during fire suppression. But, there are also lots of opportunities to help people through educations programs. Bilingual approaches get the message across and are more accommodating.

Texas has also seen its fair share of major storms over the years. One of the most catastrophic in recent times was Hurricane Harvey, which was a Category 4 hurricane.

Although it made landfall further south, the storm stalled, and the impact was felt much further inland – specifically around the Greater Houston Area. The region saw widespread flooding, property damage and great disruption in the area.

Some people don’t realize this, but it was actually more damaging than the infamous Hurricane Katrina because there was more than $198.6 billion in damages.

While politicians may choose to look at monetary values, it was up to the emergency services to handle the impact on lives in the area. Firefighters had to rescue those trapped, pump out the floodwater, secure properties and provide medical support where needed.

While we can hope that this was the worst-case scenario for Texas, there is the risk of this happening again with future storms.

Texas is also famous for a few other things. The cattle and subsequently produce and BBQ food is one major part of rural life here. Another is the oil refineries.

Texas oil is a massive industry that supplies materials across the country. In fact, there are said to be around 5 billion barrels of the stuff. In the eyes of a firefighter, that’s a lot of flammable liquid in plants and depots that could cause major fires and loss of life.

Therefore, any fire department near to a refinery must be ready to handle the worst.

Southeast Texas is home to the Port Arthur Refinery. This is the largest in the country and also a facility at constant risk of fire and damage. That is why the Port Arthur Fire Department is such an important resource in the area.

The department’s list of responsibilities is vast. They need to look after the area and keep on top of fires and hazardous material leaks.

They have also been known to handle rescue efforts in a storm, major explosions and a train derailment. Then there are all the common calls for fires, vehicular extraction and medical issues.

Fire Academies in Texas

If you want to become a firefighter in Texas, you need to build a strong foundation of knowledge and skills. The first step is to gain your certification through a fire academy or a college program.

From there, you can then increase your skillset by taking part in additional certificates on a range of subjects.

Austin: Austin Community College District

Houston: Houston Community College

Dallas: El Centro College

El Paso: El Paso Community College

Rockwall: North Texas Fire Academy

McKinney: Collin County Community College District

Kileen: Central Texas College

The Woodlands: Lone Star College System

Texas City: College of the Mainland

Pasadena: San Jacinto Community College

One of the best places to gain some professional training in Dallas is The Dodd J. Miller Training Center. Since 1987, the team here have helped new recruits learn the basics needed to complete their Firefighter I and II certificates. They have lots of classroom spaces and training areas where you can learn all the equipment and strategies.

This includes the three-story drill tower, a commercial simulator, driving course and much more. Find out more here.

Major Fire Departments in Texas

The following is a list of major fire departments in Texas.  While it isn’t comprehensive it’s a great place to start if you’re interested in learning more about how to become a firefighter in Texas.

How to Become a Corpus Christi, TX Firefighter

At least 18 years old

High-school education but preferably higher

US citizenship and local residency

A valid Texas state driver’s license

Physically fit

Of good character

Then there are some of the smaller city departments that are just as important for the health and well-being of citizens. One example of this is the City of Corpus Christi Fire Department.

The department may be smaller – because of the smaller area and population size – but they are just as skilled and dedicated. This is another department familiar with the risks of oil and fuel pipelines.

They claim that most chief officers there have dealt with at least 12 fires in petroleum storage tanks.

They also carry out a lot of work at the port in the city to protect those working with the fuel, cargo and on the boats. You can find out more here.

How to Become a Houston, TX Firefighter

At least 18 years old

High-school education but preferably higher

US citizenship and local residency

A valid Texas state driver’s license

Physically fit

Of good character

I can’t talk about the biggest and best fire departments in Texas without mentioning Houston. Houston is an ISO 1 rated company with stations covering 654 square miles to protect more than 2 million residents.

This means a staff of more than 4,000 firefighters on hand to tackle fires, medical emergencies, accidents and major incidents. Therefore, they can claim to be one of the biggest in the world.

The requirements in Houston are very similar to those in the rest of the state. You need to be no older than 36 with a clean record, good education and a good level of physical fitness.

The interesting thing here is that they ask for 24 transferable college credit hours at a C grade or above. This shows a greater emphasis on knowledge before coming into the fire service.

That is where those academic courses above can really help. Non-certified applicants go on into an academy class with 38 weeks of fire and EMT training. Certified applicants move forward to an 11-week program instead. Learn more here.

Job Prospects for Firefighters in Texas

As of 2018, Texas was the state with the second-highest employment of firefighters in the US. Stats for this year showed 29,110 staff with a ratio of 2.40 per 1000 people.

The metropolitan area of Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington has the 4th most employed with 8,570 with a ratio of 2.40 per 1000. Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land also ranked highly with 6,2000 employed.

In Dallas, officers with a bachelor’s degree receive $300.00 a month with $60,000.00 of starting pay annually.

In Houston, the base rate for a probationary firefighter is $40,170 and this increases year on year with experience. There is also $1,800 bi-lingual pay and additional compensation for medical experience.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes332011.htm#st

As long as you’re prepared to train constantly to meet the needs of your department, there shouldn’t be too many issues become a Texas firefighter.

There are some diverse departments across the state that deal with all kinds of rescues, fires and major emergencies. Show them the right attitude and character from day one and you should have no trouble making your mark and helping out your community.

The post How To Become A Firefighter In Texas appeared first on FirefighterNOW.

from FirefighterNOW https://firefighternow.com/how-to-become-a-firefighter-in-texas/

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[walmartsurvey-blog]

20 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know about Walmart (Part 1)

Walmart Inc. is one of the biggest retail companies on the earth. Situated in Bentonville, Arkansas, this global corporate goliath works an enormous chain of rebate retail establishments that are based around offering the best cost to their clients for an assortment of products. Walmart stores sell everything from staple goods to melodic instruments. This business (established by Sam Walton in 1962) has developed to have a critical nearness around the world. They possess roughly 11,700 stores and work under 59 unique names in 28 distinct nations. For instance, Walmart works as Best Price in India, Asda in the United Kingdom, and Seiyu Group in Japan.

Walmart was controlled by originator Sam Walton until his demise in 1992. Possession at that point passed on to his beneficiaries, who hold 51% of the organization – making Walmart Inc. a traded on an open market family-possessed organization. Unexpectedly, the Waltons are likewise the most extravagant family on the planet, with a great many dollars in joined total assets. This huge firm holds a lot of impact over the world we live in today. In this manner, it is essential to have a decent comprehension of how they work (nearby the tasks of comparative megacorporations). On the off chance that you have to gain proficiency with some increasingly about this firm, read on to learn 20 fun actualities about Walmart.

They Were Not Successful in Germany

Walmart's status as a universal retailer occurred as ahead of schedule as the 1990s. They have commonly discovered achievement when opening up more stores outside of the United States. For instance, their tasks in China, the United Kingdom, and crosswise over South America have demonstrated to be a portion of the more productive worldwide extensions of any retail chain (not simply Walmart). Be that as it may, this tremendous firm does at times come up short. For instance, they shut down the majority of their stores in Germany when the chain neglected to take off in this nation (which additionally happens to have the greatest economy in all of Europe). Their disappointment can for the most part be credited to attempting to dazzle American social qualities on Germans. Their clients discovered greeters at the entryway and the smiley, bright manner of their representatives off-putting. In the long run, the American company's refusal to acquiesce to German qualities cost them around a billion dollars and a hang on the German market.

Originator Sam Walton's First Store Was a Franchise

Before Sam Walton opened Walmart, he procured a part of a Ben Franklin comfort store. This was a truly decent technique for trying things out before taking a stab at anything genuine. Walton rapidly started practicing his pioneering soul with the store, presenting numerous new thoughts that helped his store become productive rapidly. Some little comforts were a frozen yogurt machine and continually supplied racks. Walton's greatest accomplishment with this Ben Franklin store was discovering providers who could give the equivalent (or comparative) items for not as much as what he was paying. He at that point passed these investment funds off to the client – designing another strategy for working together in which the firm makes their benefits on amount of offers as opposed to overall revenues. It was amazingly effective also, bringing the store's yearly pay up by more than 125,000 every year.

The Modern-Day Walmart Museum Used to Be Walton's Store

The Walmart Museum is at present situated in Bentonville, Arizona, and has an assortment of shows in plain view about the historical backdrop of the firm. One thing that guests see is that the exhibition hall is in a similar area as the Walton 5 and 10 – another Ben Franklin establishment opened up by Sam Walton in 1950. This was additionally the principal business that at any point held the Walton name. Sam Walton and his family moved to Bentonville in 1950 because of never achieving a rent concurrence with his previous proprietor for his first famous and fruitful establishment. He opened the Walton's 5 and !0 in the town square. You can even observe an impression of his initial cheapness in the roof tiles. They came in red and green however were not uniform in shading. The investment funds Walton had on these tiles empowered him to pass it on to his clients – only one case of Walton's specific strategy for working together.

Their Early Days Were Marked by Rapid Expansion

The primary store to hold up under the name Walmart was the Walmart Discount City opened by Sam Walton in 1962. It was twice as enormous as his past store (the Walton 5 and 10) and made about a million dollars in its first year. This helped Walton grow his business as fast as could be allowed, opening up around 18 stores in only five years. This rate of extension was mind blowing – however it just expanded from that point. By 1970, only eight years after the first Walmart opened, they had 38 areas and were opening around two stores for every year. Be that as it may, Walton wound up in some obligation because of the quick development. Along these lines, he at long last chosen to release the organization open so as to accomplish some additional assets for squaring away his obligations just as putting resources into the business.

They Once Operated the Largest Private Satellite Network

In 1987, Walmart effectively finished their $24 million-dollar private satellite system. It was intended to give an association between each and every store that the organization claimed with their own central command in Bentonville. This made it the biggest private satellite system at any point made when it was propelled. In nowadays before the Internet, corporate still required an approach to follow their deals and stock. This is the reason the satellite system – which flaunted two-way voice and information transmission – was so fruitful. Furthermore, they had the option to send progressively customized messages to their stores with the single direction video correspondence that this system likewise advertised.

They Weren't in All Fifty States until 1995

You may be amazed to discover that the retail supergiant was not in each state until 1995. Indeed, before 1990 they weren't even in the Northeast (with the exception of a solitary Sam's Club) or anyplace on the West Coast. Before the finish of 1990, Walmart at long last opened a few areas in California and Pennsylvania, separately. They didn't make it to every one of the fifty states until the last area was established in Vermont in 1995. Strangely enough, the firm chosen to make a universal development before setting off to every one of the fifty states. Four years before Vermont's area was added to their program, Walmart had effectively ventured into Mexico. In 1994, they likewise made it out to Canada. This prompted the establishing of their own universal deals division before they even made it to each state.

Walmarts Can Crush Local Retail

Probably the greatest concern with regards to this gigantic retailer is that they will totally surpass littler organizations. This is particularly obvious with regards to modest nearby organizations regularly alluded to as 'mother and pop' stores. Pundits of Walmart refer to its immense size and capacity to undermine most nearby retailers on cost as the techniques through which littler stores can be annihilated. A recent report by Kenneth Stone, an educator of financial aspects at Iowa State University, found that communities lose roughly 50% of their retail exchange when another Walmart opens. Different examinations supported up Stone's unique one, finding that deals in different stores decline in a split second after a Walmart is acquainted with an area that recently did not have one. In any case, other individuals found that little retailers can endure the presentation of Walmart in the event that they adjust to the evolving market. This implies they have to give something that Walmart can't –, for example, specialty items or customized administration – so as to remain in business.

They Provided Relief for Hurricane Katrina Victims

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hammered into the South, executing numerous individuals and obliterating a ton of property and foundation. One of the towns most significantly influenced by this power of nature was New Orleans. Fortunately, Walmart ventured in at the command of their liberal previous CEO H. Lee Scott – who required a reaction from Walmart that mirrored the chain's "size and effect". The firm in the long run gave around $20 million to aid ventures just as 100,000 suppers worth of nourishment, 1500 trucks of product, and even guaranteed any of their laborers who had been dislodged an occupation when things were ready for action once more. The most interesting part of Walmart's reaction to the tempest is that they reacted before the Federal Emergency Management Agency even began to give alleviation. This was because of their personal learning of neighborhood foundation and supply chains – which enabled them to convey alleviation rapidly and productively.

They Are Committed to "Green" Operations

In 2005, Walmart revealed an arrangement for how they would decrease their ecological effect. This reported their goal to eliminate squander creation, lessen ozone harming substance outflows, and lift their vitality productivity. As indicated by previous CEO Scott, they expected to deal with nature since it influences everybody – including them and their clients. So as to accomplish ecological agreeableness, the store put a lot of money in growing better approaches to remain green. For instance, they presented developments that would expand the fuel mileage in their trucks and would likewise decrease the outflows created by said trucks. Another insane development was the utilization of utilized oil (both engine oil and cooking oil) to warm a whole store. This forceful quest for their natural objectives certainly fits the usual way of doing things of this retail mammoth.

[technato]

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid

During big storms, falling trees cause more damage to power grids than strong winds

Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, the city’s famous skyline was mostly dark.

North America’s electric transmission may be an engineering marvel, but that doesn’t make it immune to failure, sometimes in spectacular fashion. For proof, just mention some dates and names to Nicholas Abi-Samra and wait for his reply.

Abi-Samra has more than 35 years of experience in power generation, transmission, distribution, retail, and end-use energy applications. He is president of Electric Power & Energy Consulting and an adjunct professor with UC San Diego. He also is the author of a new book Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions (Artech House, 2017).

The book is part technical reference guide and part history lesson. In it, Abi-Samra describes the impacts of heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes on grid operations through case studies from North America, Europe, and Asia.

Start with the 1965 Northeast Blackout. It cascaded from Ontario and upper New York State through Manhattan, leaving millions of New Yorkers in the dark. That incident offered the first large-scale evidence of the vulnerability of North America’s interconnected grid. It also led to the creation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Abi-Samra says, and its mission to enhance grid reliability through research and cooperation across the industry.

Mention the 2003 Northeast blackout and Abi-Samra links it to a realization that the grid’s operating conditions were not visible enough. Remedies included technologies like synchophasors and operational strategies like load shedding. 

Synchophasors measure the instantaneous voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations on the grid, offering operators a near-real-time picture of what’s happening on the system, which lets them take action to prevent power outages.

Load shedding involves the short-term interruption of power to one or more end users to allow the grid to rebalance itself. Many industrial-scale power users trade off the occasional loss of power for lower power prices, known as “interruptible rates.”

The early 2000s were also marked by hurricanes that hit Florida and Louisiana particularly hard. Widespread loss of transmission and distribution poles led to efforts to replace wooden poles with steel and concrete. Further hardening came after Hurricane Katrina devastated substations, leading to investments to elevate them above storm surge levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 exposed storm vulnerabilities in the Northeast, particularly the near-impossibility of insulating a system from damage in the face of fearsome winds and flooding.

The idea that resulted from Sandy was to “allow the system to fail, but in such a way that it could quickly recover,” Abi-Samra says. This illustrates another lesson: Efforts intended merely to harden infrastructure are not enough—the grid also needs to be resilient.

Hardening and resiliency are different concepts, Abi-Samra says. Resiliency refers to characteristics of the infrastructure and operations such as strength and the ability to make a fast recovery, which help utilities minimize or altogether avoid disruptions during and after an extreme weather event.

Making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes, Abi-Samra says.

Abi-Samra says that making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes. It may be advantageous, for example, to split up a large network into smaller circuits, and to reexamine circuit arrangements to enhance the speed of repair.

Greater deployment of smart grid technology can also help. With it, when an outage occurs, intelligent switches can detect a short circuit, block power flows to the affected area, communicate with nearby switches to reroute power around the problem and keep as many users energized as possible.

And because these intelligent switches do this automatically, they can reduce the time it takes to restore power to just a few minutes, Abi-Samra says.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, local utility CenterPoint operated more than 250 intelligent switches on its network. The effort saved more than 40 million outage minutes, Abi-Samra says. The utility also used smart meters to remotely disconnect customers. Both measures helped to minimize the storm’s impact and speed up restoration efforts.

Abi-Samra is a proponent of distributed generation resources and microgrids. Indeed, microgrids are part of a 10-year, $17 billion plan to rebuild and modernize Puerto Rico’s electric system, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September. The combination of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and microgrids could better protect hospitals and government buildings, large employers, and vulnerable communities.

“This duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says.

“The duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says. 

But such approaches are not a panacea to preventing grid failures, he says, and the interconnected grid still has a lot to offer.

When an area is hit by severe weather, adjoining utilities can offer support by supplying power and ancillary services. That value may be best demonstrated during summer heat waves, when generating resources from across a region are summoned to meet soaring demand for air conditioning in businesses and homes.

But when it comes to the massive destruction suffered by Puerto Rico, Abi-Samra says the biggest lessons may involve nothing more technical than a chainsaw and a bucket truck.

In part, he says, Puerto Rico’s grid disaster is the story of a financially struggling utility that deferred maintenance, limped along with a shortage of maintenance workers, and let slide seemingly mundane tasks like tree trimming.

Because as much as 45 percent of reliability incidents are due to vegetation, efforts to harden Puerto Rico’s electric system could benefit from simply revisiting its vegetation management strategy, Abi-Samra says. 

“Flying debris such as roofs and road signs and vegetation such as falling trees and limbs are the primary causes of distribution-pole damage during a storm, not strong winds themselves,” he says.

What’s more, the risk of airborne debris coming from trees outside of the right-of-way can exceed the risk from trees inside the right-of-way by a factor of as much as four to one. “Vegetation management on the right-of-way only is not enough,” he says.

Hurricane Maria in September and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 both showed that no amount of reinforcement and preparation can completely eliminate damage.

Abi-Samra says that structurally hardening the distribution system should focus on two objectives: hardening circuits that feed critical loads and load centers, and designing systems to allow for quick restoration.

“A cost-effective hardening approach should start with substations, feeders, and circuits which serve critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” he says. Once that is complete, the remaining feeders can then be prioritized.

The most common hardening practices include replacing wooden utility poles with poles made of steel, concrete, or a composite material; upgrading transmission towers from aluminum to galvanized-steel lattice or concrete and installing guy wires and other structural supports. 

In the end, Abi-Samra says it’s unrealistic to think that damage to the grid can be avoided when severe storms or other events occur. Instead, he says the goal should be to minimize any adverse impacts. Microgrids, distributed generation resources, smart grid technologies, and operational analytics all can enhance resiliency.

“Put intelligence on top of that,” he says, “and you can make life better for the public.”

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

[thecoroutfitters]

The recent one-two punch of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have left the country reeling, as any such event does.

But this time, it wasn’t just one such event that struck the country, but two, with a mere eight days between the end of one and landfall of the next. Never before in our nation’s history, has there been so much destruction wrought in such a short amount of time.

In the past, natural disasters of this magnitude have become watershed moments for various presidents.

When Hurricane Katrina nailed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, President Bush was lambasted thoroughly in the press for the poor response. Granted, not all of that poor response was his fault or even his administrations. But it happened on his watch, so he got the blame.

Specifically, Bush was blamed because it took three days for any government response to arrive in New Orleans. That’s enough time for people to start dying from the lack of adequate shelter and clean drinking water. Part of that delay was caused by the difficulty of getting through the deadfall trees on the highways, but the biggest part was that FEMA couldn’t move, until the state Governor declared a state of emergency.

  This smart device will help you slash an excess of 70% off your power bill overnight…

  The poor press generated by Hurricane Katrina stuck with President Bush until the end of his presidency. It’s even been said that the bad press that Bush received from Hurricane Katrina had a part in President Obama winning the election in November of 2008, as McCain was tainted by simply being in the same political party as Bush.

Seven years after Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the conflux of two hurricanes, struck the New Jersey seashore, once again destroying homes and leaving people without the basic necessities of life. As with Katriana, FEMA was slow getting their act together; but this time, it couldn’t be blamed on the state’s governor. Rather, it simply demonstrated how inefficient FMEA is.

There are many examples of this, most notably the fact that they didn’t put out requests for bids until two days after the hurricane hit the coast. Considering that the National Hurricane Center had been tracking the storm since it formed off the West-African coast, that was inexcusable.

But the media hushed that up. In fact, President Obama didn’t receive any bad press in the national media.

However, that’s not to say that Hurricane Sandy had no affect on Obama’s presidency; it did. In fact, it had a huge affect. Days before the hurricane hit, Obama was running severely behind in the polls.

But Hurricane Sandy changed all that. Hitting just over a week before the elections, it allowed Obama to look good, as he authorized relief efforts and financial aid to the victims, as well as visiting the area to show his support and concern.

In both cases:

The sitting presidents sent aid, petitioned Congress for disaster relief funds, gave speeches and visited the afflicted areas, although Bush delayed his visit to avoid getting in way of relief efforts.

People were displaced from their homes, lost property and in some cases lost their lives.

Thousands of homes were without electric power, in some cases for as long as seven weeks.

FEMA’s efforts at bringing disaster relief were slow and poorly managed. They apparently hadn’t learned much in the intervening seven years.

People were digging in dumpsters, trying to find something to eat.

But in one case, the sitting president came out smelling like a rose and in the other, like he had fallen in a septic tank.

What Was the Difference?

The difference was how the media handled the event.

Hurricanes are a big visual event for the media, with lots of good footage and pictures of flooding, general destruction, families in refugee centers and relief workers. People all over the nation are concerned and interested, so they can count on lots of viewers tuning in to see their “exclusive coverage.”

As such, it’s a major opportunity for politicians to make political hay. They get to stand in front of the cameras, talking about how bad it is, how much they support the victims and how much they are personally doing to get those people help.

Spending authorization bills get lots of “pork” projects attached to them, because nobody would dare vote against relief for the victims. For politicians with the right media connections, disasters are a great opportunity all around, too bad about those people who got hurt and lost their homes.

Since the media hated Bush, both for being a Republican and personally, they did everything they could to make him look bad in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But Obama was their fair-haired boy and he could do no wrong in their eyes.

So, as they did throughout his presidency and even during the campaign, they simply ignored anything that might make him look bad, refusing to report it. That left them with lots of good shots of President Obama looking concerned.

Since reality in the 21st Century is defined by televisions, computer monitors and handheld devices, all that most people know, is what the media tells them. This gives the media a huge amount of influence over society, influence that they use for the political benefit of their masters.

With the mainstream media totally sold out to the progressive-liberal left, what the low-information voters are receiving is political propaganda, not anything that even resembles the truth. Fake news has taken over, and the purveyors of that fake news have an agenda that they are trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter how much they loudly and publically proclaim their innocence and lack of bias, it’s all a lie.

So, How Does this Affect Trump?

Enter President Donald Trump, a true enemy of the media. Trump’s war with the mainstream media has become famous, with neither side backing down. The mainstream media had thrown all their weight behind Hillary Clinton in the presidential race and they lost. Like the rest of those on the left, they don’t know how to handle that, so they’ve doubled down, attacking Trump at every turn.

When Donald Trump and his wife went to Houston, to see the damage and relief efforts for themselves, the media freaked out about the First Lady’s high heel shoes, accusing her of being “out of touch” with the victims, by wearing high heels to go to a flooded region of the country. Of course, they didn’t say anything when she got off of Air Force One, wearing a sensible pair of sneakers. Oops.

You would think that even the media would learn from a mistake like that, but they didn’t.

A few days later, when the Trumps went back to Houston again, we were treated to an instant replay, as the mainstream media once again started a Twitter firestorm about Melania getting on board Air Force One in heels. As with the first time, there was nothing that even vaguely resembled a retraction or apology when she once again got off the airplane in tennies.

That’s it. That’s the coverage that the media gave Donald Trump from Hurricane Harvey. There was nothing about FEMA and their relief efforts. Nothing about Trump’s request for billions in relief funds. There wasn’t even any photos about Trump and his wife helping out at a relief center.

Not even a word about Trump giving one million dollars of his own money to help Hurricane Harvey victims. Rather, they pushed a photo showing Obama feeding the hungry in a shelter, claiming that it was hurricane relief, when it wasn’t.

Such is the objectivity of the media today. Their whole purpose is to make Democrats look good and Republicans look bad. To do so, they hide any good news about Republicans and hide any bad news about Democrats.

Of course, they’re talking into an echo chamber, repeating the same things over and over again; telling their audience how bad Republicans are. But who is that audience? The low-information voters who don’t bother researching anything for themselves and merely repeat whatever Democrat talking points the media tells them to believe.

They apparently haven’t learned yet. Bashing Republicans isn’t going to win them any elections. The Democrat Party doesn’t even have a message anymore. Their supposed “message” is to talk about how bad they think Trump is, based purely on the name calling they’ve been doing. As if name calling is any sort of evidence. Yet apparently they think it is.

But it Doesn’t Stop There!

It’s bad enough to have the mainstream media giving a false narrative and convincing the low-information voters that Trump and the Republican party are bad. But that’s just the foundation level of what they’re doing.

From there it gets even more interesting. Conspiracy theories don’t just exist in the far right of the political spectrum, the far left has their own collection of conspiracy theorists at work.

According to this group of pseudo-scientists and pseudo-political theorists, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are Donald Trump’s fault. Yes folks, our president apparently hates the American people so much, that he’s intentionally trying to ruin their lives and even kill them. He is doing this by hand-crafting hurricanes out of thin air.

One theory holds that Donald Trump ordered cloud seeding to create the hurricanes, using some ultra-secret magic dust, that they can sprinkle in clouds, causing any sort of natural disaster they want.

Cloud seeding does apparently exist, and it’s been done to cause rain during a drought. But there’s a huge difference between causing a little rain to fall on some farmlands, and creating a storm that’s 400 miles across and has winds in excess of 150 miles per hour.

Then there’s the theory of hurricanes being caused by global warming, or “climate change” as it’s called now. The global warming narrative has been debunked so many times now, that it’s not even funny. Yet there are still lots of people who stick to that story, saying that the rest of us are criminal for not accepting “settled science.” Settled? It’s only settled in their warped minds.

Once again, we can go back to the Mayans to disprove that pseudo-science. If global warming caused hurricanes, how could there have been hurricanes in Mesoamerica over 1,000 years ago? How could those hurricanes have continued to exist through the mini ice-age?

Yet the global warming crowd is trying to blame Trump for these hurricanes; not for anything he’s done, which created more warming; but rather for pulling the US out of the Paris accord. Apparently, pulling out of an agreement that wasn’t going to make any discernible difference anyway is enough to cause hurricanes to start attacking our country. I never knew nature could read.

The cause of hurricanes is known. While we are powerless to do anything to stop it, we can see from the recent hurricane activity that the National Hurricane Center is good at predicting the actions of these hurricanes and warning people of what is to come.

No matter how much pseudo-science they invent to try and pin them on Donald Trump, it’s not going to work. The only people who will believe them are those that already hate Trump and are looking for whatever excuse they can find to talk about how bad he is.

Whatever they do and say on politics, you need to be prepared and expect the worse!

This article has been written by Bill White for Survivopedia.

from Survivopedia Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

[technato]

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid

During big storms, falling trees cause more damage to power grids than strong winds

Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, the city’s famous skyline was mostly dark.

North America’s electric transmission may be an engineering marvel, but that doesn’t make it immune to failure, sometimes in spectacular fashion. For proof, just mention some dates and names to Nicholas Abi-Samra and wait for his reply.

Abi-Samra has more than 35 years of experience in power generation, transmission, distribution, retail, and end-use energy applications. He is president of Electric Power & Energy Consulting and an adjunct professor with UC San Diego. He also is the author of a new book Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions (Artech House, 2017).

The book is part technical reference guide and part history lesson. In it, Abi-Samra describes the impacts of heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes on grid operations through case studies from North America, Europe, and Asia.

Start with the 1965 Northeast Blackout. It cascaded from Ontario and upper New York State through Manhattan, leaving millions of New Yorkers in the dark. That incident offered the first large-scale evidence of the vulnerability of North America’s interconnected grid. It also led to the creation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Abi-Samra says, and its mission to enhance grid reliability through research and cooperation across the industry.

Mention the 2003 Northeast blackout and Abi-Samra links it to a realization that the grid’s operating conditions were not visible enough. Remedies included technologies like synchophasors and operational strategies like load shedding. 

Synchophasors measure the instantaneous voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations on the grid, offering operators a near-real-time picture of what’s happening on the system, which lets them take action to prevent power outages.

Load shedding involves the short-term interruption of power to one or more end users to allow the grid to rebalance itself. Many industrial-scale power users trade off the occasional loss of power for lower power prices, known as “interruptible rates.”

The early 2000s were also marked by hurricanes that hit Florida and Louisiana particularly hard. Widespread loss of transmission and distribution poles led to efforts to replace wooden poles with steel and concrete. Further hardening came after Hurricane Katrina devastated substations, leading to investments to elevate them above storm surge levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 exposed storm vulnerabilities in the Northeast, particularly the near-impossibility of insulating a system from damage in the face of fearsome winds and flooding.

The idea that resulted from Sandy was to “allow the system to fail, but in such a way that it could quickly recover,” Abi-Samra says. This illustrates another lesson: Efforts intended merely to harden infrastructure are not enough—the grid also needs to be resilient.

Hardening and resiliency are different concepts, Abi-Samra says. Resiliency refers to characteristics of the infrastructure and operations such as strength and the ability to make a fast recovery, which help utilities minimize or altogether avoid disruptions during and after an extreme weather event.

Making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes, Abi-Samra says.

Abi-Samra says that making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes. It may be advantageous, for example, to split up a large network into smaller circuits, and to reexamine circuit arrangements to enhance the speed of repair.

Greater deployment of smart grid technology can also help. With it, when an outage occurs, intelligent switches can detect a short circuit, block power flows to the affected area, communicate with nearby switches to reroute power around the problem and keep as many users energized as possible.

And because these intelligent switches do this automatically, they can reduce the time it takes to restore power to just a few minutes, Abi-Samra says.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, local utility CenterPoint operated more than 250 intelligent switches on its network. The effort saved more than 40 million outage minutes, Abi-Samra says. The utility also used smart meters to remotely disconnect customers. Both measures helped to minimize the storm’s impact and speed up restoration efforts.

Abi-Samra is a proponent of distributed generation resources and microgrids. Indeed, microgrids are part of a 10-year, $17 billion plan to rebuild and modernize Puerto Rico’s electric system, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September. The combination of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and microgrids could better protect hospitals and government buildings, large employers, and vulnerable communities.

“This duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says.

“The duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says. 

But such approaches are not a panacea to preventing grid failures, he says, and the interconnected grid still has a lot to offer.

When an area is hit by severe weather, adjoining utilities can offer support by supplying power and ancillary services. That value may be best demonstrated during summer heat waves, when generating resources from across a region are summoned to meet soaring demand for air conditioning in businesses and homes.

But when it comes to the massive destruction suffered by Puerto Rico, Abi-Samra says the biggest lessons may involve nothing more technical than a chainsaw and a bucket truck.

In part, he says, Puerto Rico’s grid disaster is the story of a financially struggling utility that deferred maintenance, limped along with a shortage of maintenance workers, and let slide seemingly mundane tasks like tree trimming.

Because as much as 45 percent of reliability incidents are due to vegetation, efforts to harden Puerto Rico’s electric system could benefit from simply revisiting its vegetation management strategy, Abi-Samra says. 

“Flying debris such as roofs and road signs and vegetation such as falling trees and limbs are the primary causes of distribution-pole damage during a storm, not strong winds themselves,” he says.

What’s more, the risk of airborne debris coming from trees outside of the right-of-way can exceed the risk from trees inside the right-of-way by a factor of as much as four to one. “Vegetation management on the right-of-way only is not enough,” he says.

Hurricane Maria in September and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 both showed that no amount of reinforcement and preparation can completely eliminate damage.

Abi-Samra says that structurally hardening the distribution system should focus on two objectives: hardening circuits that feed critical loads and load centers, and designing systems to allow for quick restoration.

“A cost-effective hardening approach should start with substations, feeders, and circuits which serve critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” he says. Once that is complete, the remaining feeders can then be prioritized.

The most common hardening practices include replacing wooden utility poles with poles made of steel, concrete, or a composite material; upgrading transmission towers from aluminum to galvanized-steel lattice or concrete and installing guy wires and other structural supports. 

In the end, Abi-Samra says it’s unrealistic to think that damage to the grid can be avoided when severe storms or other events occur. Instead, he says the goal should be to minimize any adverse impacts. Microgrids, distributed generation resources, smart grid technologies, and operational analytics all can enhance resiliency.

“Put intelligence on top of that,” he says, “and you can make life better for the public.”

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

[technato]

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid

During big storms, falling trees cause more damage to power grids than strong winds

Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, the city’s famous skyline was mostly dark.

North America’s electric transmission may be an engineering marvel, but that doesn’t make it immune to failure, sometimes in spectacular fashion. For proof, just mention some dates and names to Nicholas Abi-Samra and wait for his reply.

Abi-Samra has more than 35 years of experience in power generation, transmission, distribution, retail, and end-use energy applications. He is president of Electric Power & Energy Consulting and an adjunct professor with UC San Diego. He also is the author of a new book Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions (Artech House, 2017).

The book is part technical reference guide and part history lesson. In it, Abi-Samra describes the impacts of heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes on grid operations through case studies from North America, Europe, and Asia.

Start with the 1965 Northeast Blackout. It cascaded from Ontario and upper New York State through Manhattan, leaving millions of New Yorkers in the dark. That incident offered the first large-scale evidence of the vulnerability of North America’s interconnected grid. It also led to the creation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Abi-Samra says, and its mission to enhance grid reliability through research and cooperation across the industry.

Mention the 2003 Northeast blackout and Abi-Samra links it to a realization that the grid’s operating conditions were not visible enough. Remedies included technologies like synchophasors and operational strategies like load shedding. 

Synchophasors measure the instantaneous voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations on the grid, offering operators a near-real-time picture of what’s happening on the system, which lets them take action to prevent power outages.

Load shedding involves the short-term interruption of power to one or more end users to allow the grid to rebalance itself. Many industrial-scale power users trade off the occasional loss of power for lower power prices, known as “interruptible rates.”

The early 2000s were also marked by hurricanes that hit Florida and Louisiana particularly hard. Widespread loss of transmission and distribution poles led to efforts to replace wooden poles with steel and concrete. Further hardening came after Hurricane Katrina devastated substations, leading to investments to elevate them above storm surge levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 exposed storm vulnerabilities in the Northeast, particularly the near-impossibility of insulating a system from damage in the face of fearsome winds and flooding.

The idea that resulted from Sandy was to “allow the system to fail, but in such a way that it could quickly recover,” Abi-Samra says. This illustrates another lesson: Efforts intended merely to harden infrastructure are not enough—the grid also needs to be resilient.

Hardening and resiliency are different concepts, Abi-Samra says. Resiliency refers to characteristics of the infrastructure and operations such as strength and the ability to make a fast recovery, which help utilities minimize or altogether avoid disruptions during and after an extreme weather event.

Making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes, Abi-Samra says.

Abi-Samra says that making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes. It may be advantageous, for example, to split up a large network into smaller circuits, and to reexamine circuit arrangements to enhance the speed of repair.

Greater deployment of smart grid technology can also help. With it, when an outage occurs, intelligent switches can detect a short circuit, block power flows to the affected area, communicate with nearby switches to reroute power around the problem and keep as many users energized as possible.

And because these intelligent switches do this automatically, they can reduce the time it takes to restore power to just a few minutes, Abi-Samra says.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, local utility CenterPoint operated more than 250 intelligent switches on its network. The effort saved more than 40 million outage minutes, Abi-Samra says. The utility also used smart meters to remotely disconnect customers. Both measures helped to minimize the storm’s impact and speed up restoration efforts.

Abi-Samra is a proponent of distributed generation resources and microgrids. Indeed, microgrids are part of a 10-year, $17 billion plan to rebuild and modernize Puerto Rico’s electric system, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September. The combination of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and microgrids could better protect hospitals and government buildings, large employers, and vulnerable communities.

“This duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says.

“The duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says. 

But such approaches are not a panacea to preventing grid failures, he says, and the interconnected grid still has a lot to offer.

When an area is hit by severe weather, adjoining utilities can offer support by supplying power and ancillary services. That value may be best demonstrated during summer heat waves, when generating resources from across a region are summoned to meet soaring demand for air conditioning in businesses and homes.

But when it comes to the massive destruction suffered by Puerto Rico, Abi-Samra says the biggest lessons may involve nothing more technical than a chainsaw and a bucket truck.

In part, he says, Puerto Rico’s grid disaster is the story of a financially struggling utility that deferred maintenance, limped along with a shortage of maintenance workers, and let slide seemingly mundane tasks like tree trimming.

Because as much as 45 percent of reliability incidents are due to vegetation, efforts to harden Puerto Rico’s electric system could benefit from simply revisiting its vegetation management strategy, Abi-Samra says. 

“Flying debris such as roofs and road signs and vegetation such as falling trees and limbs are the primary causes of distribution-pole damage during a storm, not strong winds themselves,” he says.

What’s more, the risk of airborne debris coming from trees outside of the right-of-way can exceed the risk from trees inside the right-of-way by a factor of as much as four to one. “Vegetation management on the right-of-way only is not enough,” he says.

Hurricane Maria in September and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 both showed that no amount of reinforcement and preparation can completely eliminate damage.

Abi-Samra says that structurally hardening the distribution system should focus on two objectives: hardening circuits that feed critical loads and load centers, and designing systems to allow for quick restoration.

“A cost-effective hardening approach should start with substations, feeders, and circuits which serve critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” he says. Once that is complete, the remaining feeders can then be prioritized.

The most common hardening practices include replacing wooden utility poles with poles made of steel, concrete, or a composite material; upgrading transmission towers from aluminum to galvanized-steel lattice or concrete and installing guy wires and other structural supports. 

In the end, Abi-Samra says it’s unrealistic to think that damage to the grid can be avoided when severe storms or other events occur. Instead, he says the goal should be to minimize any adverse impacts. Microgrids, distributed generation resources, smart grid technologies, and operational analytics all can enhance resiliency.

“Put intelligence on top of that,” he says, “and you can make life better for the public.”

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

[technato]

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid

During big storms, falling trees cause more damage to power grids than strong winds

Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, the city’s famous skyline was mostly dark.

North America’s electric transmission may be an engineering marvel, but that doesn’t make it immune to failure, sometimes in spectacular fashion. For proof, just mention some dates and names to Nicholas Abi-Samra and wait for his reply.

Abi-Samra has more than 35 years of experience in power generation, transmission, distribution, retail, and end-use energy applications. He is president of Electric Power & Energy Consulting and an adjunct professor with UC San Diego. He also is the author of a new book Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions (Artech House, 2017).

The book is part technical reference guide and part history lesson. In it, Abi-Samra describes the impacts of heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes on grid operations through case studies from North America, Europe, and Asia.

Start with the 1965 Northeast Blackout. It cascaded from Ontario and upper New York State through Manhattan, leaving millions of New Yorkers in the dark. That incident offered the first large-scale evidence of the vulnerability of North America’s interconnected grid. It also led to the creation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Abi-Samra says, and its mission to enhance grid reliability through research and cooperation across the industry.

Mention the 2003 Northeast blackout and Abi-Samra links it to a realization that the grid’s operating conditions were not visible enough. Remedies included technologies like synchophasers and operational strategies like load shedding. 

Synchophasers measure the instantaneous voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations on the grid, offering operators a near-real-time picture of what’s happening on the system, which lets them take action to prevent power outages.

Load shedding involves the short-term interruption of power to one or more end users to allow the grid to rebalance itself. Many industrial-scale power users trade off the occasional loss of power for lower power prices, known as “interruptible rates.”

The early 2000s were also marked by hurricanes that hit Florida and Louisiana particularly hard. Widespread loss of transmission and distribution poles led to efforts to replace wooden poles with steel and concrete. Further hardening came after Hurricane Katrina devastated substations, leading to investments to elevate them above storm surge levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 exposed storm vulnerabilities in the Northeast, particularly the near-impossibility of insulating a system from damage in the face of fearsome winds and flooding.

The idea that resulted from Sandy was to “allow the system to fail, but in such a way that it could quickly recover,” Abi-Samra says. This illustrates another lesson: Efforts intended merely to harden infrastructure are not enough—the grid also needs to be resilient.

Hardening and resiliency are different concepts, Abi-Samra says. Resiliency refers to characteristics of the infrastructure and operations such as strength and the ability to make a fast recovery, which help utilities minimize or altogether avoid disruptions during and after an extreme weather event.

Making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes, Abi-Samra says.

Abi-Samra says that making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes. It may be advantageous, for example, to split up a large network into smaller circuits, and to reexamine circuit arrangements to enhance the speed of repair.

Greater deployment of smart grid technology can also help. With it, when an outage occurs, intelligent switches can detect a short circuit, block power flows to the affected area, communicate with nearby switches to reroute power around the problem and keep as many users energized as possible.

And because these intelligent switches do this automatically, they can reduce the time it takes to restore power to just a few minutes, Abi-Samra says.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, local utility CenterPoint operated more than 250 intelligent switches on its network. The effort saved more than 40 million outage minutes, Abi-Samra says. The utility also used smart meters to remotely disconnect customers. Both measures helped to minimize the storm’s impact and speed up restoration efforts.

Abi-Samra is a proponent of distributed generation resources and microgrids. Indeed, microgrids are part of a 10-year, $17 billion plan to rebuild and modernize Puerto Rico’s electric system, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September. The combination of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and microgrids could better protect hospitals and government buildings, large employers, and vulnerable communities.

“This duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says.

“The duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says. 

But such approaches are not a panacea to preventing grid failures, he says, and the interconnected grid still has a lot to offer.

When an area is hit by severe weather, adjoining utilities can offer support by supplying power and ancillary services. That value may be best demonstrated during summer heat waves, when generating resources from across a region are summoned to meet soaring demand for air conditioning in businesses and homes.

But when it comes to the massive destruction suffered by Puerto Rico, Abi-Samra says the biggest lessons may involve nothing more technical than a chainsaw and a bucket truck.

In part, he says, Puerto Rico’s grid disaster is the story of a financially struggling utility that deferred maintenance, limped along with a shortage of maintenance workers, and let slide seemingly mundane tasks like tree trimming.

Because as much as 45 percent of reliability incidents are due to vegetation, efforts to harden Puerto Rico’s electric system could benefit from simply revisiting its vegetation management strategy, Abi-Samra says. 

“Flying debris such as roofs and road signs and vegetation such as falling trees and limbs are the primary causes of distribution-pole damage during a storm, not strong winds themselves,” he says.

What’s more, the risk of airborne debris coming from trees outside of the right-of-way can exceed the risk from trees inside the right-of-way by a factor of as much as four to one. “Vegetation management on the right-of-way only is not enough,” he says.

Hurricane Maria in September and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 both showed that no amount of reinforcement and preparation can completely eliminate damage.

Abi-Samra says that structurally hardening the distribution system should focus on two objectives: hardening circuits that feed critical loads and load centers, and designing systems to allow for quick restoration.

“A cost-effective hardening approach should start with substations, feeders, and circuits which serve critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” he says. Once that is complete, the remaining feeders can then be prioritized.

The most common hardening practices include replacing wooden utility poles with poles made of steel, concrete, or a composite material; upgrading transmission towers from aluminum to galvanized-steel lattice or concrete and installing guy wires and other structural supports. 

In the end, Abi-Samra says it’s unrealistic to think that damage to the grid can be avoided when severe storms or other events occur. Instead, he says the goal should be to minimize any adverse impacts. Microgrids, distributed generation resources, smart grid technologies, and operational analytics all can enhance resiliency.

“Put intelligence on top of that,” he says, “and you can make life better for the public.”

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP

[technato]

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid

During big storms, falling trees cause more damage to power grids than strong winds

Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City in October 2012, the city’s famous skyline was mostly dark.

North America’s electric transmission may be an engineering marvel, but that doesn’t make it immune to failure, sometimes in spectacular fashion. For proof, just mention some dates and names to Nicholas Abi-Samra and wait for his reply.

Abi-Samra has more than 35 years of experience in power generation, transmission, distribution, retail, and end-use energy applications. He is president of Electric Power & Energy Consulting and an adjunct professor with UC San Diego. He also is the author of a new book Power Grid Resiliency for Adverse Conditions (Artech House, 2017).

The book is part technical reference guide and part history lesson. In it, Abi-Samra describes the impacts of heat waves, ice storms, and hurricanes on grid operations through case studies from North America, Europe, and Asia.

Start with the 1965 Northeast Blackout. It cascaded from Ontario and upper New York State through Manhattan, leaving millions of New Yorkers in the dark. That incident offered the first large-scale evidence of the vulnerability of North America’s interconnected grid. It also led to the creation of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Abi-Samra says, and its mission to enhance grid reliability through research and cooperation across the industry.

Mention the 2003 Northeast blackout and Abi-Samra links it to a realization that the grid’s operating conditions were not visible enough. Remedies included technologies like synchophasers and operational strategies like load shedding. 

Synchophasers measure the instantaneous voltage, current, and frequency at specific locations on the grid, offering operators a near-real-time picture of what’s happening on the system, which lets them take action to prevent power outages.

Load shedding involves the short-term interruption of power to one or more end users to allow the grid to rebalance itself. Many industrial-scale power users trade off the occasional loss of power for lower power prices, known as “interruptible rates.”

The early 2000s were also marked by hurricanes that hit Florida and Louisiana particularly hard. Widespread loss of transmission and distribution poles led to efforts to replace wooden poles with steel and concrete. Further hardening came after Hurricane Katrina devastated substations, leading to investments to elevate them above storm surge levels.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 exposed storm vulnerabilities in the Northeast, particularly the near-impossibility of insulating a system from damage in the face of fearsome winds and flooding.

The idea that resulted from Sandy was to “allow the system to fail, but in such a way that it could quickly recover,” Abi-Samra says. This illustrates another lesson: Efforts intended merely to harden infrastructure are not enough—the grid also needs to be resilient.

Hardening and resiliency are different concepts, Abi-Samra says. Resiliency refers to characteristics of the infrastructure and operations such as strength and the ability to make a fast recovery, which help utilities minimize or altogether avoid disruptions during and after an extreme weather event.

Making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes, Abi-Samra says.

Abi-Samra says that making the power distribution system more resilient starts with design changes. It may be advantageous, for example, to split up a large network into smaller circuits, and to reexamine circuit arrangements to enhance the speed of repair.

Greater deployment of smart grid technology can also help. With it, when an outage occurs, intelligent switches can detect a short circuit, block power flows to the affected area, communicate with nearby switches to reroute power around the problem and keep as many users energized as possible.

And because these intelligent switches do this automatically, they can reduce the time it takes to restore power to just a few minutes, Abi-Samra says.

For example, when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August, local utility CenterPoint operated more than 250 intelligent switches on its network. The effort saved more than 40 million outage minutes, Abi-Samra says. The utility also used smart meters to remotely disconnect customers. Both measures helped to minimize the storm’s impact and speed up restoration efforts.

Abi-Samra is a proponent of distributed generation resources and microgrids. Indeed, microgrids are part of a 10-year, $17 billion plan to rebuild and modernize Puerto Rico’s electric system, which was largely destroyed by Hurricane Maria in September. The combination of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar, battery energy storage, and microgrids could better protect hospitals and government buildings, large employers, and vulnerable communities.

“This duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says.

“The duet between renewables and batteries is a perfect element of a resilient grid,” Abi-Samra says. 

But such approaches are not a panacea to preventing grid failures, he says, and the interconnected grid still has a lot to offer.

When an area is hit by severe weather, adjoining utilities can offer support by supplying power and ancillary services. That value may be best demonstrated during summer heat waves, when generating resources from across a region are summoned to meet soaring demand for air conditioning in businesses and homes.

But when it comes to the massive destruction suffered by Puerto Rico, Abi-Samra says the biggest lessons may involve nothing more technical than a chainsaw and a bucket truck.

In part, he says, Puerto Rico’s grid disaster is the story of a financially struggling utility that deferred maintenance, limped along with a shortage of maintenance workers, and let slide seemingly mundane tasks like tree trimming.

Because as much as 45 percent of reliability incidents are due to vegetation, efforts to harden Puerto Rico’s electric system could benefit from simply revisiting its vegetation management strategy, Abi-Samra says. 

“Flying debris such as roofs and road signs and vegetation such as falling trees and limbs are the primary causes of distribution-pole damage during a storm, not strong winds themselves,” he says.

What’s more, the risk of airborne debris coming from trees outside of the right-of-way can exceed the risk from trees inside the right-of-way by a factor of as much as four to one. “Vegetation management on the right-of-way only is not enough,” he says.

Hurricane Maria in September and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 both showed that no amount of reinforcement and preparation can completely eliminate damage.

Abi-Samra says that structurally hardening the distribution system should focus on two objectives: hardening circuits that feed critical loads and load centers, and designing systems to allow for quick restoration.

“A cost-effective hardening approach should start with substations, feeders, and circuits which serve critical infrastructure such as hospitals,” he says. Once that is complete, the remaining feeders can then be prioritized.

The most common hardening practices include replacing wooden utility poles with poles made of steel, concrete, or a composite material; upgrading transmission towers from aluminum to galvanized-steel lattice or concrete and installing guy wires and other structural supports. 

In the end, Abi-Samra says it’s unrealistic to think that damage to the grid can be avoided when severe storms or other events occur. Instead, he says the goal should be to minimize any adverse impacts. Microgrids, distributed generation resources, smart grid technologies, and operational analytics all can enhance resiliency.

“Put intelligence on top of that,” he says, “and you can make life better for the public.”

How to Build a More Resilient Power Grid syndicated from http://ift.tt/2Bq2FuP