Southern California faces higher blackout risk this summer

[phantom power]

The risk of electricity blackouts in Southern California during the hottest days this summer is more than triple that of previous years because power plant additions have failed to keep up with demand, the state's grid manager said.

The likelihood of a Stage 3 emergency, when reserves dip below 3% and power is cut to some customers to prevent a system collapse, rose to 10% for Southern California from 3% in last year's forecast, the California Independent System Operator said in a report Monday.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-power29apr29,1,585177.story

[catzies]

1. Meanwhile, on a veranda, somewhere in Paraguay,

Ken Lay sips his drink and smiles.

[NNadir]

2. Don't worry, they have a brazillion solar roofs.

[phantom power]

3. Good point.

[Systematic Chaos]

4. Speaking of which, I think I *might* have seen a couple of those in Vegas today.

I say *might* because I'm not really sure what it was, but there were some new McMansions down in the Henderson area as paratransit was taking us home from shopping, and they had rows of black - things - on the roof. And it was only two I could see out of an entire subdivision.

And that would be the only two solar installations I've seen in this city, period, other than a little deal put up by UNLV near the corner of Flamingo and Swenson.

Whoop-de-shit.

[jpak]

7. Tell us about your trip to Cali again

:rofl:

[NNadir]

9. The one with the brazillion hydrogen Hummers, the brazillion solar roofs, and the brazillion purreed

birds and bats falling from the sky?

[jpak]

11. Which scientific society meeting did you attend???

The Society of Autodidactical Nucular Whackjobs???

:rofl:

[NNadir]

15. If I told you, it would be over your head.

You can't write, you can't spell, you can't think, and you hold all science in contempt.

I am no more interested in discussing science with you than I am interested in discussing the origin of the universe with Pat Robertson.

[jpak]

16. If was a *real* scientific society it would have a website with meeting location, dates, times

abstracts, authors, presentation schedules etc.

If it was "made up" there would be no such info.

I vote "made up"

[Dead_Parrot]

17. you also vote "power=energy". Again. nt

[jpak]

18. Here's a book you should read...

H.T. Odum (1971) Environment, Power and Society, John Wiley and Sons, New York

I knew the author and his brother was on my master's committee...

[NNadir]

19. What? Did your Mom's boyfriend's sister's cousin's lover take you to a scientific meeting once?

Did the they let "Boobsie" Boy hold the box with an RIA kit and have his picture taken with a real lab coat and real safety glasses so Boobsie Boy could tell everybody how he's a nuclear scientist because he once looked at a box that once had tritiated thymidine and even had a real radioactive symbol on the label?

Boobsie boy is a real scientist, cause Momsie's friend took a real picture of him holding a real micropipette!

Did Momsy tell everybody at the family dinner how the little scientist presented a poster at the special "Young Scientists from Maine" poster session, the one where the tenth grade kids get a chance to win a ribbon for their wonderful bread mold experiments?

"Maybe he'll go to Harvard" said Momsey, right before she got plastered and threw up in the maid's bathroom.

Whatever...

You seem to have mistaken me for someone who has something other than contempt for your scientific level. If so, this is hardly my fault. I have never represented myself as someone who at any time or any place had anything but contempt for ignorance for which - and how ironic is this - I regard you as a poster boy.

If you would like to assert that there were no scientific meetings in California in the past month, and therefore I am a liar when I say I went to such a meeting, you are free to do so.

I claim that the assertion that there were no scientific meetings in California this past month is the equivalent of the assertion that nuclear power is dying, an assertion that has been made repeatedly on this website made by the same people who assert that solar energy, for just one example, is something other than a trivial form of energy.

For the record, if one wanted to do so, one could google abstracts and programs. The entire education of the anti-nuke fundie cults consists wholly of lazy googling, so surely this comes as no surprise.

For instance, if I produce a list of abstracts from the 7th Panhellenic (International) Conference of Meteorology, Climatology and Atmospheric Physics like, say, this one:

http://www2.cs.ucy.ac.cy/~meteo/synedrio_docs/abstracts_121-140.pdf

...it hardly makes me a Cypriot Meteorologist.

Meanwhile on Planet Earth:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table1_1.html

The reason I despise ignorance is as unambiguous as my contempt: Ignorance kills.

[madokie]

8. ...

[Zachstar]

5. Here we go again.

And because that is where a great many US servers are located we will likely see problems with net activity with any blackout.

[phantom power]

6. Uh oh....

Not... The Day The Internet Died

http://www.geeksugar.com/1558782

[Dead_Parrot]

10. Ack!

Of course, with no Internet, the town couldn't do the usual Google investigation to see what went wrong.

The fear! The fear has me! Nooooo....

:scared:

[phantom power]

12. When I watched that episode, I laughed. But it was nervous laughter.

There is some threshold of electrical blackouts, and/or internet outages, past which my career evaporates. The internet (and electricity) are fundamentally what enables any level of telecommuting that people are using to respond to high fuel prices. For those people lucky enough to have a job that allows for telecommuting.

[NickB79]

13. They didn't build enough natural-gas-fired turbines?

Oh no, the horror!

[phantom power]

14. And if they did, they wouldn't be able to afford running them.