Summer’s Heat Shows Vulnerability of Power Grid

A major heat wave has caused temperatures to rise along parts of North-Eastern North America – but hey, it’s summer time – that’s not new.

Nor is the fact that our ageing and antiquated power supply system fails when we need it most.

Every summer, there are days of excessive heat, followed by warnings from local power companies to cut back on air conditioning use during business hours, otherwise rolling brownouts or blackouts may occur.

The warnings aren’t followed, and what happens?

Hydro vault fires, power failures stretching vast distances, and some of the most heavily populated areas in North America go without electricity for hours.

That’s what happened yesterday in Canada’s largest city of Toronto, right at the start of the afternoon rush hour.

Thousands of people working in skyscrapers hundreds of floors high had to hustle single-file down emergency stairwells to escape the stale hot air, as the air conditioners ceased to function in buildings where the windows don’t open.

Once those thousands of people did manage to get down to street level, they were sucked into a flood of thousands more, wandering around, wondering what to do. Traffic lights were out, subways and streetcars were stopped dead, forcing pretty much everyone in the affected areas out onto the streets, causing chaos and confusion.

That is if you got down – hundreds in elevators across the city when the power went out were stuck mid-floor. One person even used social networking site twitter.com, to “tweet” Toronto’s Mayor in a panic about being stuck in the elevator. The Mayor tweeted back emergency contact info, and eventually emergency services freed those in that particular elevator.

Memories of the major blackout in 2003, which darkened the United States and Canada along the North Eastern Seaboard for days returned.

Memories of summers past, with short, flashes of power outages (brownouts) and longer, blackouts lasting hours returned.

Despite our advances in technology, causing a constant increase in electricity demand – and a subsequent increase in the cost to consumers for that electricity -- our power grids continue to take a back seat to improvements.

Even though most high tech toys these days are mobile, we still need to plug them in to charge them prior to going mobile. Think about all our smart phones, cordless phones and laptops. Toss in our usual electric appliances like fridges, stoves, toasters and televisions, and it doesn’t take a genius to see we are completely at the mercy of the power company to keep us fed, informed and in touch with our loved ones.

Over the years, the costs of electricity in North America have continued to rise – about two percent per year since 1990.

Yet when we hit a couple of days when we the paying customer really need to use electricity – during a heat wave to cool our schools, offices and homes – the power company warns us to cut back our use, or the system will do it for us.

Granted, hitting this excessive demand isn’t an everyday occurrence. But then, it isn’t as if we haven’t hit these high levels of electrical consumption ever before. We average about two days every summer in North America when we do just that.

SO, why is it that despite all the technological advances, all the increases in power consumption and subsequent raises in electricity rates to us paying consumers, and all the previous days, every year, where we hit excessive demand of the power grid, that our power grid can’t handle it?

Shouldn’t our power companies have resolved these problems long ago? What the hell are they using the added revenue from constant price increases on? Why aren’t the power companies using the latest technologies to ensure these regular power outages every summer are ended?

Perhaps, because of our dependence upon the electrical grid to power our world, the power companies don’t feel obligated to improve their products or services – where else are we going to go to keep our homes cooled in the summer, lit at night and our tummies full?

Maybe now is the time to look at setting up our own individual solar and wind-power systems, to end the reliance on a faulty – and poorly maintained – power grid?

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Nothing More Eye Opening then a Time Change

YAWN – Wake up!

Yeah, I know you are all tired, what with losing an hour of sleep thanks to moving your clocks back an hour for Daylight Saving Time.

That lack of sleep is responsible for an increase in traffic accidents the Monday following the time change in major city centers, as our bodies are still adjusting, according to many local cop shops, and scientists that study this sort of thing.
The scientists say if we actually did the clock change on Friday night (giving us Saturday and Sunday to adjust) instead of Saturday night (giving us only Sunday to adjust) our bodies – and vehicles – would be better off.

But there is a method to the madness and it tugs at your environmental heart strings.

Falling back and springing forward saves energy. Energy to heat, light and power our homes is directly connected to when we wake up in the morning and when we go to bed at night. For all but you night owls – you know who you are – most of us go to bed in the late evening and wake again in the early morning. While we’re under the covers, most of our lights and other appliances are turned off – unless you fell asleep watching the boob tube.

By moving the clocks ahead one hour in the spring, the average home cuts its energy use by about 25 percent.

Here’s how it works -- Daylight Saving Time adds an hour to the day – giving us an extra hour of sunlight, which in turn reduces the period between sunset and the average bedtime by one hour. That translates into less electricity used for lighting and appliances late in the day. We tend to use more electricity in the morning because it is darker, but that’s balanced by the energy we save at night.

As the days are longer, we tend to be home fewer hours during the day. Aside from the warmer sunnier weather promoting us to spend more time outside, studies show we tend to do more when the days are longer. These studies show we tend to prefer to do everything from housework to grocery shopping under a sunny sky – the increased amount of daylight actually motivates us on a subconscious level.

Maybe that’s the theory behind the term “spring cleaning?”

Also, as the days are “longer” we have more light later into the evening, meaning we can delay turning on our lights to see.

Need proof?

In the United States during the energy crisis of the 1970’s, Congress put most of America on extended Daylight Saving Time for two years to save energy. The American Department of Transportation conducted a study during this extended time shift and found it saved the equivalent in energy of 10,000 barrels of oil each day, for a total of 600,000 barrels in each of those two years.

Daylight Saving Time also keeps us safe. Makes sense, there is more daylight, so there are fewer car and pedestrian accidents caused by traveling under the darkness of the night. The same American Department of Transportation study found that about 50 lives were saved and about 2,000 injuries prevented, by extending Daylight Saving Time during the energy crisis in the 1970’s. The study says that amounts to about $28 million saved in motor vehicle accident costs.

Another reason we do it is because it is just a Canadian thing to do.

Despite Daylight Saving Time changes across the globe, the whole process was invented by Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming to keep the goods and people traveling by train across North America on time. Fleming created time zones which were first used in 1883 to standardize train schedules.

Train travel made time keeping obsolete under the old system where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions. Fleming may not be father time, but his standard or “mean time” and hourly variations from that according to established time zones was adopted at an international conference in 1884. Standard Mean Time – Sir Sanford Fleming’s invention is the way we tell time to this day.

So wake up sleepy head, springing forward is something we Canucks should be used too.

YAWN.

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