Višja stopnja kompleksnosti, večja možnost napak

| 15. January 2007 | | Jure

Zakaj alternative fosilnim gorivom, ki so odvisne od prenosa preko električnega omrežja, niso rešitev in kako deregulacija/liberalizacija energetskega trga povzroča nove probleme, ko so zaradi kompleksnosti novih gigantskih omrežij napake in odpovedi v naprej programirane in logične. Tukaj

Ključno:

Prior to deregulation, which began in the 1990s, regional and local electric utilities were regulated, vertical monopolies. A single company controlled electricity generation, transmission, and distribution in a given geographical area. Each utility generally maintained sufficient generation capacity to meet its customers’ needs, and long-distance energy shipments were usually reserved for emergencies, such as unexpected generation outages. In essence, the long-range connections served as insurance against sudden loss of power. The main exception was the net flows of power out of the large hydropower generators in Quebec and Ontario. …

Kasneje:

The new regulations envisioned trading electricity like a commodity. Generating companies would sell their power for the best price they could get, and utilities would buy at the lowest price possible. For this concept to work, it was imperative to compel utilities that owned transmission lines to carry power from other companies’ generators in the same way as they carried their own, even if the power went to a third party. FERC’s Order 888 mandated the wheeling of electric power across utility lines in 1996. But that order remained in litigation until March 4, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court validated it and it went into force.

In the four years between the issuance of Order 888 and its full implementation, engineers began to warn that the new rules ignored the physics of the grid. The new policies “do not recognize the single-machine characteristics of the electric-power network,” Casazza wrote in 1998. “The new rule balkanized control over the single machine,” he explains. “It is like having every player in an orchestra use their own tunes.”²