Voltage Reduction

[d-jones]

Robert

Los Angeles generates its own electricity at plants like Valley Steam out in the San Fernando Valley, so the city is seldom ever forced to buy from outside providers. L.A. was also a major backer of the Hoover Dam project and L.A. Water and Power technicians were heavily involved in its maintenance for many years. Over the years my dad spent a lot of time up there and really enjoyed exploring the dams numerous tunnels and corridors. As a result of this involvement L.A. got really good rates on power from the dam. Then we have Castaic lake which is kind of an interesting situation. The lake has an upper and lower reservoir with a dam and powerhouse. During the evening when demand is low and there's a lot of excess capacity on the local grid, water is pumped from the lower lake to the upper lake. Then during the day when demand peaks, the water is allowed to flow back to the lower lake through the turbines which generate electricity and relieve demand on the other local power plants. They've been doing this for decades and it seems to work out pretty well.

[this post was last edited: 7/19/2013-20:58]

 

[supersuds]

Castaic

Maybe drifting off topic, but here's a list and pictures of the pumped storage plants in the USA. Castaic is one of the larger ones,mthough not the largest.

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industcards.com

 

[launderess]

Must Say ConEd Seems To Have Done Well By Manhattan

At least our part as there haven't been reported outages that I've heard. Cannot tell if there have been voltage reductions since the AC seems to have been working fine yesterday and today.

 

[arbilab]

Texas is a sorry joke by almost any measure. But not our grid. We're 98% independent of the rest of the country, for starters. Much growth, much new equipment. Natgas turbine demand plants. Max electrical storm protection. A great deal of redundancy. Example, in 2005 a substation transformer (138kV>7.2kV) literally exploded. The one that ran my neighborhood. I heard it explode at 3 in the morning, went there and saw the fire trucks. By the time I got back home a half hour later they had wired around it and the lights were back on.

If you want good electricity, move to Texas. If you want good anything else--beside Mexican food--stay where you are.

 

[vintagekitchen]

Happening here too..

At night things are close to normal, but our electrical system is so outdated out voltage is being dropped ridiculously low during the day, due to increased demand thanks to the heat wave. This has always been an area of predominantly all electric homes, and now we are paying the price. Neighbors and family members are complaining that their kitchen stoves aren't heating as quickly, everything takes longer to cook, ( I was making mashed potatoes, and thought the water would never come to a boil), it's like cooking on a 110 volt hot plate instead of a 220 volt electric range. Microwave ovens aren't cooking as quickly either, normally a package of frozen corn cooks to perfection in 5 minutes for me. Yesterday 5 minutes merely defrosted the corn, it was still cold. Another 3 minutes got the job done. And older air conditioners are struggling to do their job, mine normally cools the living room, kitchen, hallway, and 1 bedroom. The last few days it can barely take care of the living room and kitchen.

 

[tomturbomatic]

Lake Anna in VA is an upper and lower lake generating station where they run the water between the two lakes.

Castaic was one of the towns in the path of the wall of water that flooded the valley when the St. Francis dam gave way in 1928. That was a fascinating & tragic story

 

[mrb627]

Home Generators

Funny, I never considered a whole home generator as a supplement in a brown out condition. I think that is a selling point for them.

Malcolm

 

[dj-gabriele]

what is referred to as a brown out.

Luckily I never experienced one ever.
And power hasn't failed since 2003 (the big Italian black-out).
Our infrastructure is fairly efficient and voltage drop is minimal and anyways always in the range of +/- 6% and all the machines can cope with that as it's well within tolerance.

 

[brisnat81]

Have 100% reliable power isnt cheap

The wish for a reliable power grid comes at a huge cost.

Back in the late 90's/early 2000's, blackouts here were frequent and it wasn't unusual to lose power every time there was a bit of a storm, even in a metro area. (We live 4km from the city centre)

The government decided to put money into fixing it and the outcome as been that over a 10 year period, we've gone from paying 15c/kwh to 29.4c/kwh.

Its been a few years since we've had any sort of power outage now, but its come at an enormous cost.

The Government is now looking at what is a reasonable expectation for service continuity to look if they reduce the MTBF the costs will appreciably drop.

Brownouts are much less of an issue in 240v land as we're now rated at 230v +10% or - 6%, but the nominal supply is still 240v. It takes a pretty big brownout to drop down to the 215v that all equipment needs to be able to operate at.

 

[launderess]

Here In NYC At Least

Local power company (ConEdison) will ask large customers that have their own full or partial generating power to switch to that source during peak usage. This obviously takes the edge off demand which helps keep the lights on.

The alternative is to ask the same to lower usage by turning off a number of elevators, lights, and turning up the AC settings.

 

[Ultramatic]

 

<span style="font-size: medium;">Consolidated Edison has reported minor outages in all 5 boroughs. Thankfully, the heat wave has broken. A perfect summer week lies ahead!</span>

 

[tomturbomatic]

From Accuweather.com

Friday's intense heat and humidity led to New York City setting an all-time peak electric usage record.

Electric usage in New York City and neighboring Westchester County topped out at 13,322 Megawatts (MW) at 5 p.m. EDT Friday, according to Con Edison.

That breaks the previous all-time peak usage record, which was 13,189 MW from July 22, 2011.

Temperatures at New York City's Central Park soared to 96 degrees on Friday.

 

[arbilab]

96 is AVERAGE here. When it "soars", it's 106. 104 is forecast late week.