Massive Power Outage

[narf poit chez BOOM]

i had nothing to do with it.

now, bwain ovemmphh mmphh mmphh.

please disregard that Last statement. plin...er, i mean i had no idea what i was talking about.

[Alpha Kodiak]

Originally posted by Wardad:
On a totally unrelated note:

Phoenix area gas stations run dry!!!
Major pipeline delivering 40% of gasoline ruptured 10 days ago.
Pipeline owners are meeting with EPA to expedite paper work to allow pressure testing. It could be two weeks before pipeline opens.
Gas Trucks are tied up in 10 hour long waiting lines at overwhelemd Tuscon gas terminal.

story:
http://www.phoenix360.com/news/index.asp?did=3291

Yesterday I was eating lunch at a fast food place across the street from a station that was out of gas. While I was eating, I noticed a gas truck pulling away from the station. Then I noticed that the station already had a huge line of cars waiting to get to the pumps. I joked with my wife that people must be following the tankers around. Then, this morning on the radio I heard that a tanker driver had called in to report that he was being followed by between 20 and 30 cars....

The sad thing is that apparently many of the people who are buying gas are just topping off, contributing to the shortage. There is actually enough gasoline, it is just hard to distribute it fast enough, and people are buying substantially more gasoline now than when there wasn't a shortage.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Alpha Kodiak:
The sad thing is that apparently many of the people who are buying gas are just topping off, contributing to the shortage.

Can you blame them though? I can think of a few places I'd rather be then sitting on the side of the road in the Arizona desert out of gas and roasting in 114 degree teperatures.

[Erax]

To get back to energy conservation...

Brazil went through a power shortage in 2001-2002. I won't get into the causes here but the fact is that the government should have seen it coming and didn't. To their credit, once they got going they handled things quite well. One of the measures was a residential energy quota of 200 kWh per house per month, with a BIG surcharge on any power spent over that amount.

At the time, we were spending way over that, which makes no sense since it's only two people in the house. My wife went completely paranoid with the light bulbs and such, but those don't use up that much power (neither does a computer, BTW). So we took a hard look at all our appliances and discovered the following :

- We had two refrigerators but we really only used one. Pulling the plug on one of them saved us around 40 kWh/month.

- My wife drinks coffee around the clock. She had an electric percolator which she kept on all day to keep the coffe warm. Doing it the old way - heating water on the gas stove and putting the coffee in a thermos bottle - saved us 130 kWh/month.

So it turns out we were just throwing a lot of power away, every month, day in and day out, without even noticing it. And the worst thing is, we weren't using it to make our lives better in any significant way.

So am I in favor of conservation ? Sure, if you do it rationally, the sacrifice involved is minimal.

[Baron Munchausen]

The actual power use of appliances can be surprisingly different than you expect, but that's a real shocker. Most households that don't use electric heat (a terrible waste of electricity, btw) spend the most on refrigerators as I recall. Lights may not use much individually but add up all the lights around a house and it gets to be quite a bit. Compact flourescents are a Good Thing. But you never know when some little appliance might have a very big appettite...

130 kw a month for COFFEE!? Wow...

[Baron Grazic]

The Australian media have reported 3 different causes to the black-out.
1 - Lightening - which I think they have now ruled out.
2 - An old overgrown tree snagged a main powerlines that was sagging, which caused a cascading effect tripping the safety switches.
3 - My favourite. A yet unknown terrorist group brain washed a squad of squirrels into making a suicide runs onto the major power lines.

[minipol]

Originally posted by Erax:
- My wife drinks coffee around the clock. She had an electric percolator which she kept on all day to keep the coffe warm. Doing it the old way - heating water on the gas stove and putting the coffee in a thermos bottle - saved us 130 kWh/month.

Woooww. I'm impressed. If your wife drinks coffee around the clock, isn't she hyped all the time?