this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Today I Learned (TIL)
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One of these hit Earth in the late 1800's, and it was wild. Telegraph lines were setting on fire and people would get shocked just from touching the telegraphs. And that was when we had just barely started to wrap the world in conductive wire, if this happened now we would be majorly screwed.
Would we? I remember reading Ted Koppel’s book Lights Out a few years ago, but I’d assume that utilities, grid operators, and governments have been making efforts to improve grid resilience
I find your excess of faith disturbing…
Haha it’s less an excess of faith- more like someone else gets paid to worry about it, so i’m not gonna stress myself out for free
Bold of you to assume they're worrying about it.
Yeah that worked super well with Covid.
God bless the Eastern Interconnection lol
Being proactive for risks that are small for the near term is expensive, and not very profitable for the shareholders.
Lol
My power goes out every hurricane which is at least once a year.
Yeah but the power going out is what is supposed to happen. Its a good thing. It means the fault was cleared and the area made safe. The issue with one of these events is were not currently protecting against it in a lot of places. So real bad things have the potential of happening WITHOUT the power going out. No breakers tripping (or not tripping fast enough) means more equipment damage. It currently takes over a year to build a HV transformer, and that's with power. What happens when 500 all explode at the same time (cause the power didn't go out fast enough) and we need to replace them all at once? Without power?
No, it means a tree fell on a power line.