Discussion»Statements»Rosie's Corner» Is our turn next? The power grid went out in Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina causing loss of electricity for HOURS. WHY?
Our power grid is extremely vulnerable to attack ... as it has been since the 1960s.
And as we witnessed in 2003, it is possible for an accident to trigger a cascading reaction which will temporarily blackout a large section of the grid.
Accident? I speak of perpetrated purposeful premeditated grid failure. I read awhile back that a few countries RIGHT NOW could effect that. So we are living on borrowed time. SIGH. Thank you for your reply Walt! :)
I don't think a nation-wide collapse like that would be possible in the UK, short of an extremely determined and organised attack on it all at once. It would not just fail in a cascade fashion, because it is a grid,. i.e. a network. A lot of countries seem to rely much more heavily on a fairly thin network supplying a lot of spurs to individual regions.
Fire can be dangerous, but pilot lights on gas furnaces are a very good thing in N Dakota, and yes, forest fires in California are a problem, but also have their good points as well.
Forest fires can and do occur naturally and play a number of important roles in ecosystems Many types of forests have evolved to utilize fire disturbances to maintain ecosystem health and to regenerate. For example, many tree species actually require fire to germinate their seeds, and forest fires return important nutrients to the forest soil that was previously being stored in biomass. Wildfires help to clear out dead wood and other materials that would otherwise have taken much longer to break down and provide soil nutrition for the next generation of trees and plants living in that forest.
Burned forests serve as important habitat for many species, such as the Black-backed Woodpecker, Picoides arcticus, that is specialized to live and thrive in forests that have experienced severe burning.
Fell free to further qualify your answer about what you designate as "socialism."
This post was edited by tom jackson at June 18, 2019 2:19 AM MDT
What has "socialism" to do with deigning, building, operating and maintaining a national utility?
The UK is not a "Socialist" county" but its electricity generation and supply was initially in the hands of local authorities (councils etc.) and later nationalised, and it worked very well. The National Grid is still State-owned but in recent years the supply of electricity has been "privatised" with little control who buys it, so many supposedly British electricity suppliers are really owned by foreign companies and even countries (e.g. EDF, owned by the French state).
It still has to operate to very stringent standards, which with most of the network being genuinely a grid with lots of cross-links, help ensure that what power-cuts we have are normally restricted to geographically fairly small areas, and rarely last more than 2 or 3 days.
The UK's National Grid is also connected to that of France via cables laid across the English Channel, giving extra flexibility in meeting very high demands; but I don't know how the arrangement works.
The real problem is not who runs the country. Instead it is rapidly-increasing demands, in countries with rising populations all wanting yet more and more electrical equipment.
Curious definition of Socialism, the simple principle common to most developed democracies, of looking after your country's citizens by providing services very many could not afford privately.
The USA gives an impression of being terrified anything that seems the least bit "socialist", i.e. supporting or providing at State level services funded from tax revenues. By chance, yesterday I saw a video about America's railways in which one speaker called Europe "socialist"; showing only he doesn't understand Europe.
True, the NHS was established by a left-wing, trades-union funded Labour Government, by the Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan. He based it on existing health-service co-operatives that had been formed in the coal-mining villages of his constituency - I think these were funded by a sort of local, non-commercialhealth-insurance paid at a rate people could afford, so the doctors were paid without having to charge poor patients big bills for treatment otherwise beyond their means. However, the NHS has always been supported in principle at least by right-wing free-enterprise Conservative governments too, although the present one has quietly "contracted out" a lot of its functions to assorted commercial companies (some of them, American).
Bevan's original hope was that it would free for all, but the Government soon realised that would be unsustainable, so the NHS does charge for prescription medicines, dental treatment and one or two other things (unless you are on certain benefits, or over-60 for the prescriptions) BUT the charges are far below what you'd pay privately.
Your esteemed President Trump admitted wanting to get his hands on the NHS during his not very statesman-like State Visit, but back-tracked on that. Perhaps his advisors quietly told him the NHS is NOT for sale to the USA - or any other country! I'm sure we'd be happy to offer consultancy in establishing your own version though!
"... same continent... same language... " = "socialist". Hmmm. I see.
I have the impression Americans think ANY country is "socialist" if a) its Government dares to establish schemes to care for its citizens, and b) it is not part of the United States of America! '
Returning to the original subject.... the quality of national electricity supplies....
By co-incidence, my ISP's home page this morning carries a report on a joint Anglo-Norwegian electricity-sharing scheme now well under construction, scheduled for completing in 2012.
Under it, surplus hydro-electricity generated in Norway will be exported to Britain along a 450-miles long cable under the North Sea. In return, it can carry surplus electricity from British wind-farms in the North Sea to Norway, some of it for a pumped-storage hydro-electric plant.
As well as reducing further the UK's use of fossil fuel-sources, such interlinking makes both party's national grids more robust still. The scheme is rated up to 1,400MW - enough, they say, for the peak Winter demand of three cities the size of Newcastle (NE England, and near the UK end of the cable). Not perhaps the most useful form of statistics, but a valuable quantity of electricity nonetheless. The difficulty may come if a changing climate significantly reduces the water available in Norway - mainly snow and ice melt augmented by plentiful rain in the warmer months.
' As an aside, a pen-friend living in Norway told me of a rather unexpected result of a power-cut in her part of the country one Winter. Despite what the British Press tries to claim, Scandinavia does have problems with severe weather. In this case, accumulating ice broke overhead main transmission-lines supplying her town. Despite this being in December, the region had also suffered an Autumn / Winter drought, and the arcing from the broken cables on the ground set the tinder-dry heather and grass alight.
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 