Con Ed can’t explain what caused the Manhattan blackout | Hacker News Reader

Con Ed can’t explain what caused the Manhattan blackout

nypost.com

32 pointsneom24 comments

I had to determine why a single hydro electric generator kept on going off-line last week. Turned out to be a temperature sensor in the generator gone bad or high resistance connection in that circuit. Due to improper historical logging of alarms, older protection relays, etc, it took a visit to the power plant and a few hours of downloading and analyzing event files and correlating signals with the schematics.

So a massive outage like NYC has just experienced will take weeks to collect the event files and analyze them. Probably the time was wrong in some places as well so it will be hard to figure out the exact sequence of events.

Sounds like a cool job. What is the job title?

electrical engineer or power station operator

First sentence of the article "Con Ed has yet to figure out..." should be the headline, but I'm sure the more dramatic version got more clicks.

Should be but then people wouldn't click the article to find out why big professional organization is inept thereby confirming their biases and giving them that lovely little frisson and dopamine hit.

At a prior job we had our data centers in the building in that neighborhood. Because it had grown up with the computers down the hall and then down the elevator it was hard to sell upper management on moving to a real data center.

What finally made the case was multiple summer power outages because con ed couldn't tell us how much power was actually possible to be drawn in the neighborhood. Between theaters turning up stage lights a couple of times a day, companies with data centers etc. It turns out that con ed has just run wires for a long time where requested without an overall tally of what the peak draw could be. This event was predictable, and if con ed or the city doesn't actually count the peak possible capacity going to each customer and make sure it can provide that, power outages in that neighborhood will continue to happen going forward.

"the power is lowered to about 13,000 volts before being distributed to homes and businesses"

They've left off a bit of detail here :)

What don't you get? Power goes in one end and out the other, doesn't seem too complicated, thr problem was somewhere in the middle. Lmao

The parent comment is pointing out that there are additional voltage drops before it gets to "homes and businesses".

The electrical outlet in your wall does not supply 13,000 volts.

To be fair, this is equivalent to mentioning your home router when an ISP has an outage.

13000 volts to your home toaster is a bit of a problem don't you think?

Not if you've installed Linux on it to run Folding@home!

hey look it's a case study of nominative determinism in action!

that being said, i approve

Not if you are a Decepticon or Cylon...I mean really man, think of of your AI opressors for once. <<insert fav Decepticon toaster meme>>

I presume they left out that 13kV is what the street level transformers get- which in turn will turn into 240v split phase, 240v three phase, or 480v three phase.

Isn't 120v the norm in the US ? In France, every home has a three phase 400V coming from the utility, then you choose if you want single phase or three phase in your home.

In 240 V split phase, each phase is 120 V.

Heard a theory that it was part of an attempt to get to Epstein to do him in, because of all the people he could implicate.

Meh. Its a numbers thing. 42nd Street, 42 years (to the day) since the last big blackout, 42k people without power.

What else does the number 42 signify?

Well, of course 42 is an encoding of the number of the beast 6x6+6.