Taming The Grid

As an electric utility transmission system planner for many years, I agree that it takes about 35 years for everyone involved in a major blackout to be long gone and their observations and conclusions long forgotten ["The Unruly Power Grid," August]. It's an old story: those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.

Here's the history: on 4 August 1961, a northeastern Ohio electric utility's transmission system was shut down three times in one day; on 14 August 2003 the entire Northeastern United States had a blackout for essentially the same reasons (including a lack of tree trimming).

Illustration: John Bower/Alamy

"It takes about 35 years for everyone involved in a major blackout to be long gone and their conclusions long forgotten" —Fred Sener

Load shedding would likely have prevented the August shutdowns, but other things could be done before load shedding to prevent or limit the blackout. Watts generated on critical generators could be traded for much needed vars [volt-amperes reactive], to maximize power transmission, and the configuration of the network could be changed by opening circuit breakers to force power flows. Unfortunately, I have found none of these actions even alluded to in any discussion of the blackouts.

Fred Sener fsen213@aol.com

The grid is not a natural phenomenon guided by immutable equations, but a human creation with controllable operating parameters. The banking industry is arguably more complicated than the power grid—tens of thousands of employees interact with tens of millions of customers—yet no massive interruption of monetary flow has occurred since the Great Depression. This stability is achieved through competitive pressures and through heavy government regulation and enforcement.

Since the electric power distribution grid is a natural monopoly, competition cannot provide safeguards. Strong regulation, however, with requirements for a minimum spare generation capacity and systematic improvements of the distribution infrastructure, combined with the prosecution of price gouging through system manipulation, would fundamentally change the equations describing the grid and make its failure much less likely.

Yakov Shkolnikov yshkolni@princeton.edu

Looking at back issues of IEEE Spectrum, I find that articles relating to the power grid appear about once every six months, while computers and bioengineering appear in every issue. I also see a lack of interest by both universities and power companies in research on the grid and new production methods.

Judging by the ads for doctorates in the back of Spectrum, the emphasis for electrical engineers is in computers and bioengineering. What is needed is a push by both utilities and the universities to show young EEs that power also has a future for them.

William Lauterbach wclauterbach@earthlink.net

The article's list of blackout precautions, "Better Backups for John Q. Public," lacks the most important necessity for survival: water. Households should store at least 1 gallon of potable water per person. Well-cleaned jugs (preferably of glass) must be filled to overflowing and tightly capped to remain safe for several years.

Max J. Schindler Boonton, N.J.

Color Confusion

"Coming Soon:Trillion-Color TV" [August] is confusing. Any source of digital video, such as a DVD or a digital cable channel, can specify a maximum number of possible colors—up to 16.7 million. A display technology can reduce that number but can never increase it. Genoa Color Technologies' introduction of cyan and yellow primary colors into a TV display can just stretch the video source's colors over a wider range, which may or may not have been present in the video's original scenes. The article would have benefited from ignoring the irrelevant number of colors and concentrating on the wider gamut of colors that could be displayed.

Palmer Agnew palmeragnew@prodigy.net

Associate Editor Erico Guizzo responds: Agnew's point is well-taken: we could have been clearer in stating that the display gets no more color data than is normal from the video source. Rather, Genoa's system arbitrarily creates additional color data based on the original source's colors. The larger color gamut that results is shown in the illustration as "Genoa's multiprimary color range."

Looking Backward

Robert W. Lucky's essay "Retrospective Organization" [Reflections, July] brings back memories of math classes. Theorems always seemed to be provable in the most orderly fashion: theorem, lemma, lemma, corollary, note, remark, proof, QED. As with Lucky's retrospective creation of the organization chart, I always suspected that the first "mathematiker" did the proof in a very disorderly way: "Let's see, I'd like to prove that x equals y, so what routes could I possibly follow backward to do it?"

William J. Eccles Terre Haute, Ind.

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