Power Outage at Stanford University
emergency.stanford.eduFrom the NBC news: Stanford University cancelled summer session classes Wednesday following ongoing power outages in the area.
According to the university, the power outages were a consequence of the Edgewood Fire burning in San Mateo County.
"Due to yesterday’s fire in the Emerald Hills area, the main Stanford campus lost the power supplied by PG&E’s main transmission line to the campus. PG&E is providing a limited supply of power through a secondary line, but it falls far short of the normal needs of the campus," the university said in a statement.
"This limited supply is being used to maintain cooling for the hospital and other critical infrastructure on campus.
The PG&E grid isn’t designed properly if the failure of one transmission line causes an outage like this.
I live in New York City and pay some of the highest rates in the country for electricity, but over the past 10 years (including multiple hurricanes), I’ve had less than 10 minutes of downtime, and even that was only on one of three phases.
That's cheery picking the data though. NYC lost power for two days in 2003, just like everyone else who doesn't pay those high rates.
If you got the best names in the business together, gave them billions of dollars, and told them to design a power grid to fail and cause forest fires, they'd fall embarrassingly short of whatever it is PG&E has created.
How so?
Am a Stanford PhD Student, can confirm this is kind of a big deal. At 2 30 yesterday I was in the middle of a zoom call in the CS building, and suddenly the lights went off (except emergency lights)and wifi died. I walked 25 over to my place on campus, and likewise no power or wifi. Some common spaces do have light via backup gas powered generators, though.
Pretty crazy it's already been 24 hours and it might go on for days, and hard not to feel this is a portent of more such disruptions to come as summers will keep getting higher and higher peak temperatures over the coming decades...
I wouldn't be so quick to blame PGE's lack of maintenance on global warming. The PGE lines by me are nearing 75 years old. Electrical poles just doesn't last 100s of years and it is nearing it's end of life.
EVs, Heat Pumps, and Electric Stoves only put additional pressure on an antiquated grid.
I blame their lack of upgrading the grid or even performing trivial routine maintenance.
Do you know that ~all of Palo Alto can be knocked offline by breaking one line? This line happens to be under the flight path at the airport in the baylands and it got hit by a plane before. Whole city, no power, whole day. In the intervening years was an auxiliary line into the city built? What do you suppose?
Most of SF's water and power also is under that flight path. PAO should be shut down as it's an environmental disaster and has caused lead poisoning to the surrounding community.
The lead is in all avgas. The solution there is for the FAA to allow unleaded avgas, not to shut down all aviation.
PAO used to be located on what is now El Cameno a couple blocks north of Page Mill. Between Stanford Ave and Serra St. The area is called Escondido Village today.
Eventually more and more people moved near there despite knowing there was a noisy airport there first. Then they complained about noise and caused the airport to relocate to its current baylands location.
PAO is technically on wetlands and was moved to its location because at the time the black community nearby didn’t get a say in San Mateo’s planning.
The same black community who was not allowed to buy a house in Palo Alto.
https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/06/28/un-forgetting-the...
https://www.pastheritage.org/Articles/AMEZionMF.html
You mean this black community inside Palo Alto 3 blocks from downtown?
Your link opens with an anecdote that takes place on "the east side of Palo Alto". This is what people who don't know the area think when they hear the name of the city of East Palo Alto. The city that clearly sits to the north not the east of Palo Alto.
Quote Directly from your article in respect to the city of Palo Alto. “From 1925 to 1950 most racial discrimination was insidious, in the form of residential subdivision covenants banning persons of color.”
Oh yes. For sure. Didn't mean to imply that wasn't happening.
Didn't Stanford have a Cogen facility there? I think they greenified the original GE plant. But does it not supply some needs or did they completely cut the cord?
I believe there used to be one, but it got knocked down to build the new Neuroscience / Chem-H building on campus drive? I thought they put auxiliary backup power system in as part of the hospital expansion, but it might only cover the hospital?
Oh, Ok, that makes sense. I didn't realize they didn't replace the generation capacity elsewhere --but yeah the hospital would take precedence over university operations.
Stanford says it has been on "stage 4c chilled water curtailment" since yesterday afternoon. Stage 4c chilled water users are characterized as [0]:
>Building spaces with the following characteristics: Significant safety concern, Non reproducible, reproducible (long duration), Non recoverable, Laser Labs and Wet Labs, MRI, High dollar, Long Duration, Campus Data Center/ECH.
That sounds bad.
[0] https://lbre.stanford.edu/sites/lbre-production/files/stanfo...
Oh, one of the leading academic institutions of the leading industry nation of the world has no electricity?
A problem with sustainability possibly? On various levels I'd say.
The Roman Empire fell and history will repeat itself. Not necessarily during our lifetime, but good news from the US seem to have become rare during the last 10-20 years.
why was this flagged? come on, someone is trying to mess with me.
This flagging does seem out of line. Factual posts with no flaming should be respected.
Nothing works. Seems someone hacked the system
> Due to yesterday’s fire in the Emerald Hills area, the main Stanford campus lost the power supplied by PG&E’s main transmission line to the campus. PG&E is providing a limited supply of power through a secondary line, but it falls far short of the normal needs of the campus. This limited supply is being used to maintain cooling for the hospital and other critical infrastructure on campus
Physical pentesting, performed by one M. Nature.
PG&E should have paid the forests in bitcoin to not ignite.