Power Control and Distribution
A friend of mine linked me this interesting old tidbit of a video. It is very interesting to see how power is managed, and sold. In Ontario the power is controled by Hydro One, which used to be Ontario Hydro, a provincially owned company. However in California during the Enron crisis that company basically handled all of this work. The problem there was that they would limit the amount of energy available to specific areas, in order to raise the price of electricity. Then they would redirect power and charge through the roof for it, even though there was a lot of power available. One can surely see how such a control over the distribution of power can be easily taken advantage of. This is why it is important that such operations are done by the government or responsible companies. It is very interesting to see how much power is being used, and actually how much it changes during the day. To think that every time I turn on my 2,000 watt heater, it may change a value on a control room panel like this one. While I did recently have a bad dream about standing beside a nuclear power plant while it was melting down. The large steam cloud in my dream was very graphic and spooky. None the less, I am still a supporter of nuclear power. It would be nice to get nuclear power plants to supply the base day by day consumption - the rest of peak demand can be handled by coal and hydro plants.