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from the somebody-went-ape-shit-over-this dept.
Original URL: http://www.cnet.com/news/monkey-knocks-out-a-whole-nations-power/#ftag=CAD590a51e
The announcement on Facebook was sober.
"At 1129 hours this morning [Tuesday]," it said, "a monkey climbed on the roof of Gitaru Power Station and dropped onto a transformer tripping it. This caused other machines at the power station to trip on overload resulting in a loss of more than 180MW from this plant which triggered a national power blackout."
Such were the words of KenGen, Kenya's national power company, after an incident that seems to veer between the disastrous and the comical.
A monkey got into a power station and accidentally blew the power for the whole country. This was less a military coup than just sheer monkeying about.
KenGen says that power has now been restored. It added on Facebook: "KenGen power installations are secured by electric fencing which keeps away marauding wild animals. We regret this isolated incident and the company is looking at ways of further enhancing security at all our power plants."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gOnZo on Saturday June 11 2016, @03:04PM
Centralized power generation with large & complicated distribution networks were the pattern of development in the 'developed' nations. Partly, this was a mater of evolution - power stations were expensive, so were located to serve large urban centers. Power was then 'distributed' to adjacent neighbouring areas. Eventually, even most rural areas had service. As serviced area grew, and outages affected ever larger populations, the redundancy was required to provide stability. Part of the required redundancy was achieved by connecting adjacent generation 'zones' so an outage in one could be serviced by generation in an adjacent zone. Complicated protection mechanisms were put in place between zones to automatically segment the grid in the event of catastrophic failure (as occurred here). It was failure/poor design of components of this grid-tie system that caused the Northeastern US blackout of 2003 [wikipedia.org].
I should mention that another theory/driving force behind this pattern of development is that it is/was easy to monetise. You can borrow large sums of cash to build mega power projects, so the people that could did (Westinghouse, GE, JP Morgan, etc.), and reaped great benefit from supplying / controlling electric power.
Of 'traditional' sources, hydro electric generation produces relatively cheap power, though at large up-front cost and significant environmental impact (Three Gorges Dam [wikipedia.org]). Nuclear has huge installation costs, long-term waste, and significant concerns security concerns in any unstable area of the world. Coal has a large impact on air pollution, and local health. Gas creates air pollution, but is comparatively benign, and Kenya has reserves (Kenya Eyes Domestic Coal & Gas for new power plants [reuters.com]).
With the advent of renewable power sources there is the possibility of a new paradigm. Instead of exporting the pattern of development followed by the 'developed' nations, it is possible to apply more appropriate current technologies to a more de-centralized power generation / distribution system. Apply central generation, redundancy, distribution in largest centers (where it makes sense), but deploy alternative technologies to provide redundancy/stability in smaller centers & rural areas, instead of attempting to 'bridge' the entire nation (and usually adjacent nations) into one massive inter-dependent grid, where a failure in one takes everyone down.