The electrical distribution system has always been a mystery to me, but it is capable of becoming even more mysterious.
And when you stand back and look, you have to wonder how the system of generating power and getting it into people’s homes and businesses got to be as it is.
A few things are well known. Thomas Edison wanted a system of direct current, the kind of electricity that flows from a battery. As part of his campaign, he argued that the alternative — alternating current or AC — was dangerous. He sponsored demonstrations in which various animals, up to and including Topsy the elephant on Jan. 4, 1903, were electrocuted by alternating current.
George Westinghouse, who had achieved wealth and fame through his invention of air brakes for railroad trains, thought that Edison’s idea of direct current — DC — was impractical. Direct current cannot be carried very far over power lines, so there would have to be many, many generating stations under that system. AC, meanwhile, could be transmitted a considerable distance. In 1896, for instance, Westinghouse built a generating plant at Niagara Falls that powered much of Buffalo, New York, 20 miles away.
The battle raged. Westinghouse won.
Still, it is difficult to imagine someone today coming forth and proposing anything as ridiculous as covering the nation with a spider web of wires that would kill you if you touched them and, moreover, that these wires would actually be strung through people’s houses. What an insane idea!
Yet that’s what we have. The surprise is that it works at all, never mind that it works most of the time. Lately I’ve been noticing the difference between most of the time and all the time. For some reason — here’s the mystery — out here in the country the electricity goes off frequently.
I’m not talking about the understandable storm damage, such as the ice storm a few months ago that had the power out here for a week or so. No, I mean the statistically insignificant but very annoying power failures that last two or three seconds and that sometimes seem to happen just about every day.
It has gotten worse lately. One day the week before last I counted six very brief blackouts before noon. They lasted just long enough to wipe the memories of clocks and video devices and everything else that flashes to remind you to reset it.
The power would go out and come back. I would dutifully reset clocks and timers. And a few minutes later, it was off and on again. Its return was heralded by loud pops from computer speakers and the like, suggesting that this can’t be very good for things that are plugged in. It is easy to imagine damage to appliances such as refrigerators which do not like to have the power quickly cycled on and off, over and over. It’s worse with satellite television — a tiny blackout causes the whole thing to reboot, reacquire the satellite, download, apparently, its entire operating system, and only then is reception possible.
But practical considerations aside, what causes this? What part of the electrical transmission system breaks but then fixes itself in just a couple of seconds?
The phenomenon seems to take place on perfectly nice days, with no rain or storms. Just poof, it’s gone, and bang, it’s back and the world is flashing and resetting. If it happened during, say, thunderstorms, it would be understandable. (Oddly and uncharacteristically, it didn’t happen during the rains and storms of the last few weeks. The power stayed on at those times.)
And it is, as I said, not statistically noticeable. If the electricity went out 10 times a day for an average of three seconds each time, the power company could claim 99.65 percent reliability. But its effects would consume an hour or more each day.
It does not, so far, go out 10 times per day.
Mystery aside, I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do about it. There are automatic generators that switch on when the power fails, but these would fall short: they take a few seconds to kick on. In a situation where the power goes off and on three or four times in just a few minutes, one supposes they would get very confused. And they’re not cheap.
What we need is something like an uninterruptable power supply of the sort that is supposed to protect computers from power failures. They would need to power the whole house, though they wouldn’t need to do it for long — a minute, tops, because when the electricity is off for a minute, it’s going to be off for awhile. Thing is, such a power supply would be the size of a washing machine, would cost a couple thousand dollars, and would have to be replaced every few years.
But we sure could use something like that out here in the country.
It would be, like other such power supplies, full of batteries. You know, direct current.
Thomas Edison would be amused.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.