[extropy-chat] re: european vs american electric power standards

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Tue Jun 28 09:08:11 UTC 2005


I was in Bern (at ISSI: http://www.issi.unibe.ch/)  last week while
this Swiss electricity-train drama played out. A short-circuit and
an unusual 'flow pattern'. Interesting!

Amara



"Swiss seek answers after trains roll to a halt"

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/23/news/swiss.php

A three-decade debate in Switzerland over whether to build new
high-tension lines across the countryside to assure a stable power
supply played out dramatically Wednesday night in a failure of the
nation's railroads.

A three-hour power failure left thousands of commuters, some of them
in tunnels, stranded in unseasonably hot weather. A major European
freight link was also blocked. Newspapers Thursday showed photos of
stations in Zurich and Bern packed with passengers, many sitting on
platforms and staircases in the station foyers.

Operations returned nearly to normal Thursday as an investigation
began into all the elements of the country's first lengthy
nationwide rail failure.

The abrupt shutdown of the system occurred after a series of
coincidental events ranging from an electrical short circuit in the
Alps to ongoing maintenance work, the railroad said Thursday. But
underlying the cascading problems was the railroad's lack of a
backup power supply in electrical emergencies.

Almost the entire Swiss system is powered by electric locomotives
that draw their power from overhead 15,000-volt lines.

The shutdown started at 5:47 p.m. with a short circuit involving a
line leading from one of the railroad's six electrical plants,
according to a railroad spokesman, Christian Krauchi.

When the line from the plant at Amsteg short-circuited, a surge of
electricity was forced into other parts of the system because two
lines that normally would have rerouted the plant's output in a
normal pattern were shut down for track maintenance work.

The surge of electricity suddenly meant that there was an oversupply
of electricity to the western and southern parts of the country and
too little flowing to the north, Krauchi said. Feeder lines from
Germany were inadequate to handle the north.

All the railroad's plants then automatically shut down because of
the unstable power situation, he said.

"The Swiss network is not linked in circuits but in a star pattern,"
the spokesman said, adding that the railroad had been trying to
build electrical loops but had been slowed by public protests.

The main remaining mystery was what caused the initial short
circuit. Rail workers were surveying 40 kilometers, or about 25
miles, of line seeking the cause of the outage.

Only the railroad power supply was affected because the railroad
runs its own separate hydroelectric plants.

Switzerland has suffered some delays in the past but never on this
scale. Most recently, an information technology failure in Zurich in
February led to small delays across the country.

Benedikt Weibel, chief executive of Swiss Federal Railways, was
himself delayed on a high-speed TGV train between Paris and Bern,
according to a French daily, Le Temps. Weibel walked down the train
to apologize to passengers, the newspaper reported.

Passengers used to having their trains run like clockwork were
surprisingly calm about the delays. Ulrich Lehner, a senior civil
servant in the Foreign Ministry, said there was a sense of
solidarity between passengers stranded on a train between Bern and
Geneva. After spending some hours waiting at a small town station
midroute, the passengers were taken by bus to Lausanne, from where
many found their way to Geneva using other forms of transport.

"People are used in this country to things working," said Lehner, a
senior Foreign Ministry official who took five hours to get from
Bern to his home in Geneva, about three times the normal traveling
time. "We were very surprised to hear that the whole network was
affected at the same time."

"People took it philosophically," he said. "They were rather relaxed
when they realized there was nothing they could do about it."

On Wednesday night, rail workers led passengers out of tunnels.
Other passengers simply sat and waited, while some lucky ones
continued to their destinations behind the few available diesel
locomotives.

Rail staff handed out vouchers for future travel worth 3 million
Swiss francs, or $2.3 million, the railroad said in a news
conference Thursday in Bern. It also paid overnight accommodation
for a few hundred stranded passengers and organized bus and taxi
transit for others, including business people needing to get to
Zurich International Airport.

Unseasonably hot temperatures, which rose to 32 degrees Celsius, or
89 degrees Fahrenheit, added to the discomfort. Seven trains were
caught in some of Switzerland's many tunnels, with passengers
waiting up to 90 minutes to be taken out by rail staff.

By Thursday morning things appeared to be running as normal. Bern's
station was no more busy than on an average day. Notices in some
stations warned delays could be possible, but most trains were
running on schedule.


-- 

********************************************************************
Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"We haven't the money, so we've got to think." -- Ernest Rutherford




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list