What is Reddit's opinion of Living on the Grid: The Fundamentals of the North American Electric Grids in Simple Language?

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It's surprising that the traffic lights don't have battery backups, at least to go o flashing reds. I read that when they first started converting to LED lights in the early 2000s, that was one of the features. Seems like the city has opted not to either maintain the batteries or use them at all. Can't blame PGE for that.

You could get in touch with SFMTA traffic engineering. I'm curious what they'll say about backup power for traffic lights.

Maybe contact Nilesh Ram, the Signal Shop Manager orBrian Woo, the Signals Manager at SFTA.

The PGE thing is complex. If SF takes over the PGE poles and transmission lines, do you think it will improve things right away? There are a LOT of overloaded poles and old lines in the city. It's going to cost a lot and take some time. And the city will either have to hire the same contractors that PGE uses or staff up their own team. The last discussion of SF purchasing PGE's SF assets included SF hiring all the PGE operations/maintenance staff.
It's definitely a problem that needs to be solved.

I'm curious about your issues with CAISO?

Someone pointed me this book calledLiving ON the grid which is really interesting to read about what's involved with operating the grid. Supply has to be reactive to load, frequency must be kept constant, etc. Otherwise voltage will wobbly, brownouts will occur and can then escalate into regional blackouts.

PGE has actually been doing (well, forced to do) a lot of stuff for electrical reliability in SF- there is the new DC intertie cable from the Pittsburg area generating plants; they have a few other projects for underground transmission lines from the big southern substation near the Cow Palace. They upgraded feed lines around Hunters Point in the last 10 years, etc. All this was because CAISO ordered them to do this, to provide more redundant paths for power into San Francsico.

PS- This outage was caused by a downed transmission line on 20th and Shotwell.