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Re: Sustained Deep Undervoltage

Posted by Smokey Stover on November 12, 2003

In Reply to: Sustained Deep Undervoltage posted by Bruce Kahl on November 12, 2003

: A big chunk of North America-50 million households-lost their electricity this summer for up to a week.
: So I sent my local power company a bill for my lost White Castles.

: Now these were not your run-of-the-mill store bought, deeply frozen Castles sitting in your local supermarket.
: Nosireebob,these were purchased fresh locally and flash frozen to perfection and I lost them all. Ouch!
: They will not send me my 13 dollars because the event was a "Sustained Deep Undervoltage" and they are not responsible for my lost Castles.

: Sustained Deep Undervoltage---Just consider this post as the birth announcement of a newly coined technobabble.

:Bruce Kahl plainly resists excusing the failures of the regional electrical grid system by calling its cause something confusing. He's not alone. The U.S. Congress (and I imagine the Canadian Parliament) demanded and got an investigation of the cause, and I don't remember the phrase Sustained Deep Undervoltage used to excuse the failure of some of the operators. It has long been known that power companies can usually stay in business indefinitely no matter how stupid, greedy and incompetent the operators are. But the grid system, developed to prevent brownouts and blackouts in local areas, requires a bit more than the usual indifference. However, the present climate of deregulation of everything means that the system hasn't changed and probably won't.