THE NIGHT OF INCOME REDISTRIBUTION

One of the generators would be the first to go if it were not protected by automatic circuit breakers, its windings would burn out. Thereafter, the other nine now carry not 1/10th, but 1/9th of the load, and in quick succession, with ever sharper increases of load per generator, they will drop out, too.

The situation is quite analogous to a mechanical load held by 10 ropes - if one snaps, the others are under increased stress and they will all snap in quick succession; moreover, the arrangement cannot be loaded again until all of the 10 ropes have been repaired to have 8 or 9 good ropes is not enough. But to repair or replace a rope is trivial compared to starting up a large generator that has come to a standstill; one can't just let the steam loose into the turbine - the generator must first be brought up to speed electrically by working it as a motor. (That is one of several reasons why the November 1965 blackout lasted for several days; power plants now have their own little generators for start-up, without which the July 1977 blackout would have lasted much longer.)

In fact, of course, a utility is not as vulnerable as such a model. For one thing, its net is subdivided into sections that can be disconnected in so-called "load shedding," which amounts to pushing some of the passengers overboard rather than let the whole ship sink. When the typical American utility gets into this situation (and the real problem, of-course, is why utilities should ever get into it), it usually disconnects one or several of its rural districts, where the population is less dense, more capable of coping, and less endowed with political clout.

But Manhattan has no rural districts. With hindsight, it is clear that Con Ed should have shed some load much earlier, but at the time, when lightning had struck only once, what were they to do? They could have disconnected the uptown districts and started the kind of income redistribution, progressive taxation and enforcement of social justice that later took place anyway; or they could have disconnected downtown Manhattan with the nerve centers of the American Information Machine, but - well, you just don't pull the plug on God Himself.

More important, no utility is an island unto itself; it is always connected to its neighbors, to which it can sell power or buy it from them in a give-and-take arrangement. But as in taxation, the city budget and other transactions, the country's capital of social engineering has an arrangement of more take than give. Before any lightning struck, the areas that later went black consumed almost 6,000 MW (well below the 7,600 MW peak projected for this year), of which Con Ed generated only 3,800; the remainder was imported mainly from the New York state power pool to the north, but also from Long Island's LILCO and New Jersey's PSE&G.

9-77/2

Why? That is close to the real reason for the blackout, but let's keep to the technical aspects: A quick series of of lightning bolts in the worst possible places severed the link to the nuclear Indian Point plant, which was automatically and successfully shut down, and knocked out the line bringing in 2,000 MW from the NYS power pool to the north.

Lightning arresters, and why they are not 100% reliable under all conditions, are discussed below.

For a full hour, Con Ed's engineers were able to supply power to New York City by a variety ot stratagems (no small feat, which went largely unnoticed), but then the inevitable happened. LILCO was pumping in 500 MW through two small lines, heavily overloading them for one hour, until the NYS power pool ordered it to disconnect. For another 10 minutes, "Big Allis" at Ravenswood, the giant generator with 1,000 MW on a single shaft, held on before its protective devices automatically cut it loose. That left only a 750 MW link to PSE&G across Staten Island, which had been desperately pumping in 1,000 MW at a full 25% overload, but when big Allis left, the switches of this last thread tripped almost instantly, and the night of income redistribution was on.