It is the great dream of the Republicans to let the free market control all infrastructure. Old Eisenhower stopped that once with the Interstate system. Nothing done since then. Basic health care is an infrastructure.
Our great experience with this mess was the Great Blackout, of whatever year. I made a very intense study of it when I was in the old company. Mainly because the grid is the first thing to go out during a big earthquake. At that time, they had no warning systems and only relied on the fault wave, and air-gap emergency switches. This was too slow to react, and is the prime cause.
It started with some ya-hoo utility who monitored the switches with Windows screens off the mainframes. No sensors. At the time there was a Windows worm which came in as people were playing Solitaire, which was the big use for Win. The worm jammed up the network without anybody knowing they would never get any distress signals. They continued playing. And the band played on.
They finally got a call from the next utility. No, nothing here they said. This now cascaded due to the fault wave effect to everybody, including Canada. We were out a long time.
The very first cause was a tree falling on the lines, and they blamed that for the whole thing. Nevertheless, they upgraded everything, so that it requires a Chinese attack on Windows to crash it now.
Cue the same for natgas now. It is a hodge-podge of free market crap. All independent networks, and storage based on the market. As with electricity, nobody was paying for reliability. This is a disaster waiting to play out.
It will begin with a vital storage site crapping out. No quality control on these boogers. Now, the panic begins. You can't store natgas, so everybody is going to draw, to try and store some heat energy to live another day. All the storage sites will fail one at a time, adding the demand to the next one.
This new cold blast will freeze all production. Natgas comes with a lot of water, and that is not happy at 20 below. Everything freezes solid, and requires natgas to thaw it out. All the electricity relies on natgas so the grid will die. Nuclear plants can only operate with a healthy grid.
No electricity and no gas at 40 below. This is one of my perfect earthquake scenarios, except it is happening tomorrow.
Of course, there is a probability here. Maybe they get by, by the skin of their teeth, like last year. How many years can you do this? For legal purposes I will say there is no chance of this happening, where 'no chance' is defined as 2%. That's what every operator thinks.
Now we wait. If it isn't this Arctic spill, then the next one right after it. Or next year. trumpy doesn't care because his bitcoin will go way up.
ps I forgot, natgas coming from compressed storage is expanded and infinitely cold. They have to heat it for the system. Lots of stress.
ps thus, you need free gas on the network to bring in stored gas. I love it!
ps this is so horrible I'm not even looking at natgas any more.
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