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Power outage calculations

Vzearr

Vzearr

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Introduction​

We all know calculations like these. I believe these calculations are flawed, and shouldn't be calculated, heres why:

I don't think that you would necessarily need to apply the amount of energy required to power a place for a day to cause an outage to that place for a day. Wouldn't you need to absorb the amount of energy powering the grid at that specific moment to stop its energy supply? The only time you’d need the energy of a full days powering would be if you siphoned off every bit of energy produced by the grid continuously over a full day, which is pretty baseless for most feats.

Agnaa said he disagrees, but also said he dislikes calculations like this: Really, you'd just need to damage some relevant infrastructure, which would require a highly specific amount of energy.​

Resolution​

Stop calculating feats like this, and remove all current calculations of feats like this.

​
 
I think the issue's worse than presented; the calc linked doesn't even indicate that the place had an outage for a day.

A bunch of lights (not even all of them) go out, a sector of the city at a time. 40 seconds later, we see it still on in another person's place, before it turns off there too.

While the music video cuts out there, in the actual episode, in the very next scene we see electricity still being on, powering lights. A minute later, we get a shot of the skyline showing some lights being on in windows.

So yeah, I think we should stop using these feats. The calculation method is fundamentally flawed (blackouts aren't caused by draining the energy for the blackout period in one instant; that's physically incoherent, so even if a series implies that we shouldn't use it, that much energy does not exist in the grid at that time), a good replacement doesn't exist (it's highly grid-specific which points need what amount of energy to shut down the ability for it to provide power, and the time it takes to come back up is typically just based on repair infrastructure), and many of these feats don't remotely substantiate the way they're calculated.
 
Yeah, I think I can agree with the... Ban might be too harsh of wording for it. Just converting the kilowatt-hour values to joules and calling it a day would have been closer to home with how we handle wattages.

I ain't exactly well-versed with electricity feats, though. A power grid is fairly big stuff, but at the same time, we don't really give anyone durability for tanking electricity.
 
I complete agree with this.

I've always found these types of feat to be very iffy at best.
 
Vzearr said:
Really, you'd just need to damage some relevant infrastructure, which would require a highly specific amount of energy.
Click to expand...
Yeah

I think I might have inadvertently caused this by referencing the fact power grids can have a large sum of energy and thus it'd be a feat, but I also have no idea what their maximum capacity is before they break. Someone should probably figure that out
 
There are like, a few fringe cases where I could see calcs like this having merit, so I think it's ridiculous to outright "ban" a calc method. For example, in Pokémon, Electivire is stated to be able to produce electricity that can power an entire city for a year. Like any method, it should just be evaluated to see if it's actually appropriate to use, and if it's not then we simply axe the calc.
 
CloverDragon03 said:
There are like, a few fringe cases where I could see calcs like this having merit, so I think it's ridiculous to outright "ban" a calc method. For example, in Pokémon, Electivire is stated to be able to produce electricity that can power an entire city for a year. Like any method, it should just be evaluated to see if it's actually appropriate to use, and if it's not then we simply axe the calc.
Click to expand...
I think we can consider "can power a grid for a year" to not be hit by a ban on "calcs for causing power outages".
 
DMUA said:
Yeah

I think I might have inadvertently caused this by referencing the fact power grids can have a large sum of energy and thus it'd be a feat, but I also have no idea what their maximum capacity is before they break. Someone should probably figure that out
Click to expand...
As someone who is working for an electrical company, the way I put it, the amperage ratings on breakers (whether it's 15A or 20A) is usually the absolute limit a breaker can handle at any given time before A. the breaker shuts off, or B. an electrical fire starts. I looked it up and a breaker would generally shut off the power supply starting at 80% the listed amperage rating. The company I work for typically makes 240/120V breaker panels (residential breakres), 120/208V breaker panels, or 480/277V breaker panels. I don't have much tenure (I enter my second year next February), so I don't know how much these voltage ratings affect the idea of shutting off entire breakers.

Shutting off power for an entire grid at the source (power plants) is a whole nother ball game that I wouldn't be able to reach, however.
 
Bump.
 
Bump.
 
So, I asked my boss about the breaker ratings since breakers are basically the power supply in a residence or building. Here are the ratings for a breaker as a whole, this one being meant for a 120/208v breaker:


The left values are the normal voltage and amperage limits of the breaker before the breaker as a whole would shut off automatically. Plugging these values in, the power needed to shut off a breaker would be as follows:

Low End (D/C): 125*150=18750 watts (18750 joules/second)
High End (A/C): 240*150=36000 watts (36000 joules/second)

As for the values on the right, the amperage value is the absolute limit for a short of which the breaker can withstand before blowing up. My boss suggests that it would be around half a cycle (in this case, half of a 60 Hz cycle would be 1/120th of a second). As such, it'd be like this:

Low End: 125*10000/120=10416.6666666666 joules
High End: 240*22000/120=44000 joules

That's pretty much the gist of what I can gather. Obviously a power supply is going to involve multiple breakers, so watch out for that
 
I like what Flash is suggesting. I also find it weird that someone calculated the power outage as if the city was drained of a day of electricity. I thought immediately that the energy had to be enough to overload whatever electric system there is.
 
Flashlight237 said:
So, I asked my boss about the breaker ratings since breakers are basically the power supply in a residence or building. Here are the ratings for a breaker as a whole, this one being meant for a 120/208v breaker:


The left values are the normal voltage and amperage limits of the breaker before the breaker as a whole would shut off automatically. Plugging these values in, the power needed to shut off a breaker would be as follows:

Low End (D/C): 125*150=18750 watts (18750 joules/second)
High End (A/C): 240*150=36000 watts (36000 joules/second)

As for the values on the right, the amperage value is the absolute limit for a short of which the breaker can withstand before blowing up. My boss suggests that it would be around half a cycle (in this case, half of a 60 Hz cycle would be 1/120th of a second). As such, it'd be like this:

Low End: 125*10000/120=10416.6666666666 joules
High End: 240*22000/120=44000 joules

That's pretty much the gist of what I can gather. Obviously a power supply is going to involve multiple breakers, so watch out for that
Click to expand...
While this approach would be valid, I think it would be too complicated to be feasible. Like with involving air resistance in feats.

You'd need to know the limits of the breakers at the most vulnerable chokepoints of the power network. In many cases, I think this would involve the power supplies leaving every power plant in the region, but if there's isolated pockets only covered by a few breakers that would probably be easier to attack.
 
Agnaa said:
While this approach would be valid, I think it would be too complicated to be feasible. Like with involving air resistance in feats.

You'd need to know the limits of the breakers at the most vulnerable chokepoints of the power network. In many cases, I think this would involve the power supplies leaving every power plant in the region, but if there's isolated pockets only covered by a few breakers that would probably be easier to attack.
Click to expand...
True. I did point out that there are different types of breakers. You're most likely to find 120/208v breakers in residential homes, but then there are 277/480v breakers which are used for high-voltage applications. I think the different types of breakers already complicates things to begin with, never mind things like how many breakers there are in a building, what plant the power is coming from, how many buildings said plants are feeding power to, etc.

I do agree that the workings done here are perfect for isolated cases like individual breakers as stated above.
 
Yeah, ig if it is limited to something small-scale where we can be pretty confident about the number/type of breakers involved, it would be fine.
 
Dark-Carioca said:
Would calcs like these be affected by this?
Click to expand...
Yes. That uses the world's entire power consumption in a whole year, for a feat that involved absorbing energy for a few seconds.

The billion gigawatts part probably still works, and would probably end up being better than the downgraded values you'd get after this change.
 
Hm, so stuff like this might be a no-no as well even if it's for far less...

How big would the downgrade be for calcs like these?
 
For year-based ones, they'd usually end up around ~200k times lower.
 
Dark-Carioca said:
That ain't too bad, but why usually 200k times lower? What's the math there?
Click to expand...
Turns out I was trying to do number of seconds in a year divided by three, but I accidentally did minutes in a year divided by three. Oops.

It should actually be around ~10 mil times lower.

Reason is, power grids can output a bit more than they typically do, but I think ~3x typical per-second output is a fine metric to implement for now.
 
I don’t know if I can speak here (probably not, since this likely works like a staff thread but for CGMs, so sorry if I can’t), but since my old calc was mentioned, I just wanted to say that after Vzearr told about the issue in the CRT regarding the calc usage for scaling, there were pretty good efforts to fix it (see here on 4-5th pages) until I abandoned the CRT.
That calc is hella old and awful, I remade it on the other wiki but left as it is here on VSBW since it was ultimately unused anyways. Would you want me to label in the blog itself that it is wrong or maybe let’s just delete it altogether? I don’t mind either way (probably would be happier with the second option).
 
sorry for intrusion, just wanted to share something i wrote some time ago about the same exact feat, i beleive this would be a bit relevant here given these kind of calcs usually have values in the megatons or more

here is a quote from an article detailing the effect of EMP waves from a nuclear detonation and it's effects on electronics and such

1.4 Megaton bomb launched about 250 miles above Kansas would destroy most ofthe electronics that were not protected in the entire Continental United States. Duringthe brief return to atmospheric testing in 1962, a 1.4 megaton nuclear weapon wasdetonated over Johnston Island at an altitude of about 250 miles. The effects of EMP were observed in Hawaii, 800 miles east of the detonation. Streetlights and fuses failedon Oahu and telephone service was disrupted on the Island of Kauai.
Click to expand...


the article in question -> https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Documents/Pubs/320-090_elecpuls_fs.pdf


it’s worth taking into consideration than a nuclear detonations isn’t some theoretical perfect equation of EMP where all the energy is magic'd in, It was an actual bomb being detonated where in which the emp would lose energy and still take out things several hundred miles away at the very least, the results provided aren't at all realistic assuming we're taking the conservative assumption that vox or any character really was discharging energy to create a burst of electromagnetic radiation which caused an outage


well this is more so assuming vox used EMP waves, which is way more logical than the assumption presented in the calc as far as i can tell considering the context of the scene in question (the phones were damaged as well)


anyways, hope this is helpful
 
The_King_of_Prudence said:
Fair enough.

Would this affect calculations of absorbing energy? The most famous case could have its own thread, though.
Click to expand...
Yes, since a day's energy does not exist in the grid to be absorbed. If you tried to absorb that much energy, you would overrun the generators and, at minimum, cause a brownout until you stopped (despite only absorbing a tiny fraction of the desired energy), and at most, wreck breakers and take down the grid.
 
I'm not exactly sure, I think something like 3 seconds is probably in the safe/reasonable realm.
 
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