On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 06:57:49AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote
Hydro is working all over the city to rectify some of the more serious load balancing issues generated by considerabble over optisim in the effective technology of the day the grid was built. I guess this is to stimulate investor confidence before selling the whole dog and pony show to someone else.
Two issues... more people and more power usage per person. My war story. I used to work at the Environment Canada building on Dufferin just south of Steeles before I retired. The building went up around 1969/1970, and was planned in the 1960's, to meet 1960's needs, with "sufficient spare capacity" ha ha ha. The building had been designed to support an IBM clone mainframe. As part of the plan some scientists and their CS support staff and some other staff had real honest-to-goodness "green screen" Volker Craig dumb terminals. I arrived there almost exactly 30 years ago, in March of 1985. At that time "the PC Revolution" was just getting underway. I remember my management agonizing about whether they should get me an IBM PC with a 5 *MEGABYTE* add-on drive, or an IBM PC-XT with a built-in 10 *MEGABYTE* hard drive. They eventually got the PC-XT. Fast forward a few years, and you're looking at several hundred people, each with a desktop computer, plus a monstrous monitor. And they all needed power. Needless to say, the building was running rather close to power capacity. It took a a couple of years to get the building upgraded, and I assume that Toronto Hydro had to upgrade equipment on their end. I don't remember any blackouts due to that issue, but I got the impression from management that we were running close to the edge for a couple of years. -- Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>