On Mon, 24 Jul 2006, Christian Nielsen wrote:
20 - 30 years ago, Air Conditioning in a house was more of a luxury. For us, it was a Swamp Cooler. Most new houses today are built with AC and it is becoming standard practice to install them on older houses. So the load on the system will only get worse if things start to heat up.
Aging distribution plants are have caused lots of problems. We had an 18-hour power outage in Oakland (neighborhood just east of downtown Pittsburgh) about 10 days ago when two separate 25kV feeders from the local substation blew at the same time. Local utility crews ended up having to replace around 400' of fried underground feeder cable. Our core sites are on redundant power, but in many cases this didn't include the chiller plant. Some of the rooms got hot, but we didn't lose any core equipment. Other large organizations in the area were not so lucky. jms