Slight of Hand

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

By Holly the Assistant

You know the party games, right? With the cups, and the kid puts a pea under one, and switches them around, and then reveals that it’s under a different cup than you thought? Or makes a quarter vanish then pulls it from behind his friend’s ear?

Look over there! Lake America! Look over there! Horrible President Rankings! Look over there!

And everyone is looking. Over there.

I established a habit back in the first term of President Trump of when my leftist acquaintances started screeching about something inane, going to check the Executive Orders page at the White House Website. (I am a classical musician: of course I have leftist acquaintances. The real trick is telling which are truly leftist and which are situationally leftist to stay employed.) We have several interesting Executive Orders this week, among the mundane, expected, and distracting. There’s the one about beef trimming imports, there’s the Space Academy which is to be under NASA interestingly enough, and then there’s the National Emergency.

The what you say, Holly?

Yes, we have an Executive Order titled: DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO SECURE
THE UNITED STATES BULK-POWER SYSTEM. You can read it here, and you should, because I do not speak electrical or national security fluently enough to tell you what it means: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/declaring-a-national-emergency-to-secure-the-united-states-bulk-power-system/

I do not know if this means that no one can build a solar plant with solar panels from the PRC, or if it means that no one can buy solar panels from the PRC if they will be grid tied, or something else entirely. I do not know if this is the reason for renaming Lake Ontario, so everyone is looking the other way and screeching, or if something else is. But I find it interesting that the first I heard of this was bopping over to the White House website to see what Executive Orders were up.

If you do speak fluent electrical and national security (Jeff maybe?) and you feel like you can translate, maybe you’d be willing to do so in the comments?

And if you know of something else that Pres. Trump is distracting from, drop that in the comments, too, assuming it’s public knowledge, of course, just not widely known public knowledge.

86 thoughts on “Slight of Hand”

  3. It is a very broad EO. If I’m understanding it, the TLDR is any high power transmission component not made in the US can not be put on contract until the State Department has gone over everything with a fine tooth comb.

    Current orders can continue for now, unless the State Department discovers something that means they must stop. They don’t have a full definition of what that is, beyond something that would let a foreign power damage the US grid. And they should have a full definition in about six months, provided a liberal judge doesn’t start the injunction train first thing Monday morning.

    Honestly sounds like they found something pretty big and are trying to head it off immediately. Or they could be trying to signal to the power companies that they absolutely will go nuclear and bar all imports indefinitely if they try to get judges to issue injunctions. Which might work.

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    1. The CISA alerts sent out to the IT community have featured a lot of infrastructure stuff of late, so I would not be surprised if what led to all the recent alerts on municipal water system intrusions and new security rules for them also implicated new Middle Kingdom power gizmos. Alternately if something were identified by the IC from assets in the factories or coding shops over there, they would prolly not advertise that by doing a CISA alert, but sending that up the chain leading to this EO is certainly plausible.

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      1. This. I’ve been reading short asides and comments about people finding little (and one suspects not so little) surprises in things like solar panels, generators, and other stuff that should not have malicious code or worms in it.

        Since that’s what’s in the open-source general security information, there are probably worse and more serious problems that are not being discussed with the general security-aware public.

        Liked by 2 people

  4. Looks to me like everyone who manufactures overseas any component involved in a grid power system gets to onshore their production tout de suite.

    I didn’t see inverters listed, and this only seems to apply to (primarily computer controlled stuff) that’s used for grid tied generation, so off-grid types can probably still order their power system components from the Chi-Coms.

    Who steal the designs of the US inverter companies who off-shored their manufacturing and make their own for 3/4 the price.

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    1. Very retired EE here.

      From the list, “utility-scale and other grid-connected inverters” are mentioned. I figure that a residential grid-tie inverter could be (and IMHO, should be) included in this statement. After all, if Acme Inverters gets a substantial market share and ChiCom Semiconductor and Mother Boards has a controller circuit therein, it could serve to disrupt a chunk of power. Depending on the component (I’m assuming something more than an IC, up to and including the full Acme Inverter), you could see all manner of nastyness.

      A malicious actor with illicit control of several thousand grid-tie systems could raise incredible havoc. Picture a “kamikazi” mode for a few thousand installations. Scratch neighborhoods when the local fire departments are overwhelmed.

      Further complicating matters, some off-grid inverters can be configured to be grid-tie with menu options. My 2019 system has that capability, along with a option to have it tied to the bot-net of things.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. There’s an interesting question of whether it is slightly too broad.

      Iran does not have the safest government.

      So really smart Iranians sometimes get out, and get PhDs.

      Then some of those get hired at research universities.

      In normal usage, developed can have two definitions. There are basically two different parts of the engineering information supply chain which can be labeled development. One is development work where people in academia write papers. Those are basically safe, ‘washed’, by the expertise of the designer who is supposed to be informed about how they used information in designs. The other is in house development work, supporting the designer, or following the designer and doing additional work. This second may have been what was meant, and is potentially dangerous.

      Being put under this sort of contracting oversight by the Department of State is not fun.

      Avoiding problems is expensive legal advice, advice that may be hard to implement in a way that can be verified.

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  5. I’m reading this as an electrician’s wife, so while I know more than the typical layman, I am still a layman. Bear that in mind.

    Section 5b has an extensive list of the equipment covered by this order, and starts with some of the things I would expect: reactors, substation controllers, and so on. But it also includes things like backup generators, which are commonly owned by private citizens and used at home. I also can’t find any provision stating that this applies solely to power companies, nor even only to people who live on the grid. (We’re just close enough to the Alaskan bush that we know of a few places locally that are exclusively powered via home generators, and even briefly considered buying one such property.) So my hunch is that this covers all sales (or at least all *new* sales) of any such equipment.

    If the allegation of foreign actors using backdoors to access electrical equipment in America is true, that’s terrifying.

    Husband is working today but I’ll see about getting his input when he isn’t busy.

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    1. ‘Everyone’ uses back up generators. Industrial back up generators could be an important puzzle piece, and I have missed too much sleep to reread, or trust my reading of precise shades of detail.

      One clause I did see, did specify a fairly high cut off of voltage.

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  7. Interesting…

    “For the purpose of this order, this definition includes transmission lines rated at 69,000 volts (69 kV) or more, but does not include facilities used in the local distribution of electric energy.”

    So they’re targeting the high-voltage power grid that moves electricity in bulk from place to place (and the generation systems that feed it), and *not* whatever’s going on in medium-voltage municipal systems (which is actually most of the grid).

    If there’s some particular vulnerability they’ve found, I’m not sure what it’d be, although the inverters that convert the direct current (DC) produced by most renewable sources to alternating current (AC) to feed into the grid could be a big one if they’re as China-dominated as I’d guess. There’s some fancy electronics going on in there, along with some microprocessor-based control elements, so cybersecurity is a valid concern there.

    Almost all of the big, high-dollar pieces of primary equipment mentioned in the EO (transformers, generator turbines, high-voltage circuit breakers, etc.) are controlled by electronic equipment, which is where cybersecurity comes in with them. Most of the manufacturers of said equipment provide OEM control electronics with them, and you’d want those to be made by someone you can trust. (Although they can be replaced and very frequently are; I work for a company whose products are used instead of the OEM controls by discerning power system engineers everywhere.) And the EO does specifically mention protective relaying, automation controllers, intelligent electronic devices, etc., which covers that angle.

    I’m not at all sure how much of an effect this is going to have on anybody’s business or on security, really. How much of our high-voltage equipment and related electronics are actually made in “countries of concern” to begin with? No idea.

    Anyway…I’m conversant with the electric power industry in certain ways, but there’s bound to be multiple people in here who know more about all of this than I do.

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    1. The take I got with the 69kV threshold is that the 12.5kV distribution lines and associated 12.5kV to 220V user-side transformers (all pretty dumb to my knowledge) are safe for the while. Pacific Power got a bad batch of such transformers in the 1990s(ish), but they tended to crap out on their own schedules.

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        1. I’ve read of one variant with a light that turns on in case of a fault (the circuit wasn’t described, but an additional coil and a relay would do it), but yeah, it’s an oil filled transformer.

          FWIW, the main feed to $TINY_TOWN (and others along a 100 mile stretch) is a 100kV(ish) line, but there’s a 69kV line that goes to ag and a residential neighborhood south of us. We have a really small substation; larger ones are some 20 miles away. Those tend to be sophisticated. (One handles the regional solar farm, the other is at the western terminus of the 100 mile feed.)

          When (promised for 2029) the pumped storage facility is completed, that will be fairly complex. Between that and solar, that’s the “green” energy. We lost 100MWe when the dams on the Klamath River were taken out. [Spit.] Replaced by 36MWe of solar, for values of “replaced”.

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      2. Yeah, it’s the high-voltage ones that need protective relays and fancy control algorithms. And the higher the voltage, the more downstream people there are; a big chunk of the grid could go down if a few dozen of the big-uns went down at once. Temporarily, but still… And iirc, most military bases are on the domestic power grid as well. Although they’ll have backup generators, and microgrids are being deployed more and more, I doubt any major base could operate entirely disconnected from the bulk power grid.

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        2. Which is why, as I saw in an article today, the Army is letting contracts for “microreactors.” Those are around 20 megawatts each – I don’t know how much a typical base uses, but it would only take a very few of those to make them self-sufficient for power.

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      3. Yeah.

        There are quite a lot of three phase and one phase things that would not be covered by this.

        Deep background for everyone else who is not an EE, adn who like me is not a power systems bro.

        Europe and US grids are 50 Hz or 60 Hz. What gets pulled from the walls of our house is this, and the signal is pretty straight forward. Three phase is a cool trick where you stack three 60 Hz signals, I think with a phase spacing of 120 degrees. (This somehow works, and I think the trick involves using three conductors.) Anyway, the stack basically means that you have a signal at frequency (so can exploit frequency world tricks), and that the average power is close to flat, and you avoid weirdness from that. Most of the grid is at three phase.

        The core of the grid is at quite a lot higher voltage. Voltage is a ‘distance’ between points in terms of the electric potential fields. The potential field you will be most familiar with is gravity. GRavity potential is why you get faster going down hill. Second most familiar might be pressure in fluid mechanics. You have an actual physical distance between two conductors, and then you have a change in the field strength across that distance.

        What the price of tea in china? The cables hanging high have somewhat humid air between them. Air is a material, and so it has a ‘dielectric breakdown strength’. This relates to the voltage that turns the air into a very conductive plasma.

        It is bad when this happens, it is called arc flash hazard. This is something that power engineers try to avoid. (If you do not de energize equipment that is safe when no one is touching it, and then service people lose a wrench, this is also an arc flash. Aside, high voltages and currents can have a powerful electro-/magnetic/ field.)

        The voltage that power lines handle is designed before they are built, and cannot be safely exceeded. We have trunk lines that operate at very high voltages. Those are stepped down to lower voltages using transformers where the lines split.

        This is the very most central, most expensive part of the transmission lines of the power grid. Very important.

        Even if Democrats were not twirling mustaches as they deliberate helped the chicoms with supply contracts, there would be reasonable concern.

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        1. When driving a resistive load, three sinusoidal phases provide constant power throughout the cycle. Even if the load is somewhat reactive (stores and returns energy, current and voltage out of phase), the power delivery can be nearly constant.

          For large electric motors, three-phases can provide a single, smoothly rotating magnetic field on the armature, not just the field flipping back and forth that single phase provides. (Various tricks are used to ensure that the motor turns in the intended direction on a single-phase motor.l

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        2. Three phase generators and motors are more efficient than single phase. The three waveforms “fill in the gaps” when offset at 120 degrees, allowing smaller-diameter wire to carry more power. It’s also mechanically efficient, being mostly continuous instead of on/off.

          Tesla and Stainmetz figured out all the math, but in the early days the advantages of three phase were not obvious to most people, and lots of electrical engineers distrusted it.

          Then there’s six-phase electricity, which is mostly a curiosity outside of oddball applications like “soil remediation.”

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      4. I am currently working as a 3rd-party security guard verifying that utility substations and major power-line interconnects are physically secured and not sparking or smoking. I drive around all weekend checking on these remote substations. So maybe I should be a little more attentive if I might hear anything coming down channels from the utility company.

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  8. “Yes, we have an Executive Order titled: DECLARING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY TO SECURE THE UNITED STATES BULK-POWER SYSTEM.”

    This is happening because #TheDonald is listening to #BlubberDougie, the Premier of Ontario, run his mouth that he’s going to cut off electric power running from Ontario to New York State.

    Yes, NY buys power from Ontario. And sells it to Ontario. Grid balancing. It’s a big deal.

    And because #TheDonald said “Lake America”, the #BlubberyOne said “Oh yeah? We’ll cut off the juice!”

    It’s literally that stupid. But that’s what they’re doing. Good times!

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    1. Canada is mostly about China, I’m afraid. CCP wants a return on their investment and the Canadian politicians are so compromised they don’t dare not pay. Losing office is the least of it, CCP would likely make permanent examples.

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    2. That’s the kind of thing that could be just cause for war. I doubt Ford the Fnord has the authority to do it, or the balls…besides which, it’d hurt them as much or more than it hurts us, as electricity flows both ways…but there’s no telling what Canaduh’s “leaders” might be dumb enough to try these days.

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      1. Not only would we cut off the power we give Canada in return, but we’d also cut the oil pipeline that supplies the eastern part of the country with Albertan oil.

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    3. I live in the Hudson Valley region of NY State, In my opinion a cutoff of power from Canada would helps speed up the collapse of the insane “environmental” power generation regime in this state. The Green Nude Eel is still firmly entrenched here in this state. Cant even upgrade a natural gas generating plant, building a new one is completely banned. Then existing ones are supposed to be phased out over time. Oh did I mention all new construction is supposed to be electric, no new construction with nat gas or propane heating or hot water or cooking equipment.

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      1. The recent stupid moves to ban gas stoves and gas water heaters really pisses me off.

        A gas stove burns gas, which produces heat right there in the stove where you want it. Approaches 100% efficiency.

        An electric stove consumes electricity, most of which is generated by burning gas in a power plant 20 miles away to produce heat, boil water, spin steam turbines and alternators, which convert about 35% of the heat into electricity. That gets run through transformers and substations that boost it to 200KV or more and connect to long distance high voltage transmission lines. Somewhere near your house those lines run into another substation and more transformers where the electricity is stepped back down to lower voltage for local distribution. In the final step, a pole transformer steps it down to 240VAC to generate heat in your electric stove. Overall efficiency, 20-30%

        The electric stove consumes 3-5 times more gas to produce the same amount of heat. To Save The Environment!! 😡

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        1. Ah, but they’re going to do it all with wind and solar power! (And unicorn farts; can’t forget those.) Any day now, it’ll all come together, just you wait and see.

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          1. Has any actual research been done regarding the merrits and efficacy of unicorn farts as compared to fairy dust?

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        2. With combined cycle generation, the heat engine part can be 60 to 70% efficient. Today’s generators and transmission systems should be 80% efficient or so, for an end-to-end 50 to 55% efficiency. Still more foolish than a flame under a saucepan, unless you can make the wind-and-solar SnakeOil work without backup generators turning.

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          1. That can work if there’s a real use for the waste heat. Not so much otherwise.

            For example, at the late San Onofre nuclear plant, they just dumped all the waste heat into the ocean because that was the simplest way to get rid of it. No attempt to make any use of it. Each reactor unit produced about 3.3 GWT, which generated just over 1.1 GW of electricity. 2.2 GW of medium-quality heat was just flushed away.

            That heat could have been used to desalinate sea water in a place where any source of additional fresh water is valuable. But, no. Probably because of some idiotic government regulations.

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        3. I think the worst part about modern gas ovens – and possibly the stoves as well, I’m not sure what igniter options there are – is that they require electricity to run anyway.

          Oven don’t have pilot lights, no, they have electric glow bars to ignite the gas.

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          1. Some modern gas ranges can’t even be lit with a match; the “safety” valve is electric, as well as the igniter.

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  9. Local distribution uses lines around 22kV and maybe a little more. I suspect that somewhere a little blow 69kV the lines are subject to greater height and clearance requirements.

    It appears to me that single-house solar systems are exempt, but I can envision a scenario where suddenly cutting–or starting–a large number of systems could force a utility to black out an area to maintain grid stability. Worse would be a mass injection of “reactive power”–out of phase load or sell-back supply–that would endanger grid stability.

    If a sufficient number of neighborhoods were forced to drop off the grid at once, the imbalance of supply and load might force the emergency shutdown of plants. If the attacks continued, they might force the grid to disconnect, starving some regions of power and forcing shutdowns in others.

    There’s a lot of hairy math here: the behavior of systems that are described using equations with calculus, enormous systems of simultaneous equations, systematic simplifications over large networks that have to be recomputed as links are added or shut down, the limitations of both electonic power converters (with immense 60-Hz energy flow into/out of capacitors and inductors), the interaction of the grid with massive machines storing rotating momentum and energy …

    As well as the danger of malicious corruption of the signals through the network carrying “supervisory and control” information.

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      1. Not that I’m an expert, but as a nontechnical person in the industry I do hear a lot about this stuff, and it’s super interesting.

        Good news re: the Iberian Peninsula blackout is that there are effective ways to deal with that kind of thing. The technology is already in use; it’s just that it wasn’t in use there, and it seems nobody anticipated things going sideways at that scale because very few places have relied so heavily on renewable sources at such a wide scale.

        Bad news is that it takes a while to put those systems in place (but it is being done proactively all over world).

        As for Texas, from what I’ve heard about ERCOT, everyone on the board should’ve lost their jobs when the big winter outage happened a few years ago, and it should’ve been immediately disbanded in favor of a better management structure. Anything would’ve been an improvement, probably. (Haven’t followed it since the big debacle, so I don’t know what’s been done since.) If Texas had been substantially intertied with the rest of the national grid, that outage wouldn’t have been nearly such a disaster. There may be downsides to interconnection, but as far as I’m aware, with proper protection and control they’re few to none. (Political and regulatory downsides are a whole ‘nother thing.)

        Anyway, yeah…somebody actively messing with those grid-tied inverter systems en masse is a nightmare scenario for power system stability. Even if all the protective systems work optimally, it could still cause a lot of disruption.

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    2. Adjacent to some personal interests here.

      You may have slightly understated the annoyance of the math.

      The system of equations is nonlinear, and can be modeled over the set of complex numbers. (IE, I’m almost used to complex variables for transmission lines. Normal DC circuit analysis can be a system of linear equations, and only cover amplitude. Transmission Line is a term of art in electrical engineering, and basically involves the assumption of a frequency, and a require that you know the phase in addition to the amplitude. The phase is exactly where you are in the cycle. The combination of amplitude and phase is why EEs adopted complex variables. )

      The mathematics of the software is not strictly the same as what gets used by engineers doing other applications. The EEs who can intuitively understand what correct is may not be the EEs who can do binary analysis on the actual software running on the whatist.

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      1. BtRF, I have a very dusty EE degree (and I know of feedback-loop phase instability even if I’ve forgotten its proper name), but I’m just trying to give a useful impression of the problem’s depth and breadth. Clearly you’ve done the work and I’ve only studied aspects.

        To the problem of renewables in Iberia: The only “renewable” that is dispatchable in any degree is hydropower. Dispatchable means that you can get it when you need it, not when the weather lottery says you can. Every megawatt of renewable has to be backed by a dispatchable source capable of comig up from idle to full generation in less than a minute.

        (The Wind-and-Solar SnakeOilsters claim that you can just have enough windmills in enough places that you’ll always find power somewhere. This is akin to trying to get investment-grade securities out of the residue left over from extracting investment-grade out of junk. (All you get is junk!) And they neglect the losses incurred in routing power from the Tierra del Fuego to Nova Scotia or beyond.

        Nor can renewables be used for baseline power. A baseline generator is run contnuously near maximum efficiency to provide the cheapest power, but can only be throttled slowly, generally for expected, large load swings across the hours of the day and days of the week. In theory, a sufficiently large and sufficiently reliable geothermal plant might serve a baseline load, but outside of Iceland the opportunities are rare.

        In recent weeks, fossil-phobic (and nuke-phobic) England has avoided large blackouts only by frantic, emergency buys from France. France may like English money, but they might get irked enough by English politics that they decide not to sell. (My source is articles on wattsupwiththat dotcom.)

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    3. Ahhh… Neighborhood power distribution in the USA is typically 12-14 KV, 60 cycle, single phase, supplied on the two wires strung on the power pole’s top crossbar. The pole transformer’s primary is connected to those two wires through the tall terminals on top, with the long ridged insulators.

      The transformer steps that voltage down to what you use in your house with a 240V center-tapped secondary winding, which connects to the 3 wires strung on the pole’s lower crossbar. One transformer generally powers 6-12 houses. The service drop to your house consists of two insulated wires and one bare wire, usually 00 (often written as 2/0) gauge stranded. Smaller gauge numbers correspond to thicker wire; 00 gauge is about half an inch thick and is rated for up to 200 amps in free air. Less if it’s inside a conduit.

      The three wires connect to L1, L2 and Neutral inside your mains panel and thence through the electric meter to the mains breaker for your house. Most modern houses are wired for 200 amp service. From there it goes to the busbars inside the distribution panel (which may be integral with the mains panel) where circuit breakers for the individual rooms plug in.

      You get 120VAC between L1 and Neutral, 120VAC between L2 and Neutral, and 240VAC between L1 and L2. Thus you can power both ordinary 120V lights and appliances, and high-power 240V appliances like central air conditioners, electric stoves, electric dryers, welders, etc. The breakers alternate between L1 and L2, so a double-gang breaker spans both phases and provides 240V; also to distribute the 120V circuits semi-equally between L1 and L2. Not a good idea to place a much heavier load on one phase than the other. If one room, like the kitchen, needs to have more than one circuit, do make sure they’re all connected to the same phase. If an outlet is connected to L1, and another nearby outlet is connected to L2, they will have 240V between them.

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      2. Foreign intel services read those exec order pages, and very much study them.

        Perhaps our folks found something. Or just suspect something. If that finding had exactly that number, or real close, this may be a message.

        “Peekaboo”

        Or, if someone elsewhere has that number, the purpose may be

        “guess what -we- can do”.

        Or, its just a creative distraction for foreign and/or domestic enemies.

        “snipe hunt”

        Remember, this is President Orange Troll.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Back when I read the residential section of the National Electric Code–going on 50 years ago!–every room was supposed to have separate lighting and outlet circuits, and at least two different outlet circuits, as well as dedicated circuits for certain appliances.

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        1. I have always wired each ordinary room (bedroom, bathroom, office, etc.) with one 20A circuit on a 12-2 Romex cable. Inspectors always passed them. Although today’s code calls for an arc-fault breaker on a bedroom circuit. (Why not go above-and-beyond, spend a few extra bucks, and put arc-fault breakers on every circuit?)

          The reason the kitchen usually requires 3 circuits is that high-wattage appliances abound there. Your refrigerator, toaster, microwave, toaster-oven, waffle iron, pizza oven and coffee maker all draw from 500 to well over 1,000 watts. Two or three of those power hogs running at the same time on one circuit can easily trip a 20 amp breaker. So, a kitchen usually has two 20A circuits for the outlets, and a separate 15A or 20A circuit for the lights so you’re not suddenly plunged into darkness if you do trip a breaker.

          I had a rental house that had been rewired. When built in the early 1950’s it had a 60 amp integrated meter, mains and fuse box with 4 15A circuits. Some previous owner remodeled part of the house and installed a new 100 amp meter, mains and 20-slot breaker panel, and wired the remodeled part into it. They gutted the old fuse box, wired all 4 circuits together and fed it off ONE 15A breaker through an ugly conduit run around the laundry room walls. Like a cheap and dirty sub-panel.

          So, if somebody used a microwave in the kitchen, and somebody else used a hair dryer in the bathroom, 3/4 of the house went dark when that 15A breaker tripped. By code, the meter and mains box has to be mounted on an exterior wall, accessible from the street. Integrating the breaker panel into it means all your breakers are there too. You have to go outdoors to reset a tripped circuit breaker. In your pajamas, in the middle of the night.

          I rewired that house properly when I replaced the roof.

          Needless to say, when I rewired MY house I went with a separate distribution panel installed in the laundry room. I don’t have to go outdoors to reset a breaker.

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          1. Ah, good times.

            Once upon a time I bought a genuine Old Lady house in Hamilton. Built after the war with a 60A service and 4 x 15A circuits.

            One of the very first things I did after cutting down the Jurassic Park sized ornamental balsams out front was rip out the 60A firestarter and install a proper 200A service. I went with the 200 because I had to replace everything, so for a few dollars more…

            Removing the tiny little 60A box was such a lesson. There was a bunch of welding spatter in there. Proper fuses in it when I bought the place, but in the past? Somebody was running it so hot there was arcing. Thereafter, as well as I was able, each room got a circuit, and the kitchen got four. Two for each outlet.

            Best not to ask about the condition of the (original!!!) oil tank for the furnace. I ran it no more than half full, because In Case Something Might Happen, know what I mean? 50 gallons is easier to clean up than 100 gallons.

            And because I am -not- an electrician, I had one come and check all my work before things got sealed up. He thought it was overkill, but didn’t find any mistakes, so go me! ~:D

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          2. So, if somebody used a microwave in the kitchen, and somebody else used a hair dryer in the bathroom, 3/4 of the house went dark when that 15A breaker tripped.

            Hey! That guy wired my house, too!

            Originally had two (2) 15a fuses. Was upgraded in the 1970s by a state, county, *and* city-certified electrical contractor. (yes, hooterville has its own city electrical code and licensing)

            Now the house has one 15A circuit for 3/4 of the house, and a bunch of single-outlet 15A circuits, mainly separate outlets in the bedrooms, one per breaker.

            So, for all practical purposes, it was “upgraded” from two 15a fuses to one 15a breaker, since the half-dozen other breakers are for single outlets that are seldom used.

            But hey, it met the code and passed inspection!

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  10. Trump has been steadily upping the pressure on the Chi Coms. Even the Iran thing is part of that, possibly the biggest part. TO that end, today CCP announced that the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) is boosting credit support for China’s property sector. What people probably don’t know is that losses from the property sector are likely around $8 trillion US More than a third of PRC reported GDP. The losses may be as high as $12 trillion US. Further, PRC GDP is overstated by approximately the amount of the credit losses since they refuse to recognize the losses. IT’s a horrible mess.

    I’ve written here before that the great tragedy, and there were many, but the great tragedy of Jo Bi Den, is that the PRC was one good shove away from collapse and Trump was in the process of applying that shove. A minor Chinese investment in US politicians bought them four years. Thankfully , they did nothing with the four years so … one good shove, or several medium shoves.

    Lots of ruin in a nation as Adam Smith once wrote, but a finite amount none the less.

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    1. Sometimes I think the biggest shame and embarrassment in this is how little it actually takes to buy people like Biden. Fecking pikers. If they’re going to sell out an entire nation, maybe even Western civilization itself, they should at least have the confidence to demand more than just the lint in some Chinese corporation’s back left pocket.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. “Sometimes I think the biggest shame and embarrassment in this is how little it actually takes to buy people like Biden.”

        The Chicoms bought the Hugo Awards for ~1,000 fake memberships, a couple of fancy dinners and (I’m assuming) some ‘adult entertainment’ in Chengdu. They probably spent 20K on the whole thing.

        Funny how Sad Puppies is still a thing, but Chengdu Worldcon is never spoken of. Almost as if there were pictures of people engaged in things that they wouldn’t want posted to the internet, if you see where I’m going.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. They couldn’t really do anything, though, even when Biden was in office. For decades the CCP has been in the position of trying to hold off disaster just long enough for them to catch a lucky break that somehow saves them. They can’t fix things, because the temporary (if they’re lucky) hit to their economy that any attempted correction would cause would trigger widespread unrest. The current unrest (and for those who don’t know, there’s quite a lot of unhappy people right now in China) would be magnified dramatically.

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    3. The Chinese “Red Giant” star is finishing the neon-burning phase, and about to commence the oxygen-burn phase. China will appear to stabilize and grow further. For a few brief years, if that. But the inevitable moment is shortly to come, that first harbinger bit of Nickel 56 that ends the final Silicon burn phase, and fortells the moment of calamity.

      The final phase will be days, then moments.

      Then, up to a half-billion -very- unhappy people flee the calamity.

      Worst case, sure. But the doom is hard wired now. Too late to avoid it. Just a question of when and how spectacularly it ends.

      We should be fine in the long term, although the supply chain disruption of “basket case China” will make Covid seem trivial. However, thanks to -that- FlusterCluck, folks were warned and started looking for alternates. So the CCP fool-gambit worked to our advantage. Again.

      On the “cheer folks up” side, the China implosion will likely wreck our Left and its Blue Zombie states. That will facilitate a much needed cleanup of -our- house.

      (Kzin Grin)

      Like “good training”, it is going to suck. Epically. But the end result will be well worth it.

      The final indisputable refutation of Marxism, and the triumph of Liberty, is potentially within our lifetime.

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      1. [shakes head sadly] Nope. No matter how big and how bad communist China implodes, our Leftroids won’t learn a thing from it. “Yabbut that’s just China! They did it wrong! WE can make it work, we just have to destroy everything first!”

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        1. Sure. But with no examples operating, they are just kooks. The smoldering ruin of Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea, plus California NYC and a few other places will out- shout them.

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        2. “Yabbut that’s just China! They did it wrong!”

          They’ll totally say that.

          But on the bright side, China won’t be paying them to say stupid stuff like that anymore. They’ll have to be free-lance useful idiots instead of the professional ones we have now.

          There nothing more miserable and bitter than a freelance Communist, crying over his broken iron rice bowl. May their tears restore the oceans we use up on AI data centers.

          Liked by 1 person

  12. Keep in mind two other possibilities:

    1. He is doing it just to wear them out and/or keep them looking foolish. Some NPR-type shared a “Lake America” post with a comment like “Can we please have a shred of dignity? Just one? PLEASE?” Demonstrating that many of those whose brains Trump broke ten years ago still haven’t figured out what he’s doing and how he keeps playing them.

    2. It is not to distract from something already announced, but coming up soon. If they’re already clutching their pearls and dashing to their fainting couches, they’re less likely to notice a new quiet thing slipping past.

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  13. When I put solar on my house there were some interesting moments. The inverter has an antenna type thing attached which the installer said allows the inverter company (Chinese, of course) to access usage and production records. This was linked to activation of the warranty, so I essentially have no warranty since I didn’t give them permission to access my system at any time and for any reason. I never signed up, never created a login, but the antenna/machine is still there.

    I told the installer at the time that I would rather do without the warranty than give China the ability to turn off my power whenever they want to.

    The other piece was that as part of registration you had to put in your address, so they essentially have a map of everyone who has their system installed.

    Nope, nope, nope. Paranoid I might be, but I’d rather be paranoid than a patsy.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Talk to a radio hobbyist/ HAM. I believe you can swap out an antenna for a resistor to prevent sending or receiving, yet maintain appearance of an antenna to the circuits

      “dummy load” “dummy antenna”?

      Like

  14. Also keep in mind that the largest distribution station transformers have construction lead times measured in years, and can only be transported on a few routes by specialized heavy haul vehicles (I observed those hauls in my first career). If several of those were to stop working due to intentional misbehavior, it could result in regional blackouts for extended periods. And they’re too expensive to just have a pile of spares in the utility company yard (one would fill a smaller yard).

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Spares of those monsters become affordable with the right tax breaks.

      We do something similar with airliners. Promise them to the DoW/DoD in emergencies, get big tax write-offs.

      They were called for Desert Shield, for example.

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  15. I saw a few comments on X today talking about the Lake America thing as a possible distraction. But the comments were focused on an outfit that supposedly provides a lot of financial and logistical support to the progs. And supposedly, Trump got rid of it (or hurt it badly) right around the same time his Lake America comment and his “Greatest Presidents Ever!” list went public. The idea is that Trump’s comments were to provide an easy, simple to understand distraction to pull attention away from something that the left would want people to be outraged about… but only at a very superficial level (because digging into it might make people say, “Hmm…”).

    Alternately, people were also talking about an anti-Trump online site that supposedly acted as a clearinghouse for things like doxxing, and other bad behavior that the left gets up to. The site has apparently been forced to shut down, and the name changed to a pro-Trump name (though the latter seems more likely to have been a hack). Again, something that Trump might want to distract attention away from.

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    1. Smart grid means things in other places as well.

      Rumint has been for literal decades about vulnerabilities with this stuff, much more generally.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “Rumint has been for literal decades about vulnerabilities with this stuff…”

        You mean like smart meters run unpatched, unencrypted Linux? And they run Ethernet protocol over power lines unencrypted?

        Yeah, that’s never going to cause trouble…

        This is what I hear about water valves and power system switches. They run in the clear, no encryption, no firewalls.

        My television has more protection than that. Fricking genius.

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  17. I got modded for a word.

    Also, the modded post was intended as a response to Holly’s post, not to Emma’s comment where I misthreaded it.

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  19. this stuff fascinates me, but as a finance major, my understanding of numbers is in the direction of dollar signs, not volts and amps. Can anyone point me in the direction of a book or website that would teach me the basics of electricity?

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    1. To grasp the stuff BtRF and I are nattering about needs more than the very basics. A semester and a half of Circuit Theory would put almost all of it in reach (except 3-phase). I don’t have a textbook to recommend (my training was too long ago) but some universities have put their best lecturers online.

      You might also look online for “Power Distribution Book”. It is hard to tell from the listings which ones require algebra and trig and which ones can safely be read by a United States senator with an ivy league degree.

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      1. One of the drawbacks to being of my generation (I’m 70) is that you don’t often think to look online. After reading your message I went to YouTube and found several introductory lessons. Thanks!

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    1. The Howard Sams books were very good back in my day. There were five or six volumes on basic electricity, IIRC.

      I don’t know if they’re still available in any format, though.

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  21. I live very close, as in about a quarter of as mile from one set of kindling and our quiet little church is about the same distance from another. Please forgive me for wanting to change the subject for the space of one post. Also, our Choir Director’s wife had twin baby girls.

    —-

    There are certain things that should never happen aboard a diplomatic vessel.

    A treaty should not be altered.

    A diplomatic official should not be murdered.

    A corpse should not disappear from a locked room.

    And, under absolutely no circumstances, should anyone interfere with Thursday-night BBQ.

    Unfortunately, aboard the USS White House, someone has managed to accomplish all four.

    Commander Arthur “Art” Bellamy of Anglo Commonwealth Naval Intelligence would prefer a straightforward investigation. Unfortunately, the ship is full of diplomats, spies, politicians, corporate representatives, military officers, and people with diplomatic immunity.

    Everyone has a secret.

    Almost everyone has a motive.

    —-

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  22. Okay, I’m pretty tired and it’s been about a decade so this may be old, wrong, or conflicting info. That said:

    Bulk power means big, chunky power that gets swapped around the transmission network and then parceled out by the local entities. 100kVA and up for the moving bits, 20MVA to 75MVA is the floor for generating units (single/multi source). It includes big old coal plants, nukes, hydro, things like that, plus the transmission infrastructure to service that (transformers, etc). There’s six regional entities that manage/watch the grid in their specific areas that look at things like this. Occasionally the NARUC puts together a dog and pony show for regulators/political units to basically tell them what the eggheads are doing and why they shouldn’t fuck with the lights staying on. It’s readable, so long as you’ve got the basic lingo and definitions on hand even for dumb guys like me that used to just troubleshoot in the woods.

    So when His Orangeness is talking Big Powah, he’s talking things that (thank you OneMoeurThing) have lead times that start in years and plans that go by decade and scale up. You DO NOT just order infrastructure that covers a city block (or more) from Joey’s Spark Hut down next to the old salvage yard. There’s plans for this kind of thing that go back beyond presidential cycles, and will continue to do so.

    There is much uncertainty in the world of high power going into the future. Viz: AI datacenters. You might’ve heard that AI is a bubble, and it’s going to pop. Someday. Not today, maybe tomorrow, probably by 2037 at the latest. Probably. For power generation and transmission, that’s a problem. When (note this was not “if”) the bubble pops, that can mean stranded infrastructure where funding dries up, projected load does not appear, and politicians go “uh oh” while engineers and folks in hard hats swear a lot.

    Protecting the hardware that goes into bulk-power is a Good Thing. Most of us won’t ever have any direct use for it and only tangential knowledge (raises hand) but everyone would notice if the BPS got a case of the hiccups. Again, this isn’t your local transformer or distribution station. This is the big boys swapping load around. Gas plants for regular peaks, local emergencies, and critical load balancing, coal/nuke/hydro for the foundational generation. Bulk-power for swapping load over reginal areas rather than city blocks.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. Indirectly relevant, since it involves electricity.

    Our RV seems to be having a midlife crisis, involving breakdowns with the slide-outs. We had to go home for a month or so earlier this year to get it fixed. (Returning again in a couple of weeks because the other ratchet gave out. Bummer).

    So, beloved was picking up the RV and found he had to wait for the guy in front of him to pull out. Guy, among other things, was having a new washing machine installed. He and beloved were chatting when the assistant tech came up and said, “Your washer has the wrong plug. No problem, I”l just change plugs.”

    Beloved said, ” What sort of washer?”

    Other owner, “A Bosch.”

    Beloved: “That takes 220 volts. Don’t change that plug! This won’t work in the RV.”

    Assistant tech: “There’s plenty of amps.”

    Beloved: “Don’t change that plug!”

    Tech went away, returned to admit that yes, it took 220.

    Owmer and repair shop owner both thanked my beloved for catching it.

    Ignorance and confidence can be a bad combination.

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    1. “Our RV seems to be having a midlife crisis, involving breakdowns with the slide-outs.”

      Mine was the jacks. I ended up making little pieces for those blasted things because the the ones you buy are designed to break. (Nylon fittings in a jack? Come on.)

      Also because they did things like specifying a 7mm pin in one instance. Did you know that you can’t buy a 7mm pin anywhere? It’s not a thing. But it is a thing on Ali Babba and a few other such places, which is most likely where the RV swine get them. You have to buy 100 of course.

      So I made a coupler that takes an 8mm pin, which you can get anywhere, and is made of steel instead of nylon.

      But sadly this year I was forced to sell the RV, nobody uses it [because $2.20 a quart for diesel!] and it was getting old in other ways. Hopefully they had fun this summer with it.

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      1. Having a loved RV that is in good shape? Priceless to the buyer. Will not get what you paid for it, especially if got it new. We did “on paper”. But inflation says “no”. Hope our buyers have enjoyed that trailer over the last 6 RV seasons (and it is a 4 season RV). We did over the 13 years we owned it.

        Liked by 1 person

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