RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE Beenthere you say you are a very honest person. Yes you are being very honest telling everyone about your loses. But you only do this because it suits you when you are talking about why other companies you have placed a bet on will fail. It is an excuse to bash because I have beenthere.
Yes you have beenthere many times and it has very little to do with bad luck but everything to do with you and how you measure companies. Your limited level of due diligence.
Off Topic
Beenthere you say that I have a sense of "entitement" and that comes from being overpaid for what you have done in life.
How would you even begin to know what I have done? The amount of effort that I put into my career. When I was not at work I was working at home on projects on my own time. You say I am quite full of myself. Yes I am. I was the best at what I did. I will give you an example. One of my finer moments but an example of the kind of decisions I was paid to make regarding the operation of the Ontario bulk power grid. Prior to the northeastern blackout I was the acting Shift Superintendent (highest shift authority for the Ontario bulk power electricity grid). I was on shift during a freezing rain event that was localized to the east side of Toronto. This freezing rain was accumulating on the structures of a large transformer station (Cherrywood) which connects the 500 kV lines (highest voltage level in Ontario – the backbone of the province) from Darlington Nuclear Plant to Toronto area (the load center). On the East side of Darlington that connection becomes weak since the grid is designed for heavy electricity flow towards Toronto (west to east in that part of the province). During freezing rain events we have very strict operating practices. Policies that are required to be followed to avoid cascading outages caused by the flashover of contaminated insulators in rapid succession before a person can act to reconfigure the system for those lost elements. During the Blackout of 2003 system operators failed to respond to contingency events in a timely manner to secure the system. I was able to meet with the companies involved as part of my follow-up on the event. It was no surprise that this type of event could occur. There was a total lack of empowerment within the chain of command. That culture has been changed across North America but that is another story. The 2003 blackout was the result of a cascading event which started off slowly but gained momentum and escalated to a very rapid domino effect. The night of the freezing rain event that I was involved with was a high risk condition. In other words there was an elevated risk of high voltage equipment becoming faulted due to ice. However the 500kV insulators are only prone to flashover (transient ground fault) if they have a high level of contamination combined with specific weather conditions including heavy icing at a critical temperature range (very wet ice) over an extended period of time. The insulator contamination level for the station of concern (Cherrywood) was very low so we did not have all the requirements to declare 500 kV flashover weather conditions in that part of the grid. However after the first 500 kV line tripped I contacted the Darlington shift manager and advised him that there may be a need to make a rapid reduction of plant output by 900 MW due to the potential for flashover contingencies at Cherrywood. I advised him that if conditions deteriorate and I called for the reduction I wanted it achieved within a minimum of 5 minutes of my call. Approximately 20 minutes after warning Darlington of the potential need for an emergency power reduction I lost a second 500 kV circuit out of Cherrywood that runs across the top of the city. Based on experience I violated our operating policy and ordered the immediate reduction of Darlington output to prepare for the loss of the remaining three 500kV circuits from Cherrywood to Darlington in rapid succession such that there would not be enough time to make the necessary reduction to avoid the collapse of the Ontario Grid east of Toronto with the high probability of cascading into upper New York State at the St Lawrence interface. Including the potential to damage the Darlington nuclear units by exposure to area mode instability and excessive power oscillation prior to separation. My System Supervisor and Production Supervisor were both very concerned that I was making very career limiting move and I was. I did not have the necessary conditions to declare safe posture for 500kV flashover conditions but clearly we were suffering the contingencies which would suggest flashover conditions existed. I violated policy and ordered Darlington to make an emergency reduction of 900 MW. The plant performed flawlessly and the reduction was made within 2 minutes of my call. 5 minutes after we had the plant reduced we lost the remain 500 kV circuits connecting Darlington to the Toronto area plus the remaining 500 kV circuit across the top of Toronto. We also sustained a breaker failure operation which removed an additional 500 kV circuit to Barrie. Immediate following this event I reduced Darlington an additional 1000 MW’s to emergency condition levels to respect the next single element contingency that being the loss of the only 500kV line into Ottawa which would have result in the remaining output of Darlington connected to the east by a single delivery point.
These action were addressed at the highest levels at NERC and I was recognised as having prevented a wide spread disturbance that could have cascaded well beyond the borders of Ontario,
In addition this took place at a time when IESO and Hydro One were in the middle of turf wars. Hydro One wanted to be the Grid Authority. It is very probable that IESO would have lost a lot of ground in those turf wars had we suffered a blackout during this event. I was rewarded for my actions in performance pay increases. Now during this event I could have sat on my hands and I would have been untouchable because I would have been following strict protocols. If we had not suffered the loss of the 500kV connection I would have been in trouble. My judgement called into question. It was a time where our accountabilities were being closely scrutinized following the deregulation process.