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77 WABC – 1965 Northeast Blackout – DAN INGRAM.

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A sixty years ago, under bright moonlight of rush hour, they were playing the popular hit song, Jonathan King's Everyone is Going to the Moon -- as Dan Ingram would describe -- in a Key of "R", because the tape deck playing the song would slow down as the electrical frequency dropped at the start of the Great Northeast Blackout. Definitely one of the great moments in radio history. A creepy song to be playing at the start of the blackout, especially under a full moon. Not to mention Jonathan King is a creepy individual -- he would later go to prison as a pedophile. As they said, the electricity slowed down, as the load on the grid exceeded what power plants could put out, as they started shutting down automatically as they lost power and circuit breakers overloaded. The great power failure happened when the grid was most strained -- it was rush hour, on a cold night with lots of electric heat operating, along with street lights on and office buildings still lit brightly. They say based on comparisons of this tape versus the normal speed recordings of Edward's Everybody is Going to the Moon, the grid frequency was about 50 Hz -- or the power had browned out to about 1/6th of the normal power. In an analog world, this meant lights dimmed, elevators ran slow, and tape decks played slowly -- until the power finally quit. Here is the normal speed version of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00XbDRuI78Y

More thoughts on a High Voltage DC Power Grid

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The other day, I mentioned that with thyristors connected to buck and boost converters, we could have built a much more efficient Direct Current electricity grid without the inherent losses from impedance with Alternating Current. We use 60 Hz AC mainly because it works well with (large) mains transformers and has a relatively low impedance, but it still has a lot of losses from impedance compared to direct current — and causes radio noise and hum. A high-voltage, direct current grid would not only be more efficient, you could bury direct-current lines easier, and not have to worry about storm damage.

The one issue I didn’t really address is the inherent dangers of high-voltage direct current — namely the difficulty of quenching arching, due to the lack of zero voltage crossing point. Direct current, especially high voltage direct current is difficult to break, as if you break mechanically, it will arc over — quite a long distance as the natural quenching of the zero voltage crossing point doesn’t exist like with AC. You can safely break a DC current using a thyristor, but what happens if a power line mechanically fails? It could arc over for some time, before fully breaking, causing enormous amounts of heat to be produced in the mean-time, turning large sections of wire into plasma.  A high-voltage alternating current line might arc over and burn for a while, but it would relatively quickly break the connection, once enough of the line vaporized and sufficient air gap existed and the zero-point was crossed.