Berkshire Consultants Network Meeting
Berkshire Consultants Network Presents Dinner Meeting:
Why did my lights go out?
by
Dr. George Gela, BETC
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 22 Jun 2017
- Time: 06:00 PM to 10:00 PM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) US/Eastern
-
Add Event to Calendar
- Route 20, Laurel Lake
- Lee , Massachusetts
- United States 01238
- Building: Cork ’N Hearth Restaurant
- Contact Event Host
- Co-sponsored by Rich Kolodziejczyk
- Starts 01 June 2017 12:00 AM
- Ends 21 June 2017 12:00 AM
- All times are (GMT-05:00) US/Eastern
- Admission fee ?
- Menu: Chicken Marsala, Grilled Salmon, or Prime Rib
Speakers
Dr. George Gela, BETC
Why did my lights go out?
Biography:
Dr. George Gela spent 24 years performing a wide range of research and testing at the High Voltage Laboratory in Lenox, MA, which was initially built by GE in 1958 and donated to EPRI in the 1980s. George moved to Lenox from Columbus, Ohio where he was an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of The Ohio State University. Prior to joining OSU, he was an Industrial Research Fellow at Trench Electric in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He obtained B.A. Sc., M.A. Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He also served as Adjunct Professor at the Western New England University in Springfield, and is now Lecturer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
Agenda
We always like to blame the utility for every outage – who else deserves our rage? But there are many possible and uncontrollable causes. For example, a falling fish knocked out power in Seattle.
This talk will concentrate on power outages worldwide (including the one caused by the presenter in Pittsfield in December 1991), their causes and severity, how they can be mitigated, costs associated with outages and mitigation, and research underway to prevent power outages or at least to minimize their impact on consumers. We will also review the myriad of reliability indices that utilities calculate and report, and reasons for some long-duration outages.
What is a “power outage”? Let’s start with a formal definition: “Outage” … describes the state of a component when it is not available to perform it intended function due to some event directly associated with that component. An outage may or may not cause an interruption of service to consumers depending on system configuration.