Posted by lpage 3 days ago
While underground distribution systems are less prone to interruption from bad weather it depends on the circuit design. If the underground portion of the circuit is fed from overhead power lines coming from the distribution substation you will still experience interruptions from faults on the overhead. These faults can also occur on overhead transmission circuits (the lines feeding the distribution substations and/or very large industrial customers).
Underground distribution comes at a cost premium compared to overhead distribution. It’s akin to the cost of building a picket fence vs installing a geothermal heating system for your home. This is why new sub divisions will commonly have underground cable installed as the entire neighborhood is being constructed - there’s no need to retrofit underground cable into an existing area and so the costs are lower and borne upfront.
It’s more cost effective for them to turn the power off as a storm rolls through, patrol, make repairs and reenergize then to move everything underground. Lost revenue during that period is a small fraction of the cost of taking an existing grid and rebuilding it underground. This is especially true for transmission circuits that are strung between steel towers over enormous distances.
Some of it is physical infrastructure (transformers, wire, poles), but a lot of it is labor.
Labor is expensive in US. It’s a lot of labor to do, plus they’ll likely need regulatory approval, buying out land, working through easements.
At the same time you have people screaming about how expensive energy is.
Furthermore they have higher priorities, replacing ancient aging infrastructure that’s crumbling and being put on higher load every day.
https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under...
This is some level of eldritch magic that I am aware of, but not familiar with but am interested in learning.
Probably more interesting is how you get a tier 0 site back in sync - NIST rents out these cyberpunk looking units you can use to get your local frequency standards up to scratch for ~$700/month https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/frequency-measurement...
Also thank you for that link, this is exactly the kind of esoteric knowledge that I enjoy learning about
Many data centers and telecom hubs use local GPS/GNSS-disciplined oscillators or atomic clocks and wouldn’t be affected.
Most laptops, smartphones, tablets, etc. would be accurate enough for days before drift affected things for the most part.
Kerberos requires clocks to be typically within 5 minutes to prevent replay attacks, so they’d probably be ok.
Sysadmins would need to update hardcoded NTP configurations to point to secondary servers.
If timestamps were REALLY off, TLS certificates might fail, but that’s highly unlikely.
Databases could be corrupted due to failure of transaction ordering.
Financial exchanges are often legally required to use time traceable to a national standard like UTC(NIST). A total failure of the NIST distribution layer could potentially trigger a suspension of electronic trading to maintain audit trail integrity.
Modern power grids use Synchrophasors that require microsecond-level precision for frequency monitoring. Losing the NIST reference would degrade the grid's ability to respond to load fluctuations, increasing the risk of cascading outages.
You don’t need to actually sync to NIST. I think most people PTP/PPS to a GPS-connected Grandmaster with high quality crystals.
But one must report deviations from NIST time, so CAT Reporters must track it.
I think you are right — if there is no NIST time signal then there is no properly auditable trading and thus no trading. MFID has similar stuff but I am unfamiliar.
One of my favorite nerd possessions is my hand-signed letter from Judah Levine with my NIST Authenticated NTP key.
[1] https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/6...
To quote the ITU: "UTC is based on about 450 atomic clocks, which are maintained in 85 national time laboratories around the world." https://www.itu.int/hub/2023/07/coordinated-universal-time-a...
Beyond this, as other commenters have said, anyone who is really dependent on having exact time (such as telcos, broadcasters, and those running global synchronized databases) should have their own atomic clock fleets. There are thousands and thousands of atomic clocks in these fleets worldwide. Moreover, GPS time, used by many to act as their time reference, is distributed by yet other means.
Nothing bad will happen, except to those who have deliberately made these specific Stratum 0 clocks their only reference time. Anyone who has either left their computer at its factory settings or has set up their NTP configuration in accordance to recommended settings will be unaffected by this.
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
==============================================================================
+time-e-b.nist.g .NIST. 1 u 372 1024 377 125.260 1.314 0.280 #time-e-b.nist.g .NIST. 1 u 1071 1024 377 125.260 1.314 0.280Maybe their generator failing was DOGE related, but wouldn’t have happened if state level shenanigans were better handled
Don't forget Solar Roof.
Some relevant DOGE’s effects:
-time and frequency division director quit
-NIST emergency management staff at least 50% vacant
-NIST director of safety retired, and NIST safety was already understaffed when compared to DOE labs
-NOAA emergency manager on the same Boulder campus laid off
etc
It’s just a good idea, though, not a greedy one… so it won’t happen.