Chris, The "blame" for standards can be assessed everywhere. But you posted:
>> ...how we stood by and let the power generating industry make the >> consumer responsible for the supply quality. The problem here is that the industry can't control what we hang on the line. Remember Tungar (TM) half-wave rectifier battery chargers? Direct connection across the line? With enough DC component on your neighborhood step-down transformer, it goes up in flames. There's no way your local power generating authority or company (depending where you are) can adjust things at the generating end to accommodate all the user loads. They do very well to keep the power running as it is. We had some officials of Southern California Edison (our power company) at our radio club meeting a couple of months ago to talk about the last wide-area power blackout, how it happened and how it was dealt with. They did not try to evade due responsibility, or invent technical explanations with which to befuddle us. It was an impressive presentation. Bottom line, the power generating people have to run to keep up with conditions we impose on them. Some things, such as three-phase harmonic imbalance, they cannot correct...and there's where we get power quality limitations. Perhaps those are someone's "fault". I don't think one can assign blame, however. It's something we have to accept if we want to keep getting power under the conditions we have been used to. Cheers, Cortland
