Hacker News Reader

Verizon is my absolute mad-lad hero in NJ. All of our towers had Natural Gas generators keeping the towers alive during Hurricane Sandy. I lost power and land-based internet, cellular internet and phone calls were alive and well thanks to those generators. Kudos to whatever NG company they used as well.

View on HN

One thing that stood out to me in this video is that he claimed natural gas infrastructure can't run without electricity. It would seem obvious to me that you would have natural gas powered generators capable of sustaining the gas infrastructure.

I think this is what’s usually referred to as a “blackstart capacity”, and normally grid operators pay/ensure that certain operators maintain that capability.

The issue is that I imagine that just keeping an idle natural gas generator large enough for your pipeline + shipping terminal + whatever is not a trivial cost.

Also, however people test blackstart capacity for contractual purposes, I doubt it's a rigorous quarterly check of "can we start this up without outside support while the grid's massively overdrawn after a disaster of some kind shut us down in the first place?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com