The fact is, the article Sam latter posted a link to has the most accurate info of all, and it is entirely articulated in this single sentence: “”It was a piece of equipment that did its job, {Doug Thornton, senior vice president of SMG, which manages the Superdome} We don’t know anything beyond that. It’s premature at this point to say what it was or what caused it.”

And that was they key take way or to use Sam’s headline: “Lesson”. The only “Lesson” to be learned from this article is not to write speculative articles making up things before the facts have been collected. Do your research, or make it clear though your grammar that you are entirely speculating and guessing.

Lest you undermine your own credibility.

Keep that in the back of your mind anytime you read an “article” on blog or anywhere else on the net.

Cheers!

said. “We don’t know anything beyond that. It’s premature at this point to say what it was or what caused it.”

asd

But the truth is this: for most (though not all) of the events put on at major stadiums, there is little real impact to a short-duration power outage.

It’s only one or two Superb Owl (remember, we can’t legally use the name of that event) type spectacles for which the PR damage is significant enough to warrant considering a full power systems retrofit.

Many (if not most) large stadiums today are publicly owned and financed (as the Superdome is) and so you’re asking the taxpayer to foot the bill for many billions of dollars of new infrastructure across at least a dozen big-event qualified stadiums nationally just to satisfy the needs of a single event holder?

That doesn’t make sense to me. Especially when that event holder is a multi-billion dollar non-profit company (yes, the NFL as a league is a non-profit, though the individual team franchises are for-profit companies).

This to me is a situation where the status quo is probably good enough. If it isn’t, then it’s likely incumbent on the NFL to pony up the dollars to boost the infrastructure of its chosen host stadium. After all, they select the stadiums 5 years in advance, so the league can definitely work on the power issue long before game day.

“There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened when the lights went out in the Superdome…”

Well now we do know quite a bit more, thanks to this excellent piece by the Times Picayune:

http://www.nola.com/superbowl/index.ssf/2013/02/super_bowl_blackout_could_be_t.html

It turns out that in December, the stadium staff bifurcated the high voltage line going in to the stadium into two medium voltage lines. Thus they had two separate electrical systems, one for each half of the building. Only one of those circuits failed. Thus the half of the lights that were on were still being fed by the grid, not by the UPS system. That’s also why the Ravens coaches (who were in a box on the dark side of the stadium) had no power and the 49ers coaches did. The UPS system did go on, but it fed only the emergency lighting system, some emergency signage and the P.A. system.

Nevertheless, I would still argue that this event will cause stadium operators to seriously consider LED stadium lighting and a full microgrid. Yes, such systems cost an enormous amount of money. But stadium operators don’t make money by buying cheap infrastructural equipment. They make money by insuring that the show will go on. Especially when it comes to high-profile stadiums that bid against eachother for premium events, the existence of a microgrid that won’t fail is a major selling point. The cost of LED lights (which allow the microgrid to be significantly downsized to more affordable levels) are trivial if it means that a stadium wins the right to host the Super Bowl.

As to my point about critical circuit design, let me try to re-articulate it because I don’t think I was able to make myself understood: the stadium electrical system designers defined an emergency event as a mass panic that would lead to people trampling each other as they fled for the exits. Thus they sized the UPS system to avoid that (giving power to the P.A. and emergency lighting system as planned). The mistake they made was in the definition of “emergency event”. In fact, the sodium lights going out was an emergency that will probably end up costing tens of millions of dollars in lawsuit compensation (I would bet that CBS will be suing them because they will lose a lot of money because of slotting guarantees for commercials; I would also bet that the case will probably be settled out of court quickly because, frankly, the Superdome officials don’t appear to have a very good case, based on what we’re learning now about engineers’ prior warnings). To the operators of an entertainment business, the definition of an emergency should include not screwing up the most significant entertainment event of the year. Thus putting the entire system on a microgrid that is affordable because it only has to handle the load of LED lights starts to be worthy of being brought up.

Mike:
I’m not an IT professional. I don’t understand what you mean by saying that “smart grid” has something to do with what happened in the Superdome. Smart grid, as its name implies, is about the electricity distribution grid. The point of failure in the superdome happened behind the meter, making discussions about what the smart grid could have done for the Superdome kind of moot.

Charles McReary:
Here’s a video of the launch of Ephesus’ first project in upstate New York. You could have also clicked on the link in the article itself.

What would be the purpose of putting all the cameras on an emergency circuit?