A Trillion Less

To protect high voltage transmission lines from lightning strikes, flying squirrels, or errant balloons, I am employed to identify faulted conditions (usually a combination of high current and low voltage) and to trip circuit breakers to isolate the faulted equipment.

Failure to do so leads to blackouts like what occurred in Florida in 2008, where a fault wasn't detected and was allowed to drag down a half million customers.

Today I employ microprocessor controlled relays that measure such things as voltage and current 4 times a cycle, and with 60Hz power that's 240 times a second. I've been doing it for almost five years now.

If I count all the processing intervals that all the digital relays I have in my utility have processed since I started work here:

• # of intervals per minute 240
• # of intervals per hour 14,400
• # of intervals per day 864,000
• # of intervals per year 20,736,000
• # of intervals over the 5 years I've worked for SMUD 7,568,640,000
• # of digital relays at SMUD 324
• Total number of processes by all microprocessors 12,261,196,800,000

which is still a trillion less that the dollars in the national debt.