switchgear

You mean the seawall that was protecting the switchgear for the backup diesel generators?

Also, the switchgear has to be such that portable generators can't be brought in and hooked up.

For specialized electricians who do things like work on generators and do switchgear testing, $1,000 only covers around 5 hours.

You can usually get portable switchgear, and it was mainly pumps, which should be fairly tolerant even with an emergency cabling job.

Plus you have all the fixed costs of installation, inspection, switchgear, etc.

Yes, that would work, as long as you also protected the switchgear and the power cabling leading to the pumps that serve the reactor.

Can you imagine some guy speci'ng switchgear and transmission lines for a coal or gas plant that can't handle the plant running full tilt?

If your EDG is on the roof but the fuel pumps and electrical switchgear is in the basement, what will happen during a flood?

It was GE Was GE responsible for the siting of the backup diesel generators and switchgear behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami?

The wye ground is beneficial even if there are no three phase loads, because the line-ground voltage is 1/sqrt(3) and you can use cheaper switchgear.

I mean, if you can't even pay for more real estate for just switchgear, you're not going to be able to pay for more real estate for generating stations.

I think they'll never be great at switchgear rooms but apartment outlet circuitry?

Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.

> "the fact that the backup diesel generators and the switchgear for them were sited behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami" Sure, but who's responsible for that?

Switchgear too; Western Electric gear was very expensive; competitors such as Nortel [2] and Digital Switch Corp (later DSC) [3] flourished for a while then crashed in 2001 as fiber and competition made long distance so cheap.