The McDonnell Group

Is this the face of the man who almost singlehandedly brought down the electric grid?

If you don’t recognize this colorful character with the wild hair and trademark ukulele, you are probably under 50 years old.  Tiny Tim was his stage name.  No, he was not a cyber terrorist.  His only weapon was a wildly high falsetto singing voice.  His song Tiptoe Through the Tulips made it to #17 on the charts in 1968.  Of course you remember:

http://youtu.be/skU-jBFzXl0

How did he cause a disturbance on the electric grid?  I learned the story from an old-timer with whom I worked at Con Edison in New York, who was monitoring power flows on the night shift in Systems Operations on December 17, 1969.  That night at 1:00 AM, he saw electric demand drop suddenly.  He got on the phone with colleagues from neighboring utilities, and it turned out that all over the Eastern U.S. electric demand had suddenly plunged.  “Where the heck is the outage?” they all wondered.
 
In response to the big drop in demand, dispatchers had to get busy, signaling generating units to reduce their output as quickly as possible, and putting in switching orders to get all the capacitor banks charged up, trying to balance load against all excess power that suddenly was not needed.  Luckily they stabilized the grid before any outages occurred, but I’m told it was a close call.
 
What had happened?  It was the night that Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 

Believe it or not this was a big deal at the time.  It was during the pre-Tivo pre-DVR era (when we actually had to watch TV in real time) so as soon as the show was over, hundreds of thousands of people shut out the lights and promptly went to bed at 1:00 in the morning.

This abrupt drop in electric demand created difficulties because electric supply and demand  always have to  be matched within a very narrow margin.

Continued next week: