For good or bad, we in Alaska are not on a national grid. As it's staying light still till around 9 or 10:00pm, and it's cloudy and not 85 like it was last week, it would not have bothered us as much. FERC & NERC are surely going to more active now. Dee On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 16:18, JC Dill wrote:
At 02:03 PM 8/14/2003, K. Scott Bethke wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/14/power.outage/index.html
Looks like we lost the Niagara-Mohawk power grid
This looks pretty much like the same thing that happened (one failure causes cascading switch failures as the power overloads adjacent switches, taking down the whole grid) when the Pacific InterTie went down in the summer of 1996:
<http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/02/blackout.final/> <http://www.ece.umr.edu/courses/f02/ee207/spectrum/Grid/>
Am I the only one who is surprised that here we are now - over 7 years later - and the electric grid industry still hasn't found/implemented a design fix for this problem? What does the FERC and the DOE do anyway? Do they just "regulate" prices? (Yeah, they did such a good job with E! and we in California will be paying for it for many years to come.) I kinda thought the whole point of having federal departments and commissions to oversee energy was to assure the country of a *reliable* energy system...
jc