Word: blackouts
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Once at sea, the activists - who include an 81-year old nun, a Greek leftist parliamentarian and the sister-in law of ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair - braved a squall and a bizarre communications blackout, which they say was caused by lsraeli electronic jamming, and which thwarted a rendezvous in heaving seas between peace activists and a ship of journalists...
...number of things to go wrong on the same day," says Jeffrey Daigle, chief electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "Any one of those things happens on a fairly routine basis, but to create that sequence was a perfect storm." (Hear Daigle talk about the 2003 blackout on this week's Greencast...
Daigle is a member of the U.S.-Canada Power Outage Task Force, which investigated the causes behind the blackout, and worked on ways to prevent another one - but that may not be possible. He calls the blackout a "once in 10 years event," and past blackouts in 1996, 1977 and 1965 bear that out. (After the 2003 event, Daigle notes, some utility operators in western Europe said that such a widespread blackout could never occur with the continent's better designed grid - but in fact a major failure hit their system just a couple months later.) "[Failure] is always possible...
...lesson from the 2003 blackout is that utilities needed more oversight. Before the blackout, Daigle notes, regulations on utility reliability depended on little more than "peer pressure." That's been beefed up in the years since, with tougher audits of utility systems and steeper fines for failures. But more importantly, we need to enhance what Daigle calls "situational awareness," or, in other words, the intelligence of the grid. The system failed in 2003 not so much because of unkempt trees and a few sagging lines, but because no one knew what was going on until it was too late. Utilities...
...notes that last year's federal energy act contained authorization for smart grid investment - but no money has been appropriated yet. That needs to change. As electricity demand increases in the U.S. and we become ever more networked, the consequences of a major power loss worsen as well. The blackout of 2003 cost some $6 billion, but it could have been far more costly. A smarter grid can also help improve energy efficiency - if customers and utilities know exactly how much electricity they are using in real-time, they should be able to cut waste. Five years after the blackout...