[60692] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: East Coast outage?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (JC Dill)
Thu Aug 14 22:58:44 2003
Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2003 17:18:36 -0700
To: <nanog@merit.edu>
From: JC Dill <nanog@vo.cnchost.com>
In-Reply-To: <016001c362a7$81eed7c0$5a0a0a0a@CARPATHIA>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
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
