Slashdot Mirror
US/Canada Power Outage Task Force Event Timeline
bofus writes "The U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force issued the Aug. 14, 2003 Sequence of Events at noon today. While no conclusions are drawn at this point, it does paint a pretty good picture of what happened and when it happened."
A lot of people suspect that. I personally think it's the best explanation. However, even if Blaster caused the outage and every "expert" at the plant knew it, it would NEVER be published that way. That would open up a whole new can of worms in the public eye. A security and publicity nightmare. No, if Blaster caused anything that issue will be quietly swept under the rug. Maybe Microsoft will suddenly not get a contract with the power generators anymore, but that's as far as we'll ever hear of it.
To be fair, before Bloomberg made his idiotic statement (which included the words "absolutely certain") various levels of the Canadian government had blamed it on a New York power station, and then a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant fire (information they got from the US Department of Defense, as a sidenote, but nonetheless it was irresponsible to repeat it verbatim so early on). I think a big difference though is that when I hear that it's a New York power plane or a nuclear station in Penn, most Canadians don't think "Those damn Americans!", or any "us versus them" nonsense. Instead it's a power plant going down, and why the hell is this grid so fragile? I suspect for Bloomberg and crew, though, it's nothing of the sort: Not only is it not "Ontario", it's "Canada" (which gives you an idea of the perception right there), but there's a definite slant of "Well that explains it right there!". This is par for the course for the various levels of government in New York state, though: Hillary Clinton has made countless nonsensical statements about how Canada is to blame for every fault in her little fantasy world.
No. The Voltage component of Power is important when managing the health of the bulk power grid. For those that don't remember, Power is Volts Amps, and because current is directional, power is directional also. This is why people often use "power flow"...
The impedence in line in a function of the amount of energy flowing through it; as current increases, capacitive losses increase, causing the voltages at the ends to drop. This is sometimes called surge impedence loading. Impedence across a power line is constantly changing, and it is easier to wrap both variables into Power.
Next, the use of transformers makes amps by themselves meaningless. Power is near constant across a transformer, so High Amps Low Voltage can become Low Amps High Voltage. By talking about everything in the form of Power, then you can easily measure the transfer of energy between the various voltage levels of your system, which eases explaining the system.
Finally, Power is an easily understood market concept. If I run a generator at a low voltage (13kV), and produce 10 Amps, I'm generating 130 kW. I pipe that through a large number of transformers & lines, and deliver it to a load running at 23kV, and maybe tomorrow I sell it to someone at 9kV. By keeping everyone running in Power notation, we can all agree that money is exchanged for work, and the proper energy is delivered and paid for.