Slashdot Mirror
Electricity Apocalypse Soon?
mindriot writes "Heise's awarded online magazine Telepolis has published a nice article (English / German) discussing the ongoing series of power blackouts (after the U.S. blackout, London, Scandinavia, and other incidents, the most recent victim being Italy). 'The blackouts bare the Achilles Heel of our "information society" ,' the article states, and sees the recent events as a precursor to a possible massive on-line blackout. As society becomes more and more dependent on information and power networks, the failure of a single wire or the interruption of a satellite uplink can become a major issue and form a great vulnerability. As the article explains, market liberalization, globalization and plain ignorance could endanger our infrastructure to a very discomforting extent." Free markets cause power blackouts?
It's been coming for a long time.
When I worked for the local "Electricity Board" here in the UK, we had some 20 linesmen almost permanently employed cutting and trimming trees which threatened the overhead lines. There were still faults but these usually only occurred in extreme weather conditions.
Nowadays I hear there are just 2 staff allocated to tree cutting in our region - and one of those is the supervising engineer......
PS. Checking an old bill, I find that I pay the same per month now as I did almost 5 years ago.