NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout

will writes "The North American Electric Reliability Council has released four documents concerning the August 14th power outage power outage in the North East. The blackout investigation homepage lists all NERC's documents relating to this event. Press coverage is at The Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News. The take home message: FirstEnergy did it. The are, of course, denying it." The report is also available at reports.energy.gov. Reader stinkydog writes "According to Yahoo News part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

Comments

Now we know...

[zeux]

I think it's really hard to perform that kind of investigation and looking at the results I think they did a good job making the results widely available. Anyway, it's still unacceptable that such things happens in the most powerful country in the world.

Flame me if you want but France is known to have one of the best electrical system in the world. The government owns it and some laws do protect the costumer. It allows France to export a lot of power to other European countries thus making a lot of money from it and playing a big role in Europ energy.

I think France made good choices for power:
- nuclear (or nuculear whatever). Much cheaper and cleaner than oil. France is very strong on nuclear technology and do export its knowledge to other countries. To date we didn't have any major incident and I think it's pretty secure as long as enough money is spent.
- public service. There is a law in France stating that every citizen, wherever he lives, as the right to have access to electricity for free. Of course we pay bills but if you live in the country the government MUST bring you access to electricity even if you live far from everything. It's a law so sometimes it's not really followed but most of the time the government sticks to it.

When I arrived in the USA I was shocked by the poor quality of your electric system. Many outages, expensive bills and thousand of wires in the sky ! I think that it's a very advanced country with an outdated power system. I've seen on the TV recently that many companies as starting to produce their own power. I really think it's pretty bad since the installations needed are dangerous, potentially explosive and very expensive.

What happened on August the 14th also suggests that a country really depends on its energy distribution system and that it could be, in the near future, target for terrorists.

Re:Now we know...

[(startx)]

It's all about early adopter. We invested huge amounts of money to wire up the whole country before nuclear was an option, and there's no way we can spend that much again to rip it all out and replace it with newer/better/safer alternatives. Same thing with our telephone system, cable tv, internet, etc. We're trying to squeeze every last ounce of usefulness out of the existing system, while so-called "3rd world" countries are getting the latest and greatest tech because they have no prior investments.

You got it in reverse

[just fiddling around]

FYI, US governement have been engaged in a nice deregulation wave for 10 years. That deregulation has been poorly tought out, because of a "The Market Cures All" mindset. What did the deregulation bring? Gigantic power outages and California-style power crunches.

The deregulated US power grid is overstressed, has little or no margin for extra demand, and has outdated and poorly maintained emergency systems. And thanks to Enron and friends, artificial scarceness has been created to crank up prices.

In a nutshell, you pay more and get less(safety, avaliability, quality) than when the market was regulated. Ain't The Market grand?

Electric power is a basic necessity(in our post-industrial world), and should be managed by the state, just like water works and law enforcement.

Re:You got it in reverse

[Vainglorious Coward]

Electric power is a basic necessity...

Absolutely, and it's interesting to note that planned US spending on electrical infrastructure to 2005 is 71 cents per American per year. Meanwhile, the US gov. plans to spend $255 per citizen in Iraq! (Health spending plans are also illuminating : $38 per capita on hospitals in Iraq versus $3.30 in the US).

If I was a US citizen, I would be furious about this failure to invest my tax dollars in my own country's infrastructure.

Who cares about the OS or the provider?

[swordgeek]

First of all, let's be perfectly clear on this.

Any carefully managed OS (inluding Windows) can be stable and predictable.

Any badly managed OS (including Unix) WILL be unstable and unpredictable.

Got it? Good.

Now as far as pointing fingers at the guilty parties, understand that the infrastructure is really at fault far more than any individual company. Look at this from a broader perspective: One company was able to take down how wide of an area? The whole system is too fragile, too interdependent, and maintained too close to full capacity. Worse, there's absolutely no incentive for a company to maintain a large reserve capacity, since it costs a lot, and brings in no extra income.

But of course when it happens the next time (and make no mistake--it will), we'll have another commission to once again figure out the single company that broke a rotten and unstable infrastructure, instead of fixing the root problem.

It's deregulation

[laird]

"It's all about early adopter. We invested huge amounts of money to wire up the whole country before nuclear was an option, and there's no way we can spend that much again to rip it all out and replace it with newer/better/safer alternatives. Same thing with our telephone system, cable tv, internet, etc. We're trying to squeeze every last ounce of usefulness out of the existing system, while so-called "3rd world" countries are getting the latest and greatest tech because they have no prior investments."

I disagree completely -- until the US deregulated, we had an extremely reliable power system that was able to expand dramatically for many decades to keep up with demand while keeping prices low. Then some lunatics convinced enough people that it was a good idea to make power companies unregulated monopolies (i.e. they were no longer required to invest in maintenance and infrastructure, or to maintain excess capacity to cover emergencies or power spikes, and removed the cap on profit margin), after which the power companies did what you'd expect -- raised rates like crazy while slashing spending on infrastructure maintenance and expansion. The result is that a bunch of investors and CEO's made tons of money while the capacity and quality of service that they provided suffered. The problem was not just the big outage -- the number of instabilities in the power grid that didn't result in actual outages has been increasing dramatiaclly for decades.

See http://www.ncpa.org/iss/ene/2003/pd081503a.html for some more info.

Who do I blame? The politicians who allowed themselves to be bought off (or conned) by the power companies, to the detriment of the entire country.