Task Force Finds Blackout Was Preventable

Shakrai writes "In what will probably be the last we hear of this subject CNN is carrying a story that states what we already suspected: the August blackout was preventable. One of the more interesting observations from this article is that this task force will remain active for the next year to push for their changes and improvements to be adopted. Does anyone think any change will come of this? If you lived in the Northeast US or Canada what were your memories of the August Blackout?" The full report is available at reports.energy.gov.

Comments

"The world's greatest machine"

[bonnyman]

Slashdot had a great story on the blackout last year:

Guinnessy writes "The latest issues of the Industrial Physicist suggests that 'the vast system of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution that covers the United States and Canada is essentially a single machine -- by many measures, the world's biggest machine.' The article says that because deregulation ignored the physics of the machine, we have blackouts, a fact the industry warned regulators about in 1998. It has some nice hard science data for those interested in why we're going to get some more blackouts in the future unless Congress gets its act together." I work with power utilities -- this is the best single explanation I've seen of the underlying problems of transmission management and regulation in the U.S.

Memories?

[Cytlid]

If you lived in the Northeast US or Canada what were your memories of the August Blackout?

It was dark and there were no computers.

Re:Memories?

[re-Verse]

I live in Toronto, Canada. The largest city in Canada, and it was completely peaceful. In fact, people with generators threw parties down town, there were a few djs spinning outside of a record shop, hooked up to a generator... Japanese food and wood oven cooked stuff was everywhere, and there was a real sense of community. Neighborhoods came alive with communal barbeques, and you could see the milky way so clearly at night. There was a real sense of beauty to everything. I brought water to the elderly women on the floor of the highrise i was in, and when the power came back, they brought me endless dishes of delicious indian food. Its one of my fondest memories of this city. So much that I've heard more than a few people wish we could have a "blackout night" once a month in the nicer summer months.. to erase our technology and embrace human culture, and nature, if only for a little while. I didn't even really think about my computer while the power was out, and I usually live on it. I know there was a lot of damage and harm from all of it, but a lot of us experienced something beautiful.

Economist Article

[Infernon]

The Economist recently had a great article on this particular subject.
It was mainly in favor of decentralization and mimicking the internet in terms of distributing power to remote locations. Smaller more 'frequent' stations placed around the country would allow power to be routed 'around' a dead area should the surrounding stations lose contact with it-- I suppose that explaining that here was sort of moot:)
Anyway, I think that they've adopted this method in Denmark and it's been working excellently despite the initial skepticism of critics.

Re:Economist Article

[HalfStarted]

In addition to the point made about "not in my back yard" there are economies of scale at work with power generation that are not relevant to the Internet. In general with current power production technologies there are substantial savings in scaling up plants to larger sizes to generate significant operational cost savings. There is also the issue that unless you are using a consumable fuel source (fossil or nuclear) you can't just put a power plant were ever you want. Not all locations are suitable for solar, wind or hydro power stations and even these "green" power production technologies have significant environmental impacts.

I was working, at compusa

[dcstimm]

I was working at compusa, then we heard a weird noise and all the lights went out. I remember tring to get everyone out of the store, and waiting up front near the registers waiting for the lights to come back up. In the mean while we plugged a radio into the UPS that we had powering the registers. So we were still able to ring people out and buy water and candy. :) At the time I took the bus to work and they canceled all the buses, so I had to get a ride home from this hot girl that worked with me, we ended up getting married, because we bonded on that day. I would say it was a good day for me.

Re:I was working, at compusa

[Anonymous Coward]

Hot girl that worked with you... at compusa...

riiiiiigggggghhhhhhtttt :)

Things do go wrong

[JaxWeb]

Things do go wrong, and when things go wrong, they normally are preventable. People accept this, and understand it might happen. This is, for example, why there is so much opposition to Nuclear Power.

However, according to the article, there were rules in place to stop this happened, which were not followed (Quote: "Many reliability rules were ignored during the outages, the task force said.").

Also, it says:

"As it did in its interim report, the task force largely blamed FirstEnergy Corp., [...] faulting the company's lack of communication, faulty equipment and inadequate training"

These two points draw the line on acceptable accidents. This not only should have been prevented, but also it is due to neglect of rules and short-sightedness which caused it to happen.

Blackout of '03 @ Toronto, in Pictures

[Amadaeus]

"If you lived in the Northeast US or Canada what were your memories of the August Blackout?"

Well, a few days after the blackout I made a photo-documentary of the 'mayhem' that was downtown Toronto during the great blackout of '03.

The documentary is located here

Always More Power... YOU BETCHA!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I take it you live on a commune, and run your computer on hampster and wind power? Fire up your heater with methane from your farm animal's shit, do you? Peddle to work on a bike? Use newspaper for toilet paper just to get maximum useage?

Seriously, as a society we consume the amount of electricity we do because we demand the standard of living that we do. When you are ready to give up your computer / TV / radio / stereo / CD player / car / iPod (yes, your iPod will have to go!), then go ahead and harp all you want about energy consumption. Untill then...