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DHS To Review Report On US Power Grid Vulnerability
CWmike writes "The US Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid. Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China's Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks. New Scientist magazine reported on this a week or so ago, and the paper has been available since the spring."
you don't stop flying just because airplanes can crash.
No, you stop flying because you don't like having to bend over to get through the TSA security theater. Sorry, random offtopic rant because I just got back from a flight....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The electric grid has already suffered multiple cascading failures from simple events that led to widespread outage. Look into the West Coast outages of 1996 and 1998 as well as the failure in the Northeast in 2003. There's a lot of interesting science going on around networks, graph theory, complexity and all. There's a really good book on teh subject, "Six Degrees" by Watts.
There were economic issues with Edison's ideas. The biggest problem was his insistence with DC. DC only worked with local power stations. AC scaled and could transmit over much farther distances with much less loss. More fault tolerant, perhaps. More scalable? Not from an economic standpoint.
The main reason AC scaled better than DC was that simple transformers could be used to boost the voltage or long-distance transmission on affordable diameter wire and back down to what could be safely handled in a home. Shifting DC, at the time, required rotary converters and was limited in voltage by the arcing and size of the commutators.
Since about the 1960s or so DC conversion for long-lines has been practical. And with modern semiconductors it's now economically competitive. With that, DC lines become practical for a makeover.
AC, unfortunately, introduces propagation timing effects that make things a bit more complex to keep running. DC doesn't have those failure modes AND it makes somewhat better use of a given amount of metal in the wire.
(A downside of DC vs AC is that a DC arc is harder to extinguish.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way