Re: East Coast outage?

["W.D. McKinney" <dee () akwireless net>]

For good or bad, we in Alaska are not on a national grid. As it's
staying light still till around 9 or 10:00pm, and it's cloudy and not 85
like it was last week, it would not have bothered us as much.

FERC & NERC are surely going to more active now.

Dee

On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 16:18, JC Dill wrote:
> At 02:03 PM 8/14/2003, K. Scott Bethke wrote:
>
> > http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/14/power.outage/index.html
> >
> > Looks like we lost the Niagara-Mohawk power grid
>
> This looks pretty much like the same thing that happened (one failure 
> causes cascading switch failures as the power overloads adjacent switches, 
> taking down the whole grid) when the Pacific InterTie went down in the 
> summer of 1996:
>
> <http://www.cnn.com/US/9607/02/blackout.final/>
> <http://www.ece.umr.edu/courses/f02/ee207/spectrum/Grid/>
>
> Am I the only one who is surprised that here we are now - over 7 years 
> later - and the electric grid industry still hasn't found/implemented a 
> design fix for this problem?  What does the FERC and the DOE do anyway?  Do 
> they just "regulate" prices?  (Yeah, they did such a good job with E! and 
> we in California will be paying for it for many years to come.)  I kinda 
> thought the whole point of having federal departments and commissions to 
> oversee energy was to assure the country of a *reliable* energy system...
>
> jc