East Coast outage?

Fri Aug 15 00:18:36 UTC 2003

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