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Last Week's Florida Blackout Reveals Fragile Grid

Once again last week the utility industry's version of Jimmy McNulty (see HBO's The Wire) disabled two separate protection devices while diagnosing a bad switch at a south Florida substation causing a fault that propagated through the grid. In the process it cut out power to a nuclear power plant causing it to shut down (And why is it nuclear power plant's can't run on the power they generate?) along with power for 3 million people from Miami to Tampa. While most users got their power back in a few hours this incident leads me to ask: How reliable is our power? and What if this had happened in August when Florida's air conditioners are working full out?

No one wants a power plant, gas pipeline or transmission line in their back yard but everyone wants to be cool in the summer, warm in the winter and have the outside of their house lit up like Fremont street in Vegas so burglars can't sneak in. Here in New York there's a proposed power line along the Delaware river the rafting and canoeing industry has successfully blocked for years, a gas pipeline across the Hudson that some say is just too dangerous for the suburbs and a power line across Long Island Sound that Connecticut doesn't want turned on because it would let Long Island buy power from Canada and therefore raise the prices in Connecticut.

As a result nothing gets built and our infrastructure is, as shown by the northeast blackout in '03, fraying at the edges. Acording to a Carnage-Mellon study reported in Time the average US customer looses their power for 214 minutes per year. That compares with 53 minutes in France and just 7 minutes in Japan.

Clearly we as a nation need to start investing in our transmission system. Soon generation will also be an issue and we'll have to balance the known, predictable costs of mining coal by blowing the tops of mountains into the valleys below and filling the air with everything from mercury to CO2 with the unknowns of Nuclear power and alternative sources.

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