COMMENTARY
This is a piece of dialog from 2003 about a huge electricity blackout in the United States. I made the case at the time that this was entirely predicatable because of the lack of investment and the goal of profit more than reliability by 'investor owned' unilities
Peter Burgess

Major power outage hits New York, other large cities

Power began to flicker on late Thursday evening, hours after a major power outage struck simultaneously across dozens of cities in the eastern United States and Canada.

By 11 p.m. in New Jersey, power had been restored to all but 250,000 of the nearly 1 million customers who had been in the dark since just after 4 p.m., a spokeswoman for Public Service Energy and Gas said.

Power was being restored in Pennsylvania and Ohio, too.

In New York City, however, Con Edison backed off previous predictions that power for most of the metropolitan area would be restored by 1 a.m. Friday. The power company had predicted that residents closer to Niagara Falls in upstate New York would have to wait until 8 a.m.

The outage occurred quickly and rippled across a large area. Cities affected included New York, Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and Toronto and Ottawa, Canada.

In just three minutes, starting at 4:10 p.m., 21 power plants shut down, according to Genscape, a company that monitors the output of power plants.

It was unclear what caused the outage, although state and federal officials agreed that it was not terrorism.

One possibility was a lightning strike in the Niagara region on the U.S. side of the border, according to the Canadian Department of National Defense. A spokeswoman for the Niagara-Mohawk power grid said the cause was still unknown, but that it was not a lightning strike.

A spokesman for the Canadian prime minister's office said the cause was a fire at a Con Edison power plant in New York.

Canadian Defense Minister John McCallum blamed an outage at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, but the state's Emergency Management Agency said there had been no problems at any of the state's five nuclear plants and that all were operating normally.

The outage stopped trains, elevators and the normal flow of traffic and life. In Michigan, water supplies were affected because water is distributed through electric pumps, a governor's spokeswoman said.

By 6 p.m. the power was being restored in parts of the affected area, starting with the northern and western edges, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.

At 9:30 p.m. the Long Island Power Authority said its 1.2 million customers were beginning to see power restored, although it could take hours to get everyone back on line in the New York area.

The following letter has been submitted via the OpinionJournal article response feature. Contents of response as follows:

Name: Peter Burgess
E-mail: profitinafrica@aol.com
City/State: New York, NY USA
Date: Fri, August 15th, 2003

Subject: Re: Power Ties

The root cause of the Northeast blackout is not a failure of engineers and technology but a failure of politics and democratic process.

I worked in a company that was a supplier of transmission switchgear in the early 1970s, and have been close to technology from my university days. And there was a time when the world looked at the great engineering feats of the United States. But that is history. Political leadership and financial and corporate leadership seam to think that spin and market manipulation can solve fundamental problems of supply and demand. Welcome back to Economics 101. A well engineered grid with adequate generation and transmission capacity does not crash the way we have experienced in the last 48 hours.

But with inadequate generation or transmission capacity it is not a grid with redundancy that provides safety and reliability but merely a conduit for a chain of failure. Engineers know the difference. But politicians and profit maximizers do not. There is nothing of engineering substance that has been supported by political and 'profit' leadership in the United States in the past twenty or so years that has in any way helped to ensure that an event like this blackout could not happen.

Sad. And very dangerous.

Sincerely
Peter Burgess
ATCnet in New York
Specialists in International Development