Word: florida
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Aside from the transit nightmare, the Florida blackout also revived the awful memory of August 2003, when an even larger grid failure in the Northeast left 15 million people in the dark. Improvements to America's electrical reliability system have been put in place the past five years; but Tuesday was a reminder that the country's power infrastructure is still more vulnerable than many feel it ought to be. According to research by three scholars at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the average U.S. electrical utility customer experiences 214 minutes of power outage each year - compared...
...Florida Power & Light (FPL), the giant South Florida utility that runs Turkey Point and the Miami substation where the blackout started, has yet to discover why the breaker that should have isolated the fire problem failed. "These systems are all designed to handle two contingencies," FPL President Armando Olivera told the Miami Herald. "We still don't have a full understanding of what happened." Says former Florida Public Service Commission Chairman Joe Garcia, a Democratic congressional candidate, "Obviously, they've got some explaining to do. There should have been units [compensating] in other parts of the state to make sure...
...says Makovich, is another big reason the U.S. has significantly higher rates of power loss than countries like France (only 53 minutes lost per year on average) or the Netherlands (only 29 minutes) - and why it may still have higher loss rates even after the big investments are finished. "Florida can be troublesome as a peninsular power system," he adds, with few neighboring systems to tie into and big exposure to tropical heat and storms...
...nation's fourth largest utility, came under heavy criticism after Florida's spate of hurricanes in 2005, which exposed lax attention to maintenance issues like updated power line poles, tree-trimming and what was widely considered an outdated grid system. The latter may not have allowed for sufficient redundancy, or the ability to adjust to strains and funnel power via different routes. Many South Floridians have been socked with bill increases of as much as $100 a month since then, which critics argue isn't necessary for a profitable utility with a revenue stream of 100,000 new residents...
...Florida, like the rest of the country, neglected its power infrastructure investment in the 1990s. And FPL scrutinizers like Mike Twomey, a former Florida Public Service Commission attorney and founder of Florida Utility Watch, says that despite the problems, the company still has "a very high reliability rate" compared to most U.S. utilities - as low as half the average number of lost power minutes the rest of the country experiences, says FPL. Garcia agrees: "It has a good record, among the best in the Southeast...