Word: grid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...power lines to slacken. Trees near transmission lines are supposed to be pruned regularly - but this one hadn't been. When the line sagged too close to the tree, it faulted and tripped off-line. This is also something that happens pretty frequently on the U.S.'s massive electrical grid. But the breakdown of that line in northern Ohio began a cascade of failures that, in a little more than an hour, led to a near total power loss for more than 50 million people in the northeastern U.S. and parts of Canada. Full power wouldn't be restored...
Tracing the causes behind the 2003 blackout reveals just how unwieldy and vulnerable our electric grid has become. When that first transmission line in northern Ohio went off-line, it wiped out the redundancy and excess capacity built into the northeastern grid - and more things went wrong. First Energy, which was responsible for powering northern Ohio, should have detected the loss of that first line, but its energy management system wasn't working at the time (the company didn't know that). Higher up, the Midwest Independent System Operator's state estimator, which helps ensure reliability for several utility companies...
...until the lights went off in the First Energy control room itself that the utility realized the source and extent of the problem - but by that time the failure was out of control. As power lines shut off, electricity was channeled through an increasingly narrow part of the grid - until those lines automatically tripped off as well, to prevent damage from the unsafe levels of electrical current. The final result was midnight darkness in New York City's Times Square. "It required a number of things to go wrong on the same day," says Jeffrey Daigle, chief electrical engineer...
...possible. He calls the blackout a "once in 10 years event," and past blackouts in 1996, 1977 and 1965 bear that out. (After the 2003 event, Daigle notes, some utility operators in western Europe said that such a widespread blackout could never occur with the continent's better designed grid - but in fact a major failure hit their system just a couple months later.) "[Failure] is always possible," says Daigle. "But we have to find ways to reduce the possibility...
Game over? Not quite: Scrabulous' founding brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, just launched Wordscraper, a build-your-own game that, coincidentally, uses a grid the same size as Scrabble's. If a Facebook player happens to make a board that's identical to Scrabble's--a feat that takes less than two minutes--well, it's a free world. Hasbro officials did not comment on the new application...