Word: grid
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...fire in an electrical substation on Miami's western fringe. A breaker shut down the facility, as it's programmed to do; but it failed to contain the problem, as it also should have, and so in response more than a dozen other substations in South Florida's electrical grid shut down as well. That caused a cascading regional grid collapse - including the Turkey Point nuclear power plant south of Miami - as electricity demand suddenly outstripped what was being produced. Some 3 million people from South Beach to Tampa to Daytona Beach lost power. No one was hurt; but Miami...
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...
...Larry Makovich, vice president and senior policy adviser at the Cambridge Energy Research Association in Cambridge, Mass., says the initial confusion isn't so unusual. "You have to think of the U.S. electrical grid system as one of the world's most complex machines," he says. "A good analogy is the U.S. air traffic control system - like airplanes, the wires and posts themselves are only part of the story. The monitoring and control aspect needs just as much investment...
...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lax attention to maintenance issues like updated power line poles, tree-trimming and what was widely considered an outdated grid system.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...
...more serious outage that could have lasted well into the dark night. "This certainly raised a red flag about Florida's vulnerability, if not the nation's," says Twomey. "But in the end the system worked as it was supposed to." In other words, South Florida's electrical grid proved a lot more resilient than its awful traffic grid...