Florida’s Blackout: A Warning Sign?

…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


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 this doesn’t happen.”

But 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