[BohDaThone]

Here's my understanding:

There are contingency plans to keep a simple accident from taking down the whole system, and virutally all the time they work. Sometimes they don't. After the 1965 and 1977 massive East Coast blackouts, there were extensive investigations, just like after a plane crash, (And, yes, there are voice recordings of the various control rooms -- the tapes of the 1977 blackout, largely caused by an operator not following the plan, are hilarious, if not somewhat tragic). Electrical grids are very complex systems, and, in a sense, it is a "miracle" -- caused by human ingenuity every day, that it hangs together 99.99% of the time. We'll see what the after action investigation shows this time. SAMPLE CONVERSATION from 1977: Operator 1: (Not in NYC) -- Yep, he's down the dumper. Operator 2: I told him to shed load -- my needles are all flat (no power going in to NYC). Operator 3: I agree -- he's down the dumper. [The operators were people on the grid operating team, in Maryland, Canada, or whereever, who were trying to feed more power to make up for the loss when lighting took out a connection point north of NYC. The plan called for NYC to blackout some parts of the city, to help out -- However, the big boss was home in Queens, and the on the spot operator was too timid to either take action or call the boss at home -- result -- no load was cut, and NYC dragged the whole system down, as the lost power couldn't be replaced fast enough -- the other suppliers finally had to cut off NYC to keep their own systems from going down, too.] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[meyer]

There are contingency plans to keep a simple accident from taking down the whole system, and virutally all the time they work. Sometimes they don't. After the 1965 and 1977 massive East Coast blackouts, there were extensive investigations, just like after a plane crash, (And, yes, there are voice recordings of the various control rooms -- the tapes of the 1977 blackout, largely caused by an operator not following the plan, are hilarious, if not somewhat tragic). Electrical grids are very complex systems, and, in a sense, it is a "miracle" -- caused by human ingenuity every day, that it hangs together 99.99% of the time. We'll see what the after action investigation shows this time. SAMPLE CONVERSATION from 1977: Operator 1: (Not in NYC) -- Yep, he's down the dumper. Operator 2: I told him to shed load -- my needles are all flat (no power going in to NYC). Operator 3: I agree -- he's down the dumper. [The operators were people on the grid operating team, in Maryland, Canada, or whereever, who were trying to feed more power to make up for the loss when lighting took out a connection point north of NYC. The plan called for NYC to blackout some parts of the city, to help out -- However, the big boss was home in Queens, and the on the spot operator was too timid to either take action or call the boss at home -- result -- no load was cut, and NYC dragged the whole system down, as the lost power couldn't be replaced fast enough -- the other suppliers finally had to cut off NYC to keep their own systems from going down, too.]

I'm pretty familiar with the contingency plans - I operate a power system myself. That is why I have seen the gradual decline from maintaining system integrity. Perhaps we need an occasional massive event like this to remind us of why we are supposed to do what is required. I suspect that when the entire sequence of events is put together, there will be some NERC violations around the grid as well as some human error. But the primary cause will most likely be a single contingency that should have been planned for but for some reason wasn't.

I've argued with bosses at a previous employer specifically to prevent this type of thing from happening in my grid on my watch, but in the days of deregulation, companies have little financial incentive to not take greater risks with the grid.