[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

*****Well explain to us Gigawatt Guru; how is it that when the guy (or lady) at the power station
sees the amp meter rising and it's time to pick up some extra power off the grid, or, kick in
the stand-by turbine(s) (there are always stand-bys) that he failed to flip the switch... ****

Your head is up your A$$. We produce the power, the DISPATCHER sends it to where it needs to go (unless we are on load control then the dispatcher raises and lowers the load on the plant remotly). If he needs more power he calls us to increase or decrease load. We have no standby generators here.
If there is a fault on the line protective circuitry will open connections to try to isolate the fault. often this fails.

As for one third of the us loosing power at one time, look at what happened a few years ago in the western section of the US. A power plant in Las Vegas tripped off. This caused a series cascading trips that caused most of the western part of the US to loose power.
And NO, we can not send power to other areas out of our power pool as the SYNCRONIZATION may be different( unless you have a HVDC rectifier system for interconnections.)

[Iscool]

We produce the power, the DISPATCHER sends it to where it needs to go (unless we are on load control then the dispatcher raises and lowers the load on the plant remotly). If he needs more power he calls us to increase or decrease load.

And if you can't pump out enough juice for the dispatcher, he then will make the connection to get what he needs off the grid...This is correct, isn't it??? And assuming that is correct, there should have been plenty of time to make the switch and avoid the power outage... I've never seen a power plant with only one generator...And I've never seen a power plant with all generators running at the same time (except at companies that had their own small powerplants)...