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While the big fat New York Times is apparently unable to provide answers to how power outages happen and what is the nature of an electricity grid, this blogger came up with explanations that to my laymans' eye sound informative and reasonable.

Another blogger analyzed usage graphs from the Web and drew his preliminary conclusions here.

Just unsubstantiated mumbo jumbo. There's a guy in canada who blogged the cia did the world trade center crashes because you can't use cell phones from airplanes and it sounded just as reasonable.

And if it *WAS* terrorism then hooo-friggen-rah for the media that finally got a clue. If it was terrorism then the terrorists got NOTHING out of this. Just a few million people who shrugged it off as a naturall hapenstance. No message got out, nobody got scared, nobody got angry. The sick relationship between the terrorist and the press, broken.

BUMP

Terrorism, or sabotage, come in many forms. Not saying this is muslim connected or not. Just think "WORM" "WINDOWS". There's plenty of nasty-ass people out there to consider....JMHO.

FMCDH

One scenario I've seen suggested is that some power plants aren't capable of safely dealing with rapidly-varying load conditions except via emergency shutdown. If a nuclear plant is, at a given time, supporting two cities and one of them suddenly sees a massive power draw from outside, the link between the plant and the city might open to avoid excessive drain on the nuclear plant. Unfortunately, the plant might not be able to accommodate an instantaneous 50% load reduction without an emergency shutdown (the nuclear pile is going to produce a certain amount of heat per second until its output can be 'ramped down', and that heat has to go someplace).

If this is indeed the operative scenario, perhaps what's needed is to construct some thermal reservoirs near the plants which contain a fair amount of water along with some large resistive heating elements. In case part of the plant's load needs to be disconnected, divert energy into the reservoir. Since the water wouldn't generally be circulating, there wouldn't be any need for expensive purified water; rainwater would probably suffice for baseline usage, and tap water for replenishment.

Another blogger analyzed usage graphs from the Web and drew his preliminary conclusions here.

That's outrageous. We can't go around letting people informing themselves and reaching conclusions while bypassing the New York Times.

Did you see the latest, which purports to explain it, except this doesn't make sense either?

Blackout Pinned on Three Ohio Failures (claim they found "real" cause)

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/965237/posts

WASHINGTON (AP)--The failure of three transmission lines in northern Ohio was the likely trigger of the nation's biggest power blackout, a leading investigator said Saturday.

Experts are working to understand why the disruption spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest and into Canada, and was not contained.

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3 transmission lines simultaneously!!!