Had a power outage last night for 2 hours, of course the Internet connection went down for over 3 hours. Luckily it wasn’t too hot, and have no idea what happened at 12:20 AM to have brought this on. ~ Lo
By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Five years ago this month, a devastating blackout rippled through the Northeastern United States plunging more than 50 million people into darkness for nearly three days and leaving a gaping $10 billion hole in the nation’s economy.
The power outage, however, wasn’t an isolated incident.
[…]
The US power grid – three interconnected grids made up of 3,500 utilities serving 283 million people – still hangs together by a thread, and its dilapidated state is perhaps one of the greatest threats to homeland security, according to Bruce deGrazia, the president of Global Homeland Security Advisors and a former assistant deputy undersecretary for the Department of Defense, who spoke at an electricity industry conference in Shepherdstown, Va.
[…]
In an article in the May 7, 2008 issue of Energy Bulletin, Gail E. Tverberg wrote “in the years ahead, we in the United States will have more and more problems with our electric grid. This is likely to result in electrical outages of greater and greater durations.”
“Quite a few people believe that if there is a decline in oil production, we can make up much of the difference by increasing our use of electricity–more nuclear, wind, solar voltaic, geothermal or even coal. The problem with this model is that it assumes that our electric grid will be working well enough for this to happen. It seems to me that there is substantial doubt that this will be the case.
…continued and map
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Dandelion Salad 
Jason Leopold did an amazing job with this story. Thank you for bringing it to our attention. I totally forgot about that blackout
It is indeed a threat. There are a lot of energy management/demand response companies that help prevent brownouts/blackouts through automated monitoring systems.
DK, yes, you were lucky to have a back system. Most people didn’t, I’m sure.
This is probably one of our biggest threats and no one is talking about it.
I had a great time during the black-out with the exception that some of our surrounding suburbs in Detroit were on lock down so I could not go check on my relatives there and had to wait for cell-phone service to come back on. But I was lucky back then to be living on a back-up grid for the Med Center and a gov. research university. Next black-out I won’t be so lucky.