What the 2003 Blackout Revealed About the U.S. Power Grid
On August 14, 2003, a cascading failure of the power grid plunged more than 50 million people into darkness in the northeast US and Canada. It was the most significant power outage ever in North America, with an economic impact north of ten billion dollars. Calamities like this don’t happen in a bubble, and there were many human factors, political aspects, and organizational issues that contributed to the blackout. But, this is an engineering channel, and a bilateral task force of energy experts from the US and Canada produced this in-depth 240-page report on all of the technical causes of the event that I’ll try to summarize here. Even though this is kind of an older story, and many of the tough lessons have already been learned, it’s still a nice case study to explore a few of the more complicated and nuanced aspects of operating the electric grid, essentially one of the world’s largest machines. Nearly every aspect of modern society depends on a reliable supply of electr...
