
When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America - anarbadalov
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/blackouts-terrorism-history/
======
will_pseudonym
Ctrl+F "Enron" \- I was surprised not to see it mentioned with respect to
blackouts in the US. They had a huge role in California's blackouts in
2000-01. [0]

The story of Enron is fascinating, and there's a great documentary on it,
"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room". [1]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulation_and_subsequent_energy_crisis)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room)

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jacquesm
I've written about one of those that I got caught up in:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-world-without-
power/](https://jacquesmattheij.com/a-world-without-power/)

------
mjevans
A distributed system like a power grid needs to be __fault tolerant__. It's
impractical to protect every portion of it, to have maximum security
everywhere. Instead built in redundancy (reliability paths), monitoring (read
only, but remote sites can react), and automated responses that validate and
mitigate failure modes should be the goals.

Also, the article fails to conceptualize how little resources might be
required to cause actual disruption. A bomb might cause a lot of damage on
it's own if lobbed in to a substation or a transformer yard at a power plant,
but some common conductive cable and a javelin in a potato launcher cross my
mind as a ghetto version of the military device mentioned knocking out most of
a nations power grid.

~~~
generatorguy
The grid was built and operated on n minus 1 redundancy. Any single
transmission line or substation transformer can fail and there should not be
an outage. But if the other transformer in the same substation fails then you
are in the dark. Underinvestment has also led to a loss of redundancy: the
substation or redundant transmission path operates over 50% capacity some of
the time.

Building power lines takes a lot of land, a long time, and is expensive.
Redundancy and excess capacity is going to decrease. The system will continue
to become less reliable.

~~~
bigboomer
> Any single transmission line or substation transformer can fail and there
> should not be an outage.

That is not always correct. There are numerous radial lines where the failure
of a single transmission line caused numerous downstream substations and
customers to experience outages...also, not every substation has 2
transmission/distribution Xfmrs with a Tie...I've seen numerous substations
with only 1 Xfmr.

> Redundancy and excess capacity is going to decrease. The system will
> continue to become less reliable.

You're absolutely correct on this point...

