Lynne Kiesling
This Miami Herald article discusses the large outage earlier this week in Florida, caused by the combination of a substation fire and a switch that was supposed to trip to isolate the substation, but did not. In particular, note the comments from Colorado State University engineering professor, and emeritus GridWise Architecture Council member Wade Troxell:
Tuesday’s outage also reflects the system’s complexity, said Wade Troxell, an engineering professor at Colorado State. “The electric power grid is like the world’s most complex machine. No one person or entity controls or operates it. It operates much like a living organism.” …
Troxell, the Colorado engineer, said some countries are now building a ‘’smart grid,” which is less centralized and a greater diversity of power makers, such as solar units in homes. “That helps manage the system to prevent cascading from happening.”
That’s an important thing to notice in this outage: for an outage of this magnitude, service was restored pretty quickly, in about five hours overall.
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