power outages

On January 15, 2013, I presented a webcast on Energy Central titled, “Geomagnetic Disturbances and their Impacts on Power Transformers”. You can view the presentation here. The presentation generated many questions from the audience that I did not have time to address. This blog post addresses a few of those questions. This is the fifth...[read more]

On January 15, 2013, I presented a webcast titled, “Geomagnetic Disturbances and their Impacts on Power Transformers”. The presentation generated many questions from the audience that I did not have time to address. I especially want to respond to those questions pertaining to energy security, solar storms, geomagnetically induced currents, and energy risk.[read more]

Just days after the historic blackout reminded us that centralized coal is the problem, not the solution to India’s energy woes, a new era of entrepreneurs marked the beginning of a truly revolutionary effort to deliver energy access.The landmark deal that marked their arrival was lost amidst the coverage of the blackout and the...[read more]

India’s recent national outages on July 30 and 31 have received a great deal of attention in the press.  Nearly 800 million people were without power and India suffered hits to its economy and its global reputation as a result.  Years from now some definitive report will outline the details, but enough is known now to glean...[read more]

Perhaps counter-intuitively, India’s largest electrical blackout in history shows how much it has grown. Such a widespread outage means the Indian electrical system has grown large and has become thoroughly interconnected.[read more]

Alexandr Shevchenko/Shutterstock

Utilities traditionally focused on engineering the electric grid for reliability, and have well established metrics and benchmarks to gauge their performance to reliability objectives.  But today’s grid also has serious vulnerabilities highlighted in recent widespread and lengthy power outages caused by downed power lines. ...[read more]

mycola/Shutterstock

“Despite continuing efforts to make the electric power system robust, some risk remains of widespread and extended power outages due to extreme weather or acts of terrorism. One way to alleviate the most serious effects of a prolonged blackout is to find local means to secure the continued provision of critical social services upon which...[read more]

Fesus Robert/Shutterstock

The thunderstorms that tore up the Mid-Atlantic at the end of June left many thousands of people without power, sometimes for several days, during some unusually hot early summer weather. Among other things, the aftermath has been filled with price gouging complaints directed at hotels, gasoline stations, and retailers selling ice (...[read more]

 Pongphan.R / Shutterstock.com

Millions of consumers have been fuming and sweating without power for the past week. Now is the time to talk about making the push to develop market-ready distributed power storage solutions..[read more]

FotoBug11 / Shutterstock.com

We should not seek to spend more and more money to make a grid designed in 1890 fit our power needs in 2012. The solution to utility outages and the disruption that follows lies in a new paradigm modeled on invulnerability: outage nullification, rather than outage recovery.[read more]