In the past month there has been a major american black out, a major england black out, a major sweden blackout and a major italian black out, all “the biggest in 20 years”.
is this the result of something? sunspots? cosmic radiation? attacks?
or is this like shark attacks where something that was never reported becomes front page news so it seems like its happening oddly much?
The countries named have all been drinking a lot lately.
well it seems like if it was all stemming from the same source that someone would be saying something about it, which I am not hearing.
if its a case like shark attacks last year, I’m shocked that whole areas of the world can go dark and not have it make the news normally.
The immediate causes from what I have read to date seem to have been failures in crucial transmission lines, except for England where a substation seems to have switched off incorrectly. In the case of Sweden and Italy the lines were international lines for energy import (Denmark-Sweden, Switzerland-Italy, France-Italy) which to me suggests underinvestment in power generation capacity as a proximate cause. Italy is reportedly quite dependent on net electricity imports.
There seems to be no obvious common cause for the proximity in time, though, unless the trees that shorted out lines in the US and Switzerland, respectively, somehow conspired with each other.
<personal opinion and speculation>
My theory is that a development of the last few decades in free-market economies is coming to a head lately, by coincidence within one month in one particular sector: the ascendancy of financial markets over the real economy, and of accountants over engineers.
</personal opinion and speculation>
It’s simply a case of more. More people, more appliances, more use of electricity, more interconnection of systems, more reliance on computers and automatic processes, more consolidation of systems into giant corporations.
It’s simply a case of less (or fewer). Fewer new plants allowed to be built, fewer transmission lines allowed to be built, less money being allocated to daily maintenance, more costcutting throughout companies, less overhead built into the system for tolerance of emergencies.
WAG (or maybe personal opinion) follows:
At least in North America, public utilities were compensated on a cost+ basis and had every incentive to spend loads of money on infrastructure since it increased their profits. For example, the phone company used to depreciate their phones over 40 years since it increased their capital investment and therefore their income. Now I am certainly no friend of the phone companies (hate their guts might be a bit too strong, but not much), but those suckers were built like rocks and probably on average last much more than 40 years. I am still using a few that I “rescued” from my office when our phone system was upgraded to digital and they are at least 33 years old (the age of the building) and maybe more.
Anyway, under deregulation, the incentives are all changed. If the electric companies lose customers for 24 hours every ten years and shorter periods once a year, say, that is a small price to pay for saving buckets of money on the infrastructure. They are not in business to serve the customers; they are there to maximize profits and return to shareholders. Anyone who says different is either naive or blowing smoke. Since the customer has no real choice (even if you choose your “provider” you are not getting wires to your house from a different company), there is no way out under deregulation.
I assume that it is much the same in England after a couple decades of Thatcherism. As for Sweden and Italy, I have no idea. In my experiences with phone companies in various countries, I have concluded that the best system is a highly regulated system of private utilities.
Of course, it could also be terrorists combined with a conspiracy to keep us in the dark.
I guess it must be a coincidence. but all the “they cheated us! and did stuff overly cheaply” stuff still doesn’t seem to explain why september of 2003 is when they blew all over the world.
is there a reason that all of a sudden minor things happening to power grids are causeing massive nation wide blackouts? It sounds like general shoddyness in power inferstructure but why this month in particular? early fall isn’t a season I know for haveing excessive demand on power, it doesn’t seem like there is any more corruption in general than 5 weeks ago when countrys didn’t black out.
and yes, terrorist attacks do not seem likely. not really a good attack anyway.
still it seems like the reasons why power inferstructure is crappy, but why is this happening now? and not over time? whats special about this month thats causeing 4 nation wide blackouts?
The UK (or even mainland Britain, or even England) has not had a nationwide blackout.
There was a blackout in South London that hit the headlines because it caused massive disruption in the rush hour, with a lot of commuters stuck underground on the tube. I live in North London and didn’t know anything had happened.
There have also been a few smaller localised power cuts, but nothing as dramatic as the US blackout.
Crusoe:
Heh, yes. It’s News because it happened in London, just as bad weather is always more newsworthy when it hits the South-East.
Hari Seldon: a similar situation has been happening - increasing outages - with the British sewerage system. It goes back much further than Thatcherism; arguably, in the 20th century we coasted along using extremely robust 19th century infrastructure (the result of massive public spending by Victorian governments) and now this is beginning to fail.
Hari, there is simpler explanation of why deregulation caused this. Deregulation (overall a good thing, but like most political creatures, woefully incomplete) allowed new power plants to be built more easily far from the market. Most populated areas are severely infected with NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). Low population areas were much more hospitable to new high tax base installations. As long as the transmission lines were “adequate” this looked great. However “adequate” does not equal highly reliable and the deregulation plans provided no way to make any money from transmission lines that were more than “adequate”.
European issues seem to result more from complacency due to a lot of luck in recent years combined with very old equipment and limited redundancy in spite of the high density. I can’t remember how many of my European friends quickly told me “it can’t happen in Europe” after the US outage.