U.S. Electricity Blackouts Skyrocketing
August 10th, 2010Via: CNN:
Throughout New York City, about 52,000 of ConEd’s 3.2 million customers lost power during the heat wave. Triple-digit temperatures forced residents like 77 year-old Rui Zhi Chen, to seek shelter at one of the city’s 400 emergency cooling centers. “It felt like an oven in my home and on the street,” Chen said.
Should Americans view these kinds of scenarios as extraordinary circumstances — or a warning sign of a darker future?
Experts on the nation’s electricity system point to a frighteningly steep increase in non-disaster-related outages affecting at least 50,000 consumers.
During the past two decades, such blackouts have increased 124 percent — up from 41 blackouts between 1991 and 1995, to 92 between 2001 and 2005, according to research at the University of Minnesota.
In the most recently analyzed data available, utilities reported 36 such outages in 2006 alone.
“It’s hard to imagine how anyone could believe that — in the United States — we should learn to cope with blackouts,” said University of Minnesota Professor Massoud Amin, a leading expert on the U.S. electricity grid.
This ties back to your earlier post, which i HIGHLY recommend everyone go and read – http://www.theenergyreport.com/pub/na/7005 – where Williams talks about the following: “How will a small company get its goods to people? There might be blackouts. Who’s going to get the fuel to the power plants?” Perhaps not completely since we’re still getting fuel, but he’s mentioning it, so thought it was relevant.