Newswise — A series of U.S. Department of Energy studies of the grid, released from 1998 to 2002, all drew attention to very serious festering problems in the power system. Participants in those studies were waiting, as one told IEEE Spectrum, "for the big one."
Following widespread power outages around the United States during the summer of 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy convened POST--Post Outage Study Team--to hold hearings and report findings. Summarizing what emerged from those hearings, IEEE Spectrum reported in June 2000: "Whether the talk is of generation and transmission capacity, distribution lines or control equipment, service personnel or simulation engineers, it is the same story: too few resources to easily satisfy demands made on systems designed for radically different requirements."
The reasons why resources have been so inadequate are ultimately political, not technical. Existing technology, both old and new, could make the grid work much better if only it were used. But as long as the overall management and ownership of the grid is confused, so that nobody really knows who is responsible for and who owns what, needed investments have not been and will not be made.
On Thursday, 14 August, the chickens came home to roost. What was by most measures the biggest blackout in history swept northeastern and Great Lakes states, as well as the Canadian province of Ontario, cutting power to businesses and residences from New York City to Cleveland, Detroit, and Toronto.
IEEE Spectrum has compiled a one-stop source for background on the blackout, including an in-depth analysis of the event, descriptions of technology that could have mitigated the crisis, and reporting and expert analyses on the underlying forces that have made the U.S. grid so vulnerable. It is available at Spectrum Online, the Web site of the magazine.
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