Newswise — A year after the U.S. electricity blackout of 14 August 2003, the lights are back on and everything seems to be humming along smoothly. A joint report by U.S. and Canadian energy authorities has pinpointed the cause of last year's record outage, and those whose actions and sins of omission led to the failure have been put on notice. Yet statistical evidence and mathematical models suggest that such blackouts will continue, regardless of preventive and corrective measures.
The August 2003 blackout may have been the largest in history, zapping more total wattage and affecting more customers than any before, but "these kinds of outages are consistent with historical statistics and they'll keep happening." That's the view of John Doyle, professor of control and dynamical systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He added, "I would have said this one was overdue."
The numbers of blackouts bear out this fatalism. Extrapolating from the small outages that occur frequently, one might expect a large power grid to collapse only once in 5000 years. But between 1984 (when North American utilities began to systematically report blackouts) and 2000, utilities logged 11 outages affecting more than 4000 megawatts--making the probability of any one outage 325 times as great as mathematicians would have expected. Thus the blackout on 14 August, which cost between US $4 billion and $6 billion, was no anomaly.
Ironically, the best way to reduce the probability of the big outage may be to resign oneself to its inevitability. To the extent consumers of electricity take measures to ride through the next big one--by purchasing uninterruptible power supplies, if you happen to be a big semiconductor manufacturer, and by buying flashlights and wind-up clocks, if you're just an average Joe--utilities will be better able to cut power supplies locally at the first sign of demand outstripping supply. And if they do that, nipping trouble in the bud, the likelihood of the big cascading outage may be reduced.
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