Federal report on last years massive Southwestern blackout released

[bananas]

There's lots of news articles about it, here's one:

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/01/local/la-me-blackout-20120502

Report on massive Southwestern blackout faults human element

Energy agencies call for sweeping changes in providers' information-sharing to prevent future incidents like September's outage that left 2.7 million without power.

May 01, 2012|By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

SAN DIEGO — Poor planning, failure to share critical information and a series of human errors led to the massive blackout in September that plunged a swath of Southern California, Arizona and Baja California into darkness, according to a report issued Tuesday by two energy agencies.

The 150-page report, produced after an eight-month study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp., portrays the complex electrical grid as vulnerable to a single small-sized failure — in this case, a transmission line in Arizona that went down and triggered a "cascading and uncontrolled" blackout that left 2.7 million customers in the dark.

The report calls for sweeping improvement in how utility companies, regulators and coordinating agencies share real-time information and how they plan for emergencies so that a "single point of failure" cannot result in massive failure.

"There is no limit to how much improvement in communication and coordination should be made," Dave Nevius, senior vice president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., said at a Washington news conference.

<snip>

[kristopher]

1. Distributed generation largely fixes the problem of wide-scale power failures

Thanks for the post. Every large blackout is a result of human failure to manage a large complex system.
See the 1965 and 2003 Northeastern Blackouts.