Florida Power Outage

Yesterday’s blackout in Florida provides another reminder that our economy is dependent on its electricity supply. While described as a “massive inconvenience” rather than an emergency situation, the outages did shut businesses and snarl traffic. The NERC disturbance report should be quite interesting. At a minimum, the grid is operated in a way to withstand the failure of any one element, which in this case, began with a substation fire. As a credit to the operators, the outage was restored in a matter of hours, not days. Was the failure a symptom of aging infrastructure? Were there warning signs? Could advanced technologies have prevented the outage? All good questions. Stay tuned...