How to prevent future blackouts

[QuietStorm]

Deep in upstate New York, near Adirondack National Park, stands a metal building that represents the future of electric power transmission -- and one of America's best hopes of preventing a repeat of the blackout of '03.

Inside this two-story switching station, thousands of high-tech silicon valves coolly cajole hundreds of electricity streams into a workable flow that serves the region's homes and businesses. It's like a hugely capable traffic cop that keeps gridlock at bay.

Trouble is, few electricity switching stations are as modern as this one. Most of them - and the power-cable networks they control - are more Stone Age than Silicon Valley.

Yet after this weekend's outages, that may start to change. As residents from Toronto to Cleveland to New York get their air conditioners back to blasting, there's big pressure to re-engineer the region's transmission network.

But's there's still division over how best to do it.

read more...
http://www.csmonitor.com/earlyed/early_usa0815a.htm

[Champion Jack]

1. How to prevent future blackouts?

How about a nationwide tax credit or rebate for using sustainable energy systems? PV wind what ever

[pfitz59]

2. Decentralize power.......

Home-based solar panels. Shorter transmission lines. Community owned generating plants. Regulated maintenance schedules. The answers are with us; however, they'll never come to life under this admin.

[Dirk39]

3. Stop deregulation and privatisation...?

I live in Germany, and so far, we have the saftest system in Europe. But even our officials admit, that about 20 years from now, our infrastructure might be as rotten as in the USA. We have a kind of law about how much energy is needed all the time as a backup. If one system in Northgermany might fail, immediately systems from other parts of germany or even in Spain or France would jump in without one second of interruption. But the more the systems get privatised the less backup power will be there. These companys want to make profit, and they don't invest if they don't see profit, so why pay for millions of kilowatt as a backup system if it isn't necessary. At least most of the times...
It's just so ridiculous. In the USA, you never had an infrastructure like the ones we have in Europe - some parts of the USA still look as if some cowboys would just have tried to temporarily give electricity to the wild west. In Germany you wouldn't find any overland wires at all. But they even admit that the god created gift of neoliberalism and "globalisation" will just put as where the USA is right now. What stupid kind of nonsense. We have the best techniques ever, we have the most evolved high-tech ever, but it's caught in a stupid neanderthal economic system that is putting us back into stone age and they call it "modernasation".
Hello from Germany,
Dirk