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Power Outages Coincide in LA, New York, and San Francisco
- hendzen 9y agoNorth Korean retaliation for us hacking their missile launch last week?
- Zaak 9y agoNorth Korea doesn't exactly have a large pool of technically skilled people available.
- rjbwork 9y agoThe seeming reluctance to spend lots of money on infrastructure maintenance and modernization really worries me, especially when I read these kinds of stories.
- beamatronic 9y agoIsn't this a self-correcting problem? The grid will become more robust when there is an economic need to do so.
- groby_b 9y agoAlas, the "economic need" will be immediate when the outage happens, and the damage will be substantial because it hasn't been updated yet. Possibly expensive enough to make an update unlikely. The "move fast and break things" attitude does not work for infrastructure. And no, the market will not magically correct all things. Major infrastructure problems are expensive enough that damage to them causes feedback loops.
- IIIIIIIIIIII 9y agoI think the chance that it leads to lots of quick fixes rather than a redesign for the new demands and taking a long-term view is considerable.
- johansch 9y agoOnly if there's an immediate feedback-loop. (As in a AI-run dictatorship.) In practise this kind of feedback can take up to a decade to cause actual implementation in most democracies, I would guess.
- aaronblohowiak 9y agoAnyone else read ted koppel's book?
- gdubs 9y agoYea, came here to post about it. Was a riveting read with some great interviews. It being Ted Koppel, he got access to some really high placed people. [1] 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/lights-out-by-ted-koppel.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/lights-out-b...
- aaronblohowiak 9y agoOne thing I liked about it was how he dove into how the incentives and limits on federal authority combine to make it very hard to get the power industries more tightly regulated wrt security/resilience
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- perlin 9y agoCrazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
- acchow 9y agoThat's a wild theory, but I can't help feeling this way either...
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- cylinder 9y agoThe biggest part of that economic war would be letting everyone know the grid has been compromised, not the actual outage, there's no advantage to keeping it secret.
- adventured 9y agoThere's a benefit to keeping it out of public channels if it's a warning rather than an economic war.
- drspacemonkey 9y agoI'd argue that taking out the power in three major economic centers at the same time would be the opposite of keeping it secret. But I completely agree with your reasoning.
- aaronblohowiak 9y agoCapability demonstration
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- Theodores 9y agoIt could be worse, from the Wikipedia page of notable power outages (yes there is such a page): "On 7 June (2016), about 100% of Kenya went without power for over 4 hours. The nationwide blackout was caused after a rogue monkey got into a power station and triggered a nationwide blackout. However, it is notable that only about 1 million citizens were affected by the outage as the World Bank estimates that only 23% of the country's population have access to electricity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major_power_outages I am not seeing any of these power outages being due to crazy al-qaeda terrorists or any of the other bad guys our government clowns get excitable about. It's the rogue monkeys and Enrons I fear.
- flowersoldier 9y agoLet's not forget Cybersquirrel1. #cyberwar4ever http://cybersquirrel1.com/ http://cybersquirrel1.com/
- flowersoldier 9y agoI lived in NYC during the 2001 blackout. It was the first power outage since 1977. The lights don't go out in NYC...it's a really big deal when they do.
- snowwindwaves 9y agoyou mean 2003
- flowersoldier 9y agoYou're right, it was 2003. I was only 21 when I moved there and it was all a bit of a blur.
- jrockway 9y agoMeanwhile, if you read the subway service advisories, there's always some sort of issue causing delays. I saw the notifications about the power outages today and thought absolutely nothing of it. If the entire system went offline, that's kind of a big deal. But it's one station without lighting.
- tyingq 9y agoSearch "power outages" in Google news and scroll through a few days worth. They happen all the time, everywhere. I would be very surprised if there's any correlation across events here.
- olivermarks 9y agoCould be another warning shot from someone - 2013 silicon valley substation sniper attack http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/16/technology/sniper-power-grid...
- flowersoldier 9y agoHmmmm...I'm trying to verify the outage in LA. The tweet about the power outage at LAX is from today, but the other tweet in the example is from 2/22/17. No articles about a power outage in LA are popping up on google. Something about this article feels a bit click-baity.
- xer0x 9y agoSeems like something is going on in LA: https://m.sce.com/outage/OutageMap.html https://m.sce.com/outage/OutageMap.html
- Rebelgecko 9y agoUnless a bunch of outages have cleared up, looks pretty typical to me. The biggest outage I'm seeing on that map is labelled as planned maintenance, affecting 66 people. Nothing major on the LADWP map either.
- Animats 9y agoLA's outages are widely scattered, and are being blamed on high winds.[1] Crews are fixing distribution lines and transformers. Probably unrelated. The NYC subway outages may have originated at two locations. The MTA says they lost signal power at 42nd/Grand Central, and utility power from Con Ed at 7th Avenue. Trains can run through the 7th Avenue station but the station is out of action. (The NYC subway system has three separate power systems - traction, signal, and utility.) No info on cause yet, but the problems are mostly fixed or bypassed now. SF's outage is still vague, but is being blamed on a fire at the big substation on Larkin. SFFD says they've been using large amounts of CO2 to put out smoldering insulation. SFFD also says they're caught up after getting 20 people out of stuck elevators. PG&E isn't saying much.[2] They list "cause" as "unknown". They probably can't even get into the Larkin substation yet. [1] https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/outage-center/check-outage-status https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/outage-center/check-outa... [2] https://m.pge.com/#outages https://m.pge.com/#outages
- belovedeagle 9y agoIt's impressive how the article is reporting "as of 1pm" in SF, at 12:30 PDT...
- gumby 9y agoI have a friend with a very important deliverable due today and he was not ready. I'm not saying he's responsible, but in the realm of things that make you go hmm...
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoCoincidence.
- peterwwillis 9y agoI was once informed by someone working at a major energy company that if the utility frequency dropped to a certain specific value it could cause uncontrollable systemwide cascading blackouts. I don't remember the value, but I wish I did. A large outage like SF, if it wasn't done in a controlled manner, could be grid overload. Or to prevent grid overload, utilities might need to shut down a regular on a high voltage supply line, which causes an overload somewhere else in the system, and automatic cutoff switches force a blackout. Similar events have happened over the years starting in a remote state and ending in a California blackout. Often it's due to aging infrastructure which goes down unexpectedly, which then causes a chain reaction that hits other parts of the grid. If winds took down power lines in LA, this could cause a backup which could take out SF. It's possible that either LA or New York could have caused the SF blackout, or vice versa. If one part of the grid starts to go down it puts pressure on the rest, and things start to pop. Note: I'm talking out my ass here, but it's based on news reports of previous outages.
- Animats 9y agoThe power grid does not work like that. See this tutorial, "PJM 101" for background.[1] All of today's events are in distribution, not the HV transmission network. The NYC event involves tiny loads by grid standards. PJM isn't reporting any major emergencies today. Neither is CAISO. [1] http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx
- eip 9y agoThe outage in SF shutdown the company I work at for most of the day. I work remote so was unaffected but everyone else ended up being unable to work. This was an outage of one substation for less than 12 hours. Now imagine an 8.0+ earthquake anywhere in the bay area. The whole city could be shutdown for prolonged periods. You don't put all your servers in one datacenter so why would you put all of your employees in one building? I am not sure why companies don't encourage at least 50% of their employees to be remote. Seems like basic DR planning to me.
- zachlatta 9y agoRisk.
- sandGorgon 9y agoInterestingly, in India this would have close to zero impact. Because of the rate of industrial growth combined with a massive shortfall of energy - almost everyone in urban India has private diesel-fueled electrical generators (yes - including individual homes and small startups). Plus as a cultural thing, Indians have designed power failure into their daily lives. Interestingly trivia - the most popular Nokia phone in India was the one that had a dedicated torch.
- pavement 9y agoHasn't there been increased electromagnetic activity on the surface of the sun throughout the week? http://www.solarham.net/older.htm http://www.solarham.net/older.htm Is the interference causing unexpected surges in old, unshielded equipment and infrastructure?