Power cuts: Risks and alternatives to the current transmission system

✍ Scribed by Don C Smith

• Book ID: 104438775
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 189 KB
• Volume: 4
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1471-0846
• DOI: 10.1016/s1471-0846(04)00039-3

✦ Synopsis

Events of the last several months have pointed more clearly than ever before to the fragile nature of the European and North American electricity transmission systems. Despite the conven-tional wisdom about the ability of continental power grids to handle overloads, Herve Laffaye, head of French grid operator RTE, perhaps put it best explaining to the Deutsche Press-Agentur news service, "A grid spreads the risk, but a serious fault pulls everyone down at the same time." Anyone with a doubt should talk to businesses in New York and Toronto forced to shut down in mid-August, residents in most Georgian cities who lacked water on August 18th because of a power cut, commuters stuck on the Underground in London in late August, passengers on trains that ground to a halt in Denmark and Sweden in mid-September, and Italian citizens who awoke with no power on the last Sunday in September. All told, more than 125 million people experienced first-hand the vagaries of the current power transmission systems.