September 12, 2003

Power failure document

Slashdot | US/Canada Power Outage Task Force Event Timeline

"The U.S./Canada Power Outage Task Force issued the Aug. 14, 2003 Sequence of Events at noon today. While no conclusions are drawn at this point, it does paint a pretty good picture of what happened and when it happened."

This is an interesting study in self healing network colapse. The ineresting thing about the power rating is that the system has opereating conditions both minimum and maximum that must be met for any component to be online. When these conditions aren't met the component (transmission lines, generators, powerlines, capacitors, transformers) remove them selves from the network. In this case, it appears that the system was running at 90% and had a 11% failure (yes, this is a simplification). This led to a colapse of the network.

Posted by pqbon at September 12, 2003 3:13 PM | TrackBack