Blackout Threat Unmitigated a Decade After the Northeast Went Dark

Power system experts who study blackouts say that they see a similar pattern in most cascading outages. They cite recent notables, such as  Arizona, California and Mexico’s Baja California in 2011, Western Europe in 2006, Brazil in 2009, and twice in India last year.  The commonality is evidence to the experts that cascading failures are a dangerous facet of modern power grids that remains all but impossible to predict or prevent. “Large blackouts are likely to recur at regular intervals,” says Ian Dobson, a cascading failures expert and electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin.

Blackout Threat Unmitigated a Decade After the Northeast Went Dark