© Stephanie Carter/Illustration Works/Corbis
What happened in India is still sketchy. India's power minister cited excess demand on the system, while a former electricity regulator told the New York Times that the problem was political interference in the operation of the grid.
What happened in India is still sketchy. India's power minister cited excess demand on the system, while a former electricity regulator told the New York Times that the problem was political interference in the operation of the grid.
The blackout that blanketed India earlier this week was one of the largest of its kind in history. Some 670 million people went without power in an area stretching across northern India.
Details are still sketchy, but the incident has raised questions about whether a similar event could happen in the United States.
The U.S. electrical grid is pretty robust. Nobody expects power to go out on a regular basis. But there are still situations that can cause major failures, and the interconnected nature of the electrical grid means a problem in one place can be far-reaching.
"Our grid is just one big machine," said Steven Greenlee, a spokesman for the California Independent System Operator Corporation, which manages power distribution across most of the state.
The total amount of energy on a network is constant, and the voltage and current are related. They also have to be kept at certain levels. Another wrinkle in alternating current systems is that generators all have to run in sync with each other.
All this means that the loads on the equipment transmitting power have to be balanced. Too much demand in one area pulls more current through the system and drops the voltage. But running more current has another effect: Equipment heats up. The power lines, substations and everything else that make up the grid are all designed to operate up to a certain temperature.
