Five years later some are looking back at the worst blackout in North American history and are saying that the country’s problems that made it black for 50 million people have mostly been resolved. Larger issues may lead to even bigger and more damaging outages soon however.
Excess capacity in the system is diminishing and construction and plans for new plants has slowed because costs to build and operate them have skyrocketed.
Simultaneously, electricity use is projected to increase 29 percent between 2006 to 2030. Much of this will be driven by residential growth.
The blackout occurred five years ago today and it shut off power to huge areas of the Northeast and Midwest - some for as much as four days. Rolling blackouts continued in Ontario for the next week.
Hundreds of thousands of people also lost access to tap water for days in Ohio. This led the mayor of Cleveland to accuse shop owners of gouging people who were desperate for drinking water.
Millions of New Yorkers left the city on foot because subways were shut down and office towers were dark.
A U.S.-Canadian government task force was appointed and they largely blamed the Akron, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corporation because they allowed a local power failure occurring near Cleveland to escalate to the East Coast and up into Canada.
Industry experts say changes have been made to protect against a similar outage.
The above picture shows the sun setting over the Manhattan skyline on August 14, 2003 during a major power outtage that affected a large part of the north eastern United States and Canada.
Americans demand more power to operate their flat-screen televisions, video games, surround-sound systems and appliances…there’s no denying this fact. Even in the face of this, there is broad opposition to the infrastructure that experts say we need.
Construction of coal-fired generating plants has mostly stopped and new nuclear plants are years away. Higher efficiency will only do so much.
Industry experts say it is easy for those in Washington and across the country to forget what happened five years ago. This is a mistake because it will occur again on a grander scale if nothing is done.
The U.S. had its own warning five years ago.
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