The power blackout in Spain and Portugal wasn't a fluke...

Today’s Seattle Times has an article from the Chicago Tribune on the ST Editorial Page about the recent blackout in Spain and Portugal.  I copied the first part of the title — the closing line of the title was:  “It was the future”.

Back in 1969-1974 I was working on my thesis in the Electric Power Systems Engineering Lab.  One of the major research areas the lab was tackling was an extended study of the Northeast blackout of 1965.  And this article says “we’re still not doing it right!!”

In the 1990s a Danish physicist Per Bak proposed a theory  he called self-organized criticality — an insight that complex systems (power, cities, economies, supply chains, ...) inevitably organize themselves into fragile states vulnerable to disaster.  There is a point where the drive to efficiency needs intelligent reining in — or you lose the ability to cope with even a trivial fault that can take down a power grid, a water system, etc.

The article mentions statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his work “The Black Swan”, where he calls the world where low-probability, high-impact events dominate: “Extremistan”.

Just calculating failure probabilities is not going to cut it — a lot more work needs to be put in to fast response AND preemptive attention to hardening and redundancy.

Link to the Seattle Times reprint of the Chicago Tribune editorial.