Despite concerns, there were very few reports of looting or other blackout-inspired crime. In New York City, the police department, out in full force, actually recorded about fewer arrests than average. In some places, citizens even took it upon themselves to mitigate the effects of the outage, by assisting elderly neighbors or helping to direct traffic in the absence of working traffic lights.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The European discovery of Alaska came in , when a Russian expedition led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering sighted the Alaskan mainland.
Japan formally surrendered in writing two weeks later, on September 2, On August 14, , St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson throws the first no-hitter of his storied career. Gibson overcame numerous childhood ailments—including rickets, asthma and a heart President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs into law the Social Security Act on August 14, Press photographers snapped pictures as FDR, flanked by ranking members of Congress, signed into law the historic act, which guaranteed an income for the unemployed and retirees.
It was sound financial advice that McCartney may have come to regret giving New York residents congregated outside during the second day of the massive blackout. Several hundred people wait for buses in New York on August 15, Most train service was knocked out after the power outage, and the commuters shown here, many of whom spent the night in the city, were boarding buses that would take them to a connection with a diesel-powered train outside the city.
In the Soho neighborhood, a restaurant cook and his customers make the best of the massive power outage by setting up a barbecue on the street. We want to hear what you think about this article.
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Skip to content. Sign in My Account Subscribe. The Atlantic Crossword. The Print Edition. Latest Issue Past Issues. Until recently, there was no one place to view information from across the grid. McClelland says FERC is working with industry and other government agencies to pull data into a prototype coast-to-coast real-time monitoring system at its Washington, D.
Gathering the data is only the beginning. The holy grail is a smart grid capable of monitoring and repairing itself, similar to the way air traffic control systems are used to coordinate aircraft routes. Mansoor says that dream is still a good 20 years away because it depends on better data, a reliable communications network and computer programs capable of making decisions based on the data.
One promising tool for collecting better data is called a phasor measurement unit PMU , which measures voltage and current on power lines and uses GPS global positioning system connections to time-stamp its data down to the microsecond. That level of resolution across a network of PMUs could reveal an important electrical property of power lines called phase , which tells whether power generators are rotating in sync with respect to one another, Hines says.
When a blackout approaches, that difference, called the phase, is believed to grow rapidly. Another challenge for keeping the grid balanced is the growing demand for electricity—increasing load, in other words—as consumers buy more computers, air conditioners and rechargeable handhelds. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration projects a load growth of 1. The main obstacle to building new transmission lines is siting, better known as the "not in my backyard" effect: Nobody wants power lines near them.
One potential way of getting around that is so-called smart metering—hourly readouts of electricity usage that allow utilities to offer price discounts on power during off-peak times. Pilot smart-metering programs are under way in Idaho, California and other states. Mansoor notes that advanced metering tools might become useful given the potential for increasingly intermittent power sources. Wind power, for example, stops and starts with the breeze, which means system operators would have to adjust the load to compensate.
Although wind energy accounts for An alternative to power lines in cities and other urban areas is power cables based on high-temperature superconductor HTS technology. When chilled to — degrees Fahrenheit 77 kelvins, or — degrees Celsius the composite material yttrium barium copper oxide begins to carry a current with almost zero resistance. HTS power cables can therefore be made smaller than the copper kind. In a concept called the secure supergrid, would bolster existing transmission lines and would resist the stresses that can cause blackouts, because the lines shut down when the current spikes reflecting the "almost" in an HTS cable's "almost zero resistance".
Some researchers have proposed combining an HTS supergrid with a coast-to-coast hydrogen pipeline to suppy fuel cells for cars and homes. None of these tools would guarantee the extinction of large blackouts.
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