by Reza Tajali, P.E.

When a cascaded sequence of events led to the ultimate collapse of a highly interconnected power transmission system, the Northeastern “blackout” of 2003 demonstrated that the present utility infrastructure will not adequately support critical processes. And despite the fact that power-monitoring technology has been available to record the sequence of events down to millisecond resolution, the deployment of such technology was insufficient to construct a uniform explanation for the events.