JOURNAL: Flight Delays

LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) suffered its third major power failure in ten days. The last two outages (one severe causing significant flight delays) were due to birds shorting above ground powerlines. These incidents demonstrate the extreme fragility of the nation's power infrastructure -- seemingly small incidents can have a large impact on a strained infrastructure. Decades of underinvestment and growing demand have stretched the nation's power infrastructure to its limits. The closer a system is near capacity, the easier it is to disrupt. As a demonstration of the power of attacks on systems (which is the future of terrorism), these incidents are nearly perfect.

Comments

[Chris]

So realistically, how committed would the American public be to a dedicated shift to renewable energy (RE) and installation of localized photovoltaics(PV)? Isolation of power grids into locally supported intertied networks, combined with energy reduction technologies, including very intelligent design could produce some excellent results in 10 years. Almost all the techniques and technologies are in place, scaling them up by an order of magnitude would drop prices and the result could be quite a stimulation for the economy.

[John Robb]

I don't see any movement on this right now. It will take attacks on systems and a decline in oil production from the ME (either via political instability or Hubbert's analysis) to create the needed changes.