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A power outage is the loss of the electricity supply to an area. Transmission lines in Lund, Sweden Electric power, often known as power or electricity, involves the production and delivery of electrical energy in sufficient quantities to operate domestic appliances, office equipment, industrial machinery and provide sufficient energy for both domestic and commercial lighting, heating, cooking and industrial processes. ...
The reasons for a power failure can for instance be a defect in a power station, damage to a power line or other part of the distribution system, a short circuit, or the overloading of electricity mains. Oil power plant in Iraq Coal power plant in China A power station or power plant is a facility for the generation of electric power. ...
For alternate meanings see Short circuit (disambiguation) A short circuit (sometimes known as simply a short) is a fault whereby electricity moves through a circuit in an unintended path, usually due to a connection forming where none was expected. ...
A power outage may be referred to as a blackout if power is lost completely, or as a brownout if some power supply is retained, but the voltage level is below the minimum level specified for the system. Some brownouts, called voltage reductions, are made intentionally to prevent a full power outage.
Power failures are particularly damaging for hospitals, since many life-critical medical devices and tasks require power. For this reason hospitals, just like many enterprises (notably colocation facilities and other datacenters), have emergency power generators which are typically powered by diesel fuel and configured to start automatically, as soon as a power failure occurs. In most third world countries, power cuts are left unnoticed by most citizens of moderate means, as maintaining an uninterruptible power supply is often considered an essential facility of a home. A physician visiting the sick in a hospital. ...
A life-critical system or safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in a) death or serious injury to people, or b) loss or severe damage to equipment or c) environmental harm. ...
A colocation centre (colo) or carrier hotel is a type of data center where multiple telecommunications network or service providers, such as telcos or ISPs, site their connections to one anothers networks (points of presence). ...
A data center is a facility used for housing a large amount of electronic equipment, typically computers and communications equipment. ...
For the Jamaican reggae band, see Third World (band). ...
An uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, is a device or system that maintains a continuous supply of electric power to certain essential equipment that must not be shut down unexpectedly. ...
Other life-critical systems such as telecommunications are also required to have emergency power. Telephone exchange rooms usually have arrays of lead-acid batteries for backup and also a socket for connecting a diesel generator during extended periods of outage. Telecommunication is the extension of communication over a distance. ...
Lead-acid batteries are the most commonly used rechargeable batteries today. ...
Diesel or Diesel fuel is a specific fractional distillate of fuel oil (mostly petroleum) that is used as fuel in a diesel engine invented by German engineer Rudolf Diesel. ...
Protecting the power system from outages
In power supply networks, the power generation and the demand must be closely matched to avoid overloading of network components, which can severely damage them. In order to prevent this, parts of the system will automatically disconnect themselves from the rest of the system, or shut themselves down to avoid damage. This is analogous to the role of relays and fuses in households. 200 A Industrial fuse. ...
Under certain conditions, a network component shutting down can cause current fluctuations in neighboring segments of the network, though this is unlikely, leading to a cascading failure of a larger section of the network. This may range from a building, to a block, to an entire city, to the entire electrical grid. A cascading failure is failure in a system of interconnected parts, where the service provided depends on the operation of a preceding part, and the failure of a preceding part can trigger the failure of successive parts. ...
Electric power transmission is the second process in the delivery of electricity to consumers. ...
Modern power systems are meant to be designed to be resistant to this sort of cascading failure, but it may be unavoidable (see below). Moreover, since there is no short-term economic benefit of preventing rare large-scale failures, some observers have expressed concern that there is a tendency to erode the resilience of the network over time, which is only corrected after a major failure occurs. It has been claimed that reducing the likelihood of small outages only increases the likelihood of larger ones. In that case, the short-term economic benefit of keeping the individual customer happy increases the likelihood of large-scale blackouts.
Restoring power after a wide-area outage Restoring power after a wide-area outage can be difficult, as power stations need to be brought back on-line. Normally, this is done with the help of power from the rest of the grid. In the absence of grid power, a so-called black start needs to be performed to bootstrap the power grid into operation. Restoring power after a wide-area power outage can be difficult, as power stations need to be brought back on-line. ...
Bootstrapping alludes to a German legend about a Baron Münchhausen, who was able to lift himself out of a swamp by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. ...
An uninterruptible power supply, or UPS, is a device or system that maintains a continuous supply of electric power to certain essential equipment that must not be shut down unexpectedly. ...
Blackout unavoidabillity and electric sustainability It has recently been argued on the basis of historical data 2002a and computer modelling 2002b that power grids are self-organized critical systems. These systems exhibit unavoidable 2000 disturbances of all sizes, up to the size of the entire system, and attempts to reduce the probability of small disturbances only increase the probability of large ones 2003. This has immediate policy implications 2002a. The following are the relevant quotations from the sources cited: Transmission towers Transmission lines in Lund, Sweden Electric power transmission, or more accurately Electrical energy transmission, is the second process in the delivery of electricity to consumers. ...
The theory of self-organized criticality (SOC) claims that whenever a self-organizing dynamical system is open or dissipative, it exhibits critical (scale-invariant) behaviour similar to that displayed by static systems undergoing a second-order phase transition. ...
- As expected from studies of general self-organised critical systems, ... apparently sensible efforts to reduce the risk of smaller blackouts can sometimes increase the risk of large blackouts 2003
- ...the NERC blackout data suggests that the North American power system has been operating near criticality. ...It would be better to analyze this tradeoff between catastrophic blackout risk and loading instead of just waiting for the effects to manifest themselves in the North American power system! 2002a
- [The models'] PDF of the blackouts size has the same power dependence that have been found from the analysis of NERC data for the North American power grid over a period of 15 years. 2002b
- First and perhaps most striking is the intrinsic unavoidability of cascading events in such a system when driven near its operational limits. 2000
The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) was formed in 1968 by the electric utility industry to promote the reliability and adequacy of bulk power supply in the electric utility systems of North America. ...
See also This is a list of famous wide-scale power outages The Northeast Blackout of 1965 on November 9, 1965. ...
Renewable energy (sources) or RES capture their energy from existing flows of energy, from on-going natural processes, such as sunshine, wind, flowing water, biological processes, and geothermal heat flows. ...
Rolling blackout refers to an intentionally-engineered electrical power outage, caused by insufficient available resources to meet prevailing demand for electricity. ...
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