About this time last year, Americans lost faith in their power
companies, who failed to respond effectively to restore power outages
resulting from a storm. This past summer, a series of outages under less
dire weather circumstances demonstrated that the country’s electricity
distribution network was bad and getting worse.
Today, as some 60 million people face power outages with the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday, power companies are expressing confidence that they are up to the latest challenge put forth by Mother Nature. There is little public optimism to support this confidence.
Hurricane Sandy’s 900-mile storm front has already sent tidal surges over the stretch of seaboard from Delaware to New York, and its full impact was not expected until later on Monday, sparking mass evacuations along the coast and a shut-down of metropolitan transit. The National Guard has been deployed and airports ordered to close. Experts expect the storm will reverberate as far as the Great Lakes, of Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.
The power outages had already begun on Sunday, with 1,312 homes and businesses without power, mostly in Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
So, the National Guard is on top of things, but are the utility companies? They say they have made improvements since last year—though this was not evident during the series of outages this summer.
Despite their confidence, power giants servicing the Eastern Seaboard such as Consolidated Edison Inc., Northeast Utilities, and Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. are already warning customers that they expect power to be out for as long as 10 days from Washington to New England. Is this “advance” warning an improvement?
Communication and coordination have apparently been improved “a lot”.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Hurricane-Sandy-Litmus-Test-for-Americas-Utilities.html
Today, as some 60 million people face power outages with the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday, power companies are expressing confidence that they are up to the latest challenge put forth by Mother Nature. There is little public optimism to support this confidence.
Hurricane Sandy’s 900-mile storm front has already sent tidal surges over the stretch of seaboard from Delaware to New York, and its full impact was not expected until later on Monday, sparking mass evacuations along the coast and a shut-down of metropolitan transit. The National Guard has been deployed and airports ordered to close. Experts expect the storm will reverberate as far as the Great Lakes, of Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin.
The power outages had already begun on Sunday, with 1,312 homes and businesses without power, mostly in Virginia Beach and the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
So, the National Guard is on top of things, but are the utility companies? They say they have made improvements since last year—though this was not evident during the series of outages this summer.
Despite their confidence, power giants servicing the Eastern Seaboard such as Consolidated Edison Inc., Northeast Utilities, and Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. are already warning customers that they expect power to be out for as long as 10 days from Washington to New England. Is this “advance” warning an improvement?
Communication and coordination have apparently been improved “a lot”.
Read more: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Hurricane-Sandy-Litmus-Test-for-Americas-Utilities.html
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