Picture if you will a hot, sunny August afternoon. The day is
going well, until suddenly, inexplicably, the power goes out.
And stays out. No traffic lights, no TV, no computer. No air
conditioning. And no one you know has power. No one. This
scenario is not so hard to imagine if you were one of the
several million people on the east coast during the Blackout of
2003. Due to the heat of the day, a power line sagged into a
tree, which in turn caused an outage. And somehow, that caused
another outage, and another—a domino effect. This took place on
Aug 14, 2003 and affected over 55 million people (45 million
across eight northeastern and midwestern U.S. states and 10
million in Ontario, Canada.) The question of the day, and during
the weeks to come, was: how could this could have happened? In
such a technologically advanced time where anything is possible
. . . how was this? And more importantly, what can be done to
stop it from happening again? Go To Enter the Smart Grid