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Second-Largest Blackout in World History Hits Puerto Rico

posted by martyb on Thursday April 19 2018, @07:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the setting-the-wrong-records dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Vox reports

Another blackout hit Puerto Rico Wednesday morning [April 18], the Associated Press reported, cutting off electricity across the whole island and once again undermining the fragile progress made in restoring power in the [seven] months since Hurricane Maria struck.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said that it could be 24 to 36 hours before power is restored to the areas that had it. Its priorities are to get electricity back to hospitals, the San Juan Airport, water systems, and financial centers

The outage was caused by a bulldozer hitting a power line while trying to remove a collapsed transmission tower, according to El Nuevo Dia.[1] The company responsible was D. Grimm, a subcontractor for Cobra Energy, which received a $200 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's devastated power grid.

Cobra was selected alongside Whitefish Energy Services in the aftermath of the hurricane, but the deals drew scrutiny from Congress because the companies had limited experience in grid repair on such a large scale.

[...] more than 61,000 utility customers[PDF] haven't had electricity since last September, the US Department of Energy reported earlier this month. Since "customer" typically refers to a household, which can encompass several people, estimates indicate that more than 100,000 people haven't had power since the storm.

[...] The blackout is the largest[2] in US history and is now the second-largest in the world. Only Typhoon Haiyan, one of the largest tropical storms ever to make landfall and the deadliest storm ever to hit the Philippines, had a bigger impact on electricity service.

[1] En Español
[2] As measured in millions of customer hours of lost electricity service.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 19 2018, @08:31PM (#669279)

    We "modern" people don't do so well without our energy slaves. Kind of like southern plantations after the US Civil War, when they lost their human slaves.

    Bucky Fuller noticed this a long time ago and coined the term: http://www.eoht.info/page/Energy+slave [eoht.info]

    In circa 1944, American philosopher Buckminster Fuller introduced the term "energy slave". [2] Fuller proposed the term based on the average output of a hard-working man doing 150,000 foot-pounds of work per day and working 250-days per year. [9]

    In 1954 English thermodynamicist Alfred Ubbelohde, in his book Man and Energy, was using the term, it seems, independent of Fuller. [10]

    It has been estimated, for instance, that a middle-class American lives a style of life that is equivalent to the work produced by 200 human slaves. [3] Fuller, who believed that in the future human societies would come to rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar-power and wind-derived electricity, referred to Americans as possessing two-hundred “energy slaves” that run on nonrenewable resources. [4] One energy slave, according to Fuller, equals “each unit of one trillion foot pound equivalents per annum consumed annually by respective economies from both import and domestic sources, computed at 100% of potential content.”[5]