So yesterday afternoon I get a call from our friend Em in Orlando. I’d had a busy day and hadn’t checked the news, so that was the first I’d heard about the massive power outage Tuesday in Florida.
Man oh man. All the way from Miami up to Tampa on the west, and all the way to Jax on the east. And all (apparently, according to Florida Power and Light) caused when a fire took down a Miami substation. The station went down and others tried – and failed – to take up the slack. Even the nuclear plant at Turkey Point shut down, in a cascading grid failure that took out power to millions of people statewide.
I’ve been ranting on this all day. It was 75 degrees in Miami on Tuesday afternoon, and somehow the grid was stretched so far to capacity that a single local substation failure shut down half the state. When I left, monthly power bills had been going steadily up ever since the grid got smashed by four hurricanes in 2004. FP&L and Progress Energy prorated the repair costs over the next several years. So what, did they fix it with cut-up Coke cans and rubber cement? Why in the name of everything good and holy was the grid at capacity in LATE FEBRUARY, AT 75 DEGREES?!
It’s scary that the Florida power grid is that fragile. It’s always been a bit flaky, with the power going out locally with every daily 4pm thunderstorm. But what happens this summer when oil’s trading at $150/barrel, the daytime temperature is averaging 98 degrees and the humidity is over 80%?
Even better: what happens if Florida gets hit by a serious hurricane this fall?
Grumble grumble grumble. The state’s just going straight to hell, it is. And mainly because it’s full of shortsighted, self-interested people who don’t get the relationship between cause and effect. I wonder if it’s still going to be the happiest place on Earth in five years when half the place is in foreclosure, the school system is funded mainly by bake sales and the most popular energy source is a bicycle generator.
It just makes me mad. That blackout should never have happened. Stupid, stupid, stupid.