Why Power Outages And Blackouts May Become The New Normal
We used to have a lot of national systems that used to work and didn't gouge consumers. Now we have "free market" everything, and life has changed for the worse. (Remember how cheap and reliable phone lines used to be?) Via Business Insider:
Carl Wood, a former commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, explained that for the next 60 years, "the local utilities controlled all the parts of the system," so "it was very easy for them to predict how much power was going through the high-voltage lines." The grid would rarely get overloaded, he said, "because it was all very controlled, very planned." And since the primary goal of state regulators and local commissions was to deliver electricity to everyone, rather than gain a profit edge, the grid received regular preventive maintenance. "I was on a traveling maintenance crew, and we'd go from power plant to power plant," Wood, who's also a former Utility Workers Union of America organizer, recalled. "Every four years, every power plant was completely overhauled."