#blackout

#blackout

The private utility has for years made maintenance and safety a second priority, after bonus payments to management and high shareholder returns. Along with the other big private power companies in the state, PG&E has asked for even more money from the ratepayers to bump up its stock price. Now an old transformer caught fire, and the company didn't have the resiliency to avoid a blackout that impacted a third of the city, and is still going as I write this.

The April 28th outage, described as Europe's severest in 20 years, halted transport, cut internet and telephone communications and plunged cities into darkness across mainland Spain and Portugal. A report by a European expert panel last week concluded that "cascading overvoltages" caused the blackout, with the findings in line with a Spanish government report in June that also blamed overvoltage. Overvoltage occurs when there is too much electrical voltage in a network, overloading equipment.

Shooting in the Extremadura countryside became an unexpected challenge as a nationwide blackout left the team without phone signal, internet, power, and water supply.

On Aug. 15, 2003, cities from the Midwest to Manhattan restored power to tens of millions of people following the largest blackout in U.S. history.

Large parts of the Czech Republic experienced a significant power outage on Friday, impacting the entire electricity grid, confirmed by CEPS spokesperson Hana Klimova.