World

Hawaii's Oahu island regains power after blackout

by 158 | December 27, 2008 at 10:42 am

177 views | 21 Recommendations | 5 comments

This is one of the side effects of

modern city living. A small

failure in a line or in a

transformer can affect

thousands of people.

Crews gradually restored electrical service across parts of Oahu on Saturday after a power failure blacked out the island's population of about 900,000 people and thousands of tourists including vacationing President-elect Barack Obama.

Residents were urged to stay home after the lights went out during a thunderstorm Friday evening and to conserve water.

Hawaiian Electric Co. spokeswoman Jan Loose said power had been restored to about 113,000 customers as 6 a.m., mostly on the west side of the island. The utility serves a total of 295,000 homes and businesses

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SOLARLIFE

at 11:07 on December 27th, 2008

Peak power kills old grids everywhere around the globe, to replace by intelligent smart power grid with village cell independence and on-site power generation.:
Power Breaks, Try Smart City Grid, Austin Texas or Boulder Col.?Just seeing Obama in holidays during Power break, may help to speed up his plan to replace 40% of obsolete US grid by Smart grids.

Fairbanks

at 11:14 on December 27th, 2008

Power grids are getting more robust every day. There are about 60,000 counties on the planet and each county could have its own generator, but would also be interlinked where links are 300 miles or less. This is what we have here in Fairbanks. Hawaii would not be able to interlink so local power failure would be grid failure at the same time.

158

at 13:45 on December 27th, 2008

I agree. We need to do this. Obama should make this a priority.

158

at 13:46 on December 27th, 2008

Fairbanks.

Good comment.

SOLARLIFE

at 11:16 on December 31st, 2008

Fairbanks has local power, good to know. Hawaii could make several independant power cells with load control to bypass the broken line; this model is featured in West Europe with windpower cells. However you need substations size of a container to balance load or interrupt.