Power Outages: Causes and Industry Insights

In this episode of DC Power Hour, Allen along with special guests Al Warner and Fran Losey discuss how AI growth, along with data center growth and the required electrification, affect the powering infrastructure.

Episode Highlights

6:03 – Do you agree with me when I say that the politicians are those that try to enforce these laws or make the suggestions?

3:57 – It's critical that people who have our level of experience speak out when we see a need for the younger generation to understand what we've went through. We've learned a lot of lessons. In the power industry and being able to communicate those. And today's topic is probably near and dear to my heart.

10:32 – The number one lesson that I took away from the National Power Lapse study was that before the actual outage, where the power just goes to zero, there's usually a voltage sag and power supplies traditionally are designed to withstand a certain amount of voltage sag and outage.

16:06 – A brownout is where the utility lowers the voltage so they can provide for a few more customers and then there's of course the famous blackout and rolling blackouts.

19:51 – The reality of today's grid, which needs a massive upgrade, as we've said before, is it needs to be redesigned because the whole backbone of the US grid is the problem.

31:46 – We had a crew come to our, our property and they were trimming the limbs. I said take these down because they're going to be a problem and the guy said, no they don't pay me to do that. The next year we had limbs from those trees hanging on our power line and we had an outage.