Florida Power Outage
The massive power outage that occured earlier today in Florida appears to have been caused by an equipment failure and fire at a Miami substation. That failure forced both reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Plant in south Florida to go into an emergency shutdown. Further shutdowns at other plants also occured as the outages spread north througout the state. However Florida Power & Light spokespeople were reassuring customers that all safety measures had worked and that power would be quickly restored. According to one FP&L official,
"All the safety systems worked just like they were supposed to and both of those units are in stable condition right now."
Thankfully, utility and state officials are reporting that the outages were not related to terrorist activity.
This type of outage makes a powerful argument for ensuring that we keep our generation capacity strong by maintaining a diverse suite of generation technologies and by maintaining and updating our transmission infrastructure. This type of potential system instability and other related issues will be discussed at the 2008 Spring Coal Forum in Miami, FL (March 10-12, 2008)
You can read more on the power outages on these media outlets