◗ 1965: Northeast
Blackout of 1965 - 25 million people, North America
◗ 1999: 90 million people affected for hours in Brazil, South America (src: List
of power outages)
◗ 2003: Northeast
Blackout of 2003 - 50 million people affected North America
◗ 2003: 2003
Italy blackout -
56 million people in Italy, Europe
◗ 2005: 100 million people for 7 hrs on Java Island, South Pacific, 2005
Java-Bali Blackout
◗ 2005: The Katrina Hurricane in just of many examples of natural disasters in which loss of power became a major issue both during the event and days and even weeks after.
◗ See more at List
of power outages (Wikipedia)
More on different types - Power
outage, and on our vulnerability in Brittle_Power (about a book).
Article (brief) from Electronic Design, Nov 2008:
Power Grid Presents Great Market Opportunity
"The bad news is that today’s power grid is wasteful, costly, inefficient, and dumb, according to Lux Research. But, according to Lux’s research found in “Alternative Power and Energy Storage State of the Market Q4 2008: Weaving the $65 Billion Power Web,” the good news is that the advent of distributed generation, distributed storage, and distributed intelligence will change power infrastructure into an intelligent and more nimble power web" (2008-11-21) electronicdesign.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=20184.
