| Major Italian power outage again highlights lack of resilience in power grids An outage in a power supply line in Switzerland caused a domino effect, which triggered a widespread power grid failure across Italy. The power outage affected the country for most of Sunday. This was the fourth major power failure to affect Western countries in the past few weeks - major outages have occurred in North America, the United Kingdom and, more recently, in Sweden and Denmark. These incidents have all highlighted the apparent lack of resilience in power grids, with small incidents quickly escalating to have wide-area impacts. To protect themselves against future incidents, businesses should lobby their governments to investigate the short-term measures that can be taken to improve the resilience of power grids, and the long-term measures that need to be taken to ensure that power supply can keep up with growing demand. Businesses should also ensure that protection measures have been taken to guarantee organisational continuity during power outages. UPS systems are a must for most firms and many also require additional backup power generators.
•Date:
29th September 2003 •Region: W.Europe •Type:
Article •Topic: Power
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