blackout

Summer forecast: Sunny and hot with a chance of blackouts

In June of 2022, after fierce storms ripped through the region, areas in and around Columbus were hit with power outages. Residents flocked to cooling centers as temperatures soared into the 90s.

That emergency balancing act is known by many names, including “intermittent outage” or “forced outage,” but is most commonly called a “rolling blackout.” It can happen when a peak in electricity use — usually during extremely hot or extremely cold weather — coincides with significant gaps in the generation or transmission of electricity, says Ben Wilson, director of power delivery engineering for Buckeye Power, which supplies electricity to Ohio’s electric cooperatives. 

Power Lines
A map of the system of transmission lines in the U.S. resembles a roadmap, because, in a way, that’s exactly what it is.

Electric highway

Again in late March and early April, a series of powerful storms swept through Ohio — this time bringing gale-force winds that brought down trees, snapped utility poles, and pulled wide stretches of power line to the ground, causing electricity to stop flowing to homes and

For the vast majority of time, no one really thinks about electricity or where it comes from, or how it gets to that lightbulb. It’s only during that fraction of a percent of the hours in a year when power is not available that the grid comes to public attention.

But what is ‘the grid’?

In the United States, the electricity industry has a generating capacity of 1.1 million megawatts, serving up electricity to nearly every home and business — including over a million Ohioans and 42 million people across the country who are served by electric cooperatives.  

Power Lines
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