20th anniversary of the August 2003 Blackout

[afransen]

The one thing I remember from early on was some US politician saying the whole thing was Canada's fault. Like the 9/11 terrorists, they are always quick to blame others.

 

[rbt]

I lived in Niagara at the time. The power was out for a few hours initially, then returned (assuming it came from Niagara Falls). There were rolling blackouts over the next few days, I guess to fair share capacity to other parts of the province until the nukes came back on line.

There's a strong chance the rolling blackouts were changes to the grid so distant natural gas and coal power stations would receive power to enable them to start. Nearly every large plant requires electronics of some type prior to starting, and a feed of the 60hz signal to match. Bringing a plant online out of phase is massively destructive.

Since there's not a direct connection, they'd need to turn on a non-trivial region around the plant to reach the plant power. Niagara's 1GW only goes so far, especially during a loading surge. Power line workers were working very long hours manually opening and closing breakers at substations to route energy for this.

Once the remote plant had started and was servicing their local area, they'd bring Niagara neighbourhoods back online.