The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era

by Gretchen Bakke

A single line of code, in a program comprised of a million such lines, a fluke lasting little more than a microsecond, causes an alarm-event application to go into a loop. It just keeps spinning, spitting that bit of data back at the server, getting a busy signal, spinning and spitting, as the data not making it through mushroom from bits to bytes. This spinning manifests itself in slow computers, frozen screens displaying perfectly acceptable conditions as the grid outside the window is degrading ever more quickly. It becomes alarms that don’t sound, which become systems operators that look at their screens and tell worried callers that everything is fine. Until there are enough worried callers, until the data glut has gotten so severe that the servers have crashed. Until it is too late to do anything about it. Within twenty minutes of that last phone call, FirstEnergy’s own command and control center had blacked out.