Tuesday, June 26, 2007

How Rolling Blackouts Work


Rolling blackout: refers to an intentionally-engineered electrical power outage, caused by insufficient available resources to meet prevailing demand for* electricity.

*piss everyone off equally who need

Why you need to know: So you can drive your ice cream to a friend's house who's on a different power grid.

Contrary to Popular Belief (I love that magazine), a rolling blackout isn't a blackout that revolves down the street at night crushing every car and SUV in its sight just because he was never loved as a small child blackout. It is, in fact, when the electric company turns off power grids in a preset order because to many people are using their toasters, vacuuming, and watching The Price Is Right all at the same time. This is common in other countries outside the U.S. but inside, the reasons are different. At the electric plant, engineers sometime get confused which light switches turn on the coffee maker and which ones turn off power grids. So they just flip one at random. About 2 hours later, they realize that their coffee is still cold so they turn the previous switch back on and flip another switch. This continues for a few days before they realize that the coffee maker was unplugged.

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