Energy for Sustainable Society

11Energy Security

Photo: NASA Earth Observatory (public domain). Image courtesy of Chris Elvidge, US Air Force.

Satellite photo showing the US during the Northeastern blackout on August 13–14, 2003. A power line short circuit in Ohio was not reported to system operations control room due to a software bug. The cascaded failures caused power outages in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the Canadian province of Ontario. The outage affected an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 MW of electric load. The blackout began a few minutes after 4:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (16:00 EDT), and power was not restored for four days in some parts of the United States. Parts of Ontario suffered rolling blackouts for more than a week before full power was restored. Estimates of total costs in the United States range between $4 billion and $10 billion (US dollars). In Canada, gross domestic product was down 0.7% in August, there was a net loss of 18.9 million work hours, and manufacturing shipments in Ontario were down $2.3 billion (Canadian dollars).

Source: U.S.‐Canada Power System Outage Task Force Final Report (U.S.‐Canada Power System Outage Task Force 2004).

11.1 Introduction

The term “energy security” was initially used in early the 1970s during the energy crisis, which particularly hit countries relying on ...