Officials in Britain and the United States are preparing to make controlled power cuts to their national electricity supplies in response to a warning of a possible powerful solar storm hitting the Earth. In an interview with The Independent, Thomas Bogdan, director of the US Space Weather Prediction Centre, said that controlled power "outages" will protect the National Electricity Grids against damage which could take months or even years to repair should a large solar storm collide with the Earth without any precautions being taken .... Read More at http://www.independent.co.uk"Transformer failures cause blackouts in Venezuela"
A series of blackouts have hit western Venezuela, affecting several states and the country's second-largest city, Maracaibo.The outages began Friday night with the failure of a transformer in western Zulia state, Electricity Minister Ali Rodriguez said. Other transformers exploded before dawn Saturday, knocking out 3,000 megawatts and affecting the states of Zulia, Trujillo, Merida, Tachira and Barinas, he said.
Two other power failures occurred Saturday morning, one of them due to an explosion in a power plant, Rodriguez said, reading from a statement .... Read More at http://www.taiwannews.com
