There are some hospitals that are having to ask patients to bring in their own water with them because they simply cannot get enough supply. The blackouts in Venezuela hit people's homes, causing pumps powering running water to stop and food to spoil in fridges. Credit: Getty Images. The situation he describes seems almost apocalyptic in a country that until a few years ago was one of the richest in South America and has the largest proven oil reserves in the world.
But such widespread and long lasting power cuts, known as black sky events , are not restricted to countries teetering on the brink of collapse. Each year millions of people in the US and Canada are plunged into darkness by passing storms that bring down power lines.
In June , almost all of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay were hit by a power outage that left nearly 40 million people without electricity. In August, almost a million people in the UK were left without power , trapping commuters on busy trains, when lightning strikes caused a gas-fired power plant and an offshore wind farm to shut down simultaneously.
These events, however, are minor in comparison to the kind of power outages that experts fear could be in store in the future. Growing demand on our electricity supplies from rising populations and new technologies like electric cars will face increasing instability as we shift to more renewable, but intermittent energy sources like wind and solar power.
Extreme weather events driven by climate change will only heighten the risk to our power supplies further. Traffic lights are just one of the aspects of transport infrastructure affected in huge power cuts. She is right. In our modern world, almost everything, from our financial systems to our communication networks, are utterly reliant upon electricity.
Other critical infrastructure like water supplies and our sewer systems rely upon electric powered pumps to keep them running. With no power, fuel pumps at petrol stations stop working, road signs, traffic lights and train systems go dead. Transport networks grind to a halt. Our complex food supply chains quickly fall apart without computers to coordinate where produce needs to be, or the fuel to transport it or refrigeration to preserve it.
Air conditioning, gas boilers and heating systems also rely upon electricity to work. A little over years ago, our cities ran on human and animal muscle power to ferry goods and waste around. Modern infrastructure is now utterly reliant upon electricity. The causes of a black sky event are many. They vary from natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes to geomagnetic storms triggered by enormous flares from the Sun , or coronal mass ejections, that send a barrage of electrically charged particles racing across the Solar System and can overload electrical grids.
One intense geomagnetic disturbance caused a nine-hour outage across large areas of Canada in The Electric Infrastructure Security Council, an international body that reviews threats to power grids, also lists a number of human threats that can trigger a mass black out. These include cyberterrorism attacks or coordinated physical assaults on energy infrastructure such as power stations, and electromagnetic pulses that can disable electricity grids.
People use phones to illuminate goods in a supermarket in Buenos Aires, Argentina during a power cut Credit: Getty Images. She says that while true black sky events are mercifully rare, the deep impact they have on businesses and people means more needs to not only update grid technology and management, but also improve infrastructure so it can be more resilient against physical threats like flooding.
In Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria crippled infrastructure across the island, leaving people in the dark and triggering a humanitarian crisis. In order to keep these events from becoming more common and to minimise their impact, we need to invest in our grids. Putting measures in place to counter all of these potential threats is difficult and expensive. Critical systems can be guarded from human attacks and they can be shielded from electromagnetic pulses with enough money being spent on them.
Building new systems for protecting transformers from coronal mass ejections can also help to keep systems safe. But there are some events that cannot be planned for and the complex, interconnected nature of our electricity grids are remarkably vulnerable. The whole of Italy was left without power because of two fallen trees starting a cascade of events.
Modern electricity grids are increasingly interconnected and complicated, making failures like this difficult to predict. Most of Europe now runs off a massive interconnected power grid — probably the largest in the world — that supplies more than million customers in 24 countries. The USA is made up of five different grids.
But there are some that are seeking ways of anticipating potential power failures and are enlisting the help of artificial intelligence to help them grapple with this highly complex problem. IBM also demonstrated that the phone was capable of displaying maps, stocks, news, and other third-party applications, with certain modifications.
Tragically, the Simon ended up in the heap pile of being too ahead of its time. Despite all the snazzy features, it was cost-prohibitive for most and was only useful for a very niche clientele.
And even then, the company only sold about 50, units. The company took the product off the market after six months. In a way, smart technology was all the rage during the late s, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of stand-alone smart gadgets known as personal digital assistants.
Before hardware makers and developers figured out ways to successfully merge PDAs with cellular phones , most people simply made due by carrying two devices. The leading name in the business at the time was Sunnyvale-based electronics firm Palm, which jumped to the fore with products such as the Palm Pilot. Throughout the generations of the product line, various models offered a multitude of pre-installed apps, PDA-to-computer connectivity, email, messaging, and an interactive stylus.
Other competitors at the time included Handspring and Apple with the Apple Newton. Things started to come together right before the turn of the new millennium, as device makers began slowly incorporating smart features into cell phones. The first notable effort was the Nokia communicator, which the manufacturer introduced in It came in a clamshell design that was fairly large and bulky but allowed for a qwerty keyboard , along with navigation buttons.
This was so that the makers could cram in some of the more salable smart features, such as faxing, web browsing, email, and word processing. But it was the Ericsson R, which debuted in , that became the first product billed and marketed as a smartphone.
Unlike the Nokia , it was small and light like most typical cell phones. Remarkably, the phone's keypad could be flipped outward to reveal a 3.
The convergence continued as competitors from the PDA side moved into the fray, with Palm introducing the Kyocera in and Handspring putting out its own offering, the Treo , the following year.
The Kyocera was significant for being the first smartphone to be paired with a major wireless data plan through Verizon, while the Treo provided services via a GSM line and operating system that seamlessly integrated telephone, internet, and text messaging service.
In , local upstart telecom NTT DoCoMo launched a series of handsets linked to a high-speed internet network called i-mode. The major players at the time were Palm, Microsoft , and Research in Motion, a lesser-known Canadian firm. Each had its respective operating systems. You might think that the two more established names in the tech industry would have an advantage in this respect. At a bunker somewhere in the United States, a pilot squadron lost contact with the armed drones they were flying over the Middle East.
The failure of secure satellite communications systems left soldiers, ships and aircraft cut off from their commanders and vulnerable to attack. Without satellites, world leaders struggled to talk to each other to diffuse mounting global tensions. Meanwhile, over the Atlantic, thousands of passengers watched movies, oblivious to the difficulties on the flight deck as pilots struggled to talk to air traffic control.
Without satellite phones, container ships in the Arctic, fishermen in the China Sea and aid workers in the Sahara found themselves isolated from the rest of the world. As people started work in their offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, Moscow, London and New York, they found it difficult to talk to colleagues in other countries.
Email worked and the internet seemed okay, but many international phone calls failed. The rapid communications systems that tied the world together were unravelling. Rather than shrinking, it seemed as if the Earth was getting larger. As presidents and prime ministers gathered their crisis teams, a new threat to global stability began to emerge: the loss of the Global Positioning System GPS. As far as most of us were concerned, GPS helped us travel from A to B without getting hopelessly lost along the way.
It had transformed the lives of delivery companies, helped emergency services reach incidents much quicker, allowed planes to land on isolated runways and enabled trucks, trains, ships and cars to be tracked and traced. But GPS turned out to be much more pervasive in our lives than many of us could possibly have realised. GPS satellites are little more than highly accurate atomic clocks in space, transmitting a time signal back to Earth.
Receivers on the ground — in your car or smartphone for instance — pick up these time signals from three or more satellites. By comparing the time signal from space with the time in the receiver — the receiver can calculate how far away the satellite is. But there are plenty of other uses for these accurate time signals from space. Uses that, it emerged, our society had become increasingly reliant on. Our infrastructure is held together by time — from time stamps on complex financial transactions to the protocols that hold the internet together.
When the packets of data passing between computers get out of sync, the system starts to break down. Without accurate time, every network controlled by computers is at risk. Which means almost everything. When the GPS signals stopped, back-up systems employing accurate clocks on the ground kicked in.
But, within a few hours, time had started to slip. The cloud began to fail, web searches became slower, the internet started to grind to a halt.
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