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While Con Ed was happy to have hit a record number of megawatts on Tuesday without blackouts, yesterday's cooler weather actually did bring some brownouts Brooklyn and Queens. The NY Times spoke to Con Ed, which said 150 homes and businesses lost power. Con Ed can't quite explain what happened (burned wires). The article focuses on what happened in Fort Greene (Corona and Sunset Park were the other neighborhood affected), with one owner frustrated because at least during the 2003 Blackout, everyone else was affected, whereas no one knew what he was going through yesterday. Gothamist liked how people in the neighborhood went to one business that still had power to charge their cellphones. Gotta stay connected!
On the other end of Con Ed news, the state decided that Con Ed should pay the family of Jodie Lane, the graduate student killed when she was electrocuted on slushy East 11th Street in January 2004, $9.6 million, plus another $1 million for a scholarship in her name.
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I live in Brooklyn and experienced a brownout that necessitated the rebooting of my computer and a 2-second interruption of my tv viewing last night, but I wonder if this is really newsworthy. By the Times own account, only about 150 homes and businesses lost power. If ConEd provides electricity to millions of homes and businesses, a hiccup to a fraction of a percent of its customers on one of the hottest days of the year seems like a nonstory. The half-assed explanation that it was "fried wires" sounds like it was more of a localized infrastructure problem than a systemwide breakdown that would warrant the description of a "blackout." If that's the Times' standard then I'm going to start to report every blown lightbulb and fuse in my apartment as a localized blackout and call in to work as unavailable. The reporting on the spot prices of electricity in the open market is interesting, but is it at all relevant? Did the soaring price of megawatts have anything to do with the loss of power to a few dozen homes? The Times story is a good example of conflation and non sequitur.
A precursor of things to come...
It can hardly be unexpected as Con Ed haven't upgraded their entire distribution system...
I'm on the Upper West Side and we had two brownouts on Tuesday night and at least one yesterday while I was at work. It might be people cranking up their air conditioners, which the building can't support, but I'm leaning toward blaming ConEd, because the super tends to not turn the power back on quickly if tenants are causing it to go out by using air conditioners in the apartments that can't have them.
I really wouldn't mind a blackout at work today....
Just to be pedantic, those were not "brownouts." When the voltage drops momentarily, dimming the lights or maybe resetting your computer, that's a brownout. When the power goes out, even if it's in a small area, it's still a blackout.
One of the local newscasts yesterday said that when ConEd says "customers" it often considers an entire apartment building 1 customer. So it wasn't just 150 single family houses/individual apartments that were without power.