Energy infrastructure survivability, inherent limitations, obstacles and mitigation strategies

The blackout of August 14, 2003 affected 8 states and fifty million people and could cost up to $5 billion². Yet another press release claims it may have cost Ohio manufacturers $1.1 billion, based on a poll of 275 companies. Preliminary reports³ indicate the outage progressed as a chain of relatively minor events, rather than a single catastrophic failure. This is consistent with previous cascading outages, which were caused by a domino reaction⁴. The increasingly ubiquitous use of embedded systems to manage and control our technologically complex society makes our homeland security even more vulnerable. Therefore, knowing how vulnerable such systems are is essential to improving their intrinsic reliability/survivability (in a deregulated environment knowing these important properties is equally essential to the providers).