[singhrac]

I think people underestimate how valuable these reports are, so I’m very glad that detailed investigation is done here. Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid.

In a lot of ways it’s like investigations into airplane crashes.

[WJW]

The root cause tree on page 452 gives a good overview of how complex the behavior can be.

The good news is that the grid operators have a good idea of what the problem was/is and it's well understood how to fix it. The downside is that it will require quite a bit of both time and money to reinforce the grid infrastructure.

[pseudohadamard]

  Every major grid operator around the world is going to study this and make improvements to make sure this doesn’t happen on their grid.

You mistyped "Every major grid operator is going to get their lawyers to reword their contracts to make sure they can't get sued when this happens".

[holgerschurig]

Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.

If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.

So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.

Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!

That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.

[pseudohadamard]

Separate reply for a separate topic: You're repeating the urban-legend version of the McDonalds lawsuit, not the real story, which you can find in numerous places, e.g. https://www.ttla.com/?pg=McDonaldsCoffeeCaseFacts. tl;dr, it was repeated wilful negligence by McDonalds, they'd already injured several hundred other people through it. They knew it was a serious problem but kept doing it anyway.

[pseudohadamard]

  Spotted the US-american

Really? Where?

We had a problem some time ago with a major power outage due to operator negligence. When it came to assigning blame it turned out the corporate structure was such that it was impossible to sue the operator. Since it was in effect publicly-owned, the public would have been suing itself.

[pjc50]

Plenty of grids are publicly owned, or regulatory equivalent.

[Rygian]

Obligatory read: https://how.complexsystems.fail/