More on Last Week's Florida Power Outage

For those who have not heard what the cause was:

A Florida Power & Light engineer not following proper procedure was the sole cause of Tuesday's massive power outage that left millions without electricity throughout the state for a few hours, FPL officials said Friday.

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FPL President Armando Olivera said a preliminary investigation found that not one customer would have lost power had proper procedure been followed. The engineer, who Olivera refused to name, disabled two levels of relay protection, while diagnosing a piece of malfunctioning equipment. When the equipment short-circuited, there were no protective measures in place.

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The engineer was working on a piece of equipment that controls voltage at the Flagami substation in West Miami. While he was diagnosing the problem, an arc -- originally thought to be a small fire -- occurred and melted some of the equipment. Since the protective relays had been disabled, there was nothing in place to contain the problem.

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Olivera said changes in how protection relays were governed are already in place. He also said that once a full investigation is complete, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) would conduct a review of the findings.

According to Annex B of the World Energy Outlook 2006, 25 percent of the world's population had no access to electricity in 2005. While the brief Florida outage was an inconvenience, everyone should recognize that 1.6 billion people live in this world every day without access to the benefits of electricity.