Coordinated grid drops finally get a name

Power outages that appeared in lockstep across continents stopped being a mystery last week. A German research team announced they had identified the source of the coordinated drops that have haunted operators for years.

The team, based at a university in Berlin, published a brief note describing how the drops shared a timing signature that pointed to a single trigger. They did not claim a malicious actor, but the fact that the patter…

What this means for the grid is simple: operators now have a variable to monitor rather than a black box. In practice that could translate into tighter synchronization checks and a review of the software that schedule…