Mysterious outages in D.C. blamed on faulty infrastructure [VIDEO]

Transcript

An energy transmission error last week left 28,000 Washington D.C. and Maryland residents in the dark last week, including the White House.

PJM, the regional transmission organization overseeing that region, stated the event could have resulted in up to five hundred megawatts of power loss, as well as sending three separate large-scale generators go offline entirely. The culprit appears to be a single ruptured transmission line a Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative's switching station, which caused as small brush fire. All organizations involved have stressed this was a technical glitch and not a supply issue, though FERC is investigating.

The widespread outages resulted in a short market spike for local generators BGE and Pepco, whose prices exceeded $500 and $400 per megawatt-hour respectively in the hours following the blackout.

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