Will New York City Get Rid of Blackouts?

New York City will be the first city to experiment a new solution against accidental or intentional blackouts and will become the testbed for a $39.3 million Department of Homeland Security project aiming to replace the existing power grid of the city with new superconductor cables.

"This is about Wall Street, this is about making the electric grid for the financial capital of the world ... more defensible against potential problems," including a terrorist attack, Jay M. Cohen, the agency's undersecretary for science and technology, said The Associated Press.

Superconductor cables will create a "secure super grid" which will have an increased power and an improved capability of resisting surges, whether they are caused by natural phenomena or by acts of sabotage.

NYC is believed to be the main target for terrorists seeking vengeance on the US, so making Wall Street more resilient to external attacks is the main priority of the new applications.

So far, the financial aspects have not been made public, but it is estimated that the entire project will cost around $7.5 billion, over the next five years. Unfortunately, it will most probably mean an increase in costs for the citizens, since the power company earlier this month asked state regulators for a rate increase that would raise its average customers' electricity bills by 11.6 percent beginning next April.

Last summer, a major electricity blackout left 175,000 people in Queens in the dark for nearly a week, which demonstrates the need for a significant improvement to the city's power grid.

New York City's 1977 blackout affected some nine million and the blackout of 1965 left 25 million in the dark in New York state and New England.

In August 2003, a major blackout caused by a solar eruption affected 50 million people in the US, being he biggest power outage in U.S. history.