What Could Go Wrong?
What Could Go Wrong?
Besides everything. According to the BBC, and ‘Huge power cut in Spain and Portugal doesn’t seem to be caused by a cyber-attack, say officials.’ Now that is surprising – or should it be. The Portuguese electricity operator earlier said the outage initiated by a ‘rare’ atmospheric phenomenon, related to variations in temperature.’ Spain has reassured the rest of Europe that its nuclear reactors are ‘safe’ after they stopped working after the outage and the emergency generators kicked in. Comforting – not very. The shutdown was ‘in line’ with the way in which Spain’s power plants design responds to an unexpected power outage.
Here are other examples of the immediate and inconvenient fallout:
Lisbon Humberto Delgado Airport closed.
Spain’s national railway all services suspended.
Traffic jams across Iberian Peninsula due to lights out at intersections.
Fuel stations closed because of suspended payment processing.
Mutua Madrid Tennis Open postponed.
So, what should we learn from this? First, our planet and its people are increasingly interconnected in ways that are difficult to quantify until something goes wrong. It is critical to design for safety, as in the case of the nuclear power plants going into soft shutdown. However, when we design solely for safety, the implications could translate into unexpected and costly consequences for end users. More advanced design techniques consider not only safety and redundancy but also uptime and resiliency.
Before we launch ourselves headfirst into a world completely interdependent on machine learning technology and single sources of electricity, our public and private institutions increasingly have a competitive mandate to analyze their vulnerabilities with more comprehensive approaches. Design with expected outcomes in mind: minimize negative impacts on customers, maximize uptime, and balance costs and benefits. Preservation of human life is always a priority and should not be used an excuse for poor planning and sub-par operational performance.
The opportunity to re-invent our infrastructure and our lives based upon a refreshed collection of priorities is now!