The horrific blackout that has engulfed all of Venezuela is not going away any time soon.  Today is day four, and there will be more. New York Times has a good reporter on the case, Anatoly Kurmanaev, and he got pretty close to the bottom of it.  He writes: I went to the heart of Venezuela's transmission system in Guarico to try to find out what's going on with the grid.  Here's why partial blackouts are unfortunately likely to persist for a while.  I sincerely hope I'm wrong. Here is his actual filed story, but his bloggy 18-tweet Twitter thread of some kind — strung together here, with graphs showing transmission lines, and his own pictures of what a wasteland the power station is — is more useful and easier to understand.  The Caracas Chronicle has another useful piece by someone who seems to understand power grids, Rodrigo Linares, who comes to the same...(Read Full Post)