Jack LaDuke will tell us how Clarkson University professors are using lessons learned from the Ice Storm 20-years ago to make improvements to electric power grids in hopes of preventing wide-spread power outages like the ones that left tens of thousands of people across Northern New York without power and heat, for days and even weeks, during the 1998 Ice Storm. Jack talks with Clarkson University Communication & Media professor Dr. Stephen Farina who has produced a documentary on the impact the Ice Storm had on the North Country and the devastation it caused to the region’s power grid.
The documentary reconstructs the great 1998 ice storm that destroyed power grids across northern New York, Quebec, and northern New England. The film goes on to explore an effort twenty years later to build a new kind of grid, a microgrid, designed to withstand future disasters.
Based in part on Professor Farina’s book “The Grid and the Village” — the documentary also features current microgrid research headed by Clarkson Electrical Engineering Professor Thomas Ortmeyer.