With the spread of deregulation, power systems are operated more and more close to their security and stability limits, and system conditions have become increasingly complex. Under this situation, blackouts occur more often, and large-scale blackouts cause enormous economic losses and social problems. Firstly, we analyze 37 important blackouts in the world from 1965 to 2005. And we classify their features in each phase, summarize their mechanism and give some recommendations for preventing the future blackouts. From the analysis, cascade overload and voltage collapse are the major incidents in the blackouts and a real-time system to prevent the blackouts is necessary. Based on the new measurement and control technologies – Wide-area measur...