East Coast outage?

Fri Aug 15 15:39:20 UTC 2003

On Thursday, 14 August 2003, at 23:13PM, David Lesher wrote:

> I'm no power engineer but I do not envy them. Can YOU build an
> equal size TCP/IP network with the added requirement that you
> never drop any more than say one or 2 bits/hour?

Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always 
lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more 
autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more 
reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging 
failure modes.

Seems to me, if more consumers were opportunistic generators (fuel 
cells, solar cells, wind turbines, whatever) the islands formed during 
interconnection failures would have far more accurately-matched supply 
and demand, and failures would stand a much better chance of having 
only local impact.

Joe (battery and GPRS powered, still)