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)