In message <oydr83m2w1m.fsf@bert.cs.rice.edu>, Scott A Crosby writes:

I don't know, but at least reading this IEEE Spectrum article: http://www.ece.umr.edu/courses/f02/ee207/spectrum/Grid/ implies that long distance transmission is full of strange and nonlinear effects such as 'reactive power', voltage support, and other technical concepts that made me conclude that there are nasty details that are not widely known.

Precisely. Or, to put it in NANOG terms, would you trust a power engineer to design BGP 5? After all, we all know the limitations of BGP 4, and it seems pretty obvious how to do routing -- just look for least-cost paths... --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb