Re: Y2K Was: Re: POWER: San Mateo/San Francisco power outage report

[David Lesher <wb8foz () nrk com>]

Unnamed Administration sources reported that Nathan Stratton said:
> As far as I know we
> have never had the entire national grid fail, we have had large
> sections (say New York, 13 north western states, etc.) of the grid fail
> because of cascading failures that were caused by very small problems. 

That is because there really is NO "national grid".....

I'm not a power engineer, but my understanding is there are
6-12 regional grids.  Keeping things in sync across the country
qualifies as "really hard" at the least.  Some regionals are
interconnected with DC {The Pacific Intertie, for one} lines for
this very reason.

This topic at least, I assume, that presidential infrastructure
protection committee has looked at in detail. I have far more
faith they can grok what to do there than with BGP grief/router
flaps/etc.

This is topic creeping so I'll close with one thought. Power
is hard because: unlike TCP/IP bits, when things fall down,
you gotta get RID of the stuff blowing back in your face NOW,
or lots of things get turned to smoke. Suppose that when your
big box of bits stutters; the box feeding you in LA didn't just
stop, but halted & caught fire...and that meant YOUR box, that
was picking itself back up, just did likewise.





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