Early warning system

[Sean Donelan <sean () donelan com>]

During the rolling blackouts on Monday and Tuesday, one of the complaints
was the lack of notice before the lights went out.  Would it be useful
if you received advanced notice before a rolling blackout?  Or would you
do nothing different, and wait for it?

Cal-ISO, PG&E, etc have said they don't give warnings because they don't
have a way of contacting lots of people at the same time.

The net has a system for relaying messages to thousands of systems in a
few seconds.  People tweaked NNTP to forward messages almost instantly,
across multiple links. NNTP is a tried, and well-known protocol. Multicast
and other multi-user messaging systems also exist.

If we got early warning from PG&E, Cal-ISO, etc is it worth the effort to
provide advance notification to NOCs?  Or do most providers not care?