Jon Wellinghoff’s is a moron and is certainly no “expert” on transmission and distribution. He’s a lawyer who has never worked a day in his life in any capacity providing electricity to consumers. Smartgrids might be the new buzzword with idiots like Wellinghoff, who absurdly stated that the concept of baseload power will become meaningless with them, but their integration into the existing grid would have done nothing to stop last week’s blackout and will make our entire gird more susceptible to outages. Giving every wannabe hacker on earth a direct link into our power grid, will do little to help with its security. Activity on transmission lines are already monitored in real time and no amount of monitoring could have prevented the system trip that was experienced in San Diego.

Its electrical engineering 101. 

You want to know why the reliability of the nation’s grid has been slowly eroding over the past 25 years, google Sunrise Powerlink (especially relevant to this discussion) and read up on all the luddite NIMBY’s who are fighting it tooth and nail, delaying its construction many years into the future.

Many electrical transmission lines are outdated, and parts of the grid date back to the time of Thomas Edison.

There are no parts of the grid that date back to Edison. Statements like that make you sound like an imbecile.

Why do we even need a grid? Let’s move all the money from the 19th century idea of “grid” to the 21st century of “everybody generate your own energy”... bye bye grid - oh and everybody who makes money from having a grid - ohhh, now I see why there’s a grid… I am so dumb

I agree 100% with Mike H. I am contractor for Transmission utilities and work in the field every day. No amount of fancy smart metering would have helped in California.

Since most power outages are caused by storms and weather conditions knocking out power lines, does this speak more to weather pattern changes than aging systems? 

Single failure events are handled and prevented daily on the electrical grid.  It is part of daily operations.  The event in California which is said to be caused by a single employee, I believe will eventually be shown to have been caused by a failure of many people who did not follow operational and safety practices.  High voltage grid systems are designed to recover automatically when possible.  Only a catastrophic even such as storms or earthquakes which take out major portions of the grid should be able to bring down such a large grid.  As has been seen from past outage investigations, failure to follow standard operational and safety practices have usually been at the heart of the issue.

San Diego is effectively at the end of 2 long “extension cords” to nuclear plants in Arizona and San Onofre.  There is comparatively little base load generation in/around San Diego—they don’t want nuclear or coal plants in their neighborhoods, so they outsource generation like most major metro areas on the coasts.

While load loss outages might be increasing in some cases as contended by Massoud Amin, transmission line outages have been stable or improving during the 1990-2010 time period.

Load loss outages in many cases are driven by the fact the grid was designed in a vertically-integrated environment.  Today the grid is expected to provide “trading opportunities” for power marketers never envisioned when the grid was designed.

Electric consumption on a per capita basis in the US is some of the highest in the world.  European countries such as Germany, with much larger manufacturing industries and electric powered rail systems, use half the electricity on a per capita basis.  There is significant opportunity for conservation and demand management to REDUCE consumption and obviate the need for more transmission and generation.

IMO, “smart grid” is a program for equipment and service suppliers to sell tens of billions of hardware, much of which is unnecessary.  Indeed, digital controls are not the panacea claimed by manufacturers, academics or think-tanks; they often add new layers of complexity, providing additional opportunities for serious error.

But, without the smart grid, how are we going to keep Silicon Valley alive selling crap that nobody really needs but looks cool with all the blinkie lights, guys…?

Ahem.

You’re absolutely right.  The problem is that nobody wants to generate power locally, so the “extension cord” has to run hundreds or thousands of miles in places too remote to see regular maintenance and with too little room for redundancy.

Bill’s right, I think.  We’ve spent the last two hundred years centralizing everything from manufacturing to politics, and it was probably the right decision for the time, but it’s no longer helping.

I learned recently, for example, that many solar power systems are designed to only work when they’re connected to the grid.  So, for example, if your neighborhood’s power goes out after a hurricane (I’m in New York where that was common just a few weeks ago), those fancy panels on the roof don’t help.  Congratulations, we’ve managed to even centralize distribution!

Decentralized distribution systems would secure electrical energy.

The United States can’t move of the dime on alternate energy because we are stuck in the “pipes, wires and rail systems” of the 19th Century.

Linda, that itself is 19th century thinking.  Build around and let the old system die.  We shouldn’t need their permission or their cables to build local energy systems, just enough people who are sick of the existing system to do something about it.

It’s only our own stupidity that allows solar panels we buy to be tied to the existing infrastructure.  They make power, you consume it.

Of course, as I say this, I’m sure someone’s writing a bill for Congress banning personal generation of power, and your Congressman will surely note that it’s important to give the energy companies “the tools they need to stop those who would undermine their business.”

Or we could, you know, use less electricity.

John, you misunderstand my comment. That is what I am saying…we do not need the “big grid…..

My mistake, then, Linda, and I half-suspected as much right after I hit the Post button.