North American Network Operators Group
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Re: East Coast outage?

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Fri Aug 15 11:45:32 2003 
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)