3 ms·
So an obvious long-term solution is to reduce the need for the grid. Many commercial and industrial facilities could run at least partly on local wind or solar,
by rwallace 10y ago
So an obvious long-term solution is to reduce the need for the grid. Many commercial and industrial facilities could run at least partly on local wind or solar, and the more decentralised capability there is, the less the vulnerability.
(I'm actually not just thinking about terrorists and suchlike. I'm also thinking about other risks, such as another Carrington event.)
- niftich 10y agoThe more decentralized capability, the higher the need to distribute excess production to places of excess demand, hence a higher need for a grid.
- rwallace 10y agoThere's an important difference between 'if the grid goes down, we will have some inefficiency because of excess production here and insufficient production there' and 'if the grid goes down, everything goes down'.
- evgen 10y agoIf your local "grid" can't distinguish between your TV usage and the ventilators at a local hospital then there is no difference between your two conditions. If such a distinction cannot be made within whatever circle you use to define "local" then the two cases are identical. The alternative is to wastefully over-provision each local area.