12 ms·
The past few years have shown that our infrastructure -- electricity, fuel, shipping, etc -- is more fragile than we expected. We're running on very thin margin
by infogulch 5y ago
The past few years have shown that our infrastructure -- electricity, fuel, shipping, etc -- is more fragile than we expected. We're running on very thin margins, which is efficient!, but not very durable.
These systems should have a larger buffer for variation than what they run at now, and we should regularly exercise their flexibility. A chaos monkey for infrastructure perhaps. It will be a pain to deal with outages in normal times, but much less of a pain than being surprised by their inflexibility in the middle of some other crisis.
- mepiethree 5y agoFor electric power it’s an especially tricky physics problem; you can’t overproduce power, or things will just blow up. Grid operators must perfectly balance supply and demand at every moment of every day and electricity moves at the speed of light, so the electricity powering your lights was a hunk of coal or a gust of wind within the last nanosecond. large scale batteries could make the jobs of grid operators like me soo much easier.