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Yeah, but they aren't cool like a car-sharing network. This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar

Yeah, but they aren't cool like a car-sharing network. This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar arrays, and the boring thing is running the existing grid that we depend on for life. Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career. People have abstracted away how much work it takes to keep society running. For the most part that is okay, because it gives them more time to specialize in their chosen field, but then they think because something has been abstracted away that it's easy to make some "minor change" without knowledge of the cost either in dollars or in lives.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
> Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career. Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power. Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power. Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.

toomuchtodo 12y ago

> Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career. Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power. Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power. Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.