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Electric Grid is a Vast Machine
Guinnessy writes "The latest issues of the Industrial Physicist suggests that 'the vast system of electricity generation, transmission, and distribution that covers the United States and Canada is essentially a single machine-- by many measures, the world's biggest machine.' The article says that because deregulation ignored the physics of the machine, we have blackouts, a fact the industry warned regulators about in 1998. It has some nice hard science data for those interested in why we're going to get some more blackouts in the future unless Congress gets its act together."
...and all this time, I thought it was a magic electric grid!
You mean those electrons *aren't* being pushed to my outlet by little electric gnomes?
Competition and free markets make everything better. They work great for companies, so they must improve electrical power delivery too. Public utilities are an old-fashioned idea and should be abolished to create a free-market long distance energy trading utopia. We will all save money and cash in on our dividends. The same goes for public schools. Kids get smarter when their schools have to compete for them. Deregulation makes food taste better, roads safer, and can increase your penis size by 3 to 6 inches.
The collapse of the Soviet Union just proves that I am right. Anyone who doesn't share my mindless ideological fanaticism for deregulation is by definition a socialist and we all know how that turned out, people!
Something to do with the number of interconnections between circuits becoming a reasonable fraction of the typical brains interconnections.
Anyway - it might not hurt to store up some good credit and be polite to your electrical outlets just in case.
Well, he did mention "the Boiled Frog Scenario"...
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