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."