[PLUG-TALK] The unstable "smart" grid

[Keith Lofstrom]

> On Thu, 22 Oct 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> >I did not even get into the fact that the communication system is powered
> >by the electrical system; making the electrical system dependent on
> >sophisticated communication is not a formula for robustness.
 
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 09:08:14AM -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   This self-referential system (the electricity powering communication about
> the electricity) would do Douglas Hofstadter proud. Of course, when it fails
> the communications could be by smoke signals (burning transformers and
> sub-stations).

We already have a demo of the process.   In 2003, The U.S. purposely
disabled the Iraqi power grid.  The electrical grid powers the water
pumps and charges the batteries in the telephone offices in Baghdad. 
When we invaded, the admiral in charge of the Navy's medical centers
(Bethesda, etc.) was tasked with bringing up Baghdad's hospitals. 
Which need power, water, and telephones to operate.

Nobody was tasked with restoring those services.  The admiral, a
can-do guy, decided to restore services to Baghdad to complete his
original task.  The big problem is that the Baghdad power grid is
"optimized", a nice way of saying that it had no reserve and barely
functions at the best of times.  The 68 power plants feeding the
city had to be brought up adaptively, in just the right sequence,
or it would melt the transmission lines.  The sequencing, before
GulfWar2, was done by telephone.  And there was no power for the
telephones...

The admiral used his personal credit card to buy 68 satellite
telephone sets, and sent out 68 teams of officers with Iraqi power
engineers.  They successfully brought up the Baghdad grid, which
charged the telephone batteries and refilled the water mains.  The
admiral then got on with his principal task.  When he submitted
his request for reimbursement, he was cashiered for exceeding his
authority.  That is, embarassing his idiot superiors.  

If we learned just that one lesson about the fragility of systems
without reserve capacity, even that enormously costly war would
have paid for itself in lessons learned.  Sadly, Santayana was
right about learning from history (or math, or physics, or 
simple causality for that matter).  Time to get to work on IP
protocols for smoke signals.

Hofstadter went to U of O, BTW.  A friend of mine was his roommate. 

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs