On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 23:03:28 -0500, Big John
wrote:

Texas grid did not go down. It's not hooked to anyone else.

Hey I noticed that on the interconnect map. Wonder why that is when
everyone else is connected to a much larger grid.

Out west here the grid is designed to partition itself as
automatically as possible if something happens to go wrong. I seem to
recall that in the mid-nineties it kept the big-area states here from
all collapsing when that Idaho power plant went belly-up. From this
layman's perspective that's pretty neat engineering.

It seems to me that the most problematic part of the national system
is that northeast interconnect. The rest of us seem to be getting
along pretty well with five or six-nines reliability on the system.
Heck, even in the northeast with the outage this week I'd say they're
getting six nines.

Rob