Andrew Odlyzko’s sensible 2 cents on the East Coast electrical outage
Andrew Odlyzko: Re: East Coast outage?:
Should oodles of money be spent improving the power generation and transmission grid?
… [follow the link for back-of-the-envelope calculation] …
the true economic cost of suffering a blackout once every 10 years is probably more like $400 million per year. That does not buy much generating capacity or transmission lines.
Now we simply will have to build more power plants and transmission lines, since electricity demand is rising. However, this costs much more money than putting down fiber, and causes much more political opposition. Given these constraints, the electric power industry appears to be doing an excellent job.
Let’s hope that a reasonable analysis ensues, leading to a sensible expenditure that fixes more problems than it creates. How likely is that?