Speaking on Deep Background, the Press Secretary whispered:
> It seems to me that the power guys are still living somewhere in the
> last century. Is it really impossible to absorb power spikes? We can go
> from utility to battery or the other way around in milliseconds, so itHow many kVA are *you* switching?
How many kVA are running through those big 765kv lines?
This is what a *circuit breaker* looks like at those sizes:
http://www.hhi.co.kr/english/IndustrialPowerSystem/product/highvoltage/product2-7.html
8000 amps at 765kv.
And that's just to *break* the circuit without vaporizing itself in the process.
At last, someone with clue. But note the minor details missing in the url:
price, and lead time.
Plus, the 'last century' guy needs to do a little math. Sure
we can store 50-500 joules. BFD. But the gap between that and that
768KV going flat out is many orders of magnitude more than between
oh 110BPS and OC-48.
The basic issue with all the power nets is really simple to
grasp, in NANOG terms:
Redundancy co$t$ – who wants to pay???
The power industry had no telecom bubble to overbuild
facilities. It's easy to go from OC-48 to OC-96, right? It's far
far harder to double the capacity of a 500 mile or even a 100
mile line.
FIRST, there's the money.
Then there's the politics.
Only THEN do you hit the lead-time issue.
And then....
And to put it another way...
You have a buncha OC circuits, and get hit by backhoe fade. After
you patch the fiber, you first have to junk the ci$co boxes at
both ends because they blew up when the fiber broke. To restart,
you then must get a sync signal from Hillsburo, get everything
all on key & in tune, and then you start the smallest box, the
next one, then finally.... Do it wrong and you get another Star
Trek Bridge panel scene.