In fact, many people have been discussing the dire challenges of our crumbling infrastructure. I’ve read expert reports from RAND, the Hudson Group, the Academy of Sciences, and even Public Citizen, so, in other words, this crosses all political lines and is no secret. One of the biggest challenges we have is our power grid, which is why we had a rude awakening in 2005 when the lights went out in the Northeast after a cascading blackout. OK let’s talk.
Okay, so how bad is it really and what should we do to fix it? Should we hire a company or consortium of companies to address this problem? What company is big enough to do it? Bechtel, GE, Boeing, who, everyone? Consider if you want the enormity of the challenge here, we’re talking about the power grid for the most powerful nation (literally) on the planet. Not long ago, I was talking about this with an acquaintance and he told me;
“Thinking from that angle, it seems like the company doing this is thinking more about the financial gain of having a computer do it, and not having to spend as much money on the human factor, and then having the consequences if something goes wrong. in mind.”
Oh, but so does the government that will underwrite the research for the “SmartGrid.” You see, we actually need to invest about $800 million to $1 trillion to upgrade our underpowered grid, in the meantime, if we do that, we can also modernize it, right? If they had maintained the grid and spent the money fixing the transmission lines as needed, we wouldn’t need the new system anyway. It’s like this: our rail system is less than desired based on current technology, but it works.
Should we spend to upgrade now or wait until we have better materials for more reliable high-speed rail and systems? Why upgrade and spend that money when things work now and the increase in efficiency is hard to justify for the money we could spend? We could easily spend $500 million on the smart grid in the US, on an untested system, which could fail just like the current system will if we continue to overload it without repairs and maintenance.
Increasing the complexity of a simple system is not the answer to the transmission problem, and it is risky to completely remake the current system into a space-age system, which claims to be more reliable and efficient without testing. Also, allowing politicians who are not engineers or not in industry to make decisions is insane.
There have been a lot of pretty prominent engineers and scientists, real technocrat types, who have come up with various solutions, but still, you know; I am concerned, unconvinced and not amused by the concepts presented so far. It would need a lot more information, not PR press releases from academics clamoring for more funding and praise. Don’t trust anyone, especially a human being. In fact, we never should have gotten into this position in the first place: poor planning and government bureaucrats asleep at the wheel, in my opinion. Please consider all this and think about it.