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Originally Posted by helpplease
Most of the grid itself is very old.
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Unless it is failing, age is not a reason for an upgrade. Overhead transmission lines don't really wear out. Insulators need to be replaced, but not often.
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Obviously some updates have been had but for the most part the system has remained unchanged. It is inefficient at best.
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what part of the grid do you consider to be so inefficient? Generation? Transmission? Distribution? There's a lot of 'stuff' there that's lumped into this thing we call the Grid.
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Examples the meter boxes are one way only they only show customer usage but don't alert the company about power outages.
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This has little to do with efficiency, and besides, if there is no power at the meter box, how is it supposed to send an alert???
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The wires themselves I am sure could be better designed.
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Umm, wire is wire, how do you design that better??
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The relay stations seem to be very prone to one goes and then another goes. There has to be something done about that.
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Updates can go a long way to prevent these cascading overloads. The trick is to shut off the circuits fast enough that the remaining load is within the generating capacity still online, which is a good trick since the load changes 60 times per second. These failures can cascade FAST!
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I realize they are privately owned but the problem with that is they are not going to spend anymore money then they have to.
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Many of them are publicly owned, and you can buy stock in CON-ED, etc. They have a duty to provide electrical energy at a high reliability and at affordable rates. That means they won't invest a lot in new, unproven technology, and they won't spend $1 to avoid only $0.01 in problems.