After spending a little time yesterday with a power grid guru whose visions of the grid closely parallel my own with respect to the Internet, something occurred to me, which I think is pretty amazing. It makes no difference how smart or stupid a network may be, because the pipes that carry payload (and this applies to electricity, Internet data, voice, tv content, even water and gas) are implicitly dumb in all cases. The intelligence resides in network nodes. The pipes/wires/ducts/tunnels are dumb. This holds true for the high-voltage and distribution parts of the power grid, and it holds equally true for the backbone/second-mile/last-mile sections of telecoms and cable facilities as well.
High-voltage transmission system owners (the Regional Transmission Operators) argue that they are not being adequately compensated for carrying the juice. They claim all the money is being made by the generators. They further argue that much of the energy carried over their longer spans incur "losses", resulting in measurably reduced yields of megawatts actually delivered over time -- not unlike dropped packets on congested Internet routes -- hence the question: Who pays for the lost power en route, especially during abnormal conditions and contingency situations? They must support flows of all sizes and durations regardless of how loads shift from hour to hour, day to day, month to month.
These are the same dumb pipes that everyone's squabbling over: the part of the network that 'costs', not the part of the network that generates revenue.
Structural separation would give the incumbents new-found freedoms from the burdens of facilities management, and at the same time allow them to aggressively go after the content end where all the gravy's being made. The problem they face, however, and I wholeheartedly believe that this cultural issue is a major part of the overall equation, is that they have been institutionalized for such a long time at this point, just like a patient that's spent too much time in a hospital, or a prisoner who's spent the last half-decade in a penitentiary, that they wouldn't know how to compete "on the outside" without the crutch of the vertical hooks they have enjoyed into the outside plant for so long.
Methinks they merely need a little push, is all. They'll do fine. Of course, it may mean tossing overboard or rewriting quite a bit of billing code and useless back-office architecture, but hey, welcome to the 21st Century.
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