A very interesting observation, made by an acquaintance, regarding the deteriorating national infrastructure and those who are calling for more technology and automation (note, especially, the first and last two paragraphs):
For those not so well informed, most of our national infrastructure has been going downhill for years. While it is operational, it can be maintained at a fairly low cost, but once it fails, it becomes very costly to restore the system to previous operating conditions.
The situation is made worse when people who don't know anything about the profession think they can fix all things by broad sweeping solutions.
The same arrogant bliss as the above reported comment occurs 98% of the time when somebody is managing an "Optimization or Optimal Control" project to install 'smart controls' throughout an infrastructure.
When operating companies don't even have adequate information to manually operate and control system failures, they won't improve things by 'automating' them.
Some things are improving with telemetry, where policies to meter everything, might make it feasible to actually have a better intuition on network flows in utility systems, but many such implementations simply install expensive meters with communications, but no well understood method to organize, track and monitor the data, let alone make intelligent decisions on load shedding.
When an electrical network is hard down, it can only be reliably brought up slowly, while coordinating loads and responses between safety devices.
Generators and local PVs, tend to complicate the problems because some installations end up back feeding the system when not properly installed per the codes.
I'm more reassured knowing they are tracking the solution manually, because it shows they actually understand how their system works from the bottom up.
The low tech solution using single line diagrams, maps, and highlighters shouldn't be ridiculed. The people who think everything in life should be a cellphone application should be ridiculed.
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