During the hurricane, at every instance, my land line
telephone worked. Dial tone, calls, in and out, no problem. But within minutes
of the start of the storm, down went the power. Heavy dew or fog knocks out the
electricity. Why?
They work over the same telephone poles, they both come from
central stations, they both are wires, they both require power sources, and
they both have repair trucks. So why?
Simple, you see that the telephone network is changing by
the day, we now have broadband, wireless, sophisticated communications devices,
world wide networks, and the list goes on. Power production and distribution
has frankly not changed one bit in almost 150 years! They still use the same
generators, same wires, same poles, same transformers, and frankly the same
sockets.
One of the reasons is education. We have thousands of highly
skilled telecom engineers, making changes to modulation, multiple access,
network management, protocols. We have hundreds of universities educating them,
and the industry absorbs them at a premium. Yet when was the last time we had a
PhD in power engineering? MIT no longer teaches it, it has not taught it since
before 1960 to my memory. I found this out when I took a Doctoral written exam
at Northwestern, just to try it, and they did there, DC motors and power
transmission lines. But I suspect that 1966 was the last time they did that.
They even had vacuum tubes, but alas that was the end of that as well.
We just have no quality power types, no high tech capability
in an entire industry. I remember back in the 50s, if you were smart you tried
to get to Bell Labs or ATT, if you were a slacker you went to Con Ed.
Thus the key problem is that the industry has no R&D, no
place for smart innovative people, and it seems to be managed by “managers”
whose best talents are in keeping the maximum rate of return for a utility.
The industry is shameful for its long lack of investing in
high tech solutions. The national grid network is an example. It is on a par with
water distribution or sewer pipes. Can
Government do anything? The answer is also a simple, no! Just look at DoE,
since the early 1970s it has wasted hundreds of billion on electric cars. Sound
familiar. Then batteries, then solar. It
is clear that there is a major set of challenges, but to meet them will require
a major upheaval of the utility mindset, the mindset that seems to see it fine
to have tens of millions sent to the darkness while the dial tone still work.
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