Wall
Street Journal: "Superstorm Sandy," writes former New York
Republican governor George Pataki, "exposed perhaps the
greatest flaw underpinning the American way of life: insecure
and unreliable electrical infrastructure." He calls for burying
local distribution networks underground and increasing the
number of high-voltage DC transmission lines from power plants.
They can be buried less expensively over long distances than
can AC lines, he observes, and they can be placed underwater,
like the Cross Sound Cable between Connecticut and Long Island.
Whether underground or underwater, burying DC cables helps to
"enhance their reliability." He advocates "distributed power
generation through fuel cells, microturbines, and the
simultaneous âcogeneration' of both heat and
power," with small installation footprints and reliability even
during grid outages. Pataki also calls for smart-grid
technologies that automatically post trouble reports, for
"so-called self-healing transmission and electric-system
technology [that] can help the electrical grid react to system
damage as it occurs by isolating outages," and for improvements
to federal procedures that counterproductively mandate
replacing disaster-damaged obsolete equipment only with the
same technology.
