Word: grid
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...It’s possible, with the assistance of a good backroad atlas and a knack for knowing which turns are more interesting than others, to spend a lot of time seeing America. A century of inspired roadbuilding blessed this country with an impressive asphalt grid begging for travel. There are no passport tangles to worry about, the currency exchange is easy, and the language barrier—excepting a few regional absurdities—is nonexistent...
...Gloucestershire housed in converted World War II airplane hangars. Not all of his people work on the manufacturing end, but scores of assistants execute his product-lines-on-canvas, which are hugely profitable but for the most part aesthetically negligible. Those include hundreds of "spot paintings," each a multicolored grid of little circles and named after a pharmaceutical product; "spin paintings" made by pouring paint onto a whirling disk; and "butterfly paintings" made by embedding dead butterflies in pigment and resin, sometimes in elaborate stained-glass-window formations, sometimes just attached here and there on the canvas. At Sotheby...
...possible. He calls the blackout a "once in 10 years event," and past blackouts in 1996, 1977 and 1965 bear that out. (After the 2003 event, Daigle notes, some utility operators in western Europe said that such a widespread blackout could never occur with the continent's better designed grid - but in fact a major failure hit their system just a couple months later.) "[Failure] is always possible," says Daigle. "But we have to find ways to reduce the possibility...
...utility reliability depended on little more than "peer pressure." That's been beefed up in the years since, with tougher audits of utility systems and steeper fines for failures. But more importantly, we need to enhance what Daigle calls "situational awareness," or, in other words, the intelligence of the grid. The system failed in 2003 not so much because of unkempt trees and a few sagging lines, but because no one knew what was going on until it was too late. Utilities can't talk to each other, and often can't even talk to themselves. Most utilities...
Making the grid smarter will take real investment, but that's been lagging, and like much of our infrastructure, the grid is overdue for an overhaul. "Government funding has been pretty modest in scale," says Daigle. He notes that last year's federal energy act contained authorization for smart grid investment - but no money has been appropriated yet. That needs to change. As electricity demand increases in the U.S. and we become ever more networked, the consequences of a major power loss worsen as well. The blackout of 2003 cost some $6 billion, but it could have been far more...