Just twenty four lit­tle hours and I am recharged and rar­ing to go again. Start­ing next week my girls and I will be get­ting to know Port­land much bet­ter while the LIM is assem­bled so that we can start excit­ing elec­trons and gen­er­at­ing power.

Also, I got a note that a com­menter on The World is talk­ing about redun­dancy. Just think, empir­i­cally, about power out­ages in gen­eral. They are local events, typ­i­cally, unless a big DC inter­tie goes down and then giant swaths of the coun­try go dark. Decen­tral­ized power and micro-grids local­ize both pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion and main­tain local redun­dancy as well as con­tain any fail­ure locally whereas within a cen­tral­ized sys­tem, a local event can have a cas­cad­ing effect as in the mas­sive 2003 black­outs in the North­east brought about by one power plant in Ohio.

An anal­ogy sug­gested to me would be to com­pare a micro-grid to a cel­lu­lar phone net­work and the cen­tral­ized power grid to the global land line tele­phone system.