A wee thunderstorm rolled thru Cambridge an hour ago and knocked out electrical power in a major southwestern part of the city bracketing Mass Ave. The Miracle of Science among other provisioneers to the gods had to close down, unable to deal with lack of grid juice. How borderline barbaric! Thousands of US$ lost in both direct and opportunity costs! Very "Third World" -- only it's right here in the USA! Didn't Franklin invent lightning rods two and a half centuries ago?! Yay, go NStar, the incompetent local monopoly electricity "service provider." Except, however, at MIT which is largely off-grid with our own 20MW gas turbine cogeneration plant continuing to deliver the dynamics! We've got resilient power -- i.e. it actually still works -- and I'm now at MIT überbar, the Muddy Charles Pub sampling a cool and rather tasty Sierra Nevada;-)
01 June 2011
Resilient Power ~ MIT's Off-grid but Electrified;-)
A wee thunderstorm rolled thru Cambridge an hour ago and knocked out electrical power in a major southwestern part of the city bracketing Mass Ave. The Miracle of Science among other provisioneers to the gods had to close down, unable to deal with lack of grid juice. How borderline barbaric! Thousands of US$ lost in both direct and opportunity costs! Very "Third World" -- only it's right here in the USA! Didn't Franklin invent lightning rods two and a half centuries ago?! Yay, go NStar, the incompetent local monopoly electricity "service provider." Except, however, at MIT which is largely off-grid with our own 20MW gas turbine cogeneration plant continuing to deliver the dynamics! We've got resilient power -- i.e. it actually still works -- and I'm now at MIT überbar, the Muddy Charles Pub sampling a cool and rather tasty Sierra Nevada;-)
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