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.
