Redundancy, in the context of power transmission and distribution, means simply that there are lots of backup sources for power to take over, should a power source fail anywhere along the grid. My push for distributed energy micro-grids has been criticized locally claiming it lacks redundancy when in fact wide scale distributed energy is the epitome of a redundant electrical system. To make my point here are a few examples of massive power outages that occurred because there is no redundancy in the centralized grid. The article lists many examples of catastrophic grid failure but this one below is pretty amazing.
November 2006: A German power company switches off a high voltage line over a river to let a cruise ship pass. It triggers outages for 10 million people in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Recently, we had an outage in North Bend that cascaded through sections of Coos Bay. In the event of such an outage most utilities fall all over themselves disconnecting from the faltering line as quickly as possible to avoid massive outages. They do not, as is believed rush to help by rerouting power to the stricken area. It is more akin to a mass exodus to the life boats with all lines cut to keep from being sunk with the ship. No one tries to keep it floating.
