How can we upgrade our cities so that they function during such adverse conditions? Where should we invest in infrastructure to get the best return? Answers may lie in the design of another crucial system: the Internet.
The internet was built to be resilient -- it was engineered to keep functioning even if part of the network went down. The designers of ARPANET, the precursor of the modern internet, chose a distributed system with no central node for their network. They found ways to route information in multiple paths from origin to destination to avoid a single-point of-failure fault. This is one reason why the Web is so robust today, even when it is attacked by hackers or its physical elements by natural disasters, information can be re-routed around the fault to reach its recipients.
Unlike the internet, our power grid is architected such that if any fault takes place along a line, all customers on that line lose power. Steven Johnson calls these "Legrand Star" networks in his new book, Future Perfect, after the central-node railway system in France. It turns out that our power grid is even more fault-prone than a central-node network. In 2003, 45 million Americans lost power due to a sudden blackout. In that disaster, the entire Eastern half of the US lost power when just one utility plant in Ohio went offline. What would happen if hackers tried to take down the system at multiple points?
And yet, we learned little from that catastrophe and did seemingly nothing about it. Our grid is the very definition of the fragile system that Nassim Taleb warns against in his new book, Anti-fragile. Taleb urges us to redesign systems to learn from failure points and get stronger.
Our grid today is just as fragile as it was in the blackout of 2003 -- maybe even more so. The grid that serves lower Manhattan was the first utility network in the country, built by Thomas Edison in the 1890s. It's time to upgrade the infrastructure in NYC and across the US. Here are specific steps we can take to increase the reliability and resiliency of our electric grid: Click here to continue reading my CNN/Fortune article Sandy Meltdown