Former New York governor calls for a range of power-grid upgrades

Wall Street Journal : “Superstorm Sandy,” writes former New York Republican governor George Pataki, “exposed perhaps the greatest flaw underpinning the American way of life: insecure and unreliable electrical infrastructure.” He calls for burying local distribution networks underground and increasing the number of high-voltage DC transmission lines from power plants. They can be buried less expensively over long distances than can AC lines, he observes, and they can be placed underwater, like the Cross Sound Cable between Connecticut and Long Island. Whether underground or underwater, burying DC cables helps to “enhance their reliability.” He advocates “distributed power generation through fuel cells, microturbines, and the simultaneous âcogeneration’ of both heat and power,” with small installation footprints and reliability even during grid outages. Pataki also calls for smart-grid technologies that automatically post trouble reports, for “so-called self-healing transmission and electric-system technology [that] can help the electrical grid react to system damage as it occurs by isolating outages,” and for improvements to federal procedures that counterproductively mandate replacing disaster-damaged obsolete equipment only with the same technology.