Consolidated Tesla

I knew there’d be blame of all sorts thrown around for the blackout, and on Friday I was joking with someone that while they were down, we should force Con Ed to change its name to Con Tesla, because Tesla/Westinghouse wanted to build a direct current system that wouldn’t be susceptible to things like this. Of course, you’d need a generating station every couple hundred feet, because DC can’t maintain voltage efficiently across distance. But it was a good joke, and those who knew what I was talking about got a boff out of it, and for the rest of them it just confirmed that a “Heathers” or “Pump Up the Volume” era Christian Slater should play me in the movie version. Anyway….

Then I read in one of the newsletters yesterday a quote from someone at one of the energy think tanks, a respected one, that this should never have happened and wouldn’t have happened if we had a direct current system. And HE was completely serious.

So I guess it’s time to electrocute a few elephants, in order to prove the dangers of DC again. It’ll be fun.