[RightWhale]

When the grid goes down, it should collapse to its several local, autonomous community systems. Overall efficiency would not be as great, and there would be local problems, but the whole economy should not suffer. Drag out the old diesel generators and dig up the old station operator and start polluting the air like in the good, old days.

[_Jim]

When the grid goes down, it should collapse to its several local, autonomous community systems.

They refer to his as 'islanding' - when local generation provides for 'load' in that islanded area ... this sort of thing *should* have happened on Aug 14, and, it did, actually, as the entire eastern grid did not go down as the mechanism for the collapse was halted by such system as the Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland (PJM) controlled areas ... by shedding adequate smaller 'loads' in an area that has islanded *most* of the local load (and, most importantly, the generators *stay up*) stays powered up.