Advantages & economics of decentralized power

I've always thought decentralization made a lot of sense probably from an environmental perspective as well as security. Economics perhaps too.

 

A decentralized power system is also FAR less likely to experience catastrophic failure due to weather events. There was an ice storm in southern Ontario, southern Quebec, and parts of New Brunswick, in 1998. Some facts about the ice storm:

- 28 died, mostly elderly living alone and mostly from hypothermia
- 4 million lost power, some areas for up to a month
- 600,000 had to leave their cold, dark homes to live in emergency shelters
- 130 ice-encrusted high voltage towers owned by Ontario Hydro and Hydro Quebec collapsed
- The most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, around $5 billion

In 1989 during a bad solar flare, all of the Hydro Quebec transmission system failed. The geomagnetic induced current - badly out of phase - forced the transformers into half-cycle saturation, which caused them to burn out. Actually a few even exploded. The out-of-phase and harmonics disabled the capacitor banks from providing voltage protection. Over 9 million lost power

Based on my industrial and telecomm background, whenever I hear of "central source" I always fear "single mode failure."