"economic trickle down from the 1% doesn't seem to include the monies to keep up the maintenance costs on things like roads, bridges and power plants. At least not in the generation of power. The cost of generating power in California took a dramatic change in direction when the do-gooders in Sacramento talked the PUC into believing that the big ugly mean power company didn't have the rate payers best interest in mind. Once that idea took hold and in a state like California that didn't take long, it wasn't long before the power companies were forced by the PUC to divest all interest in power generation (with a few exceptions). All of the company owned generation plants were forced to be sold off to independent power producing companies. To manage these companies they created the "ISO". The result of this sell off was to have the utility companies, which were regulated, separated from the power producers, which were not. The goal was to keep the utilities from charging higher prices for electricity and claiming that the cost of generation was the cause. A second result was that the PUC wouldn't allow the utilities a rate hike to cover the cost of doing business maintaining the grid. While the utilities were held at a lower rate the power producing companies were allowed to charge the utilities for the extra fuel cost incurred because of inflation, a crisis in the Middle East, what ever. This produced a significant difference in the amount the utilities were able to charge the customer and the cost they had to pay the producers. Oops! You might remember that PG and E declared bankruptcy and SDG and E managed to just dodge BK. Edison's stock went from the high 30's to around 7 and the midnight oil was being burned big time down at the GO (general office). So it wasn't the one "percent-ters" that caused the fiasco but the do-gooders. It was good for me because I took every penny I had and dumped into Edison stock. I was in Hawaii on vacation when it hit 7 and by the time I figured it out and got everything sold and into Edison the price had bounced back to twelve. I later sold it off in the high 30's. There were huge allegations of corrupt business practices in the small independent producers because they would claim a generation unit had to be taken off line for maintenance just when the summer was the hottest. They would find some issue like a bad gauge and take the entire unit down. Something that Edison would work around like changing the gauge while the unit was running instead of shutting it down. That would drive the cost of the remaining energy on line way up. The producer got to save wear on his generator and get a higher price for the energy he still produced on his other units. The customer ended up paying the difference in an "added extra fuel cost" line on his bill. Before the do-gooders got involved you never heard of a "brown-out" did you? That's because Edison and the other guys, PG and E, SDG and E and some others had what we called "spinning reserves". We had extra generators up, running (spinning) and ready to go if the summer heat took a spike and everyone started flipping the Air Conditioner switch on. The Independents won't do that so now every afternoon in the summer your being asked to cut back, set the thermostat higher, don't do your laundry and even sign up for electric meters that will cut your power back automatically! You're being asked to step up to the plate and "do your share". Take a bit of the pain for the team. Just because the Independents won't pay for the spinning reserves. So who's the big bad guy now? The utilities or the do-gooders? This is making me crazy! Boy, am I glad I'm retired.

As for someone tripping over the big power cord, I like it. But I have to add that they would have to trip over several. Here the deal. The AC power grid in the US, Canada and Mexico is all tied together with what they call "Inter Ties". All the power companies are tied together as well. Again, Inter Ties. All these systems run on 60 cycles. The generators turn at a speed that will produce a 60 cycle sign wave. Motors are designed to run at 60 cycles. In Europe it's 50 cycles. That's why your inverter and micro wave won't work after you leave the US and end up in the Med. and try to plug into a marina. To keep the generators running at 60 cycles they have what they call "Relays". They have a bunch of different kinds designed to do different jobs. One of them is called a "Load Shed" relay and it can be set to operate at any cycle they deem necessary, like 59.9 or 59.8 or 58.8. These relays are spaced out around the companies at the sub-transmission and transmission voltage substations and set to trip the transformers off line when these set points are reached. Lets say a drunk power pole wanders out in front of a car and gets knocked over. The line (circuit) on the pole hits the ground and "ground current" is passed through the ground back to the substation and through the "Ground Relay" on the circuit. In the relay there is a disc about the size of a CD. On that disc is a set of electrical contacts. A current is induced into that relay that spins the disc. The more ground fault current the faster the disc turns. Those contacts are connected to a circuit breaker that's feeding the line that's on the ground. The contacts make up. The breaker trips. The power is turned off. Here's the rub. If the any of those things don't happen and the power is still flowing then the next protective system in line kicks in. In this case it's the "Buss Overload" relay. If that system doesn't work then it backs up to the "Bank Differential" relay. If that doesn't work it backs up to the line "Overload" relay that feeds the substation. If that doesn't work it backs up to the "Buss Overload" and on and on until it backs up all the way to the Generator. Meanwhile, while all of this is taking place, the generators are slowing down because more and more fault load is being applied. More then the generators can withstand. Somewhere along the line the engineers have figured out where to put these Load sheading relays to break this cascading disaster. When the generator slows down enough, say 59.9, open goes the relay and the load at that station is dropped off the grid. If the generators still slowing down the next station drops off the grid at 59.8. and so on until the fault is cleared from the system. You can see that it's all a matter of timing. This is moving really fast! We're talking seconds and milliseconds for each piece of equipment to work. In the big outage the southwestern United States experienced a few years back that were talking about, several relays and or circuit breakers had to have failed to operate. Most likely it was a timing issue with relays improperly set. I never read the report because I was already retired but that's my bust guess. The systems that were in place to keep it from backing up to the generators didn't work and the shut down generators had to do what is called a "cold start". Then they had to pick up the load and that takes time. IMHO