Siemens has made late deliveries of trains to Deutsche Bahn, underestimated the difficulty of building offshore windpower substations and installed faulty wind turbines.
American Superconductor makes smarter devices known as D-VARs that fit into portable tractor-trailers and can be parked right next to existing substations.
With the exception of some simple sensors located at a minority of substations, there is little "intelligence" embedded in today's grid.
Microsoft's $500m new facility near Chicago, for instance, will need three electrical substations with a total capacity of 198 megawatts.
A beautiful side benefit of the technology is that data-enabling their power networks will let utilities monitor what is happening on their power grids in real time, down to local substations.
The same goes for all the routers at substations.
The result was a violent fluctuation in line voltage that fed back through the grid to trip switches at substations throughout the San Diego area.
"Bizarre cell phone towers, electrical substations, trash compactors, construction workers making a hole in the road that exposes all of the tubes and pipes that have always been below us are suddenly visible to me, as if out of nowhere.
Assaults on oil pipelines and electricity substations have left a trail of human casualties.
Microsoft's new data centre near Chicago, for instance, has three substations with a total capacity of 198MW, as much as a small aluminium smelter.But cheap electricity is only one, albeit important, criterion for choosing the site of a data centre.
In 1999 BVU ran optical fibre among its substations and city offices, at first purely for internal use.
