[swamp_donkey]

A downside to these schemes is that the stability of the electric system now also depends on large communication networks and some computer solving some algorithm. I can imagine the outages. I prefer my power outages to be caused by good old fashioned weather rather than Hadoop kubernetes cluster operator eventually consistent race error.

[schiffern]

Yes I agree. Ideally there's an ecosystem with many providers, minimizing the impact of any one system failure.

More likely, the NSA / Homeland Security will assist large providers in system hardening and resilience.