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Ok, I agree, single line corridors would require additional lines. The utilities I have worked with have required two line and two paths.

Where does this money come from? This a very important first step to your plan.

fault isolation and redundant grids would not improve reliability. I also do not see where I would be reducing the ability to reroute power. Please explain.

Your first premise did not include major new construction, adding redundant lines will reduce outages, but where does the money come for this, again, this is an ENORMOUS expense. A large grid has a greater ability to instantaneously reroute power without any break in power. Depending on redundant, ISOLATED grids means a short break in power to switch to the other grid. At many manufacturing facilities (such as an extrusion process, refinery, etc) a 10 cycle break in power means tens of thousands of dollars and plant down time up to a day.

"Your first premise did not include major new construction" - ok, I can see where your comments would arise.

As for the money - yes it would be expensive. The cost of which would need to be evaluated against the %of annual failure times the average cost of failure both in terms of lost revenue and in terms of financial risk from inheritance (loss of life, cost of repair, lawsuits or insurance to cover, etc.). This is standard risk analysis stuff. Lastly, the % of failure or uptime should be compaired to public policy. If the grid requires 99.90% uptime and that is already being met, then no changes would be required.

Initial capital can be raised in any number of ways - including traditional bonds, with cost recovery coming from rate increases. In short, the final person to foot the bill would be the consumer.

However, in my prior analysis the build out cost were not as extreame as you propose. Perhaps that was a unique situation. The sample "grid" did not have any single leg substations. I will admit that such may have tainted my cost model and distorted the final costs.

I would find it very concerning though to have a single leg substation. There would be a very high failure risk due to the lack of redundancy. If multiple such stations existed in the grid, the overall risk factor would be, relatively speaking, very high.

You mention that a large grid has the ability to switch power. I agree. My comments would not reduce the geographic foot print of the grid, but it would reduce the amount of power per grid.

Given my test case, it would have been possible to create Grid A and Grid B, each with 1/2 the lines. In a redundantly connected substation, you end up with 4 possible paths.

Grid A: path 1 & 2
Grid B: path 1 & 2

What I'm hearing you say is that this is not typical of most substations??? That would be very concerning.