The experiences of the reponses to Hurricane Katrina and 9-11 show what can happen when there are massive failures of communications between military and civilian authorities and agencies: hardware failures, incompatibility, systemoverload, interference, and other factors that vastly complicated a coordinated response.
My colleague William Pentland writes about another consequence of excess hydropower: wind farms in the Pacific Northwest are being forced to disconnect from the power grid out of concern their added electrons with overload the system.