Well, our town is not 99.999% reliable - I'd be happy with that! I don't have power probably averaging something like 3 days a year. I'm part of ConEd, but not in NYC. I'm paying just about the highest rates in the country for this poor level of service. My guess is that the local grid is...
Why do you need switches for the redundancy? If you have extra connections the power will just flow through them all, when some fail the load should automatically redistribute, no? I'd think that the cost of the redundancy is just the extra wire, is that not correct?
I live in a town that is hard hit every time there is a storm. Trees knock out power lines - often the main feeders to an entire area. I'm wondering why the utility doesn't build a little redundancy into the local grid. For example, an area can have two different connection to the main feeders...