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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

Yep, and this is why electrical grid issues never take down entire regions of the US!

Like the 2003 Northeast blackout, for instance. [0] Things like that, where an error in one part of the grid cascades into massive issues elsewhere - those don't ever happen.

Sometimes, being big is a danger. Even when that's not the case, it can be worth accepting the same risk of each individual point on the map losing power if it means that (for instance) Ohio still has power while Indiana's in the dark and vise versa. I'd rather have one state in the Northeast lose power each year than have every state lose power at the same time every 15 years, if that makes any sense.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

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Well the Northeast Blackout of 2003 had quite a few lessons learned, but the fact of the matter is over time the US grid has become more interconnected - just like Europe - and through the interconnections brings more stable and cheaper power. Sure one off events happen, but the grid is more stable now than in the past when it was less isolated. Part of that is high voltage DC to DC links that allow for sharing of electrical over production, while at the same time isolating grids. Even within ISO grid regions these links are used.

The main benefit from having one ISO in the US would be a reduction of rules. If you wanted to build solar or gas or wind in California, it would be subject to the same grid rules as Texas (e.g. how to handle a fault on a line - how quickly it recovers from fault, from frequency or voltage deviations, etc.). The fact that a particular power grid is isolated from others means they can't benefit from cheaper power due to overproduction of say wind power in Kansas. That electricity goes to someone else or goes to waste.

Finally if anyone here cared to read, the FERC doesn't regulate the Texas grid.. it's ISO has its own rules (which I'm pretty sure are similar to the rest of the ISOs in the US which are subject to meeting the FERC regulations or going beyond them). The Texas grid is connected to other grids.

"The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with two DC ties, and has a DC tie and a VFT to non-NERC systems in Mexico. There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only one time in its history (after Hurricane Ike).

On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via three 5 GW superconductor links.[2] As of 2017, the project was reduced in scope and only related infrastructure was constructed for nearby wind projects connecting to the Western Interconnection." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection

That blackout was caused by a tree limb in Ohio, but it always seemed likely to me that the Blaster/Welchia worm either was a contributor or magnified the impact of the grid issues.

I worked next to a power plant that shared some network components with my employer at the time. They did an emergency shutdown minutes before we were impacted by blaster. Some of our upstream providers operating backbones in NY also were impacted and had capacity issues due to the worms. At least one of those providers had issues for days after the initial incident.

No it was caused by poor grid management at First Energy. If your high voltage lines start to sag because you don't know how to distribute your load and you don't maintain your right-of-way because all you want is profit that is what you get. Ohio is now bailing these idiots nuclear plants out on its citizen's dime, along with coal plants that should have been shut down years ago.

You can be sarcastic all you want, it doesn't make you right. I never said connecting grids makes them invulnerable, just more resilient. Connecting the EU grids has made them more stable, made electricity cheaper, made energy production more efficient (no more hydro going to waste), etc. etc.

There is indeed risk for cascading failure but it is very rare (how long have the US grids been interconnected vs. how many times has there been a massive, multi-state blackout?) and with EU countries higher attention to infrastructure maintenance the risk is even less.

You asked "Why does it make sense to have independent grids?" and I provided a reason. "But that'll never happen to us!" feels rather naive, personally - I think massive, deliberate power outages have a decent chance of occurring over the next 50 years. Future of cyberwarfare and all.

(And sometimes a system being extremely stable just means it's brittle, not strong)

The word you're looking for is resilience. That is basically all the regulators and grid ISOs do for the most part, make sure the grid is stable with different power sources of all types - be it gas generators and wind turbines that exist within a region under their control, or connections to outside grids. Regulators, national security people and others are definitely looking at what a hacking event might look like. The various grids, connected to each other or not, are definitely not as well designed to be resilient to something like a deliberate malicious act to damage power equipment by essentially hacking into the control systems to do something that they never were intended to do.

The design of electrical power grids is such that their control systems are by their very nature suppose to keep frequency and voltage within tolerances no matter the unpredictability of the grid. This is the definition of stability and resiliency that you're talking about. And the design takes into consideration failures of any device on the grid.

That being said, even being a minor power grid, it isn't actually isolated. Its just not subject to FERC regulations. But for the most part, its own regulations are similar to that of what other grid operators are doing, because it makes sense to do for grid stability reasons.

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