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Interesting that the US grid is not national, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wide_area_synchronous_gri...

Am I misunderstanding "synchronous"? Would it really be possible to mis-frequency only part of the IPS/UPS grid without bricking the rest?

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Combined, the Baltic States are about 67k square miles. This is smaller than Missouri. Smaller than nearly half of the US states. Alaska by itself is ten times their area. And though you might say, "but that's Alaska" that's exactly why comparing the US to European nations at the national level is usually a category error. Individually, the Baltics would rank in the smallest ten if they were US states.

Or to put it another way, for things like utility grids and high speed rail, a national level system in the US is comparable to a pan-european system that includes everything from Lisbon, to Oslo, to Bucharest and Belgrade and Istambul.

> Or to put it another way, for things like utility grids and high speed rail, a national level system in the US is comparable to a pan-european system that includes everything from Lisbon, to Oslo, to Bucharest and Belgrade and Istambul.

Which is exactly what exists, and what the Baltic states are joining: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continen...

It doesn't go as far north as Oslo, but does include Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

>> Smaller than nearly half of the US states. Alaska by itself is ten times their area.

I wonder if there is something between those states, maybe some sort of land bridge linking Alaska to the more southern states? The north american grid is very multinational, with the US generally a net importer of Canadian power, especially in the east. Except texas. They are weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NERC-map-en.svg

(And be careful when talking about the size of US states. Americans don't like being reminded how small they are.)

Functionally speaking, the infrastructure of Canada doesn't really expand into the northern territories. The Alaska Highway was only built as an emergency measure during WW2; without it, there'd be no infrastructure connection between (non-panhandle) Alaska and British Columbia, or even much of the Yukon and British Columbia.

> (And be careful when talking about the size of US states. Americans don't like being reminded how small they are.)

The US actually has slightly more land area than Canada, as a larger fraction of Canada's area is large lakes such as Lake Winnipeg, Lake Manitoba, Great Slave Lake, etc.

Canada has built many highways since WWII, including a second, straighter, highway through the yukon to alaska.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Roads-Ca...

The alaska panhandle and BC coast are a series of islands not suitable for highways, or power lines, or much else. As a practical matter, it isn't really connected to canada. Much of it is effectively more remote than canada's northern territories.

The (very real [1]) risk is that the Russians could disconnect the Baltic states from IPS/UPS, forcing them to operate autonomously, at a time of high demand and low local power generation. This could rapidly (within seconds) cause a grid-wise blackout which could take days to recover from - you have to do what's called a "black start" [2] to restore service - which is technically quite challenging.

[1] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/38632048.pdf [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

Importantly, from your first citation:

> The present report gives an insight in the ability of the Baltic States to operate their electricity systems independently of the neighbouring countries. The results show that by 2020 and 2030 the dependency of the Baltic States on the outside generation resources is fairly low, following current electricity system development trends.

Consequently, if one were to desire to disempower Russia and Belarus, you’d increase funding to the Baltic states to allow them a more rapid transition to robust electrical grids (through transmission, generation, and interconnector upgrades). The Baltics could always get more power from Finland and Sweden and disconnect entirely from Russia and Belarus if necessary.

> The Baltics could always get more power from Finland and Sweden and disconnect entirely from Russia and Belarus if necessary.

Estonia has been a net exporter of electricity since 2017. [1] Amusingly one of the export targets is Russia.

Looking at the current live data [2] it looks like Latvia is in a similar situation, although I haven't searched for yearly statistics.

Lithuania is a net importer though, but that's largely due to major restructuring of its electricity system. Specifically because a condition of Lithuania joining the EU was that it has to shut down its nuclear power plants. If those plants were still running then Lithuania would be a big exporter, because the plants were built during Soviet times with the idea of powering a bunch of the neighboring coutries as well. [3][4]

[1] https://majandus24.postimees.ee/6738108/energiasoltumatus-on...

[2] https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/LV

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_energy_in_Lithuania

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignalina_Nuclear_Power_Plant

The EU required Lithuania to shut the nuclear reactor in question (Ignalina) down because it had an inherently flawed design making it unsafe to continue to operate. There is still an opportunity to use storage and renewables to be a power exporter. The renewables will need to be built regardless.

I highly doubt that the Baltic countries will exist in 2030, rather they'll be already annexed by Russia(this will happen around the middle of this decade).

I don't have high hopes in NATO, but I really doubt that would happen

I'm afraid its going this way. Belarus will join Russia this year. Trump will get reelected and throw the Baltics to Russia in exchange of the new nuclear detente.

NATO and the EU are useless - NATO depends on the US, EU is toothless and their biggest military power - France is Russian slut.

The only solution would be to show strength NOW - deploy nuclear weapons to the Baltics and deal with every single fifth columnist there in a brutal, public fashion. Of course this will never ever happen. Annexation is matter of time.

I'm moving away from Tallinn next year, so hopefully this year nothing will happen...just in case I have all my money moved out of the country.

Russia doesn't exist for centuries. Great Russian Empire doesn't exist for century. Russian Federation may not exist in 2030.

This is the most entertaining (and uninformed) statement I've read today. I'd be curious to know what makes you think this is a plausible scenario?

Looking at the map, reading the news, reading history books. Basically summing up 2 and 2 together.

Yes, North America is not a single synchronous grid. All of it operates at 60Hz, but interconnections between the regions are done using either HVDC or VFTs because electrical signals from both regions would not be in-phase (i.e. have synchronized peaks)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection has details on how the Western Interconnection works.

I wonder what the actual advantage of a synchronous grid is.

You can transfer power from one side to another without the extra hardware expense and losses that a HVDC connection imposes.

Non-synchronous interconnects are more expensive, inefficient, and complex than synchronous ones.

Historically cost. Building a non-synchronous grid is much harder because you need equipment that can correct for phase differences in your grid. This equipment used to be very large and very expensive, Mercury-arc valves are some of equipment that used to be used (they provide AC to DC conversion) [1].

But modern power electronics are so cheap and efficient that High Voltage DC transmission lines are becoming increasingly common, driven by the fact the High Voltage DC is more energy efficient that High Voltage AC (you can push more power down the same cable, with less energy lost to resistive loads because DC doesn't suffer from the skin effect [2]).

With more High Voltage DC transmissions lines it becomes easier to run non-synchronous grids, because the DC transmissions acts as natural breaks between synchronous grids. Running a non-synchronous grid tends to be a little easier because you no longer need to worry about strange phase variances caused by multiple transmission lines of different lengths injecting phase delays into your network.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-arc_valve [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_effect

That's sort of what I was thinking. Seems easier to coordinate a HVDC interties than a synchronous grid. I also keep coming back to the thought that long east west and north south interties would be beneficial when you have large percentages of solar and wind.

You can provide frequency control in one part to keep another part stable. For example if you have a part of your grid with a high level of renewables (for example, South Australia), system stability can be provided by large intertia generators in other parts of the grid (in our example, coal power stations in Victoria).

Take away the interconnect, and the islanded part of the grid is no longer stable, requiring the renewables to be switched off and replaced with gas and diesel generators. This happened after a storm earlier this year:

https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/sa-to-remain-cut-off-fr...

If two interface points take different-length paths from the origin, they might be out of phase at the interfaces. If I'm doing the math right, a path 250 miles longer would be 90 degrees out of phase.

There are many factors that affect the phase angle. Path length is one, so is the impedance of the lines (a line with double the X will get the same phase offset in half the length). Other equipment will have phase offsets such as transformers where the phase offset is a function of the winding configuration. There are event specialized transformers just for this purpose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_booster

This is considered a feature, because having multiple independent systems reduces the probability of a complete failure. IIRC, some national security-sensitive facilities are duplicated on two grids.

The really weird thing is that Texas has its own grid. Especially since electricity is significantly cheaper on the Texas grid than on the other two.

Isn't it that chokepoints are what causes failures in the electric grid, not general connectedness? If you are looking at security holes in control equipment it doesn't matter of you are connected to a grid, when you've got the NSA/KGB/Chinese Ministry of State Security inside your generating station you've lost anyway.

Failures can cascade across the grid. A software bug in an Ohio utility's computers in 2003 ultimately took out power for 55 million people in several US states and the province of Ontario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

If you have sites in multiple grids you're guaranteed that one failure doesn't take down every site.

Never heard it was a software bug? Lack of maintenance allowed tree branches to grow under transmission lines which sag the hotter they get and so on a hot summer day with record system loads one transmission line tripping caused a cascading outage.

Read the Wikipedia page, sure the system operators in MISO didn’t get some alarms but blaming the whole thing on that is pretty lame. There were multiple causes and not Getting alarms was just one of 10 things that went wrong.

we do what we want! which is wind power somehow

It's not weird at all. Texas disconnected from the East and the West via AC ties (still has DC ties that connect to the Eastern and Western Interconnects) to avoid FERC's federal oversight, so they only answer to the Texas PUC.

Electricity is cheaper there due to the prevalence of wind in comparison to much of the country, but there are also really low prices in the SPP region (includes part of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and parts of several other states) due to wind.

It is also important to remember that ERCOT does not have a capacity market like every other FERC regulated ISO. The added cost in places like PJM and CAISO is noticeable. Though having capacity markets does not seem to prevent blackouts.

In practice, capacity markets seem to be mostly handouts to incumbents with a lot of fossil capacity.

ERCOT has an ORDC, further pushing up prices during a crunch. OTOH the rest of the time consumers enjoy quite low prices.

Yep $9000 prices upon occasion.

That is not entirely true. SPP does not have a capacity market as capacity procurement (outside of resource adequacy) seems to be on the States.

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