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Comment by senkora | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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