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Comment by rangewookie | Hacker News Reader

Lets get back to the basics here. If Texas was connected to either the East or West grid, would it have power right now? Yes.

Edit - Texas can only access a tiny fraction of energy reserves due to weak connections to the East and West Grid. Imagine those connections were stronger or direct. I'm sure neighboring states will suffer too. I'm applying general knowledge of distributed systems, I'm not going to act like I know the specifics of the US power grid. If you go it alone, in any system, there are consequences.

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No. As I pointed out in another link, there were too many outages for transmission to cover it.

For example, California "only" has 10GW of north-south transmission capacity. TX lost nearly 45GW. Even if it was part of the East or West grid there wouldn't be the transmission capacity there to cover such a loss, plus the states closest to TX which were "connected" were also having major outages, which would have put even more strain on it.

TX does have HVDC interconnects to other states too, but I believe imports to TX were significantly down/zero over this crisis.

Exactly. The DC ties with the other grids are small and can only import <1 GW, but even if they were larger it wouldn’t have mattered much in this case. TX was pulling 600 MW from the Eastern grid but even that had to be shut off because Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri etc were all under blackouts too. The other grids had no spare electricity to share.

TX also has ties with Mexico, but those were useless too because even Mexico was hit hard by this storm and had blackouts all along the US border.

If you read the article, you would see that there's a strong chance they still wouldn't have power. Texas' grid currently exceeds the requirements set out by NERC for winterization.

If you're defining a couple houses as having power, sure. If you're talking about recovering the entire customer base? Not a chance. Power Distribution grids have been running on margin for years, if not lowering capacity. Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about but you still need to post. I don't understand why. Care to share why?

There are limits to how much you can distribute. AC does weird things when you try to power too large an area with several power sources, which is one reason for Dc interconnects. Too large an area and you can't synchronize the cycles.

Maybe. Oklahoma, and other surrounding states have been dealing with rolling blackouts but on a smaller scale. I would wait for the NERC report on this.

The Texas grid does have interconnects with the other US grids and Mexico. However the capacity on those is insufficient for current demand.

You are just playing word games as you just redefined the term interconnector.

In power grids an interconnector is used to move large amounts of power between grids and if it can't do that then is not an interconnector.

The Texas grid is and independent grid control by ERCOT exactly for this reason.

It was always designed to be independent by the Republican government that has controlled Texas for the last 20 years.

The 3 separately controlled grids have been around a lot longer than 20 years. Blaming politicians doesn't really solve much. The regulatory boards are not Republicans or democrats, those representatives are in the US government.

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