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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how a hyper developped rich country like the USA tolerates so many grid failures over times. I do not mean that as a critic or boasting about ours or whatever, and I do understand (a bit of) the specifics that gives this end result, I just don't understand why there hasn't been a massive push by the population to make that issue one politicians had to fix.

Short of their pylons being taken down from storm/flood/... causing localized failures, the french grid virtually never goes down like this, and yet even then people complain if it takes too long to recover after a small localized blackout.

Or maybe this is a biased view I have from not living there and only getting fragmented news about it, and grid failures are actually very rare in the USA too ?

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The main problem is, because of various political idiocies, the US has put effectively no money in basic infrastructure in 50 years - so the lines are old and a lot of the more local base load generation has aged or is aging out of functionality. In addition to this, the power industry was one of the ones that got privatized in the 80's and regulation of it has been remarkably milquetoast outside of a few pushes like after the 2003 blackout.

The Texas problem has to do with ERCOT dodging oversight by keeping its grid separate from the other interconnects and within state lines, so they don't need to actually bother with much national regulation, like investing in heaters on their gas lines to keep the valves from freezing, for instance.

This is substantially misleading. Due to the 2011 outage, the Texan regulations are stronger and more strictly enforced than the federal regulations. Additionally, the primary issue with natural gas was due to suppliers not being able to get gas to the generators. The natural gas suppliers are federally regulated.

Could this be due to France's high use of nuclear energy (~70%)? I wish we had that, but it's nearly impossible to build here.

It probably does plays a part in why France's grid holds so well, but it doesn't explain why the US tolerate theirs.

How would we fix it without building nuclear plants? I don't think building a bunch of fossil fuel plants is going to go over well. Even Texas hasn't built anything other than wind and solar in years.

Maybe we tolerate it because fixing it is politically impossible.

> I don't understand how a hyper developped rich country like the USA tolerates so many grid failures over times.

Because there is not such thing as the "USA grid". The US, unlike many other countries (FR, ES, UK, IT), is not a monolithic legal entity. It is made up of small legal units (states) that have sovereignty with-in their borders over certain matters:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism

There is no "US electrical grid" in the legal ownership sense. Rather there are a bunch of smaller grids tied together, each somewhat free to do what they wish with-in guidelines. Different areas may choose to tolerate grid failures more than others depending on how they want to allocate resources: some may want 0 issues per year and pay more for that level of reliability, while others may be okay with 1-2 so that prices are lower.

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