You can isolate yourself from cascading blackouts while still being able to share power. This is why they may cross several states, but never hit nationwide.
Funny how this was actually caused by a planned shutdown of a specific line to let a ship pass. Something that had been done before :)
> In total, over 10 million people in northern Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Spain lost power or were affected by the blackout
It's especially funny how while this was less total people affected, it spread much more so to speak. I would tend to believe that this is actually due to the fact that Europe's power grid is way more interconnected, meaning that they could power more people more quickly again by just routing electricity differently than they would usually do.
That US blackout was completely isolated to the Northeast Power Coordinating Council (NPCC), all other regional grids where unaffected. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_power_transmiss.... “The regions are not usually directly connected or synchronized to each other, but there are some HVDC interconnections.”
It’s just a question of cost. Regional grids could have more resiliency internally, but large blackouts are rare enough it’s not considered worth it.
Yep, they do. But that doesn't mean they don't exist or that they're impossible to do.
From what I can tell, each DC tie to the Eastern Interconnect is 800MW max, while apparently the normal draw for this time of year on the Texas Interconnect is something like 45GW.
So those two interconnects can only provide 3.5% of total power usually being consumed by the grid, which was obviously not nearly enough for this Black Swan event.
