I understand why the contiguous United States developed the East/West/Texas power grids but why have we never connected them to operate as one power grid?
In: Engineering
The US is a very large country. Having separate grids allow three management teams to have responsibilities that are only a couple of time zones wide.
There are interconnects, but they are mostly to provide alternate sources for circuits along the borders.
The three power grids operate at different phases. You may know that our AC power operates at 60 HZ – that is to say, 60 times a second a “pulse” of electricity is sent over the wires (ELI5-level version of electrical engineering here).
Within each grid, all power plants are synced up – they provide their pulses at exactly the same time, thus boosting the strength in the wire. Think of one of those big jump ropes that one person holds at each end – the people swinging it have to swing up at exactly the same time. If one person swung a half-second later than the other, the rope wouldn’t loop around, it’d just flop around randomly and uselessly.
Each of the three power grids send their pulses at slightly different times, so it’s not as simple as just linking them – they need to be synced up, too. You can (and we do) use fancy transformers to send power from one grid to another, but you waste a *lot* of energy doing so. Our capacity for sharing energy in this way is something like 0.1% of the total grid capacity, so it’s really tiny.
So it’s a *big* project to unify the grids – we need to figure out a way to adjust the timing in at least two of the three grids so that all three are synced up, and of course we need to build new infrastructure to allow efficient sharing between them.
But linking the grids is a *great* idea because it lets us spread the load, take advantage of more daylight hours for solar generation, take advantage of windy area to make wind generation much more constant, and avoid wasting electricity by over-producing in one area that doesn’t need it so much. In 2016, Obama started a project looking at how to link these grids up.
Unfortunately, that’s kind of a big project, and he started it at the end of his term. The planning was finished by 2018. By that point, Trump was president, and Rick Perry of Texas was secretary of energy. Both these people have *very* strong ties to the coal and oil industries – which are *very* much against a unified power grid, as it would reduce reliance on coal and oil and make solar and wind much stronger.
Trump-Era policies had a very strong focus of scientific censorship. In 2016, the EPA had an extensive publically-available database of research and information on climate change – by 2018 it had been removed. The work of the commission designated to plan to unify the grids was shut down, and the paper they wrote outlining exactly how to do so was censored. The Biden administration never really revived the plan.
A few reasons:
1. Politics: Texas loves being Texas and doing things Their Own Way, and this has been a major factor in keeping the Texas grid independent.
2. It’s hard! I wouldn’t think of this as ‘We have three,’ I’d recommend thinking of it as “There were many, now there are fewer.” The current grids are a combination of many, _many_ smaller ones which over time have been interconnected. It’s not like there were 3 from the start and we haven’t gotten around to merging them. It’s more like after a long time, we’ve arrived at the current 3, and the final work to get a single mega-grid is actually really hard due to geography, local politics (people don’t always love tons of power lines), etc.
Huh? Why would having 1 power grid be beneficial?
Remember the Northeast USA blackouts in the 1960s and 2000s? Do you want a nationwide blackout?
And no, I don’t want to hear any redditor say they don’t remember the 2000s blackout. That is purely a rhetorical question.
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