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
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.
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