The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it's actually the intended architecture. Denmark is frequently a net electricity exporter.
replyNo it wasn’t. That has come later.
replyIs that really a "dirty secret"?
replyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.
The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty.
replyExcept for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages.
replyI'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit...
replyEvery winter is a stretch, yes.
replyBut they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died.
> But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.
replyCost is always a valid reason!
> A couple hundred people died.
Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. So this happens frequently in states that aren't in its own interconnection, too.
> Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average.
replyIn their powerless homes?
I don't doubt people get lost in the woods. But that's not some systemic failure.
Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out.
replyLike all the Canadians who die every winter in the Halifax explosion of 1917.
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replyYa, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though.
replyThe only dirty secret is that humans are happy to kill future generations as the effects of the oil economy will only minimally affect the people alive today.
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replyThat's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid.
replyYeah and entire countries would shut down without LNG and oil- it's almost as if we are all living in an interconnected world!
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