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The world’s power grids, 50 million miles’ worth, need a major overhaul
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Quite frankly, you might consider whether the idea of "the grid" is even a good idea in todays world. Perhaps smaller, more independent, resilient grids that power a single city or single neighborhoods in a city are what is needed so that if one major grid outage happens, it doesn't knock absolutely everybody off at once. The people who do grid tie solar that when the grid goes out kills their solar as well are crazy. They could put in a transfer switch that senses loss of the grid and stops transmitting the power back upstream and use it themselves.
The bigger the grid the more resilient it is because it can cope with localised issues better.
You only need the transfer switch (expensive!) On your solar installation if you actually get power cuts.
But everybody gets power cuts, whether it's from a disaster such as a hurricane, or just a drunk ramming into a pole, people lose power all the time, and it's worth having something of your own that will continue to work. Take Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria, for example. Most of the power generation was done on, I believe, the south side of the island, and they had one single high tension line running to the north side. And so when that line snapped, everybody on half the island lost power at the same time. Now I know that their power grid was very underfunded and barely staying afloat anyway, but that's still not a good thing.
I think I have only had 1 power cut longer than 5 mins in the last 15 years (SE England), it's not a big problem here. (Bigger issue in Scotland/Wales/Cornwall as they get bigger storms)
The grid already allows some areas to be cut off and others continue when there is a problem or lack of generation (see ZA load shedding for an extreme example).
I think what you are asking for is for the generation to be spread out so that everywhere is almost self sufficient, but can rely on others when they are not?
It's a nice idea, but I don't think it's feasible as the economies of scale make big power plants/big offshore farms more efficient. Generation will almost always be concentrated into a small number of locations. It's also much harder to balance load/demand on a smaller grid - if your street was a grid and had to operate off grid off rooftop solar for example how would it cope when everyone turns on the oven for dinner?
Yeah, that's exactly what I mean is more decentralized generation as you mentioned. Here, our power is not often interrupted, but when it is, it can be for hours at a time or longer depending on how strong the hurricane or whatever that knocked it out was.
I don't think the solution to that problem though is having multiple, smaller, unconnected grids.
I think it's to just have a more resilient grid system that doesn't have any areas that are a single point of a failure
Many smaller, unconnected grids would also allow more resilience against something like solar flares as there aren't nearly as long of wires to build up a charge over and fry things.