| ▲ | mikaeluman 4 days ago |
| The dirty secret is of course that the Danish power grid would be totally unusable without the base power provided from Sweden and Norway. They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved |
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| ▲ | ethan_smith 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is that really a "dirty secret"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason. |
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| ▲ | tensor 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty. | | |
| ▲ | crooked-v 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Except for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages. | | |
| ▲ | karamanolev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit... | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Every winter is a stretch, yes. But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died. | | |
| ▲ | gottorf 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. Cost 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. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. In their powerless homes? I don't doubt people get lost in the woods. But that's not some systemic failure. |
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| ▲ | amarant 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out. | | |
| ▲ | card_zero 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Like all the Canadians who die every winter in the Halifax explosion of 1917. | | |
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| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ya, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though. |
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| ▲ | tensor 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The 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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| ▲ | matthewdgreen 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid. |
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| ▲ | expedition32 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yeah and entire countries would shut down without LNG and oil- it's almost as if we are all living in an interconnected world! |
