It has now become conventional wisdom that America’s electrical grid sucks. Except America doesn’t really have an electrical grid per se — it has three big separate grids. One serves the Midwest and East, one serves the West, and one serves the Republic of Texas (most of it anyway).
This, of course, makes no sense. Instead, a bold plan proposes to tie them together, so power can go wherever it is needed. Here’s the cool part (in both senses of the word.) The grids would be connected by buried superconducting cables requiring only 25 feet of right-of-way with nothing aboveground. Each cable would carry a whopping 5 GW of DC current.
