Over 600 million were without power in India on their second day of stunningly huge outages. Worse, no one knows what caused this, the biggest blackout in history.
Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde blamed the new crisis on states taking more than their allotted share of electricity, and other officials said grid faults were likely to blame, but didn’t know where they were or how many may have occurred.
The grid in the US is old, inadequate, and badly needs upgrading, especially since we are transitioning to renewable energy. There have been some nasty blackouts recently in the mid-Atlantic states, New York, and New England. People in Connecticut were without power for over a week last October after a freak storm hit.
We need to upgrade our grid before truly massive blackouts happen here too.
I understand use of the term, “The Grid”, nonetheless it is somewhat imaginary. The Grid in Hawaii is not the Grid in the Mainland and probably never will be. The Grid in the mainland United States actually consists of a number of grids. There is some attempt at organization at a Federal level, and at subsequent lower political levels with varying degrees of success.
BTW: How come there is not a single, off-coast wind turbine in United States waters?
Maybe that’s part of the problem. We need a unified national smart grid, not an aging collection of parts tied together.
That we have no offshore wind in beyond pathetic