So to give you a sense of just what the scale of the transfers is and how small it is, the East and the West interconnects have a total of about 950 gigawatts of power-generating capacity together. Now you can trickle some power across those divides, across what are called “seams” that separate those, using DC power converters-basically, sort of giant substations with the world’s largest electronic devices-which are taking some AC power from one zone, turning it into DC power, and then producing a synthetic AC wave, to put that power into another zone. And all of the generators, all of the power consumption within each zone is doing that synchronously. So you’ve got your 60 hertz AC wave 60 times a second the AC power flow is changing direction. Peter Fairley Everything within those separate zones is synched up. Steven Cherry And why can’t they share power? And then you have Texas, which has its own separate grid. You have the Western Interconnection, which is most of North America west of the Rockies. You have the Eastern-what’s called the Eastern Interconnection-which is a huge zone of synchronous AC power that’s basically most of North America east of the Rockies. fiefdoms, we’re talking about big zones that are physically divided. Peter Fairley Now, in this case, when we’re talking about the U.S. What are they? And why can’t they share power? Specifically, there are three that barely interact at all. So that you’d have one big market and a more competitive, open market and the ability to, for example, if you have spare wind power in one area, to then make use of that in some place a thousand kilometers away. And that algorithm basically made a big step towards integrating them all. And so there are these individual regional markets that handle keeping the power supply and demand in balance, and putting prices on electricity. So even though the different regions are all physically interconnected, there’s a limit to how much power can actually flow all the way from Spain up to Central Europe. But until fairly recently, there have been sort of different power markets operating within it. Europe, over the last century, has amalgamated its power systems to the point where the European grid now exchange’s electricity, literally across the continent, north, south, east, west. That story was about a pretty wonky development that nevertheless was very significant. Peter Fairley Thanks for the question, Steven. Maybe you can tell us what was bad about the separate fiefdoms served Europe nobly for a century. Steven Cherry Peter, you wrote that 2014 article in Spectrum about the Pan-European Hybrid Electricity Market Integration Algorithm, which you say was needed to tie together separate fiefdoms. Peter Fairley It’s great to be here, Steven. The resulting article, with the heading, “ Who Killed the Supergrid?”, was written by Peter Fairley, who has been a longtime contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum and is my guest today. That’s the conclusion of an extensively reported investigation jointly conducted by The Atlantic magazine and InvestigateWest, a watchdog nonprofit that was founded in 2009 after the one of Seattle’s daily newspapers stopped publishing. The problem is not the technology, and not even the cost. has been almost as great, and by 2018 the planning of one was pretty far long-until it hit a roadblock that, two years later, still stymies any progress. The need for a continent-wide supergrid in the U.S. In the early 20teens, Europe began merging its distinct grids into a continent-wide supergrid, an algorithm-based project that IEEE Spectrumwrote about in 2014. This year, California once again saw rolling blackouts, and with our contemporary climate producing heat waves that can stretch from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains, they won’t be the last.Įlectricity is hard to store and hard to move, and electrical grids are complex, creaky, and expensive to change. Even in a modern city like Mumbai, generators are commonplace, because of an uncertain electrical grid. By one estimate, a billion people still do without it. It’s the key to modern life as we know it, and yet, universal, reliable service remains an unsolved problem. The vaccines we’re all waiting for depend on electricity in a hundred different ways. Antibiotics and the modern hospital would be impossible without refrigeration. Once you get past some key enablers that can’t really be called inventions-fire, money, the wheel, calendars, the alphabet-you find things like light bulbs, the automobile, refrigeration, radios, the telegraph and telephone, airplanes, computers and the Internet. If you look at lists of the 100 greatest inventions of all time, electricity figures prominently. Steven Cherry Hi, this is Steven Cherry for Radio Spectrum.
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