Die drei Stromnetze, die die Vereinigten Staaten betreiben
Von vladgrinch
Die drei Stromnetze, die die Vereinigten Staaten betreiben
Von vladgrinch
22 Kommentare
For all its size, the United States relies on three separate power grids rather than a single national one, and this map shows how the country is carved up between them. The Eastern Interconnection covers everything from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, the Western Interconnection handles the mountain states and the Pacific coast, and then, almost defiantly, there is Texas. Most of the state runs on its own grid, operated by ERCOT, which serves around 90 percent of Texas’s electricity load and is deliberately kept separate from its neighbours. By avoiding physical connections that cross state lines, Texas keeps its grid outside the reach of federal regulators, a piece of engineering independence that has become part of the state’s political identity. The two big interconnections themselves meet only at a handful of small links, so in electrical terms the country is really three islands rather than one.
Texas’s go-it-alone grid was tested severely in February 2021, when Winter Storm Uri froze power plants and left around 4.5 million homes and businesses without electricity.
You’re missing the word „contiguous“ somewhere in there.
ERCOT doesn’t work when it gets cold
When did those Canadian provinces get annexed?
Alaska? Hawaii?
[Where’s Quebec?](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/hydro-quebec-transmission-lines-new-york-9.7238106)
how odd that the western one encompasses the rockies. you’d imagine the rockies form a natural barrier separating the grids.
Damn when did Illinois annex a huge swath of southern Wisconsin. There’s a 4 corners with WI, IL, IA. & MN. Looks like Wisconsin also took the U.P.
Can anyone explain the difference between the ‚Eastern Interconnection‘ and the ‚PJM Interconnection‘, for example?
How are those smaller regional interconnects tied together, related, or unrelated to each other, within the larger Interconnection?
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Rto_map_2024.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Rto_map_2024.png)
By “Eastern” you mean quebec grid?
now do balancing authorities!
The New York Times did an article recently highlighting the fragility of the North American power grid. The piece was called „What if America Went Completely Dark?“
>FERC conducted a power flow analysis, which modeled the cascading effects of knocking out the most critical substations in each interconnection, ones where multiple high-voltage lines came together. “We came up with some very astounding numbers,” Wellinghoff said. “If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.”
>According to Wellinghoff, which nine substations were taken offline didn’t matter as long as each one was among the 10 most important in its region, and you could black out the three interconnections individually as well: “I mean, it’s not like there are particular substations. You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects. Which, to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12-year-olds with the internet could do pretty easily. All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations — that’s a critical substation.”
The kicker is that, if this could happen, it might result in a nation-wide blackout of 3+ years. That’s because of the difficulty in replacing the high-voltage transformers they are talking about being disabled. They’re each hand-made, unique, and there’s a backlog of 3-5 years just to build one of them.
This is outdated, the Quebec interconnection with the US went live months ago
Good lord we are so fucked when that once-every-few-hundred-years Auroral discharge from the sun knocks out our power grid.
This is wrong map, op is inflation Texas interconnect, Quebec interconnect is connected to New England states. Alaska and Hawaii are missing.
Slop slop slop it up baby gimme that AI sloppp
Ercot made deals with several states this past year to supplement demand.
lol jokes on you, Texas power grid barely runs. It runs out more than anything.
There are more regional transmission operators, which actually control the flow of electricity. It isnt this simple.
Cape Cod is missing.
I like how Texas insists on doing it’s own thing, but is the only State so far as I can tell actually relies on ALL THREE interconnections in order to provide basic infrastructure and service for ALL its citizens. Failed State.
„We got this pygmy thing going on in Texas, whatever happened there“.