Hacker News Reader

Not just politics, security as well. One bad actor could wipe out the power grid for most of the world's superpowers.

How would that hypothetical work out?

I know that the grids - as they stand right now - must balance generation and consumption. Would a large outage (or large spike) in any given part of the interconnected grids be able to take out all of it?

The Wikipedia article on Cascading failure [0] lists a few examples of this kind of a large scale grid failure. You start by taking one (or some) power plants down, thus overloading others trying to reblance the system, and possibly failing too. Such a chain reaction can, over multiple generations, take a great many power plants down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

Reply on news.ycombinator.com