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That's exactly right, but the capacity is limited. ERCOT in Texas, for example, has 5 DC ties to the other grids: http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

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> Peter Fairley: 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. And they can share a little over one gigawatt of electricity.

> Steven Cherry So barely one-tenth of one percent.

From TFA.

I wonder if this has more to do with "Black Start" planning than actually providing power cross grids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

Interesting suggestion, though AFAIK that typically relies on auxiliary onsite power source at some generating plants, as noted in the Wikipedia article intro?

Anything you can find to support grid interconnects as black-start capacity?

Purely speculation based on the small capacity compared to total generated capacity.

From what I understand there can be a number of different techniques for black starting a grid, including pumped storage / hydro generation because they can be started with very modest power. Being able to jumpstart a grid based off of a neighbouring grid seems to make sense.

Most of them are ageing too.

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