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Comment by jdswain | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't a better solution be to make them all in phase with each other? Then there wouldn't need to be any HVDC interconnect.

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A large grid is harder to manage and runs the risk of a cascading failure. Especially as HVDC is a lot cheaper and more efficient than it used to be, there's an argument we should actually be breaking our grids down further.

Indeed. For some reason I keep thinking back to this :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BD4jmTS_M

Consider the distance, and speed of light, and the speed of electricity (1/100th of that). I don't think it's truly feasible to keep that much physical space in sync. Hmm...

The speed of electricity isn't 1/100th the speed of light. IIRC it's something closer to 70% in copper. The speed electrons move is much lower, however something more like cm or m per second (presumably depends on voltage.) However, this isn't related to the speed of electricity which is analogous to how the speed of water through an (already full) hose isn't related to how soon water starts coming out the end when the tap is turned on.

I've also heard, but I can't explain so you'll have to look it up yourself, that none of this matters when keeping a grid in sync anyway. It just works out.

Apparently not a problem to do today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continen...

That's not a very large area, to be fair. That's about the size of half of the United States, in distance/spread. Europe isn't a continent in the traditional sense, it's a region, and not a huge one.

This might counter the grandparent poster if Asia was on the same synchronous grid, but it's not.

I guess there's two ways of looking at it. The distances spanned by the extreme points net or how dense it is. Not that I have the knowledge to relate any of that to real world use cases or consequences.

Here's the map including all larger powerlines

https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

This is a better example IMO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPS/UPS

It spans 8 timezones.

Europe is just larger in capacity, not breadth.

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