[cynwoody]

Right below the author's comment, "Regardless of a grid’s size, the current flowing through it oscillates in perfect synchrony, at exactly the same frequency, throughout the whole grid," he presents a map of Western Europe's regional groups. I notice that Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland comprise the Nordic Regional Group.

Iceland? There is a lot of water between Iceland and the other three nations in its group. Is Iceland's power indeed synchronized with the other three? If so, why does it need to be?

Below the map, the author includes a link crediting the Wikipedia article on power grids[0], which includes maps of other regions in the world.

Perusing the map for North America, I notice another noncontiguous regional group, namely the Alaska group. Most of Alaska is off the grid (or, more accurately, on a collection of local grids too small to be named). The named group includes a slice of the interior extending northward from Anchorage towards Fairbanks and a separate noncontiguous area containing Juneau. I have the same question, are the two sub-regions synchronized?

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

[azernik]

The map for Europe is a map of organizational/bureaucratic boundaries within the ENTSO-E; the world map on that page correctly omits regions not connected to the big synchronized grids.

Alaska, similarly, is a set of two isolated grids, connected only by organizational ties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Interconnection

[NikkiA]

Norway to Faroe Isles and Faroe to Iceland are about the same distance individually as the electrical links between the UK and Norway and UK and Denmark, so I don't see why not. The north atlantic is a little deeper, but that's probably not much of an increase in distance all considered - a couple of km at each end at most.