[MichaelBurge]

Connecting to a larger system seems like it would reduce your risk on average, but increase systemic risk. Perhaps a coordinated terrorist attack would cause a power outage across the entire country except Texas, making it more appealing?

[cogman10]

Power doesn't work like that.

If someone attacked all the interconnects then the net importers would lose power or brown out while the net exporters would be just fine. (assuming the net importers are currently running power generation at capacity).

For the grids under load, if more capacity can't be brought online they'd do rolling blackouts while working to restore the interconnects.

There are far better targets for a coordinated terrorist attack if they wanted a larger impact.

[thsksbd]

Not necessarily. The sudden loss of load would cause over voltage and frequency ramp ups that cause further trips.

I believe the 2003 blackout was basically a cascading set of load loss faults

[sacnoradhq]

The option to connect to spare capacity and to sell power to another market is more useful than not having it. The worst case would be needing it but not having it.

The risk of very high altitude "super EMP" nuclear attacks is the most concerning. If Taiwan were attacked, it would stand to reason that China would first create CONUS disasters against infrastructure without a direct, kinetic military attack. This would be most effectively deployed by EMP at very high altitude while simultaneously sabotaging infrastructure with hacking.

[profile53]

The core problem with this argument is that if China were to detonate a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere the US will immediately retaliate with massive nuclear strikes in which case the world would effectively end

[coliveira]

Following this logic they should disconnect each municipality, so if one goes dow the rest can continue operating...

[rapjr9]

This is what microgrids are:

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

If solar on rooftops (with batteries or EV connections) became really widespread in the US it may make some sense to be able to isolate communities from the rest of the grid to localize failures. Utilities would probably hate it but it could be really resistant to disruption.

[cogman10]

> Utilities would probably hate it but it could be really resistant to disruption.

I mean, I don't really understand why they'd hate it. I'd hope they'd embrace it. Deploying batteries for communities would allow utilities to still support things like net metering while also also allowing them to turn off grid connection for an area so the main lines can be worked on (without disrupting service).

It'd also give them a lot more time to address outages, even really severe ones.

Not to mention their ability to better control load and generation with rapid response batteries.

[andrewnicolalde]

If that were feasible and comparably efficient (which I doubt), then yes, I imagine they ought to!