[jrs235]

Honest question, are we better off in the long run, and is it a better solution, to decentralize energy generation and make more smaller grids rather than linking them all up? This isn't to say completely getting rid of the ability to transfer between the smaller grids to assist with power disruptions but to decouple and make it less likely for catastrophic "global" failures like this.

[mhandley]

With a high fraction of renewables, the reverse is probably better in the long run. The larger geographic area you connect, the less you're affected by weather systems, and the wider area you can draw dependable dispatchable power such as hydro from. But that depends on having enough grid capacity to move enough power around, which is currently a problem.

But I wonder from a reliability (or lack of cascading failures) point of view whether synchronous islands interconnected with DC interconnects is more robust than a large synchronous network?

[zanellato19]

It's hard to build big generators, so as we already struggle with infrastructure I don't think that's feasible, but it would be great.