[mikaeluman]

The dirty secret is of course that the Danish power grid would be totally unusable without the base power provided from Sweden and Norway.

They almost suffered a catastrophic shutdown a year or two ago and the situation has not improved

[ethan_smith]

The Nordic grid was designed to work as an interconnected system though - Danish wind exports and Norwegian/Swedish hydro imports balance each other out. Calling it a "dirty secret" makes it sound like a failure when it's actually the intended architecture. Denmark is frequently a net electricity exporter.

[Gud]

No it wasn’t. That has come later.

[ceejayoz]

Is that really a "dirty secret"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_Europe_Synchronous... exists for good reason.

[tensor]

The power grids of US states are similarly linked. Very dirty.

[crooked-v]

Except for Texas, which decided as a state that avoiding federal regulation was worth people dying every winter from power outages.

[karamanolev]

I'm not a fan of Texan electrical isolationism, but "people dying every winter from power outages" is stretching it a bit...

[ceejayoz]

Every winter is a stretch, yes.

But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons. A couple hundred people died.

[gottorf]

> But they did get a big warning shot in 1989 and 2011, and ignored those lessons for cost reasons.

Cost is always a valid reason!

> A couple hundred people died.

Looks like about a thousand people in the US die of hypothermia every year, on average. So this happens frequently in states that aren't in its own interconnection, too.

[amarant]

Which actually works out to rather more than one person per winter, when averaged out.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ya, it was just one winter where people actually died, it was recent though.

[tensor]

The only dirty secret is that humans are happy to kill future generations as the effects of the oil economy will only minimally affect the people alive today.

[matthewdgreen]

That's like pointing out that Rhode Island isn't designed to be a self-sufficient grid.

[expedition32]

Yeah and entire countries would shut down without LNG and oil- it's almost as if we are all living in an interconnected world!