> As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:
Indeed, and that’s the main problem: you can’t remember or know anything.
It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.
Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.
The US has three “independent” grids so losing them all would be hard. But I believe at times Texas has gotten close, and East went pretty dark at some point recently.
CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.
2021 would have been a non-event if people in Texas weren't propagandized about some nonsensical "Independence" bullshit.
A few more interconnects with the rest of the country and it wouldn't have even made the news.
this is after decades of Texans bragging about their independent power supply. Many Texans still believe outright lies about the blackout, like it being "caused" by green energy sources, which was false.
It was caused by free market participants not spending capital to harden their network. Solar panels and Wind Turbines work great in the cold climate of Canada.
The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm. The grid companies all should have foreseen this with even minimal investment in planning. They didn't, because that's less profitable, and the "regulator" in Texas has no ability to punish them for pinching pennies on reliability and resilience.
There's five different grids in North America (Eastern, Western, Texas, Alaska, Quebec) so something would have to go very wrong for a nationwide blackout.
As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
