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One Worldwide Power Grid
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
I don't think having a single "grid" covering a larger area is itself a problem. The problem arises when you don't have an appropriate set of safeguards in place to protect that grid from itself and an effective SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) network in place to monitor it all.
The technology is there to do it safely and reliably. It just costs money. Right now the major utilities have no profit motive to deploy technologies to harden and protect the power distribution and transmission systems.
In most states you can now sell power back to the utilities. A local generation plant (solar, hydro, wind, etc) can be connected to the power system via a utility intertie rated device.
This can as simple as a utility intertie rated inverter as part of you home solar system. Unfortunately for everyone else on your block, as soon as commercial input fails your system will stop providing power out to the utility side. This is to protect power company personnel during line repairs.