Japan's Massive Mistake of Building Two Incompatible Power Grids

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USA also has two power grids are they compatible?

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/so_random_next 📅︎︎ Feb 11 2021 đź—«︎ replies

Happy Cake Day!!

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/justanbot 📅︎︎ Feb 11 2021 đź—«︎ replies

Does anyone have something to read wich explain this problem in more detail?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Pankney 📅︎︎ Feb 11 2021 đź—«︎ replies
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This video was made possible by Ting Mobile. Get $25 off your cell phone bill by visiting HAI.ting.com. So, Japan has a problem: their most recognizable international mascot is an Italian plumber. But there’s another problem too: electricity is very expensive there, and their power grid is one of the more fragile ones in the developed world. There’s also a third problem, which is that their watermelons are the wrong shape, but we’re gonna focus on the electricity thing for today. Now, while it’d make the work of my unpaid intern farm a lot easier if we could just blame this on funny meme stuff like anime addictions or the fact that Japan’s a baby-sized, resourceless, little, rock country, unfortunately, the real answer is much more complicated. Sure, heavy usage and limited natural resources are factors, but one of the main reasons behind Japan’s expensive and unreliable electricity is the fact that rather than having one electrical grid, they have two. Now, to make sense of why one isn’t the loneliest, but rather the bestiest number when it comes to electric grids, we need to talk about how large-scale power grids work. As a general rule: the bigger and more interconnected the electrical grid, the cheaper and more consistent the energy. The big thing you have to understand here is that because batteries suck, and Daddy Elon is too busy buying Gamestop stonks to fix them, we don’t have a good way to store large amounts of electricity. That means that electricity has to be made and then almost immediately used—the electricity that’s currently powering your lights or your air conditioner or your quote unquote “girlfriend,” most likely just got produced by a coal plant, or a hydroelectric dam, or a wind turbine and then got sent straight to you. Given the volatile ebbs and flows of daily demands for electricity, for this system to work, you need to have a whole lot of nimble and responsive sources of electricity, and also, importantly, you need an interconnected grid, so that you can be continually moving electricity around, from places that have it to places that need it. When a power plant over here has a bunch of excess energy, and a town over here needs a bunch of energy, you have to be able to connect them. Multiply that by a bazillion towns with varying needs for electricity, and a bazillion different sources of electricity with varying outputs, and you can start to see why you’d want to invest in having one big interconnected system. Which is why most developed countries have done just that—and here’s a map that proves it. This displays the world’s Wide Area Synchronous Grids, or WASGs for short. Notice how each block of color, representing an interconnected electrical grid, is big, usually spanning the area of a country at minimum, and often covering a gaggle of cooperating countries. I mean just look at Europe getting along with the Middle East and North Africa… and then there’s Japan, split right down the middle into two separate pieces, just like a picture of your divorced parents. So, what gives? Well, it all started with a case of the “ahh we’ll fix that later’s” in the 1890s, when not thinking about the future, and in a rush to figure out a way to ruin watermelons, west Japan bought electrical equipment from the US while east Japan built their electrical grid with European technology. Problem was though, these two sets of imported equipment moved to the beat of a different alternator… which brings us to the part of the video where I draw on the physics PhD I forgot to get and explain alternating current. Now if you recall learning about the Tesla with the mustache, not the confusing door handles, you’ll likely remember that AC became the bee’s knees because it’s more efficient to move over long distances. That’s because you can easily use a transformer to raise AC’s voltage and lower its current, which reduces the power lost by accidentally heating up the cables it travels through, which is a sentence that took me a full work day to write and understand. The point is, AC’s efficiency made it the preferred method of moving zip zap zoom juice across the power grid around the world—Japan included. What’s unique about alternating current though, is that it alternates: reversing its direction of flow a specific number of times per second. The frequency at which an AC system alternates direction is called hertz, and it’s here where Japan’s grid got itself in trouble. As with most “ahh I’ll fix that later'' decisions, they didn’t fix it later, and never committed to the European or American technology, leaving them with a mismatched grid that in the west alternates at 60 hertz, and a grid in the east that runs at a lazy, sluggish, probably doesn’t have a job, 50 hertz. Like unstable Manhattan real-estate developers, Japan’s mismatched grids were funnier and less consequential in the 1990s. Electric clocks and internal timing devices in toasters or coffee machines that relied on hertz for pacing would either speed up or slow down depending on which side of the great hertz divide they were plugged in on, and some larger household appliances just wouldn’t work at all if used on the wrong side. This problem was seemingly fixed when thing-makers made things that could work at both 50 and 60 hertz… and then was very clearly not fixed when a 2011 earthquake led to a tsunami, which led to a nuclear meltdown, which then led to blackouts throughout Japan because eastern electricity couldn’t be easily transferred to the west. On the one hand, it’s not entirely fair to use an earthquake-turned-tsunami-turned-nuclear disaster as an “I told you so” moment that proves Japan needs to synchronize their power grid, but on the other hand, I told you so. Now, if you don’t want to pull a Japan and get “told you so’d” about all the money you’re throwing down the drain on your cell phone bill, check out Ting Mobile. Being that it’s the middle of winter, you’re probably spending more time around the house… and if you’re spending more time around the house connected to Wi-Fi but still paying for a set amount of data with a major phone carrier, then you’re certainly overspending on your phone bill. With Ting Mobile you pay for what you use at the end of the month—talk, text, and data—and if you aren’t on the move using data instead of Wi-Fi then you shouldn’t be paying for it. Giving Ting Mobile a try is easy, too. Almost any type of phone works, there’s no long term contracts so you can use the service for just a month, and by using my link, HAI.Ting.com, you’ll receive a $25 dollar service credit that covers the average user’s monthly rate, so keep it simple and pay for what you use.
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Channel: Half as Interesting
Views: 1,206,647
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Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)
Published: Thu Feb 11 2021
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