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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
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USA also has two power grids are they compatible?
Happy Cake Day!!
Does anyone have something to read wich explain this problem in more detail?