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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
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