I’m not an expert, and I’m sure there’s some way in principle where it could be architected so this isn’t so, but it just seems empirically that the more interconnected the more we see unexpected and enormous outages.
Map of the European grid: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
Synchronous grid of Continental Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...
The most recent large blackout we had was IIRC specifically due to mismanaging the interconnected grid, which is part of where my concern comes from.
I'm in Saskatchewan. For a good chunk of the year, everything is frozen. We currently heat our homes with natural gas but require electricity to run the furnaces. Power outages are a very big deal, and in the winter are generally correlated with terrible weather (big snowstorms and deep cold tend to have a negative effect on our infrastructure).
The province itself is quite flat as well. Ignoring the part where reservoirs freeze over for at least 5 months of the year, pumped hydro (which seems to be our best current energy storage approach) isn't going to work very well with no significant hills to pump the water over. We absolutely require continuously reliable electricity to, at a minimum, keep the water pipes in our homes from freezing. A 24h outage in the middle of winter is going to, at a minimum, cause significant widespread property damage; past around the 72h mark, there's probably going to be significant death as well.
On top of all of the other reasons why I like nuclear, that is the reason why locally-generated nuclear is at the top of my list of "ways we should produce electricity around here".
Example from China: 12GW over 3300km at 1100kV DC, for others look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity... .
Europe is also building HVDC (high-voltage direct current) links connecting windparks and consumers with e.g. norwegian pumped hydro power plants for storing excess energy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current )