it's one thing to interconnect a few GW here and there, but to power the Texas grid you need 80GW or so. That is a humongous amount of power. You would need at

it's one thing to interconnect a few GW here and there, but to power the Texas grid you need 80GW or so. That is a humongous amount of power. You would need at least 10-20 HVDC projects that span thousands of miles each. BTW, Texas is already connected to the other grids, but not synchronized, e.g. https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/20964502/abb-replaces-hvdc-link-in-the-united-states https://www.tdworld.com/overhead-transmission/article/209645... As we all know, these kind of connections were not enough during the big freeze. But say you make that investment. That is still not a guarantee that you won't have a continent wide lull without sun or wind. You just can't risk it. It's cheaper and more effective to just install some gas turbines for backup. If you fire them up 2 times a year it won't matter for the CO2 budget.