Comment by cogman10

2 hours ago

I think an even better example is what happened to the Tacoma Bridge. You have an oscillating frequency and phase that needs to be precisely tuned in order for everything to work well. If something is out of sync wrong, you can end up with higher peaks, lower valleys, or flatter locations which can ultimately cause catastrophic failure.

In the Tacoma example, the input frequency continued to add onto the bridges motion which ultimately caused it to destroy itself. In an electric grid, a misaligned phase can cause excessive spikes (imagine 480V when you expect 240V) or the generators to ultimately burn themselves out because 2 generators are fighting with each other, one trying to raise the voltage while another is trying to decrease the voltage. The really tricky thing is that load (particularly inductive or capacitive loads) look almost exactly like an unaligned generator.