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WTF are you smoking? Too low? Installed per regulations. It's OK to have them lower than the tips of the trees, provided the trees are far enough away. Or do you know more than the Bureau of Reclamation as far as power line installation goes? Or that the PG&E towers weren't built to CPUC code?

Cough

The chart doesn't really apply. It apparently tracks flow based on some sort of average, and is scaled by years, not hours. It says nothing at all about whether the flow is stopped for a few hours; the resolution isn't nearly sufficient.

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region...

Large dams like the Hoover constantly let water through

No. Water flows only during periods of peak power demand.

https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region...

Rivers flow between nations all over the world.

Do you know what happens when upstream nations dam them and keep all the water? Usually the dam gets bombed.

Quick fact, In 1934, Arizona called the state National Guard and militia units to the California border to protest the construction of Parker Dam and California's diversions from the Colorado River. For a few days, the "Arizona Navy" patrolled the river...

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix...

There's a lot of wear on the turbine systems. They require weekly to monthly checks of bearings and regular lubrication and maintenance. I doubt that Hoover Dam would operate without maintenance for 50 years just as you could not run a car for a decade without ever changing the oil.

Nope.

from: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverd...

How is the firm energy generated at Hoover Dam allocated?

Arizona - 18.9527 percent
Nevada - 23.3706 percent
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California - 28.5393 percent
Burbank, CA - 0.5876 percent
Glendale, CA - 1.5874 percent
Pasadena, CA - 1.3629 percent
Los Angeles, CA - 15.4229 percent
Southern California Edison Co. - 5.5377 percent
Azusa, CA - 0.1104 percent
Anaheim, CA - 1.1487 percent
Banning, CA - 0.0442 percent
Colton, CA - 0.0884 percent
Riverside, CA - 0.8615 percent
Vernon, CA - 0.6185 percent
Boulder City, NV - 1.7672 percent

Lake Mead was essentially full in 2000. Since then a series of drought years has dropped the water level by around 100 feet. 2011 was an exceptional water year in the Colorado drainage so the lake came up some but for 2012 the inflow is expected to be less than 30% of the average from 1981 to 2010. The Lake Mead Water Data web site has historical information about the water conditions in Lake Mead. In particular you might want to look at the Averages by Year data. Also, you can get a summary of the current conditions for the Upper Colorado basin that is updated monthly here.

Actually I take back some of what I said, the lake is higher now than it was in the last 2 years (since the article I linked was written).

Levels are pretty good now, though that link doesnt show the outflow amount, and so doesnt say how much more water we use today.

The irrigation canals in southern Oregon cover hundreds of thousands of acres.. but their biggest cost is power, to run pumps.. (pretty flat land) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klamath_Project however, it looks like they are trying to get some power project put along the canal.. (maybe to offset the costs of pumping) http://www.usbr.gov/mp/nepa/documentShow.cfm?Doc_ID=8142

FTFA 24 of them will fit on a C130 and provide water for "more than 10,000 people", so I'm thinking more like 500 people per large unit and that's under ideal conditions. That's as opposed to a more traditional unit about the size of a cargo container that can do 200k gallons a day or enough for 40-50k people. Personally I think for large scale disasters it makes a LOT more sense to drop 2 of those and two fuel/generator sets and supply 10x more people with fresh water since every cargo flight counts.

An increasingly more common mechanical solution to this problem is to use flywheels:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9968539-54.html

Another nice mechanical way to store energy is to pump pressurized air into underground salt domes as is already being done for about 25 years in Germany:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/01/compressed_air_2.php

But your solution of lifting heavy stuff is in use as well in the form of pumping water back into storage lakes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wivenhoe_Power_Station,_Queensland
http://www.usbr.gov/power/data/sites/mtelbert/mtelbert.html

Not exclusively, but that is generally the chief benefit that the government is looking at. Look at the events in this timeline (the Hoover and Southwest seem to exemplify your point):

http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/articles/chrono.html

They include both the control and use of the river, but there weren't enough people living in that area at that time for water storage to be an issue, the big motivator was disaster control (and if you are going to make a huge reservoir, it simply makes sense to install hydro).

Dude, you really need to cut back on the hydro, in more ways than one.

A pyramid is a static structure. All it has to do is sit year after year.

A power-generating station is full of moving parts. Things with moving parts break down over time. You may want to look at this handy informational link which shows maintenance over time on our local power plant. (since it's run by falling water, it provides some of the world's cheapest power, regardless)

When you start talking about tidal power, you are talking about putting devices which sit in salt water day after day. Go find someone who owns a boat. ANY boat, large, small, freighter or dinghy and talk about this idea of "set it and forget it". Watch as peals of laughter come rolling from their mouth. Boat owners in this part of the world (US Pacific Northwest) will pay a substantial rental premium to moor their boats in fresh water because it saves so much money on maintenance.

Finally, remember that electricity is like no other commodity on earth. You can not store it for a rainy day. You use it when it's generated, or not at all. Even fish (our other highly perishable commodity) can be canned or packed in salt. Good luck doing that with electricity.

Yes, oil gets some subsidies. Yes, euphemistically named "energy companies" almost certainly throw their weight around to discourage development of alternative energy sources. These are fairly small market-distorting effects which reinforce (but do not change) an underlying fact: historically, petroleum has been the cheapest and most flexible means of generating energy. While we get spoiled in this part of the world by abundant hydropower, there are some fairly serious environmental consequences (check out our vanishing salmon runs!) and hydro is a one-off. Once you've dammed the river, you're done. You can't scale this solution forever.

While more needs to be done with alternative energy sources, there seems to be this meme running around that there is cheap power floating around which is being withheld from the people by "The Man". Standing in the way of that cheap power in reality is not some gigantic conspiracy, but some really tough unsolved engineering problems (i.e. how do you store enough energy to power a city for when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow? A big pile of batteries doesn't really work).

The brownouts we're mainly hot air. First off, very few actually happened. Secondly, they were artificial- caused by manipulations of the power grid by energy providers for profit. There was no energy shortage.

Bzzzt... Wrong.

The energy shortage was real and localized. In the Enron days, California capped electricity rates as a consumer protection move. As a result, Enron in a move to cut losses from expensive generation and as a leverage tool to negotiate new rates, took the oppertunity when fuel prices spiked to shut down a lot of ineffecient generation plants for maitenance. This was followed by a heat wave which put a spike in demand for AC. A line tripped offline. It was either blackout time as systems cascaded carrying the overload or simply drop part of the load and leave the rest of the sytem up.

http://tdworld.com/mag/power_world_technology_update_2/
"California Energy Crisis Reaches Stage Three Electrical Emergency Already under a Stage Three Electrical Emergency due to scant resources, the California Independent System Operator (California ISO) encountered a significant and sudden loss of transmission capacity Jan. 21, 2001, that forced municipal utilities in Northern California, U.S. to endure a brief 20-min transmission-related outage."

"The California ISO issued the controlled outage to keep the ac lines from overloading at Path 15, a group of high-voltage lines in central California already at their limit because of low resources in the northern part of the state."

There was a blackout because there was not enough in area generation online. The capacity of the system was stressed. A line failed. The already loaded lines couldn't take on the replacement load. Part of the area was shut off to preserve the remaining area. It was small blackout time of watch the entire area go dark as the system collapsed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
"Due to price controls, utility companies were paying more for electricity than they were allowed to charge customers forcing the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric and the public bail out of Southern California Edison. This led to a shortage in energy and therefore, blackouts. Rolling blackouts began in June 2000 and recurred several times in the following 12 months."

"Energy price regulation forced suppliers to ration their electricity supply rather than expand production. This scarcity created opportunities for market manipulation by energy speculators."

If you need any more proof that price controls cause shortages, just re-read the above. You can mandate $1/gallon for gasoline, but don't expect to find it for sale anywhere.

Read between the lines.. they didn't pay high prices for fuel for ineffecient plants.

"Despite the action, PG&E said it still is having trouble getting gas suppliers to comply with the emergency order originally issued January 19. PG&E has said it has enough gas in storage to make up for the lost supply under such a scenario until the first week in February. According to a company spokesperson, PG&E's storage currently is well below 50% full, or less than 16 Bcf and depleting rapidly by about 500 MMcf/d to 1 Bcf/d."

They used their reserve fuel, but could only buy fuel at a loss due to price caps and high fuel cost. Gas suppliers were not selling below market. They sold at market rates, a price the utilites could not afford.

Expensive to run generation plants were shut down for upgrades and maitenance while they waited out the high fuel prices. The spike in demand caused the inevetible. The lines into the area could provide only part of the cheaper power from elsewhere.

http://www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/pninter.html This is the list of the lines from Oregon into California and their capacities.

(If it's not being done, then patent-pending, patent-pending, patent-pending!)

Sorry, It's already being done in lots of places

Grand Coulee Dam has had these for decades, and I doubt it's the first.

Under budget and on schedule.

The main lines between the Columbia River and LA/SoCal are DC. Only ones in the US, IIRC.

Nother thing about DC lines: they are almost ALWAYS one way only. You *CAN* make them two way, but it costs significantly more.

BPA:
http://www.usbr.gov/dataweb/html/pninter.html

Power storage can be accomplished by using "water gravity batteries" (I just made that term up) which are essentially hydroelectric facilities that are reversible, pumping water up into a reservior during off-peak hours, and releasing it thru turbine/generators during times of peak load.

One such facility is at Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state.

Hydro doesn't produce much? WTF?

Something like 20% of the power in the US comes from hydro sources. Considering just how much power the US uses per day this is a pretty damn (no pun intended) big number.

The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State alone is capable of generating 6,809,000 kW at peak output.

I don't think Arizona or Nevada will be likely to use hydro as their main source of power in the near future.

Not the main source, but perhaps you heard of a little thing called Hoover Dam

Fuck you. It's our desert, not yours. When Nevada builds a nuclear power plant, maybe we'll consider it.

The truth is that presently, we don't know of a cleaner, ecologically-safer way to generate power than fission.

Really? What about this, this, or this.

You are only looking at a very narrow slice of the big picture.

Both of you are scum.

Sure it is. You just set up a gravitational potential energy collector (GPEC) to charge a bunch of batteries to power the plane with. There already is a massive fully-operational GPEC near Las Vegas, and the government plans to build more.

USBWR's Hoover Dam Facts.

Wrong. DC is very useful for long distance power transmission -- it is both cheaper and easier for distances over about 300-400km. Here are a couple links:

Pacific Intertie

Gas to wire PDF (has some cost graphs vs. distance for AC and DC)

The building of the Hoover dam itself, does not really cause the lose of water. It is the useage that does. The colorado river gets used mostly by California that is sucking it dry before it hits the ocean.

Nah. The Pacific DC Intertie runs between northern Oregon and Los Angeles, carrying about a 1.4GW load at 800K VDC. It was built to essentially carry fission-plant power north and hydro power south depending on the season, and has worked very well at that since 1970 or something.

It would be capable of up to 3GW at 1M VDC if the rectifiers at both ends are upgraded from mercury-arc tubes to solid state resistors. That doesn't appear likely to happen, emphasis will go towards additional links, which makes sense. It is a lot harder to find intertie information on Federal web sites than it was a couple years ago, for all the obvious reasons, I guess.

So long-distance transmission has been solved for over 30 years. The fundamental problem with PV and wind (for more-than-secondary use) is peak capacity; it's gonna take take a big fscking flywheel to store enough energy to handle windless/cloudy days.

I know you asked for geeky things, but I can't resist recommending the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. Pictures of them are cool to look at, but you can't get the effect of being there except by being there. (BTW, the former is near Hoover Dam, and the latter is about 4 hours from the Bay Area.)

I haven't been on the new tour as I went pre-9/11. Is it any good? Clearly it's not as detailed as the old Hard Hat Tour, but then again, they didn't close the dam entirely, either, or the terrorists would have won.

As to Lost Wages, that's a matter of personal taste. On the plus side, there are lots of shows to see, such as Blue Man Group, and Cirque du Soleil [flash required] ... provided you can get tickets. Le Cirque has two very different shows in town and they're booked far in advance. BMG isn't much better. Don't pay scalper prices! [please!]

It's a five plus hour long drive to the Grand Canyon [as in the main entrance] from Hoover Dam. "Close" in American terms, but damn far through the stinking desert.

Sure thing ;)

You know, I drive around on a golf cart every day, and it goes a good 20mph and requires minimal charging. I wouldn't mind in the least bit switching over to an electric car providing it would be cheap to recharge

Battery-powered automobiles are incredibly inefficient (avg. range: 90 miles) and the energy sources that would power such automobiles output as much CO2 as an appropriate number of internal-combustion automobiles (sorry I don't have enough time to corroborate the findings I've read from /. and other sources). You'd be paying as much or more to recharge that battery-powered car compared to what you're paying to refuel your internal-combustion-powered car. (Again, google for the info or go to the library to inform yourself about these things.) Golf carts, mind you, probably weigh one-eighth the weight of an average automobile, so indeed they travel a long range because they are light in weight! Driving battery-powered hatchbacks for short-range trips in a bustling metropolis may be more beneficial than driving the comparable gas-powered hatchback, but I'll leave that to another discussion.

Take Oklahoma for example... TONS of rivers and lots of space where you could easily and very cheaply recreate another hoover dam. WHY DOESN'T THIS HAPPEN???

If I'm not mistaken, Oklahoma is not incredibly rugged (mountainous). If you wanted to produce as much energy that is produced from the Hoover Dam turbines, then you'd need enough an immense volume of water to flow at an appreciable velocity to achieve such energy, thus an immense amount of land would be consumed in Oklahoma to achieve such power and would damage the ecosystems of the Red River and the Arkansas River, if they aren't doing so now. Take the Missouri River, for instance, where the dams that have been erected along the river have decimated the total fish populations that were once ubiquitous in the Missouri.

Read up on the benefits and costs of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The vehicles may be environmentally sound, but the means to power the vehicles end up failing to reduce greenhouse gases, at this moment (if only fusion power were implementable). Same thing goes with battery-powered vehicles (cars, not golf carts.)

As for the Three Gorges Dam, it is an environmental, anthropological, and economical disaster unfolding before our eyes. I trust the majority of posts that have been or will be posted reflect what I would like to mention in this post, and indeed this post is grossly offtopic, but someone needs to inform those who may not wholly understand the totality of internal-combustion, battery-powered, and fuel-cell vehicles and the totality of all energy sources.
</two_cents>

It's all about scale.

I'll spare you the lecture about how animals take what they need and humans take all in their field of vision. I think you get my point.

The Boeing Everett Factory (where they build the 747, 767, and 777) is absolutely awe-inspiring.

The Hoover Dam is deceptively MASSIVE.

The Eiffel Tower is a whole lot of iron!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa was actually quite terrifying before they put up the railings!! (Think about walking, 10 meters up, on wet, smooth-as-glass marble at like a 15 degree angle)

The Pyramids are one hell of an engineering feat!

And, although not human engineering, my favorite has to be Uluru. Yeah, it looks like just a big hunk 'o rock, but when you walk all the way around it, it's quite amazing how the hues change with literally every footstep.

"Is there anyone besides me who likes to travel and look at engineering projects? ... Does Slashdot have suggestions for destinations, or for web sites where people share their experiences."

On topic, I recommend Hoover Dam. Take the tour and see the big-ass turbines in action. Unfortunately the hard hat tour isn't available now (security concerns). Only an hour from Las Vegas!

Indeed you could... the hard part is storing enough energy for a few hours with small enough loss/expense to to profitable.

There's a plant at the twin lakes resivoir which pumps water uphill at night and generates power during the day.

They have much nicer bathrooms than are avaliable at the nearby national forest campsite, too :)

--
Benjamin Coates

However, unless this power generation technique is competitive with burning petroleum at about US$33 per barrel, it won't be practical in the long run.

There are other ways of calculating the cost of energy. If you treat energy as a public works project like the Hoover Dam, the capital cost is paid off over many decades at a nominal rate of interest. Essentially, the cost of producing energy is the operating cost and maintenance of the plant.

Also, because a domestic source of energy is less likely to be interrupted by war in the Middle East, it would be worthwhile to have these plants for strategic reasons even if the cost is much higher than oil.

According to the April, 2002, issue of Harper's, the U.S. currently spends $50 billion a year protecting crude oil imports in the Middle East that are only worth $19 billion. These military costs are not included in the cost-per-barrel of oil. If the U.S. could replace Middle East oil by investing that $50 billion annually in R&D, the cost of the resulting energy might be offset by the lower cost of protecting it.

Oil industry subsidies and environmental costs distort the true cost of a oil as well. In the end, politics determines the cost of energy.

Thank you,
Bob

PS. If you can't tell, I'm speaking facetiously. I think I have made my point.

Many "highland" regions use water and pumps to "store" spare energy, by simply pumping the water up into the hills in large tubes and then when needed let it come back down and through turbines to (re-)create energy. A siple and VERY efficient battery. I challenge You to find a better large scale storage method of energy.

1. This is not useful unless you have a large supply of water close to a much higher area you can use for an upper reservoir. If you don't have the necessary geography, you can't use pumped storage.
   
2. This is not something that coexists well with other uses. Fish tend not to fare well when they go through the pumps.
   
3. The net efficiency is only about 80% at best.
   
4. The systems must be huge to be effective. To store 6 gigawatt-hours (to replace one major powerplant's output during the afternoon hours) with a 200 foot rise takes (6e9 * 3.6e3 / 9.8e3 / 61 ) = 36 million cubic meters of water. That's an area of 2900 acres covered to a depth of ten feet. It can't be used for wildlife habitat or fish or much of anything else because it's always being filled and drained. Here are links to sites for the Ludington MI pumped-storage plant, and one for the Mount Elbert plant. (Note that the Mt. Elbert plant claims a capacity factor of 15% of its rated 200 MW, and that is probably when running on a daily cycle. If it had to even out multi-day variations in supply from e.g. wind, it would be far lower.)

I never said it was CHEAP, I merely said it was possible.

I never said that nuclear power was obsolete. I merely pointed out that it was not a NESSESITY as we have alternatives,

I was refering to CARS

But look at the operating costs of fossil fuel powerplants, and You WILL see that they are obsolete. first of, the sheer cost of rawmeterials WILL increase as the availability of materials decrease (law of supply and demand).

Second look at the environmental impact. The cost of cleaning up the environmnt, reversing the greenhouse effect etc.

Reversing the greenhouse warming (we need the greenhouse effect or the earth freezes solid) needs further tricks. One that I like involves taking the methane clathrate deposits on the continental shelves (which are threatening to decompose to gas, and CH4 is about 200 times as good a greenhouse gas as CO2) and mining them for fuel. Crack the CH4 into H2 and carbon soot, then bury the soot (old coal mines seem appropriate). Burn the H2 in whatever is convenient.

However, MANY countries are right now doing fine wihtout nuclear power, MANY countries (including a lot of US states) are suppling a larger and larger part of their electrical energy from "environmentally safe" powersources

In this DOE table you'll see that the total nameplate capacity of non-hydropower renewable energy generators in the country for 1999 was a whole 2000 megawatts. That is out of a total generating capacity of nearly 700,000 megawatts. The entire nameplate generating capacity would barely replace 2 nuclear plants, and probably have about 1/3 the capacity factor. If it's going to really be an alternative, it has a hell of a long way to go.
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