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Will The Power Grid Fail?
rhyder writes: "This article from CNET explains the increasing chances that the nations power grid will not be able to support the growing high tech economy.
Maybe it is time for those of you running e-commerce servers out of your home to check out Home Power and generate your own electricity."
Here in Vermont, there are financial provisions for the people who have the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in their back yard. So how much money would you accept to have a power plant in your back yard? Keep in mind that the more money you want, the more money that electricity is going to cost. But if that's the price we have to pay for adequate supplies of electricity, then let's get ready to pay it.
For that matter, how many other things do you not want in your back yard? How much would you have to be paid to have them there?
Maybe someday we'll ALL have undesirable things in our back yards, and we'll ALL be subsidising each other.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Well I don't know about all solar panels, but the booklet that came with mine said the panels are more efficient in hotter temperatures.
From tests I have done I have personally seen maximum output power decrease over 20% between 30 degree (F) and 90 degrees.
Marv
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
I also have a shelf of paper-back books at home running at 75-85*F. It's called "room-temperature".
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
We currently have more than enough capacity for current demands and there are new plants being built that will add enough capacity for the next 10 years...
Californias system is also expanding their power capability. My company has the ability to take measures to protect the grid if needed (power reduction, begging the state to send home state workers, and more)... California probably has the same or similar powers.
If these "e commerse" companies need 99.99999 uptime then they should do what hospitals and other critical places do.. build their own backup power system..
As for Y2K issues... I had to work on Y2K EVE because of all the paranoia. There was ONE incident on the entire planet attributed to Y2K (in a Japanese Nuclear plant).
UPS Sucks
Home generated power will not solve this problem unless the entire power system is rethunk.
There are two reasons for this - firstly, the main consumers of power are either cities or industries, neither of which are suitable for this kind of thing.
However the most important reason is that solar power is generated at the wrong time. power consumption peaks in the morning and just before tea time, with OPHW in the middle of the night. Coal and nuclear power plants take hours (days for nuclear) to change their output, so having power generated in the middle of the day is pretty useless.
I think the only way to solve the problem is to have viable fuel cells and fuel transportation. Then large power plants can simply generate hydrogen to store power, areas can use hydrogen to generate their power or it can be used to smooth out the load and allow cogenerators to really make a difference.
The other problem is with "energy conservation". Remember all that talk back in the eighties about using flourescent lights and efficient appliances? It all came to nothing (at least here in Australia) because people want more and more air conditioning, computers and crap and think the power system is someone else's problem.
I could go on all day (I work for a power distributor), but I'd better stop here.
I sincerely hope this is a joke.
Privatising an industry is great for lowering prices, but in the electricity industry this means slashing maintenance and capital budgets.
So if you want cheap power, fine - but don't expoect reliability when your power company lays off half it's workforce and outsources everything to save a few bucks. Try totally deregulating the industry and see how reliable your power supply is.
If you don't believe me do some research on Mercury Energy in New Zealand.
Government Energy Monopolies may be slow, costly and inefficient but at least they get the job done and are accountable to the consumers.
So thus, if a company can lose a million dollars in minute, that must mean that they make around 525 billion dollars a year in revenue.
Um, dudes, these numbers do not add up.
Even if we assume that that is a peak, and the average is 1/10 that.. How many companies on the planet run 50 billion dollars of revenue a year? More importantly, ANY such company would be plenty big enough to afford to avoid these outages.
The only other thing that plays with that quantity of money is banking. (Credit cards/Stock market), neither of which are californian E-businesses.
So, as written, it reads like trash. They're off by 3 orders of magnitude from the believable values.
Of coruse, apart from that it is probably the less worse choice because it gives us the time to find a solution (fusion?).
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
There are already "leakage" areas around the country. Back home here in NC, there's once spot in Cleveland county where you can literally feel it in the air standing under the transmission lines. We cannot get any cattle to go anywhere near them.
There's an "urban myth" of a guy stealing power by placing several large coils in his back yard under a primary transfer line... The power company eventaully sued him.
The Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado has done alot of good work on (among other things) the potential for a massive distributed energy generation system.
You can read one of their reports in this issue of their newsletter. More stuff is available here.
As fuel cells become more common, the approach becomes realistic.
Supplanting and replacing the old-fashioned power grid system makes alot of sense: You don't lose power in long distance transmission, and your demand and your production can track much more closely. It also has the potential to introduce a powerful market incentive towards conservation. Imagine: everyone has a fuel cell in their home and in their car. The grid is networked so that if you have surplus, you can sell it to the grid; if you need more power, you can buy it. On a hot summer day, you have the choice between paying (probably through the nose) for more power for your A/C, or just plugging in a fan and drinking icewater.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
They offer good cost savings, especially when you count how many times you have to replace conventional bulbs, and how much electricity they save over their lifetimes. The initial cost is no longer prohibitive, especially if your local energy utility offers rebates for purchase of CF bulbs. I checking with your local electric company to see if they offer a rebate program. I received a Starlights catalog that advertised quite a large range of lighting options.
The biggest energy savings may come where people replace their energy guzzling halogen lamps. You know them: those torchieres that shine their light upwards. Every so often, you might see a puff of flames as a moth catches fire on the bulb. I have a couple of flourescent lamps that look a lot like these halogen monsters, except they work a lot cooler. If you replace a 500W halogen with a 35W flourescent, you remove a fire hazard from your room. The energy savings will be significant: unlike a comparable appliance like a microwave, these things can be left running unattended for hours.
Apart from energy savings and safety, flourescents can make your life easier. You spend much less time standing on chairs changing light bulbs. Your circuit breaker will not overload because someone turned on the microwave and your halogen lights are on. They run cooler, so they give off less heat: important in the coming summer months. That's why I use CFs where they make sense.
My father, a retired power engineer who worked for the New York State PSC in System Planning told me about Plug Power , a company that is making and selling PEM (proton exchange membrane) fuel cells for home use. According to the web site, the fuel cells are powered by "natural gas, propane, or methanol and are expected to achieve 40% electrical efficiency. Excess heat generated by the fuel cell can be captured and used for hot water or heating. When this is done, overall efficiency can exceed 80%."
They've had a house running on a 7kW fuel cell in Upstate New York since June 17, 1998.
Having some expertise on this matter, I'd like to clarify some of the information presented in this post
Privatised utilities can offer a far superior service to consumers given the competition built into the free market socioeconomic model, and the privatisation of utilities in countries like the UK has been an unqualified success for both consumers and utilities, allowing people to choose exaclty who offers the best deals on their gas, electricity and so on.
In the U.K., like in many European countries, the electric utilities were GOVERNMENT owned. In the U.S., most major utilities are already privately owned by investors. You can buy stock in many of these companies on the major exchanges. The main reason why Thatcher initiated U.K. privatization was to bust up the Coal Miner Union who were requiring U.K. owned electric generators to buy and use expensive (and environmentally unsound) U.K. coal for fuel stock. So it's difficult to say what degree of the success of U.K. is due to privatization and what degree to deregulation (not the same thing).
What America needs is to have more privitised utilities - look at the success we've had with our health service, it is the envy of the world with the best equipped hospitals to be found anywhere. Surely it is obvious that this success could be used elsewhere, such as in an ailing electrical market.
Already happening. At least 23 states have passed some measure of deregulation. For example, California (perhaps the state most affected and effecting the Silicon Revolution) has one of the most aggressive deregulation program with a competitive wholesale electricity market. One of the problems with the current electricity industry (mentioned in the article), large price spikes along the magnitude of $10000/MWh, is a result of deregulation ... under regulation, prices were effectively regulator capped and determined. Under deregulation, firms can try to exercise market power (see Microsoft).
That said, there's also the issue of whether competition leads to better reliability. Remember, firms are just as likely to cut corners in an effort to provide 'cheaper' electrcity as they are provide better 'quality' (reliable) electricity in a competitive market ...
For a more in depth and technical discussion of this, check out an article in this month's IEEE Spectrum magazine at: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/publicfeature/grdo.ht ml
OK, a little History hear. Back in the 70's there was a "power crisis" and by 1990 California was going to need 40 Nukes, and Washington was going to need 8. I dont know how many Nukes there are in CA, but in WA state we have one working and seven DOA power plants that almost sent the states power supply into recievership (ie bankruptcy). We still have plenty of power (more or les, and certainly not the massive blackouts predicted). . . why? because power companies found that it was cheaper to reduce the usage then increase production. Example: It is cheaper to supply natural gas for homes and get them to have gas driyers, stoves and hot water heaters then to build a natural gas plant. It is also more effective to uncrease the effiency of electrical appliances then to create more power plants. Many private utilities want to take over the infrastructure of the existing utilities without aquiring the "stranded costs" (ie mothballed and dead power plants and other ghastly mistakes) of the existing owners. This is akin to buying a car that is still under contract, but not paying off the contract. Who pays "stranded costs?". Why we do! So our elecric bills may go down some (and I doubt much). But our taxes will go up to pay these costs. There is also the matter of "externalized costs" or not cleaning up your messes. Many public utilities are alrady guilty of this (see the Movie erin Brokovich fo an example) do you think that a private company is going to be any more reasponsable for cleaning up its messes? I dont think so. My opinion- The utilities should remain in public hands, and transparency should be increased, not decreased as would be the case with privitization. These utities should start investing not in increased power out put, but in conservation measures, which could be sold to the consumer, who will be happy to buy them once electric costs are increased to cover all the externalized costs. On a final note, the main who orhastrated the power fiasco in WA state (WPPS or "woops") became secratry of the interior after James Watt, proving that if your mistakes are giagantic, there is a job in a repblican administration waiting for you. Any one contemplating more nukes should read the book "Mtn in the Clouds" by Bruce Brown.
I remember a story back in 1983 when Pacific Gas & Electric raised their utility bills to totally silly levels for its time. There was a homeowner in Cameron Park, CA who has solar-powered EVERYTHING in his house; he saw his PG&E utility bill go from US$14 to US$28, and was definitely NOT a happy camper (and even reported it to the local newspapers). I mean, this homeowner was just about off the local utility grid and still got stuck with a 100% price increase!
Fortunately, modern technology has reduced power needs even for computers. If your computer and monitor is Energy Star-rated it means the computer supports APM or ACPI power management and the monitor supports DPMS power management; you can set it so after a set time the system essentially draws less than two percent of power consumption when everything is on.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The reason we have the 11th in life expectancy are multifold.
within those three points, you can see that the healthcare already has it's hands full. No wonder heart diseas is so pevalent in this country.
Lowmag.net
First of all, there is a huge up-front expense for installing solar panels. Several thousand dollars. So I wouldn't say that you aren't giving up anything.
Secondly, there are the maintenance costs. These things can and do break (if not the panels themselves, then the supporting electronics), and you as the owner would have to have them fixed. And given the extremely low demand for people who fix solar electrical systems, you can bet that it costs an aweful lot to have someone fix it for you.
Lastly, electricity from even a government-imposed monopoly is just so damn cheap, relative to all the alternatives. Solar power is just not a really good alternative yet. Hopefully the technology will continue to be developed, and those with lots of disposable income and an environmental bent will continue to test and improve it.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The above post is classic FUD. Thanks for playing.
Yeah, Alphas are great, but they do suck quite a bit of power... it's tough to find a chip with that much FPU power without all of the expense. PowerPCs are pretty good in the FPU department, and top-notch when it comes to power - what, no heatsink?!. Not an immediate replacement, though (especially considering all of the retooling involved)... hmmm, I'd love to see a chart: SpecFP/Watt... that'd be interesting...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
There is already quite a lot of energy saved this way. CFL sales have been substantial for years and are still growing. The latest trends are in the natural spectrum (better light quality) phosphors and the low harmonics CFLs. (Harmonics cause "hidden" power loss in the grid and make reactance compensation more difficult.) The trick is to get those to be as efficient as the high harmonics and "blue" flourescents. Give them a few years and they will be there.
Also vaguely related is the growth in the use of LEDs for lighting. The red LED is more efficient at generating red than a flourescent, and much more efficient than an incandescent. This is why you are seeing more and more LED based stop lights. Even for white light, the combination LEDs are more efficient than incandescents. The present barriers to their use are:
1. Production costs are high (think 10-50 times more than incandescent).
2. Large surface areas are needed for bright light.
3. Proper color balance is very hard.
4. DC power is used, meaning special power supplies and their attendent efficiency loss. (Electronic equipment already need DC power, so they don't suffer this problem.)
So for a while LEDs will be mostly used in situations where color balance is unimportant, like red lights.
Alll of the good generators are diesel, anyway... which is ~$1.45-1.55/gal... and will get you more watts for your gallon.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
That's when they started building nuke plants under a project named WPPSS (yes, "whoops"). It ended up being the biggest bond default of all time.
Why? Because they were projecting a linear growth in population and energy. Instead, we became more energy efficient, and as the population went up 50%, we only used 10% more energy.
There are several places in Washington State where you can see the rotting hulks of nuke plants that were never put into commission.
The doom and gloom that they are predicting in 2007 may never come true. Does it take into account Moore's law? By 2007, it's likely that computing will be using *less* energy than it is using now, yet have grown by leaps and bounds.
-ted
There have been some bad trends in terms of power consumption for computers recently. The first two are less significant than the third, but they'll all notable when multiplied by 100 million:
1. CPUs requiring 30+ watts of power (50+ for an Athlon), so much that they need their own fans. The geeks that *think* they need 1GHz so they can get 350fps in Quake 3 are a blip on the radar, but realize that these kind of machines will shortly be common in insurance offices and secretary's desktops.
2. High-powered 3D graphics cards being standard in all machines, even though 90% of those machines are only used for word processing and web browsing. Most of the recent chipsets are hot to the touch, even with heat sinks, and many are starting to ship with their own fans.
3. The design of window managers and application software that provide incentive to purchase larger monitors. Having a big monitor is a geek goal, but it's getting more and more uncomfortable to use most window managers on reasonably sized monitors (say 14" or 15"). If you think about it, you're only focused on one application at a time, and the rest of your screen goes to other applications that you're not using at the moment. Windows managers could use a good rethinking here, as it's starting to seem silly to spend your days word processing inside of a window that only takes 50% of the screen. Sure, you could maximize it, but then you just have giant margins. I would be happy with a small monitor, if applications and desktop environments were designed for small monitors, and not huge ones. This is similar to the "gotta get me a massive SUV" trend. People think bigger is so cool, until gas prices get near $2.00 a gallon.
I remember when I first found out about the "Y2K Beta Test", A.K.A. when one of the major cities in New Zealand lost power.
Now lemme clarify. I'm not talking about that piddly little 24 hour blackout that hit San Francisco last year and caused all sorts of havoc and fingerpointing or whatnot.
Nah, the same kiwi's(and I say that with awe and respect) who pretty much invented all that is extreme also had probably the biggest blackout in modern times:
Months.
Big city.
No power.
I remember reading this incredible diary documenting what the city went through(gigantic oil tankers turned into floating generators; power backup systems that survived their "smoke tests" but were never meant to run for weeks on end, etc.) but I can't find it. The best I can see is this link, which does a pretty good job of explaining what happened for those many, many, many months.
I'll leave it to people here to discuss whether it could happen here, but lemme tell you: It has happened, and oh, it did suck.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
What they mean is "it's too expensive". You can do it with a large dam and a small hydroelectric plant / pump but this requires a good location.
Capacitors are far too expensive for their capacity and lead-acid batteries are worse than the problem they solve. The only small, viable alternatives are fuel cells and possible those flywheels featured on slashdot a while ago.
this has already happened in California, New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and a handful of other states for gas and electricity. (see energyguide) it's generally a good idea, but there are a few questionable issues, namely grid maintenance and expansion -- typically, the grid has remained in the hands of the utilities. is this this case in the UK?
circa75.com
Not an issue for peak-load-reduction on the hottest summer afternoons. Utilities *hate* high peak loads -- they have to buy expensive equipment that sits idle most of time. Anything that helps with load peaks will have political support on several fronts.
I pulled that number out of the air anyway. ;-)
Estimates like that assume current-generation appliances and building construction. But most currently deployed household systems are energy hogs:
Semiconductor fabrication is semiconductor fabrication. Photovoltaics is just another family with unique challenges, like SRAM, DRAM, flash, bipolar, analog, MEMS, etc. The only difference is that people haven't poured billions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-years into PV. If PV does take off, companies will fight to make the most progress, in the same way that Intel and AMD are now fighting to see who can build billion dollar fabs the fastest. If that ever happens (a big if), then PV technology will advance at a breathtaking pace. Judging from the size of the existing energy industry, there will be plenty of money available if PV does snowball. The only question is whether it will get over that hump.
And don't forget that practical PV energy depends on converters (DC-to-DC and DC-to-AC), which in turn depend on power transistor technology. The last few years have seen radical improvements in power transistors. UPSes use the same technology as PV inverters. They used to be expensive and rare -- now you can get one for $89.
You mean like the people who are already running on PV electricity? I'm not saying solar power is the wave of the future. It's just that we could go all-solar if we had to. It would be painful, there would be much bitching and moaning, but the human race could do it. The technology is already borderline viable, waiting for an opportunity to grow the market. The alternatives are things like fission reactors (nasty habit of sterilizing cities), or fusion reactors (nobody knows how to make one).
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Of course, once the power need it too high for the microwave dish, then you can use fusion power, which is much cleaner than nuclear power which polutes the surrounding air. And fusion plants have no disasters associated with them.
Man, SimCity cities are so much easier than real life... you can just shut off the newspaper and ignore public opinions...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
But wait!
I can't run distributed.net if the computer's off!
--Ben
As a side effect, the generator companies (who's sales have probably stagnated since Januarty) might get a lift, as will the pyramid schemes based on "geomagnetic home power generation" machines that don't work.
Remember the good old days, when we just thought nukes were going to kill us all? Now it's a different crisis every week, hailed by somebody who wants to sell stuff to us.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Errm, what about retirement funds?
:-)
Lotsa yuppies sitting around playing daytrader when they should be working
Instead, why not take your 401(k)/IRA funds, talk to a lawyer and an accountant, buy some solar panels, and connect to the grid? Keep investing every paycheck, take the excess production and sell it back to the (deregulated) grid.
I'd bet you could make 5-6% on your money easily (+++, once you get to the exponential part, and panels come down in price; this is *real* productivity, BTW, not just "paper profits" on the bloody stockmarket), and HELP TO SAVE THE PLANET at the same time.
(No, I haven't done this myself yet, but I am extremely interested...)
Death of the powergrid! Film at 11.
How long ago was it that New England paid $6,000 per MWH for three hours or more? When you are selling power for 6 cents a kwh and buying it for $60, you can't make money even on volume sales. What is currently your percentage of reserves in New England? Is it going up or down? My own study shows that nationally, from 1992 through 1997, kwh use went up by 15% but capacity installation went up by 4%. How can you get someone to invest in new generation when there are the uncertainties of wholesale competition, retail competition, possible caps on free market sales at elevated prices, new technologies coming along like the industrial aeroderivative turbine and the combined cycle system which double fuel efficiency over the coal fired steam turbine, and here comes the fuel cell with its own combined cycle or hybrid fuel cell/gas turbine promising an 80% efficiency. The free market doesn't work under those circumstances and the grid will get worse and worse. What will save us will be distributed power with the fuel cell winning out over the IAD turbine because fuel cells can provide efficient generation in small sizes and the IAD and its combined cycles can't.
I'm just glad I work on a laptop.
The problem with nuclear power is not necessarily that of radiation, which (in a modern US plant) is probably less than the background radiation. Part of the problem is that the waste water effluent from these plants can harm the ecosystem. They have a deleterious effect on algae and fish populations, causing other ecological problems. Most of this is from thermal effluent causing changes in the favorable species. Brown algae perhaps prefers a higher temperature than favorable species. Also, power plants happen to be built near environmentally sensitive areas (i.e., far from people!). Turkey Point is a good example. Manatees seem to congregate near them though!
Nonsense. Charge the car during the 10 hour off peak at a meter which won't supply power during on peak or will supply power on peak only at a price five times as much. You will not only supply all the power you need to the cars but you will improve the capacity factor of the generators and cut the cost of electricity to everyone and cut the amount of maintenance because the generating units aren't cycled as much.
You can put a fuel cell in my back yard or even in my cellar. No noise. (No moving parts) No pollution of sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide (my fuel cell will eat carbon monoxide and spit out more electricity), neglible particulate matter (smoke), pollution an order of magnitude below the Vision 21 federal standards. Efficiency of a fuel cell will be better than from a 600,000 kw coal fired steam turbine which is 33% at the busbar and 30% at the meter. It will even be better than the efficiency of a combined cycle system of the same size and it will be cheaper , when costs of reserves, transmission, subtransmission, and distribution are taken into account, then even GE's new H technology combined cycle unit with a claimed efficiency of 60%. Maybe that's why the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power just bought one to be located at their headquarters building in downtown LA. For many years they haven't been able to build any thermal generation in the Los Angeles Basin because of the smog [According to Bob Hope, "Smog" is a nasty rumor, started by tourists, who insist on breathing."] Because of the smog, they have had to go as far our as Four Corners to build generating capacity. You can invest in this technology. If you do, you will be like the missionaries in James Michener's Hawaii who when to Hawaii to do good and did very well indeed.
Sweet! Sounds like New Jersey!
It's called conservation of energy. Matter and energy are never created nor destroyed but merely converted from one form to another.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
One possible solution to this problem is the development of more scalable clean power plants, such as fuel cells. Fuel cells can be nearly as efficient in generating electricity on a car scale as a large power plant scale, or even more efficient because of lower line losses.
One nifty use of this I have heard of is to have car fuel cells running all day, and supplying power to the grid while parked in company lots.
The privitization proposed really refers to regulatory oversight. Though they may exist as independent commercial entities, power utilities are heavily regulated -- particularly in the arena of "universal service" requirements. This is ultimately the same reason telco companies have sucked for so long.
That's not to mention the regulatory rate burdens they face.
Real costs of electrical power are not yet borne by the purchaser. Even putting pollution externalities aside, prices are not accurate conveyers of information on the matter, due to regulations.
so, here's how it works: you put some solar panels on your roof, a phase matching inverter (or several, depending on how many watts you need to handle) in your basement, and hardwire the whole thing into your builings power system. you could also spring for a bank of batteries, and essentially have a big-ass UPS. most modern inverters will monitor your batteries and automatically start up your back-up generator if needed. the really cool part is that your local utility company will buy any excess power you generate, usually for 1/3 to 1/2 what you pay per kW. most such systems will pay for themselves in a few years, particularly when combined with energy saving policies (like having people power down their work stations when they go home, for example).
enough companies (or even individuals) doing this would remove the need for building new power plants (you know, the NIMBY ones a previous poster mentioned). building nuclear power plants is something that should especially be avoided, as nuclear power is not clean. i would insert a link to the NIRS home page here, but it was vandalized last week and is currently closed for repairs.
these are real, workable solutions. check the home power link in the article for more detailed info, actual costs, and probably people who will set it up for you. i spent the first 20 years of my life off-grid, and while complete disconnect isn't for everyone, it does make you think about how much power is simply wasted. and as the guy from oracle stated, complete grid reliance is not really an option either.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Maybe if my Windows box didn't lock up everytime it went on standby, I could leave on the power-saving features and and not waste so much juice!
:)
Also to blame are screensavers and key-cracking programs. Heck, blame Canada!
Three words:
Prisoners On Treadmills.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Plus all the bitching and moaning from AEP about the danger to linemen during maintenance. They claim that they can't be sure that you won't back-feed a line that they have cut for work.
Do what you have to do in industrial situations: provide switchear on the outside of your house with a lockable handle. Make them lock the handle so that if they shut off the line without locking it and die, it's their problem.
When I visted GE CRD, they had a number of different fluorescent bulbs, including one based on a betatron, and a couple that had phase-shift coating, so the light came out looking more like a soft-white incandescent rather than a flourescent... none of the blue glare, etc.
The technology is out there...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Your skin offers a certain amount of resistance to the flow of electricity. There isn't any "more rapidly" to it... it either goes through your skin or it doesn't -- humans aren't inductors (not much anyway.) 1.5V isn't sufficient to move any current (and it's the current that kills you.) 12V might be enough to notice. 120V AC is very noticable. 220/240V AC freakin' hurts. 440V AC will knock you off the ladder :-)
It only takes a few milli (yes, MILLI) amps to kill you. 100 or so nanoamps can cause serious nerve damage. Your skin usually provides enough resistance to protect you from the occasional causual shock.
The frequency of AC power affects how badly it can hurt you. Less than 100Hz tends to penetrate the skin rather well. Higher frequencies penetrate less -- the current flows over the surface instead of through the flesh. Have you ever played with a Tesla coil? Ever touched a "plasma globe"? I, personally, have touched 37,000V sources (at 25kHz mind you.)
Fusion plants do produce radioactive waste. The containment shielding needs to be replaced every so often. This shielding is constantly being bombarded by all kinds of EM energy. Even though the fusing plasma is magnetically contained, the engery produced is not. Thus, over time, the material surrounding the reaction is irradiated much as the interior of a fission plant. Acturally more so, as the reaction is much more intense. While fusion reactors wouldn't produce as much waste as fission plants, there still is a waste issue.
Yeah, well my website is powered by Apache, which will scalp your so called 'Red Hat'...
Oh, wait... it's apache on an Earlier Mandrake... hmmm...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Discover's 2000 awards (the link on their site doesn't show the finalists) included a scientific team that came up with a white led comprised of blue and yellow leds that feed off of each other to make white light. It even puts off no heat, as it does not actually make white light directly, but by the mixing of two colors. nifty tech.
Lowmag.net
Now all those people with 20 or 30 generators in their garage are laughing the mad scientist laugh. I can see it now. "We're Prepared! The boy scouts won't kick us out anymore!"
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
This account doesn't have any luck.
there's a lake in VA, Smith Mountain Lake, which was built to store electric power during off peak periods. Has to be not the most effecient means but that's the idea.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
You should be aware that under the private cogeneration provisions of PURPA (the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978) private individuals can resell their privately produced electricity back to the Public Utilities at either a) the 'new generation' cost to the utility; or b) a higher price set by the state regulatory commission to encourage private co-generation.
I actually did this back in '82 (when I was building a new house, and Carter-era tax credits made it more feasible). The power company had to install (at their eexpense) a different kind of power meter to record the power going both ways (though I haven't checked my bill in years to make sure I've been getting my earned credit... dang!)
Details vary by state, but I know NY pays 6 cents/kwh which will hardly make you rich, but helps the system pay for itself . It's pretty much set-and-forget, with an annual mop-down of the teflon-coated solar collectors (which shed snow in the winter, too)
But the real money-saver is solar hot water. It supplements my central heating, and assures that I don't run out of hot water in the morning!
The only complaint I have is that since my house is angled to catch the maximum sun on the back roof, my front yard doesn't get much direct light. The snow in my yard or driveway may not completely melt until 1-2 weeks after the rest of the houses on my street. (which suggest how much otherwise wasted power was harnessed)
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
"What America needs is to have more privitised utilities - look at the success we've had with our health service, it is the envy of the world with the best equipped hospitals to be found anywhere" If you can afford it. The same is tru of utilities. Out west we have metro areas that supply a market-rich area for utilities, and rural areas where ther are relatively few. The Idea of the BPA (and rural electrifivation is that the cities help pay for the rural eletricity. With privitization or utilities, all the companies want to get the cities and screw the rest.
I have seen that study what you and it fail to take into account is that it is our lifestyle not our healthcare that is the problem. Anyway i would rather live 60 years free than 80 under a government like Cuba that has socialized medicine. Because, in the end socialist will never be happy until they control every aspect of modern life; government is the answer to all. And by the way States were it makes since (My state of NY) they are deregulating the power industry
It's been six months... still waiting for the Y2k power failure to end life as we knew it. ;-)
--Mike--
CANDU reactors are great! They produce lots of easily-refined high grade Plutonium as waste! Uh, oops, maybe that's not so great... :)
And, back on topic, with the nukes out of commission, all those nasty coal plants have been fired up, resulting on Ontario getting the #2 pollution producing state on North America! (yes, Ontario is a province, and I live here, but need to use the word to easily compare to US and Mexico)
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
This looks like more hysteria to me, remember back in 96 or so when the internet was going to bring down the phone networks?
This Sig Intentionally left blank
Nah, in SimCity 2000, all you needed was the Raise Terrain tool ($25/tile), the Water tool ($100/tile) and then a Hydroelectric Dam ($400/tile). Instant waterfall from nowhere, and a power source that lasts forever, all for around $600! (Anywhere from $400 if you already have a waterfall to $725 if you needed to raise terrain from flat ground.) No polution, doesn't bother sims (as they usually aren't up the side of mountains). I wonder if they fixed that, um, feature, in SimCity 3000?
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Here's how Power Grid Mind Control(tm) works.
First of all, you'll need the following:
Assembly:
Method:
Conclusion:
The power grid can be very useful in the hands of trained insurgents, but dangerous to the cause of liberation. Use with care!
I remember that there was some experimental home down in Florida that was just a double-wide trailer home with solar panels for singles. They claimed that not only could they run the house off of it, but actually produced more than they used from time to time and would recieve credit vouchers from the local electric company.
This was a while ago, too. I'm sure that the technology is better now. And you could go as far as you want with it. Just a power supplement to try to save a little money when you're running the AC all day in the summer or go full bore and see if you can try to power totally off of it. I wouldn't mind giving the former a try myself if I owned a home.
Ya...unfortuantely, some of us don't have that option. I agree that the idea of lower consumption devices is a sound one and should be taken seriously, but unfortunately a lot of the existing infrastructure will be too expensive to replace easily.
For instance, where I work, we have 5 UltraSPARC-II 296Mhz pumping away at Data all day, as well as quite a few (28 in fact) Alpha 21264 machines running our FORTRAN simulations, a few scattered Intel MMX and Pentium boxes, and some Orca Auspex units for mass storage.The work is time-critical and can't go down at all, and our storage must be available full time for the rest of our team to analyze and use. We don't - CAN'T - take chances with electricity, and besides having UPS's connected to all the major units, we have a diesel powered generator in the basement of the building, and 60 car batteries to back that up.
I'd have to say that although I agree that *eventually* things will have to change and either alternative fuel sources need to be optimized and improved, or current devices need to come down in power consumption requirements (preferably both), for the moment, a lot of companies don't have a choice when it comes to using staunch amounts of electricity.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Might I suggest Parallon power by honeywell .. this seems to be a $$ saving alternative to burning conventional gasoline, and you can stay on the power grid....
~ride hard.. live free~
Natural gas is burned to produce electricity and chilled water for cooling.
Recently construction of a large ice chilled water tank (one of the largest in the West) was completed. This allows the plant to chill water at night when electricity is cheap, serving as inexpensive large-scale energy storage.
People are doing this even as you whine it isn't possible/feasible. Home Power writes about it in every issue.
BTW, Home Power Magazine is produced with a bunch of Macs by a bunch of pretty interesting people who are by no means 'typical magazine' folks. These guys are more like a big family.
Most of the people who made these claims also made Malthusian claims of exponential population growth, which we have yet to see.
B) There's no problem in doing fusion, hot or "cold"; the problem is the radiation. To do fusion on a commercial grade level (i.e., several hundred MWatts from one plant) would send so much gamma isotopes into the surrounding area that a plant built of concrete and rebar would crumble within six months. How do you justify rebuilding a multibillion dollar plant twice a year?
C) Wishing for "cold" fusion to work is like wishing for people to carry thermonuclear weapons in their briefcases (not an unlikely scenario if cold fusion worked). Cold fusion would make building a high yield device very cheap and convenient. When you consider that a 200 megaton hydrogen bomb (average sized citybuster) uses about the amount of hydrogen in a wastebasket (at atmospheric pressure and temperature), this would put a sobering amount of destructive force in the hands of anyone determined enough to put one together.
In short, be careful what you wish for. Or at least do more research on it.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
America has it, and it sucks. What are some more symptoms? How about food?
They say that over half of americans could stand to loose some weight? I wonder how come. Whenever I turn on the TV, there's a close-up of a slowly rotating sandwich with at least a POUND of beef, and several slices of cheese. Do I NEED one of those after typing for 7 hours? Hell no! A really tasty little green salad would be much more my speed. And without a lot of heavy dressing, too!
Americans can't get enough. We're a bunch of Homer Simpson clones. How many people do YOU know who say "D'oh!" ? Are you one of them? I guess it's like being Chris Farley. I have no idea why that's attractive to everybody. I guess we like attention,as individuals- and how better to get attention, than to be the CENTER of attention? We like to feel IMPORTANT, and how better to do that to be BIGGER than everyone else?
Fuck that line of thinking, my friends- and we shall overcome. Stop talking big, and BECOME a vegan- start RIDING that bike to work. Go get some real culture, and I guarantee that you CAN feel important, and attended to- without being Top Dawg.
(sigh) I'm out of here.
As someone working in the PC game industry, here's how the last five or more years have gone.
From 1994-1996, we were getting lots of experience with software rendering. It was slow, it was annoying, but we were getting good at it. Then the Voodoo 1 became popular, and we had more power than we knew what to do with. So we started writing games specifcially for that chipset, and we just started scratching the surface of what it could do. Then all these other chipsets started getting marketshare, those from Nvidia, those from 3Dlabs, those from Rendition. So we had to give up tuning our code for Glide and got into the whole OpenGL/Direct3D API and driver nonsense that we still haven't gotten out of. Performance was watered down as a result.
Then the Voodoo 2 hit in early 1998. We had to focus on a variety of cards and APIs by then, so we couldn't take full advantage of what it had to offer. If you consider that the coin-op San Francisco Rush was powered by a Voodoo 1, and it surpassed just about everything that was released for the Voodoo 2, you'll get a feeling for how things were. But the Voodoo 2 was cool, so we pushed back into Glide. Then the TNT was announced and gave similar performance. It might have been better on the benchmarks, but our 3D rendering code was getting pretty spread out and API-heavy at that point. We didn't push either card to its limit.
The 3DNow CPU extensions were released, but we ignored them because we had too much else to worry about.
Intel announced their so-called "Katmai" extensions for vector math, which ended up in the Pentium III. Honestly, we didn't have time to listen. Cards and drivers were changing so fast that we didn't want to blow our test suite that wide open. From what I hear, most developers ignored them too. Driver writers didn't, but driver writers were getting a "who cares, when a new card will come out in three months" attitude, so the support was poor to spotty.
Then more cards, like the GeForce, the Savage, and some from Matrox. All good cards, but only the Matrox supported hardware bump-mapping, the Voodoos still had the best multitexturing support, and the GeForce was the only one with transformation and lighting. We started ignoring most of this stuff, just shooting for decent performance on mainstream cards. Nobody really knew we weren't getting near the performance we could, because fan boys were going crazy and buying new cards as soon as they hit the streets.
Now, in 2000, we have the unfortunate situation of the Pentium III and Athlon being standard in corporate desktop machines, though the whole gig with those chips was the SIMD floating point meant for games, the support that very few game developers bothered with. AGP added more cost and complexity to motherboards, though again that was a gamer thing. And those same machines have 3D accelerators in them, soaking up more power, though once again there's no need. The gamers are happy, but of course they don't want to know that we could probably get better performance out of a Voodoo 2 than a GeForce 2, if we were able to concentrate on that chipset alone.
The end result is a complete mess that nobody's happy with. But what can we do?
Electric cars don't emit any fumes, computers with their hard drives don't cut down forests to store their data. Wow these technologies are fantabulous, they don't pollute at all. Oh, wait we forgot something. Production and generation. To produce said computers with their computer chips you need some form of energy, that is most likely got from some form of fossil fuels. The electric car of the future is being produced in a factory belching out all sorts of smoke and chemicals. All the metals using in the production of said eletric car are also being smelted and forged in very dirty factories (although the metal production now is a hundred times cleaner than it ever used to be to which I give mad props). Both the computer and electric car are being electrified mostly by fossil fuels which in case you missed the lecture earlier this decade, are running out. An electric car spits out more pollutants per mile than my car does since its power is coming from coal and oil power stations. The pollution is entirely besides the enormous strain we're going to be putting on the eletrical grid in the next fifteen years.
There are plenty of things that could be done to better manage our power requirements. Take Southern California for instance. There are oodles of noodles of new houses being built out in the desert yet they are hooking themselves up to the same overtaxed power that LA has a hard enough time with, especially in the summertime when all the air conditioners go on in the south western part of the country. I think it'd be a good idea to stick some solar panels on all these new houses, maybe at a discount since the panels are bought and installed in bulk when the houses are built (hey there is even a company that builds microinverters for home solar panels which converts it from DC to AC in unit so every panel ends up spitting out AC instead of DC). This would at least relieve some stress during the most taxing parts of the year. Thats just residential housing. Would it really hurt companies so much to stick solar panels on the roofs of their warehouses. Solar panels also don't need to be the ultra bulky rotating panels we usually think of. Nowadays you can whip out some photovoltaic film that yould be embedded in windows on office buildings and such. We'd have alot more free power all about if cities produced a little bit of power rather than just mooching it. Thats idealistic, I know.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I'm from Royal Oak, a suburb 20 minutes drive south of Downtown Auckland where this happened. I've been in Mountain View CA for the past few months but was in AK when this happened back at the start of '98. It wasn't "months", the bad blackout only lasted a week or so until people realised that yes, Mercury Energy had f*cked them that hard and that they should ease off on the electricity. The remaining time was rolling outages at scheduled times to maintain the limited supply while the overhead emergency corridor was built up the Southern Motorway and the main cables were repaired. It did cause the school year for the U of A to be delayed by a week though, and there were a couple of short incidents as things got back online, but only those living in a small zone in the CBD were hit hard. The large businesses that had their home in this area found other places to work out of and pretty much everything came back to life when the problems ended. Not an event you'd aspire your city to go through, but not something the people affected by it (in Auckland at any rate) weren't able to figure out and deal with for that period.
This analysis does not consider disposing of spent nuclear fuels. Obviously, that would make things worse, but since we don't know how to dispose of spent fuels, there is no way to know how much energy it costs to dispose of them!
The SciAmer article was based on research published in another journal. That journal apparently had 14 people referee the paper. Obviously the journal was being exceptionally careful.
The nuclear power industry, ever mindful of its profits, naturally tries to be oblivious to all this.
> Would we really be taking energy out of the system? Or just moving it?
Well, yes, but doesn't the same logic apply to coal burning? We're just moving some matter around and changing some energy states.
> No problem there, we could make up for all those trees we cut down.
Also, perhaps if solar cells soak up the energy that the ground and atmosphere would have otherwise soaked up, perhaps we'll provide some global cooling to offset the global warming?
Lots of arguments sound plausible; I was just wondering whether anyone had actually studied it quantitatively.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Fact 3: America has far higher levels of criminal violence than any of the countries that spend less on health care and have higher life expectancies. For example, the total murder rate in Japan is lower than the non-gun murder rate in the U.S.
Guess what? Criminal violence simultaneously reduces life expectancy and increases health-care costs, and the problem can't be solved by changing the health care system.
When adjusted for the affects of criminal violence, U.S. life expectancy is very near the top, and health care costs are rather lower. The rest can be explained by the higher U.S. levels of arteriosclerosis, which is an effect of our having the fattest society on Earth, which is the result of lifestyle choices and affluence. We have the fattest "poor" on the planet.
In short, the factors that make Americans shorter lived and pay more for health care are not because of the health system, but because of other problems in society.
Steven E. Ehrbar
We need something to replace the y2k bug, do you think this could be hyped up to be the next big thing. Spruce up the bunker here comes the y2k power failure.
Oil/coal demand has been sluggish due to 1970s/80s environmental efficiency improvements. However the petroleum industry has already observed that computer/communications demand may reach a quarter of the US electrical demand this decade in some talks I've heard. This will increase demand for natural gas, coal and petroleum in electricy generations. (Nuclear is dead and hydroelectric pretty much saturated.)
However, there are already Green government specifications for energy efficient computers. But companies and homeowners have been slow to adopt them because they cost some extra dollars.
This sounds remarkably similar to what all those dooms day folks were saying in the mid to early Ninties about how the "Internet boom" was really dangerous because it simply couldn't handle the increased the traffic and would face certain collapse unless large scale and extremely expensive upgrades were performed globally. Well, I don't remember hearing about anyone doing any upgrades that were out of the ordinary, and the Internet sure seems to be doing fine.
--pc
may I also add:
The most common way to be killed by electricity (as I've been told by people in the know) is that it messes up the electrical signals the brain sends to your organs (esp. heart and lungs) and if this happens long enough, then you end up... unhappy, shall I say.
Now, as for the 240V, it's not lethal by its own merit. Electricians say it's Amps that kill (faster).
I live in Europe and I can tell you 240V is just a wilder shock (you just jump up a bit higher... ~~~#:-)
anyway....
Trian
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Your thinking of the wrong industry. If VISA rejcets everyone in a minute who is trying to use their card, it really does amount to a large sum of money. Thats before you add in all the labor involved with bringing the comptuers back up.
Of course, after a week of intense 20 hours workdays from power crews the city gets back to normal, but the worst of the damage did not hit the city. A triangle formed by the cities of St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, St-Hyacynthe and a less-important town I forget the name of is completely cut-off. All high voltage power lines have been brought down. And when I say brought down, I mean CRUSHED under the ice. Pylon after pylon torn like aluminum foil, laying to the ground. I saw the line leading to the area at the worst of the storm, and it was post-apocalyptic. The irony is, the pylons were within normal safety regulations, except they had to support 10 times the weight of ice they were designed to.
It took over a month to power the area back up, during which roughly 100,000 people had to live like cavemen in high schools and army camps (except the lucky few who had wood/gas powered ovens, or family in the city).
Lucky me, I only lost power for about two days. Had I lived 10km to the south, I would have been sent back to the ice-age.
Thankfully our huge government-owned power company was able to rebuild all the power lines FROM SCRATCH in record time.
"The advance of technology is a problem for us"
-------------------------
"After Careful Consideration, Bush Recommends Oil Drilling" - The Onion
Just remeber the Great Storm from a couple of years ago. After Hydro Quebec got most of Montreal up and running, there was a trangular patch of land in the South East (? correct me if that's wrong) that couldn't get ANY power, because they lay in some weird dead zone between all the major conduits.
Granted, this was "act of god" and not over-consumption, but the fragility of the system was belied very quickly.
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
There's an "urban myth" of a guy stealing power by placing several large coils in his back yard under a primary transfer line... The power company eventaully sued him.
That's no myth.
Where I live there is a great deal of snomobiling and one of the shacks near here had the entire shack lit from a coil of wire wrapped 'round a PVC pipe and put in a tree near a high tension line. They weren't drawing mega amps or anything, just enough for about six 100W light bulbs. The power company found it but nothing bad happnened, just a warning. It was used for a public "building" and hardly any power was drawn. Hell I bet the inspector used the shack himself while out on his sled. :-)
While it is possible to do this, you have a very poor transformer in action and you need to get quite close to the lines. Three phase power lines don't "leak" much because the lines all magnetically cancel each other out and there isn't much left to induce unless you're up close to the line, but that's not safe in the first place. :-)
Sounds great, but can I go out and buy one of these flywheels down the street from multiple vendors, such as the parts store or walmart?
Magnetic bearings? Made possible by superconducting magnets? I can see the costs escalate now. Its difficult for the average person to get a hold of even a gallon of liquid nitrogen to make them work.
Even conventional ball bearings are expensive. I work in the maintainance department at work and the mechanics might be very interested in magnetic bearings that just don't fail. We recently replace a set of bearings in a medium sized machine and the bill for the bearings alone was $50,000. Things like mechanical shock, temperature changes, and impurities such as water break the oil film between moving parts and all cause wear. If it moves, its expensive.
And what kind of composites do they use? Carbon-graphite? We use carbon graphite at work for high speed 20 foot bows and when they break due to imperfections and fractures, they rip the housings, wiring, and other things in the machine. They don't turn into hot dust, but chunks and splinters. If you know something that turns into dust, I'd be mighty interested in knowing what it is. The last time one of these bows turned over 2000 rpm, I had to replace the wiring in that machine. No fun.
I still see batteries as a much more viable solution since they are readily available at the local parts store or Walmart down the street. They are also easily charged by commonly available generators that cost less than a few thousand dollars and the makeshift setup through an automobile.
From my understanding, there is no way to know for sure what a wide spread deployment of solar cells may do to the Earth. In any situation, the Earth is a system that gains energy from the Sun and we just move energy and matter arround down here on the surface. It's just that when we burn fossil fuels, we end up moving the matter into a form that isn't good for some aspects of the Earth system. Wether solar or wind power would do the same is unknown, but I'm sure willing to find out.
Contrary to popular opinion, the unknown is a better choice than certain doom.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich (among countless other experts) predicted a huge famine. He stated "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
Life magazine reported "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support ... the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution... by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earch by one half..."
Doesn't seem like much has changed since then and now except the exact nature of the impending disaster.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Sadly I've no mod points, but this is brilliant
--
Cheers
Cheers
Jon
Don't forget that in the next few years, a great deal of the private transportation industry (read, people with automobiles) will be transitioning from internal combustion engines to electric power. When this starts to happen en masse, we'll see a sharp spike in power consumption across the board.
One solution I see is smart appliances; embedded microchips in your air conditioners, car rechargers, refrigerators, etc. that are linked to computers in the electric companies power plants. If you were to give each appliance in your home a ranking based on how valuable it is to you, then the server could adjust power consumption based on available supply. It's not a permanent solution, but it would keep us from losing power to things like iron lungs and quake servers when unimportant things like air conditioners could be sacrificed instead. I could see this being completely client sided, as well- make electricity costs continuously variable, with the demand dependant $/KwH broadcast over the net, so that your smart machines could shut themselves down when the cost of running them becomes prohibitive.
Food for thought?
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Maybe because of all the new electronic gadgets the power structure will not be able to handle the load and all will crash
Or perhaps the the power grid will grow to support the new influx of electronic gadgets, just like it has been FOR DECADES!
Come on people, when microwaves, VCRs, and TVs came out no one was pushing this kind of crap. It's not like we've never faced a growth of power demand before.
Finkployd
Read through the reliability assesment reports of the North American Reliability Council (NERC). You will find that power companies are scrambling to build enough generating capacity to have adequate power availability margins. The "safe" level is a 15% margin; most regions are expected to fall below this in the next few years while the construction of new capacity is completed.
Interestingly, the western side of the US is projected to have the best power generating capacity while having the least reliable design. Many areas have power grids that aree inherently reliable in design, but have insufficient capacity to meet demand.
-JD
(I still don't see how power outages could cause worldwide anarchy, it wasn't even until 150 years ago or so that we even had electricity. Have we grown so dependant on technology?)
:-), no banks, no phones (your phone works when the power is out, but the phone company sure won't), no burglar alarms, even *gasp* no SLASHDOT!!!
Is this supposed to be a joke? Our civilization couldn't possibly survive a significant amount of time with no electricity. No electricity means no refrigeration, no heat, no A/C (ok, so this one isn't so important, at least in places other than Texas
Electricity and technology is so entrenched in our society that to take it away for a significant amount of time would be a complete disaster. Small generators and backup power supplies would only last so long. 150 years ago people knew how to survive without electricity. Now, few people do.
That said, I know that things aren't as bad as this article makes them out to seem. My mother is working for the NSF right now working on redesigning the country's power grids. So she knows all of the inside information, and she doesn't seem to think there's going to be a problem.
--
For what it's worth, I have a G4 at home - and it consistently runs between 75* - 82* F - a pentium can fry an egg :-P
:o)
And here I am, wondering what to have for breakfast.
But mankind will not be able to survive if it happens! there is no way our weak infrastructure could withstand this possibility!
Sheesh. We've prospered (somewhat) for thousands of years, I don't think capacity of a power grid will hurt much
Thousands of years ago, we didn't have refridgerators.
Thousands of years ago we cooked food differently (no microwaves, no toasters, no electric ranges).
Thousands of years ago we didn't have automated computer systems handling many mundane tasks that most of us have long since forgotten quite how to do.
Thousands of years ago, we didn't have automobiles and traffic control systems.
Thousands of years ago, we didn't have telephones.
Thousands of years ago, we didn't have hospitals so dependent on electronics.
Believe it or not, but a thousand years of technological progress makes a huge difference on the way in which humans can and must live.
As for the 70's, you might want to see what's different between now and then. You might be surprised.
First of all, I am pretty sure all the AC you have in the US consumes a HELL of a lot more juice than all the PC's do.
;-)
Second of all, I thought *everybody* in the US is already used to having their power disappear at any time. I remember horror stories from new england. Basically any time there was a storm, you'd have whole neighbourhoods without energy, simply because lines got knocked down etc.
Move to Europe. Here in Hamburg, Germany, I can't even remember the last time we lost power.
I was able to hear the 15.75Khz horizontial sweep frequency of TVs in my youth, rock & roll and age has cured me of that annoying little problem, but walking by the TV section of the store used to be painful.
I drove Best Buy nuts by buying and returning TVs because of the volume of their squeal, until I finally found an acceptable one.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The LED Light has a flashlight with 4 led and it runs 700 hrs on a set of Li batteries. 30 days on standard batteries. not bad.
Lowmag.net
I'm not questioning the competency of PowerPC chips for a moment. What I do need is a good, solid FORTRAN compiler, though. A lot of our work is done in FORTRAN, and basically that's the main factor in choosing our hardware - FORTRAN compiler availability and quality, and raw performance. Of course, at one stage, one of the directors wanted to standardise on Compaq's new Fortran compiler for Win32, so we tested an NT 4 Server, SP 4, Dual PII Xeon 400 (if I recall correctly), and the damn thing didn't run near as well as the Alpha boxen we had, at that stage older ones - we have newer ones now - so that was basically the end of the discussion. I'm dissapointed by Microsoft's and Compaq's (in regard to mainstream comupting integration, that is, I'm not questioning their brilliance in Alpha/Digital/FORTRAN areas) dedication to the Scientific community - especially Microsoft. When asked to choose between Tru64 and NT, there's just no comparison at this stage. We're still being pressurized into migrating our stuff to NT, but I don't think the scientific community will stand for it. As for the G4/G3 from Apple, how good is MacOS? I've never used it. I've read about the new OS X, it sounds pretty neat, if it gets released soon and decent FORTRAN compilers become available for it, I'll certainly take a look at it.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
I would assume you have never been in series with 440 or 480 volts. It is very hard or impossible to let go of once touched. Although it's true your heart restarts eaiser, the smell of burning flesh is quite unpleasant and the healing is prolonged.
However, you do have to admit that not having to mine for uranium (with all the environmental hassles associated with mining) and also dealing with spent nuclear fuel rods is a definite plus. Since deuterium is easily extractable from seawater, that means if you're next to the ocean there's 1 BILLION years of fuel for a fusion reactor right there for the taking.
I think a commercial fusion reactor becomes possible between 2015 and 2020.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I remember not too long ago (~3yrs) someone mentioning that the then current generation of terrestrial cells would never be able to produce as much power as was required to make them. At first this sounds fishy, but remember that solar cells are not very efficient and that value drops over time as the semiconductor degrades. There are known equations for determining the life expectancy of a solar cell (unforturnatly my reference is at home). The other problem with solar is their efficiency drops significantly as temperature rises, so unless they subject to a fairly strong wind, they require active cooling to get reasonable performance.
There are lots of other issues with solar. It's great in concept, but can be a real bitch to get good performance.
- standard house current 120 volts is enough to mess you up but not kill you
WRONG. It's people like you that end up killing themselves changing a light bulb. If you can feel the shock then it has the potential to kill you. You feel something because there is current crossing nerve endings. Prolonged exposure (more than a few seconds) to 120VAC can (and does) cause second and third degree burns on and under the skin (electrolysis and boiling of the water in the blood and flesh) as well as nerve and tisue damage.If the current flow crosses vital organs, there can be serious organ damage -- including perm. heart arythmia due to pacemaker damage and/or heart muscle nerve damage, kidney failure, reduced lung capacity, and the ever popular "walking funny"... I've had more than enough "training" on the hazards of working with and around electrical devices from my days in high school. (Seeing an idiot "jump" over a set of workbenches after saying "What's th[at?]" while trying to point to an exposed high voltage cap on a color tv picture tube, you come to appreciate some things. Yes, the area was clearly marked and we did tell him to keep the f*** away from it. He was rapidly static-charged to about 30kV (much along the lines of a VanDeGraf generator) -- of course, I was laughing too hard to help him. He was unconscious for a few minutes and his hand and fore-arm was numb for a few hours. Afterwards there was the requisit three tons of paperwork -- the school board can be so demanding when a student almost kills themselves.)
I couldn't tell you about OS X or the macs... I was thinking more of the RS/6k workstations and lower-end servers (read: still pricey, but solid). I've only a passing experience with FORTRAN, so I wasn't aware of the different compiler disparities. I have to believe that there is a solid FORTRAN compiler for AIX (I know xlf/f77 is available, but again, I can't comment on how it stacks up). I was just looking at it from a power (no pun intended) perspective. Of course, that's just the CPU, not even counting the rest of the system... hmmm...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Wattage (AC or DC) basically is voltage time current (amps)
(AC has some extra nicities like pahase relationships thrown in, but the basic idea still applies)
This means Twice the voltage times half the current give you the same total power, never mind that once the electricity enters your box, it is converted back into DC, and still has the same power requirements it always had.
so the suggestion is based on a incomplete understanding of the basics of electricity and power transmision. admittedly, not an intuitive topic, but still the idea is flawed. [sigh]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The NRC grants 30 year licenses after which the reactor is supposed to be decommisioned -- all fuel is removed, the core is drained and the containment building housing the core is filled with cement.
Creating wonderful rock-climbing monuments all over the free-world...
I like home power despite the fact I live oin NYC I like slashdot despite the fact I am human I made no money, and why wouldn't home power deserve the attention? rhyder
BTW, folks; Silicon Valley has been having rolling 2-hour blackouts (yes, I said black, not brown) for the past couple of days.
--
A bit of background. I work in the Electric Utility industry, so take my comments knowing that bias and that I might have a clue about this stuff. In any event, my comments are my own. My employer doesn't even know I read Slashdot.
Not surprising, actually. However, the reasons for the delays are different for power plants than transmission lines. Power plants are being built these days, as companies react to the incredibly high prices of two summers ago. The market price for energy spiked at about $7-10k/MWh in summer of 1998, in part due to sellers defaulting on energy sales. Transmission lines are very hard to get built, in large part due to the "Not in my back yard" syndrome mentioned by another poster.
This is the real problem. There has been and continues to be very little incentive to build new transmission lines. Remember that in nearly all states (perhaps all, I am only aware of the states where we do business) the Transmission system is not being deregulated. As a result, the owners of transmission systems will only be compensated for their investment via the regulatory process.
Finally, I have to comment on this:
- Byron noted that utilities can promise only 99.9 percent reliability--a figure that translates to about eight hours of blackouts a year--while high-tech firms stand to lose millions of dollars from a blackout lasting just a minute.
Ahhhh, that kind of reliabililty is going to require (at least) on-site back-up generators. One hundred percent reliable == Infinitely expensive."We need 99.9999 percent reliability for e-commerce, and we need more flexibility from regulation to achieve that," he said.
Some (hopefully) useful links:
NERC NERC was formed following the 1966 Northeast US blackout.
Public Utility Home Page
The misc.industry.utilities.electric newsgroup homepage.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Milalwi
(First time poster, long time reader.)
Oh, right. Sorry. I'm an being an idiot today :) The "root" servers eh? RS/6000s :) Hehe. Sure, I guess it's worth a look, but I think the main reason we haven't had to explore other options is because Compaq's support is so good, the people on the Digital FORTRAN team are superb in the support department, and we generally have had a lot of success and a great relationship with them. I think a lot of people in the field were getting nervous around '98 when Digital was bought out, but Compaq has done brilliantly, IMO, and a lot of the scientific community out there seem to agree with me.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
You raise the voltage and lower the current? The wattage still stays the same. Thats whats important. Buying converters for 80 years worth of legacy appliances is no small task.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
the power grid is in no danger of failing from the growing use of electronics. while the share of power usage is up, it is as much the result of less being used by manufacturing and heavy industry( they're going offshore)as it is the rise in computer use. it takes thousands of computers to use what one medium sized motor would use. the shortages of last summer were contrived by the large investor owned utilities to drive up the price to their wholesale customers and that are also their retail competitors.
Wouldn't that freak out the cat? I've heard that their persistence of vision is lower than human's, so they actually see 60 hz flickering more than people. The blue/yellow thing all the time would probably be just like a constant katnip trip.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Er, no. "A hell of a lot of amps" will kill you at any voltage, if it goes through your body. It only takes something like 100 milliamps to kill you. As long as you're not grounded, you can grab a 100 kV line no problem, because no current is flowing.
However; more voltage implies more current given the same resistance (Ohm's law). So, a shock (the current) from a 240 V outlet will be twice as bad as from a 120 V line.
Anyway.
Just an Idea, I'm a person who likes Advanced, or atleast cool technology, and I also like Efficiency. So I bought a couple of GE Compact Flourescent Light bulbs, the ones I got give out light equivilent to a 75 watt light bulb but only uses 20 watts and will last 7 years or there around. I wonder how much energy would be saved if most people used these "High-Tech" bulbs instead, they look pretty nifty too. Hey what do you want old fashioned light bulbs or more electricity for the high tech stuff.
They are talking about the power grid here. It opperates at a much higher voltage than your home or office does. The other problem with changing the voltage or frequency is all the infrastructure that is dependent on it. It would just be way to costly. It's cheeper to just build a few nuclear power plants and the lines to tie them into the grid.
I'm really glad that you pointed out the link to Homepower.com, because one of the things I've been thinking about is how communities can become more self-reliant and how we can eliminate single points of failure.
The power plant, right now, is a single point of failure, which is why it's so detrimental when it fails. Something like electricity has to be distributed.
My vision is a world of self-sustainable, self-governing communities, where worthless buildings such as McDonalds and Starbucks have either been replaced with miniature power plants or torn down to make way for community gardens and agriculture.
But that just might be the anarchist in me talking.
One last thing, have any wobblies noticed that the image they use for Home Power is very *very* similar to the IWW sabotage cat?
Compare here and here.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
To the best of my knowledge, the choice of 60Hz had multiple factors, but there was no big "switch" from 50 Hz to 60. There are some old systems in the local steel mills which still use 25Hz power, but nothing that runs at 50Hz. Increasing the system frequency requires re-engineering (and most likely replacing) all of the power plant equipment in the country. It's also a bad idea because it would increase the energy coupled to the environment in terms of stray electromagnetic fields, which already play havoc with underground pipes, and which may contribute to cancer, leukemia, etc. (The last point is highly debated lately).
Increasing the voltage in the home requires replacing all the home wiring in the US, for zero benefit, the problem is the big lines, not your house. Higher voltage in the home is an increased hazard, I've survived a few hits of 110 accidentally encountered, I would not have been so lucky had there been 440 volts available to push current through me.
The standard is set, messing with it won't help the supposed problem pointed out in the article.
--Mike--
This sort of thing just goes to show why the whole concept of a public utility is severely outdated and needs to be replaced. Government interventionalism worked back in the days of building an infrastructure, but it invariably fails when it comes to maintaining and expanding a service.
Why? What is inherently different about building an infrastructure versus exapnding it? Many of the same issues are involved. Either way you've got NIMBY and emminent domain issues. It's like a road. Who the hell is going to build a road, then let everyone drive on it? Infrastructure is one of the few legitimate functions of government. The others are defense and justice.
What America needs is to have more privitised utilities - look at the success we've had with our health service, it is the envy of the world with the best equipped hospitals to be found anywhere. Surely it is obvious that this success could be used elsewhere, such as in an ailing electrical market.
The market isn't ailing. The transmission lines, generating plants and distribution lines are getting old. And now we're allowing these "energy broker" companies to buy, sell and trade power over these same facilities, stressing them even more. It's a wonder we haven't seen more problems. The health care industry is not comparable to the electric power industry and it isn't that our health care system is all that great, it's that the rest of the world sucks more.
Of course, the only real danger here is that the Government will attempt to privatise the industry whilst remaining in control of it through legislation and "industry watchdogs", stifling the benefits that privitisation should bring. As I'm sure all libertarians out there would agree, that would not be a good thing at all for anyone.
You're right but for the wrong reasons. Infrastructure is a legitimate function of government, one of the few. Not all libertarians are anarchists.
The electric power grid problems are not comparable to the Y2K thing. The grid is old. It can't be expanded easily, publicly or privately. And now, the "energy broker" companies are overloading the hell out of it and lining their pockets. Sooner or later, something will give. My advice to everyone reading this is buy a little generator.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I saw that once on CNN actually. I would like to have solar panels built flush into my roof to atleast subsidize part of the cost of my electricity, and if you really want to save some electricity get some GE compact Flourescent Light Bulbs, they use significatly less electricity and look cool too.
I'm betting Home Power isn't used to such traffic.
The thing that seems to be ignored when talking about power consumtion is part of the equation is ignored. If every human wants to live with 10KwH of electricity, and the number of KwHs is limited, to make the equation balance, the number of people will need to be reduced.
Ebola, war, people jumping out of windows when the Internet stocks they own collapse in price, or when we send off 20% of the population (the telephone sanitizers) can do the job.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
There is always concern because of the growth in home electronics over the past few years; I'm definitely guilty of adding to the demand... Last summer caught us by surprise, not because of lack of generation, but because of reactive power modeling errors, but that event, not to mention Y2K, made us take a hard look, and all of our models are correct to the best of our knowledge.
As to the NIMBY phenomena, I point you to our Queue A map as to where new (planned) generation is scheduled to be built in our zone. Its a double-edged sword; everyone wants the electricity, but noone wants the plant in their county.. But if you put the plant too far away, then you have the added problems with transmission...
Other ISO's:
California
New England
New York
Keep in mind that the CNET article was entirely about CalISO (which is only a few years old and not as developed yet as the east coast) which is only one piece of the entire puzzle. And I'm sure "HomePower" thanks you for the free advertisement, but I hope next time you at Slashdot try to cover the other angles in the story first, other than the pop-answer. Rememeber, one Nuclear plant generates over 1100 MW of power, thats 1,100,000,000 Watts, or about 167,000 times the output of the lead article on HomePower, and those people are the exception, not the rule.
-- Scott
Oh, btw, if it gets back to me, I'm not an official representative of PJM LLC. Thats what Customer Relations is for.
Say 250 million people, each with a computer (or one operating somewhere on their behalf) drawing 100 Watts, makes a total of 25 Gigawatts. That's a lot, though I'm sure it's nowhere near "17% of the total output". Probably about 20 biggish power stations. Time to put power management into devices other than laptops, maybe?
"This would cut unnecessary energy consumption almost by half". Sorry, but no. It would halve the power lost as heat in domestic wiring only. That has got to be a tiny tiny tiny fraction of total power wastage. The transmission from the power plant to your local area is done at huge voltages (high enough to cut down the transmission loss, low enough not to cause lightning strikes from the power lines). Then once it gets into the home, consider the various big wastages: the inefficient fridge, the incandescent lightbulbs creating more heat than light, the air con set a degree or two chillier than you need it. Far more than than what gets lost in resistance in your domestic ring main. There's another thread about this somewhere else.
Generation is being built at crazy rates right now, much of it expected to be online next summer.
Now I would agree with the transmission problem, currently do to regulation there is no money in transmission lines. An entity must charge its cost for the usage of its transmission lines, so their is no real incentive to build transmission lines. Especially when putting a 385 thousand volt line through the back of someones yard tends to upset them. And then there is the time and money involved in the simulations, studies, etc of the effect of the line on flows around the grid.
The answer? Perhaps deregulate transmission? Of course when you do, and until enough is built, there would probably be more unreliability in the grid. Nearly every day since the beginning of the summer season we see TLRs (Transmission Line Relief) for our purchases/sales of power on the grid.
Maybe the government needs to build transmission to help ensure reliability, leaving marketing of power to the private sector.
Of course, all this deregulation that is occurring within the industry isn't helping things. Senators/Representatives are creating laws for issues which they have no real understanding.
I don't know, but I bet this gets fixed before complete deregulation throughout the US occurs simply because leaving a customer in the dark means losing a customer to someone else.
But hey.. deregulation means cheaper power! Yeah right.. I have my job because of deregulation, and more jobs are being created because of it, which means more overhead. And the accounting process is going to get much more complex. Just imagine.. You used to buy power from Company A, but company B gave you a cheaper rate. So company b builds a line to your house to give you their power right? Nope, they just send the power through company A to get to you. So, now company A charges company B some $$$ value for the use of their line. Now somebody has to account for all that mess.
And what about the meter reading? Does company A read the meter, or does company B have its own meter readers?
I think the result will be much like the telephone industry. Prices haven't gone down (at least, my phone bill hasn't) but services have certainly shot up.
By 2 cents... sorry.
I don't think you want to use Candu as an example of a safe system.
Ontario Hydro has been running several major Candu reactors for about 20 years, everyone blindly assuming that they were safe.
In the last few years we've seen most of Ontario Hydro's candu reactors shut down for extended period of time after major leaks, etc.
Candu is not as safe as we've heard.
_Am
No - the power grid belongs to National Grid. Power generation is done by National Power and Powergen, and maybe others, who sell the power to National Grid. Delivery to the customer is typically handled by the local electricity company, though the customer may actually pay a different electricity company (or other companies who sell electricity, such as British Gas).
A similar system is in place for the gas supply. The infrastructure is owned by Transco (formerly part of British Gas), but the gas is sold by various companies, including British Gas, and electricity companies.
In the southeast, we have more urgent need for backup power. Hurricanes, ice storms and blizzards have brought widespread power outages lasting for more than a week per episode. During the 90s, North Carolina has seen several hurricanes cause massive power outages. There have been 2 blizzards and numerous ice storms which have also caused widespread power outages. It is not easy to determine the effects of deregulation on the restoration efforts after these storms but when you are one of the ones without power, you think about this stuff. Generator and inverter sales are brisk these days.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
--Mike--
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
>What America needs is to have more privitised >utilities - look at the success we've had with >our health service, it is the envy of the world >with the best equipped hospitals to be found >anywhere.
Ohhhh, I'm sooooo envious.
Can you see me turning green?
I live in the UK; along with every other citizen, I pay a small amount of my income to the government and they provide me with healthcare free at the point of use. I don't need to take my credit card with me when i go to hospital. We spend 7% of healthcare revenues on admin as opposed to 11% in the US.
Privatisation is not some kind of panacea to solve the problems of healthcare provision(or any other social issue that requires a proper debate). The last government we had tried to introduce a degree of privatisation. The only change I noticed at the hospital I was studying at was the arrival of a whole lot of middle aged managers and their BMW's in the parking lot; and the closure of many elective beds.
Now that the energy market has been deregulated the only change I see is that of people knocking on my door at 6pm (when I'm eating my dinner) telling me how much cheaper it'll be to switch to their generating company. Who pays for the people to come knocking at my door? The consumer perhaps?
All they're interested in is increasing market share. We're the windiest country in Europe (an island surrounded by sea) but the Germans have more wind turbines than we do!
Privatisation is no substitute for debate and regulation. The market has no rationale, look at Adam Smith: we'll become better human beings and look after our resources-Whoops there's no fish left on the Grand Banks!
Anyone know of one? Here's a solar radio, but haven't been able to find a server.. I'd sure like to solar power my DSL server 8P.. anyone doing this?
The way things are now, every time we log on to Web page we send up a foul little gush of soot somewhere.
I want a solar-powered logo on every Web page I see. I refuse to buy anything off your cheap, sleazy, oil-powered Web site. I want a clean Web. I don't want to be part of the problem every time I log on. I'm sick of living with that. It revolts me.
Bruce Sterling
Actually, privatization is also part of the problem.
A large number of utilities are moving toward power brokerage in their business focus, and away from power generation.
As the industry is being deregulated, there is more money to be made buying surplus power (really, the RIGHTS to power, at a time when there is a surplus) and then re-selling it on the spot-priced market (at a time when there is a defecit of power). Think: Electricity day-trading; Power arbitrage.
Existing power utilities are dropping expensive upkeep on older generating plants, and just letting the plant run down until they officially "sunset" it. Actually, many of them are for sale right now! As the CNET article mentioned, they aren't building new generating plants.
And just as we are seeing with telcos, there are more and more 3rd parties and middle-men moving in to make money on "market inefficiencies". They aren't creating new power, only buying existing power at a lower cost and re-selling it at a higher cost. If the consumer and the broker are the ones reaping the financial reward of this more efficient market, then the generating utilities are the ones who are paying for it. In this case, it IS a zero-sum game.
Here is where a comparison to telcos falls apart. Ameritech likes brokers because if demand increases, they can just build new facilities to meet the demand. Brokers help them sell MORE service. (Don't even get me into a discussion about the quality of service 3rd parties typically provide.) People don't protest the construction of a new phone switching station in their neighborhood. Hell, most folks don't even KNOW what that boxy building with no windows behind the supermarket IS. Not so with coal/oil/trash-burning power plants. Or a new dam on the river that will make a lake out of a couple of small towns. Or a nuke plant.
Virginia Power doesn't like brokers. They want to BE a broker. The costs of being a generator are just too great, especialy now in a broker's market where wholesale power margins are too tight. Better to slowly abandon the facilities and make money from pushing paper.
July, 1998 was hot summer. A number of power companies had plants out of service for maintenance (and Y2K remediation). Demand shot up with the temperature. Electricity that had been previously trading on the spot market at around $0.03 to $0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) soared to $7.00 per kWh. That's an increase of greater than 14,000 percent! Illinova Power (Illinois) lost an entire year's worth of profits in one week. FirstEnergy (an energy trader with no generators of their own) was also harmed because other power-generation companies defaulted on their delivery contracts. (Source: New York Times, July 7, 1998 "Demand Surge Costs Utilities Huge Loses on Open Market". Archived article for $2.50)
Here's a fictional example to show how unregulated markets can hurt consumers:
PowerCo operates two 500MW plants (Alpha and Beta) near the City of Ciudad. There is a transmission line into Ciudad; it has a 100MW capacity. Ciudad can use it to import power from elsewhere on the grid to supplement what it can buy from PowerCo. This helps out on hot summers. Ciudad has a fairly consistent demand for 1000MW.
The current price for elextricity is $0.05 per kWh. Both plants are operating at capacity; Ciudad isn't importing any power over the transmission line. Each plant costs $20,000/hour to run at maximum capacity, but at $0.05/kWh, they are each pulling in $25,000, so PowerCo is making $10,000/hour profit. So far, things are hunky-dory.
Beta plant breaks down. Ciudad is now buying 500MW from PowerCo (getting it from Alpha), and supplementing that with 100MW from the transmission line. Ciudad is still 400MW short, and will probably send kids home from school and give city workers the day off, plus a few regional brown-outs to conserve power. It costs PowerCo $5,000/hour to pay the interest and salaries for Beta, even when it is broken. The shortage of available power raises demand for electricity and with it, the price.
Here is a quick table of power prices and the amount of profit PowerCo makes with Beta shut down:
Price - $/kWh Profit - $/hour
$ 0.05 $ 0
$ 0.075 $ 12,500
$ 0.10 $ 25,000
How soon do you think PowerCo is going to repair the broken Beta plant? Anyone with an MBA will tell you that the goal is to maximize profits, not sales.
This kind of scenario was prevented when power utilities were regulated for the public good. PUCO's required that utilities supply all the power that the public demands, fixing sales volume. They also fixed price and profit levels. Not so in this (admittedly simplistic) completely open-market model.
All of that was a long-winded way for asserting this:
In the current climate, there is little business incentive to increase the supply of power. It is too expensive to build and run generators. They are dirty, and people do not want them built near them. The expense to make them cleaner is far too great to appeal to most power companies in an unregulated industry. The demand is increasing; there is no question about that. With supply and demand out of balance, prices (and profits) will increase. Power brokerage is where the money is. Existing power companies' move away from generation toward brokerage will decrease the supply.
Watch for more blackouts!
How efficient are the current generation of solar cells/panels? Isn't it in the neighborhood of 25%? Also, how much power does a square foot (or square meter) of solar panel produce?
The Candu and French reactors are relatively standardized for starters. Secondly those major leaks aren't very dangerous to anyone but those working in the plant. Thirdly my source on this is someone who works in a US reactor and knows first hand how dangerous they are compared to the Candu and French reactors.
. . . Soylent Green . . .
Yes, it's made of people, but it may prove to be one of mankind's greatest conributions! Forget donating your loved-one's body to science -- donate them to the power grid! What better way for the voluntary self-extinction people to off themselves than being processed into a vat of green goo, to be turned into paper, plastic or fuel!
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
And this month's discover has a symbiotic blue/yellow led that produces white light with no heat. Heat is where a good part of the spectrum from white light bulbs goes to. This may have practical applications very shortly.
Lowmag.net
I'm not positive, but I'd bet utilities have insurance for this type of thing. In any case, the high costs represent a free exchange in a fair market, which the utility can capitalize over the rest of the year. The utility doesn't suddenly bill people for 10x what they usually pay for electricity.
The high prices make it worthwhile for the small power developers to invest in building mini-plants. Without them, we'd have a lot more outages.
You're right about nuclear, but it'll never happen in the US. The French did nuclear right, but they seem to accept it over there. We build every plant unique, so the design and certification costs were outrageous. The French standardized and planned things much more effectively, but they're also nationalized.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
With all the immense energy that life on Earth has always taken from the sun, I think there is a pretty good precedent that it would be just fine. Anything that is going to come whether you use it or not (sun, wind) and comes bearing such HUGE amounts of energy I truly doubt we as a species could fuck up. And there's no way it could be worse than what we're doing now.
By the way, what sort of effects did you possibly have in mind? I mean, if we even used 1% of the sun's energy there is still 99% left. Unless we cover the entire earth with solar cells (which is STUPID and self-defeating to the problem) and don't let anything else have sun, how will this effect other life except for reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emmissions? You should remember that as we take energy out of the system there is always more continually being rained down (even in the case of wind, because it is the sun that drives the weather) at GIGANTIC levels.
ooky
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
There is some fear-mongering here. The fact is that there is plenty of electricity in most markets throughout the year. It's only peak demand periods, like we get in cities during a heat wave, that overload the system.
The article is correct about the price of energy increasing exponentially during these peak demand conditions. That is why many small private power companies are building gas turbine plants which can be started in about 20 minutes to meet peak demand. These micro-plants are idle most of the time, because they are less efficient than conventional plants and therefore unprofitable to operate when the price of electricity is at a normal level. But at peak demand, the price increases by one or two orders of magnitude, and these microplants become very lucrative.
These microplants are being built as fast as good locations can be found. The developers are targeting locations that can serve the largest peak demand nodes. Better than any government regulations, private industry is going to supply the electricity that we need. It may be a few more years before the capacity is there to prevent blackouts altogether, but the power industry is working very hard to solve this problem.
Incidentally, the increase in demand from computers is not seasonal, so it isn't contributing significantly to this problem. The power industry has expanded capacity gradually over the past 100 years to keep pace with steady demand. Unlike having your AC or lighting down for a few hours once a year, however, companies can't afford to have their computers go down, but they are not causing the power problem, they just feel the effects.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
That was something the marketfluffer from whatever power company they were interviewing was saying, IIRC any server host worth a damn has battery backup/generators. I can't think of one person in the tech field complaining about the availability of power.
The fact that with all the complexity inherant to delivering power that it does work 99.9% of the time is a miricle of the modern day, right up there with the fact that my umpty umpt thousand part 20 year old car will start every time.
This Sig Intentionally left blank
Not all libertarians are anarchists.
Okay, not to nit-pick, but actually, *no* libertarians are anarchists.
Anarchist = An Archos, or "No Rulers", which means that if you support capitalism (and the heirarchy that results from it), you can't support anarchy.
For more information, check out the Anarchism FAQ.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
how many times in one year can our life as we know it be almost destroyed... hmm... first 9/9/99, then y2k, then feb 29th, now this... shit... isn't it about time for another 'a non-zero chance of getting hit by an asteroid|comet|toilet paper article...
Just because you're paranoid does not mean that the world is not full of assholes.
Hmm. For $100/month, I'd let Microsoft build a new campus within sight of my house.
They are awesome for energy efficiency. They, however, give off really bad light. Like most Flourescent light bulbs, they operate at a freq that can be bad for people who get migranes/SAD, etc.
Plus, the light from them is ugly. Compare to a full spectrum bulb. Plus, you can not do proper color correction working under those things.
Tom
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
Of course, once the power need it too high for
the microwave dish, then you can use fusion power, which is much cleaner than nuclear power which polutes the surrounding air. And fusion plants have no disasters associated with them.
sorry too nitpick but I think you meant nuclear fusion (hydrogen --> helium) is cleaner than nuclear fission (uranium --> krypton + boron)
The nice think about uranium is that you just need to fire a neutron to start a chain reaction. With hydrogen, you have to heat it up plasma state and high pressure before any nuclear reaction happens. I think plasma state requires temperature of around, off-hand, 15,000,000 K, give or take a number of magnitude. That's about the temperature of the sun, which is nature's efficient hydrogen fusion reactor.
Now you know where the myth of cold fusion is coming from, eh?
Hasdi
Currently, Vermonters actually purchase the bulk of their electricity from HYDRO QUEBEC, which makes things worse. We're stuck in a contract written a few years ago that anticipated high electricity rates that never materialized. And, as evidenced by the severe ice storm that hit the area a few years ago, there have been some issues with the ability of Hydro Quebec to reliably supply electricity to the States.
Unfortunately, the movement to use alternative power sources are still nascent even for a place as environmentally aware as here. Quite recently, here was a case of a guy up here who bought a wind turbine to produce electricity for his house, but his neighbors in the neighborhood he lived in (houses go for $300K) complained that the wind turbine would be noisy and would mar their ($$$$$) views of Lake Champlain. He eventually won the right to put up the turbine, but the attitude of the neighbors is disturbing.
This is another view of the world.
You can't have any sort of "governing body" regardless of size, and anarchy. Anarchy is the lack of any sort of government, large or small, no leadership, no order. It's pure chaos. There's no way you can really be an anarchist and want "small self-governing communities". It should be "Every man for himself" in your eyes, if you really are an anarchist.
If you had taken the time to read the FAQ that I had linked, you would realize that you are completely incorrect. You are confusing anarchism with nihilism. A community which is directly-democratic, egaliatarian, and non-coercive, is self-governing and yet still anarchistic (ie, "No Rulers").
Honestly, don't make a statement like the above until you've actually educated yourself. Anarchism is a very substantial political belief that has a long and diverse history.
Damn idiots.
My sentiments exactly. Now go read the FAQ.
Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net
I've heard estimates like this before (millions lost per minute). Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way, but for e-commerce this seems exaggerated -- if I hit a site intending to buy something and it's down, I'll definitely try back in 1,2,5,10 minutes.
If a site is down for 1 or 2 minutes, how would I know the difference between that and an overloaded server or high net traffic anyway?
I can see longer outages causing lost business, but not minutes-long outages.
Fact 1: America is rated like 10th or 11th on the average life expectancy amongst nations.
Fact 2: America spends WAY more than any other country in the world on medicine.
Maybe doctors looking for big paychecks are envying the U.S., but all things considered I'd rather get a little more bang for my buck.
Oh, incidentally, I firmly believe that quality of life is a far greater concern than length, but I see no indication that quality of life has been made better by the health care system in this country.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I wonder if those potato powered webservers are up to the task?
--
Donald Roeber
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
Hey! Y2K came and went, and we're still here...um...what's next...well, what of our predictions could still come true? Oh yeah! Mass power outages!
:-P .sig: File not found.
Hrmm. Wait, this one was played out in the 70's. It's been covered.
But mankind will not be able to survive if it happens! there is no way our weak infrastructure could withstand this possibility!
Sheesh. We've prospered (somewhat) for thousands of years, I don't think capacity of a power grid will hurt much
ls:
ls:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?
My understanding, although very limited, is that 60 hz was chosen because it is the least objectionable to the human ear.
My father worked with old computer equipment, which had 2Khz power via a motor-generator. Smaller transformers and capacitors in the power supplies, but he said it was a noisy and annoying place to work in, requiring special soundproofing.
I was able to hear the 15.75Khz horizontial sweep frequency of TVs in my youth, rock & roll and age has cured me of that annoying little problem, but walking by the TV section of the store used to be painful.
Looking forward to being able to use a fuel cell for all my power needs.
http://www.fuelcells.org
-- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
I love Alphas personally, but the motherboard on my home alpha died, and nobody at Compaq would even sell me one, much less replace it under warrantee. Oh well. You get more respect as a company than as an individual from them...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
the other issue is that ownership of the delivery system and power supply are being split up, kind of like telecom deregulation. in lots of US states, you can choose an electricity or gas provider (see energyguide.com to check if you're deregulated) that's greener or cheaper, but there's a big question as to whether deregulation is always good for us. the traditional utilities still maintain the lines, but who is responsible when there's not enough juice on the grid?
circa75.com
In fact it'd be even nicer to see systems in place to shut down workplace desktop computers automatically after hours (this can be a security feature too). The relief on the power grid might even offset the increased usage when people arrive home at six o'clock and start using all those temperature controls and home appliances (including, obviously, their home PC). This obviously doesn't solve the problem in a world with more and more computers and finite power reserves, but it'd be nice to see only those ones that are in use receiving power, and the bonus is that teaching an overall energy ethic scales automatically with each new device.
(This message required 75 Joules of hydroelectric energy and one bagel to compose)
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
I have noticed alot of computer compnets, 3d video cards being one, are hot to the touch even when they are not being used. Mind you they are much hotter when being used, but still... if it is not being used it should really be in deep sleep mode.
Even my IBM thinkpad laptop still pumps out hot air when it is doing nothing but playing an mp3.
I just got hit by an enormous electricity bill -- 650 UKP, or about (uh) $1000 -- for /three months/. This is for a small 4 bedroom house with gas-powered heating, and past bills are a sixth of this. All that's changed is that I've been running two desktops and a laptop 24/7 for the past few months (in addition to another box which has been there for three years.) I've been physically switching off monitors when not in use (for reasons of pollution as well as the bill.) I thought that apart from the monitor, the main circuitry, HD, CPU etc used a tiny amount -- 10 watts or so (a tenth of a lightbulb.) At the moment I'm disputing the bill with the power co, but could they be right ?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
--
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." -- Darth Vader
Maybe every home should be fitted with one of these machines.
The potatoes sound like a much better bet.
There are more things involved than simply P=U*I. For DC that may be enough, but for AC you also have to consider the effect of changing the power-grid frequency on efficiency.
Transformers and AC generators/motors utilize in some way the law of induction:
u = d [flux] / d [time]
The faster magnetic flux changes, the higher the voltage generated in a coil.
This means e.g. in a transformer which runs at higher frequency, you don't need that many windings in your coils to get the same voltage.. which reduces price and also might reduce the ohm resistance of the coil, reducing power loss..
Higher frequency can lead to cheaper/more efficient units . (Those things can be quite complicated to calculate.)
When the frequency gets higher, the fast changing magnetic field in the iron of transformers/generators/motors induces currents in the iron (since it's a conductor). The voltage induced rices proportional to frequency.. so the losses rise proportional to f square. Additionaly you have "hysteresis" losses which rise with f too..
So too high a frequency isn't that good either. I heard on aeroplanes they use 400Hz, which is more efficient than 50/60Hz.
QUICK! Go get 2 years worth of rack mount UPS!
Eh...
Have you ever put your hand over the top of an imac, That thing releases a ton of energy. Apple should start shipping them with generators built on top, and it'll be a self powering computer. Or maybe not, but the imacs are overdue for a product refresh anyways, and I'm just trying to help
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Here in Illinois, ComEd has been overbuilt by a large margin (or merely conserative, if you ask me), and have already handled loads (back in the 90's) that supposed watchdog groups said wouldn't happen until until the year 2017. It was fun to watch the system generation numbers go past 17 Gigawatts. ;-)
The Y2K hucksters had me almost convinced... but not this time. The sky isn't falling.
--Mike--
NERC (the North American Electric Reliability Council) says that we should be able to meet the eletrical demands for the upcoming season in most areas in North America.
They do say that New England, New York, and California are areas of concern though.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
There is a company in Latham NY called plug power that has set up a house in our area that is entirely powered by fuel cells and claims to be the first of its type. There web page is at http://www.plugpower.com (Surprisingly enough). They have a pretty interesting description of residential fuel cells. There technology is proprietary, butll still worth a read.
Folks,
I think it's time we build more natural gas electric generating plants.
The reason is simple: you can get methane, ethane and propane from almost any hydrocarbon source. Provide the incentive to create plants that can convert coal to the natural gases I mentioned and the USA could easily generate a LOT more electric power quickly.
People forget that natural gas burns far more cleanly than gasoline, diesel or coal, and in fact a number of cities have converted their public transit buses so they use compressed natural gas (CNG) as fuel. (The best example of this I know of is Sacramento's Regional Transit, which has very few diesel-powered buses left.)
Here in the Bay Area, there are folks who think the new CNG-powered power plant south of San Jose, CA is going to be a problem. Unfortunately, they conveniently forget that because CNG burns so cleanly, the effect on air pollution will be extremely miniscule, to say the least.
In short, with clean-burning natural gas plants out there, we can buy time until more advanced technologies such as improved solar power plants, improved wind generators, and eventually fusion power comes on line. IMHO, the day that fusion power plants become practical is the day the energy crisis is effectively OVER; there is enough deuterium in seawater to cover the current energy worldwide energy demand for the next one BILLION years (I kid you not). Since fusion plants will not have any emissions, our biggest source of air pollution--powerplant smokestack emissions--will be gone; we also don't have to worry about spent radioactive fuel rods because the radioactive byproduct of deuterium fusion reaction is tritium, which also can be used a fusion fuel.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I hear a lot about how a flywheel can store energy. These are the things that spin around at high speeds right? Moving parts, bearings, grease, and all those things that wear out? Sounds like something great for the lab, but expensive in terms of reliability and maintainance for practical use.
What about trusty old chemical storage batteries? I have a rather healthy marine battery connected to my UPS supply. A voltmeter on the computer tells me when a battery needs to be swapped. Two other batteries are connected through jacks to allow hot swapping of batteries if a blackout ever gets to be more than several hours. Not only is my computer system supplied by this power, but my entertainment, and lighting in this room.
If the power ever fails in this house, I might have to put the jumper cables from the car or motorcycle to keep the lights and other stuff on here.
Just because internet businesses stand to lose the most doesn't mean that they're the place to work on reducing power consumption. Perhaps they should be working to secure the power grid by investing in areas that are more easily fixed.
For example, what if e-commerce corps started investing in new power plants? Fortunately, the curent energy limits aren't fundamental problems like the speed of light or the minimal thinness of a silicon wafer; they can be solved in a fairly linear fashion simply by doing more of the same. With the assurance of backing from big computer firms, it would be easier for municipalities to issue bonds, thus improving the speed with which new facilities could be built.
Of course, I'd rather see a decrease in power consumption, and computer businesses can help too. Aside from hardware manufacturers making their own products lower-power (Crusoe, anyone?), the computer industry could fund public-service campaigns to decrease energy waste. They could even fund R&D in other high-energy-consumption industries. air conditioning uses up 13% of residential power. I'm not sure how that figure compares to the 12% of all national power that goes to computers, as cited in the CNET article, but it's clearly a big chunk. If making more efficient air conditioners could free up more power-space for computers, perhaps that's something the computer people should be pushing forwards.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
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DNA just wants to be free...
Solar should get a lot sexier in the next few decades when we start to see chlorophyl-derived solar cells. Few people will complain about a power plant if it just looks like your average redwood forest, and the squirrels will be happy too if someone remembers to leave an artificial food source.
If there's a color that people don't mind being surrounded by (besides blue), it's green.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
or will personal fuel-cell generators become wide-spread enough in the near future to start making homes and businesses more autonomous? I'm curious to see how the fuel cell generators like those from Plug Power work out in the next few years.
This reads like a stupid advertisement for the Home Power website... I think slashdot got paid to post this story.... swilson@numbsafari.com
I hear a lot about how a flywheel can store energy. These are the things that spin around at high speeds right? Moving parts, bearings, grease, and all those things that wear out?
Good flywheel designs use magnetic bearings (no friction losses) and composite flywheels (that turn into hot dust instead of flying shrapnel during mechanical failures). Modern devices boast similar energy-in/energy-out ratios to chemical batteries, and much improved energy-store/physical-volume over chemical batteries.
All we need to get the price down is economy-of-scale. Preorder yours today!
--
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
I don't need the power grid for my PC. I'm powered by Red Hat!
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
Damn the squirrels! Full speed ahead!
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
What is in this exciting package? Let me tell you more! (At this point a beautiful blonde-haired beauty comes out in a small bikini showcasing the contents of the Crate-O-Stuff)
1. 3 of Natures Own (tm) Rats.
2. 1 UPS
3. A notepad and penthe Y2KNPSAK!!
Operators are standing by!
Well, I have experienced an office building where the power backups and alarms go off about once an hours... This was due to the fact that we had a large office building + a LOT of network/server support crammed into a pipe that was JUST BARELY enough to serve us.
Eh...
This sort of thing just goes to show why the whole concept of a public utility is severely outdated and needs to be replaced. Government interventionalism worked back in the days of building an infrastructure, but it invariably fails when it comes to maintaining and expanding a service.
Privatised utilities can offer a far superior service to consumers given the competition built into the free market socioeconomic model, and the privatisation of utilities in countries like the UK has been an unqualified success for both consumers and utilities, allowing people to choose exaclty who offers the best deals on their gas, electricity and so on.
What America needs is to have more privitised utilities - look at the success we've had with our health service, it is the envy of the world with the best equipped hospitals to be found anywhere. Surely it is obvious that this success could be used elsewhere, such as in an ailing electrical market.
Of course, the only real danger here is that the Government will attempt to privatise the industry whilst remaining in control of it through legislation and "industry watchdogs", stifling the benefits that privitisation should bring. As I'm sure all libertarians out there would agree, that would not be a good thing at all for anyone.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Lower power consumption is the key. All the effort towards building less thirsty portables will certainly be of much use when the real concern about power consumption comes. If the power grid is stressed to its limits one can expect frequent blackouts, in which case a computer demanding half as much power shall stay alive twice as long on the same no-break.
Fuel cells are the answer. They are more efficient than anything on the grid or anything coming in small sizes. With efficiency in small sizes you can inexpensively protect against contingencies. If your single largest unit, generating at a 55% efficiency is only 250 kw, it doesn't cost much for 4 nines, 5 nines, 6 nines efficiency. More than half the grid is coal fired steam turbines at 30% efficiency (30% at your meter after a long trip down transmissiona and distribution and through a number of transformers). You can get a 60% efficiency in a couple of years with GE's H technology but you need a load of 400 MW to do it. Then you need 20% reserves (at least) and only get 3 nines reliability. And you need to build transmission (if you can get right of way) and subtransmission and distribution). By the time you are done you have paid $600/ kw for generation and $850 per kw for subtransmission and distribution. That's a total of $1,650. For $1250 you can get a FCEL fuel cell, and for a little more you can get 5 or 6 nines reliability. No transmission or distribution outages. No blinks. What more do you want.
I suppose generators are out of the question -- it would cost a small fortune to fuel those things at $2/gallon!
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Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
The biggest problem is the persistant NIMBY (Not in my backyard) attitude of people. There is no way you are going to be able to build a new power plant in city limits. People will protest no matter how good it may be for others. This means the power plants have to be built relatively far away increasing losses through transmission and the chance of outages.
Secondly other types of large scale power projects, for instance nuclear reactors and hydroelectric dams, are almost impossible to build because of enviornmental/political reasons. No matter how clean nuclear power may be (you have to remember that Chernoble was a horrible design along with inept staff) provided it's well run (look at the system France uses and the Candu reactors used in Canada) political reasons have killed almost all new reactor projects.
This leaves a whole lot of alternative power. But even then people don't like the idea of wind power, too noisy, and would probably protest against solar a bit too. (uses up a lot of space and doesn't look very good) And then you have the fact that wind and solar are relatively expensive and unreliable. There are efforts in place to promote them, in some places you can pay extra money to have your electricity generated from alternative power sources, but those efforts will need to be scaled up a lot before they are realistic alternatives. Of course with the fuss over nuclear and hydroelectric alternative power may be a very realistic alternative...
Any why is anyone using 120V still (or worse, Japan using 100V)? I think 240V has proven not to be any more dangerous in the household.
Sure people will have to use converters and such for a while. It'll be a pain at first. A new outlet shape to prevent old stuff from plugging into new higher voltage outlets. But through attrition, old stuff will slowly disappear and in the long run we'll all be better off.
Maybe the world should go to a single new standard, say, 440V @ 100Hz?
1. When Crusoe comes out, suddenly long battery life will be all the rage, and with it, low powered chips. What's more, the iMac uses a 400 MHz G3 and needs no fan, although it could get away with a 100 MHz 603 for most purposes. Also, offices will see the wisdom of purchasing used PCs with 100-200 MHz chips rather than new PCs with 1000-2000 MHz chips.
2. The iMac uses a Rage128, which needs no fan. However, you are correct that for 90% of the population, 3D graphics chips are a frill. Offices can save money by purchasing custom-made 3D-free PCs. And of course, 3D free notebooks last longer on the battery.
3. LCD monitors can become very large without using much power. The Apple Cinema Display takes only 50 watts or so and is 17x11 inches. Now if reflective LCDs (think Game Boy Color) come back in style, we could see wall-sized monitors that take under 100 watts.
Fixed gas-turbine installations are common. Stanford University has its own power plant, installed in the 1980s and recently expanded. Those usually run full time, unlike the Diesels.
Ah-Ha! So I should buy up all the Generators from the whole Y2k scare!
I can't help but wonder...
If we tried to run our whole society off wind and/or solar power, would there be any adverse environmental effects simply from the sheer amount of energy taken out of the system?
Has anyone ever done the calculations? Or is this just another one of our "think it will be OK" decisions, mess to be cleaned up later?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The problem with most energy storage systems is that they don't scale well. A bank of batteries is fine for a single dwelling for a week or two, but try obtaining enough batteries to run your home's essential systems for a month or two -- or an office's for a week. You'd need batteries comparable to a diesel submarine's loadout.
Flywheels are great, until you get a mechanical failure. Then you pray that you haven't placed anything remotely valuable in the plane of rotation. You can't imagine just how much kinetic energy is stored in a massive rotating object until you see a chunk fly off and pierce everything in its path.
And a large capacitor, as suggested further up in this thread? Think of a large chemical battery without the stability.
Aero
We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
...the power grid is going to fail and the year 2000 bug is going to destroy civilization as we know it...oh wait the year 2000 bug didn't happen... This is just another example of media sensationalism that every media outlet thrives on (including /.) If people start experiencing major (or even just minor) brown outs, I guarantee that more power plants will be built to compensate.
My favorite visualization of this is to imagine a table with a weight on it. The volts is the height of the table, the amps is the mass of the book. The bigger the weight or the higher the table, the more it is going to hurt if you it lands on you.
At standard house current 120 volts is enough to mess you up but not kill you (assuming you don't lower resistance by dunking yourself in salt water first). At around 240 volts though there is a problem in that the current can cause arythmia in the heart which is very bad.
In fact, you are actually better off at higher voltages to some extent. If you get hits at say 440 or higher, it will stop your heart, but it will likely start up right away. At some point the voltage gets high enough that it won't restart on its own.
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This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
As someone who works in the Power Generation industry, this year and the next two show that there is a huge schedule of delivery of new units around the country. This so-called "bubble" has been caused by the slow erosion of power margin the utility co.'s saw the last few summers causing brown-outs, etc. Also there is a large plan to de-regulate the industry so the battle will be won on price. You'll soon be able to buy your power from companies all over the country, similar to the concept of long-distance telephone rates.
In fact, the demand for new units is so high, if you put in an order today, you'd have to wait until 2002 or 2003 to get delivery. Some companies are actually paying millions of dollars simply to buy someone else's place in line.
The power consumption trend has been thoroughly analyzed and I don't thing there will be any shortage of output any time soon. So fire up those extra quake servers whenever you can L:)
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
This makes a lot of sense, especially if instead of shelling out a high, one-time cash payment the funds were instead aggregated and invested into tax-exempt fund. You'd get a monthly contribution from the entity in question in the fund. These would accrue until you moved out of the impact area and you "cashed out", tax-free.
People moving into the area could make a one-time, tax-deductable deposit into their NIMBY account to get it started -- the more money in the fund, the better off everyone is. In the meantime you could borrow against your NIMBY account for home improvement projects, with the "interest" paid on the loans going back to your NIMBY account.
The "community" could have an account as well with periodic disbursements for public projects to counter the effects of the entity nobody wanted (landscaping, parks, ecological measures, etc).
The goal, really, is to provide an incentive for people to stay in the community and tolerate the entity. Letting people see their "investment" in the community grow every month, tax-exempt, provides them with an incentive to not move away.
The other alternative is to provide whatever utility or service the entity provides for free or at cost for the residents of the impact area. I'd live near a nuclear power plant in a heartbeat if I could get all my electricity for $0.02 per kWh; it'd cut my electric bill from $60 to $20 or more.
I think it's time we resurrect nuclear research after a 20 year dirt nap. If the Bee Gees can make a comeback, then nuclear power can. Nuclear has a lot going for it: cheap, reliable, and mostly clean.
Unfortunately, we have not found a way to dispose of the pesky waste by-products and other radioactive stuff that comes along with it. Short term we're just going to have to stick it deep, deep into the ground and deal with it untill we come up with a more creative solution.
Ultimately the holy grail for nuclear power is cold fusion or some form of fusion. Ten years ago we almost got there. Ufortunately that experiment was a hoax but I think there is some promise to be held.
What we really need now is to start pumping more money into nuclear research to find a better way to do fission or fusion before our petrol reservers run out.
If design is not Bauhaus, it is Baroque.
The US has the best health service in the world, shit I just fell out of my seat laughing. If you're rich the US has the best health service, but I wouldn't swap places with a citizen of the New York ghetto for anything. What you're basically advocating is that poor people should only have access to a really shit electricity service while those in Beverly Hills should have the best.
The only problem that I have with solar power is that while the energy source itself is clean, the process to make solar cells is very expensive and harmful to the environment in itself. I don't remember the exact figures, but it takes something like 10 years of clean energy production for a solar cell to "make up" for the environmental damage caused during its production.
In case it is not blatantly obvious, I am not an engineer. Someone with hard numbers back me up (or even better, contradict me!) here.
- Rev.If you read the article, you will see that the problem is not generating enough electricity -- it'd be mad if they couldn't manage that, what were they, comatose? -- but distributing that electricity. Essentially, they have too much at low times and too little at peak times, too much in some areas and too little in others (Silicon Valley in particular). There's an interesting parallel here with world hunger: the problem is storage and distribution, not production. It's about time the 1st world got a bite from the bug that's been hounding the 3rd world all these years...
Glad to see the mention of Homepower Magazine.
Aside from being full of interesting DYI projects
for the tinkerer, there are real solutions in
there for someone who seriously wants to break
their reliance on the grid.
More importantly, though, is that Slashdot is much
more foreward-looking then the rest of the press
out there. Most of the time, journalists look
at the power problem and report "We need more
power plants, more lines, and cheaper fuel". Rare
is the day when someone in the press says "There
are serious alternatives to builing large
generating plants out there".
People already have the legal right, in many
states, to produce electricity and put it back
on the grid. Were everyone to put a panel or
two on their rooftop, you'd knock off your own
reliance on the grid and reduce demand. If
people use higher efficiency electrical components
or simply didn't do things like leave their old
refrigerator on in the shed during the summer so
that the compressor runs all day (or build a
styrofoam 'cozy' around it), then demand would
go down or at least stabilize.
But you never hear about these because the
utilities want you to think that there is only
one way and one place where you can and should get
power. You don't have to be a nut to do lower
your dependency, and you don't even have to do
all that much or give up anything you're used to.
So Kudos to Slashdot for raising awareness!
So we are back to the solar-panels-on-the-roof argument. I'll remember to call you next time I need someone to shovel snow off my roof so my solar panels can see the sun.
I'm afraid I don't have the numbers at my fingertips, so I cannot check on your claimed 20 year longevity. However, I do see a Britannica article that points out that one needs 40sq m of solar panels per person per day, even in sunny regions. Not everyone can afford to buy one house per person. And these estimates are for thermal energy generation (the ones that I called viable in my original post). Other media success stories also use thermal energy solutions. Photovoltaics are far less efficient.
Your use of ICs as an analogy is poor. Our computers use very tiny amounts of silicon per person. Photovoltaics, on the other hand, need large surface areas and far more raw material.
Theory is nice, but changing the world needs more than a few nice theoretical numbers.
One of the problems with electricity is that it cannot be stored for long periods to form a viable reserve.
"Can't" or "isn't"? How long until every office building has an enormous capacitor for a roof?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If he was able to harness the 1.21 gigawatts of a lightning bolt to generate the nuclear reaction to send Marty back to the future, surely he can help us solve a simple power problem. Someone get him on the horn!
Steve
There'll be a lot of people who will FINALLY decide to keep the lights they're not using off...
All we need here is a nuclear generator built atop an island constructed of landfill. In fact we better build two just in case a tornado destroys one of them... Then build a bunch of parks. matt
This is really stupid. An entire building full of computers doesn't draw the electricity of even a single manufacturing device like a hydraulic press or arc welder. C'mon; I don't think the construction industry has managed to take down the power grid yet, I really don't think that the tech industry has anything to worry about.