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Superconductors as Electrical Grid Surge Suppressors
securitas writes "The New York Times published a story about Intermagnetics -- a company that plans to use 'superconductors as valves on the electric-utility power grid, letting their temperature rise to choke off the flow of power,' a day before the largest blackout in North American history. The timing couldn't have been better. On the day of the blackout, Intermagnetics announced a $6 million contract from the Department of Energy to develop and install superconductor 'valve' prototypes by 2006 in the Niagara Mohawk distribution system. Considering that one of the leading theories for the cause of the cascading blackout is a surge in the Niagara Mohawk power grid, this announcement seems incredibly timely."
those bastards!
nic.
That's one thing I like about my Linux hardware -- almost all of it uses less power than its proprietary counterpart.
Actually conserving power instead of upgrading the power grids is an underrated option. We need to customize our appliances better, and in some cases, Linux might very well be the answer.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Or sabbotage? ;-)
-psy
So is the SEC investigating this company yet? What a coincidence that a blackout occurs the day after their announcement...
It seems to me we need more synchronous condensers to absorb fluctuations, not more protective devices.
sPh
I for one welcome our new superconducting overlords.
In related news, NYTimes is considering a namechange to NYFutureTimes
I have a photographic memory for numbers. I know almost a hundred of them.
this announcement seems incredibly timely.
A little too timely.
/me twirls handlebar moustache
So whatever happen to using plain old inductors as suppressors?
I don't know how is this supossed to work.
Ok, so you can have a very tiny wire, that when superconductiong can carry several amperes... But if it heats and looses its superconductivity, it would just break like a fuse...
I mean, why not use a regular fuse??
how long until
Or as Kosh said, "Once the blackout begins, it is too late to order pizza."
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Since the byline was by Jayson Blair, the blackout story in the NYT reported the blackout mostly hit Nevada, and was caused by the army of Alexander the Great.
Where were they three days ago, I wonder?
Ñ'
How is this a storage device? It's supposed to increase its resistance when a large, sudden change in current takes place. In other words, it sounds like it would dampen an oscillation. I don't see how it could "inject" current into the grid.
Maybe if there were more DC distribution and tranformation points.
The US-east is mostly a big distributed network.
You can build an internet by connecting local networks, but without T-1,2,3 but if your neighbors computer restarts you might have tp wait a while before you can reconnect to it.
This is very difficult to do. Anyone who knows anything beyond EE 101 knows that trying to stop electicity over 30,000 volts is heading for trouble. Unless you have a huge insultor that is at least 500,000 Ohms, the electricty will just jump over it without even slowing down.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
I don't get it... magnetic fields don't penetrate superconductors. So how is a field "bath" supposed to limit the current? From what I remember of my Solid State Physics class, magnetic fields don't penetrate more than a fraction of an atoms length into the material.
sPh
You know...
Germany: small country, 80 million people, too much(!) electricity left
US: super power country, 300 million people, all electricity wasted for SHIT
Hey, need any electricity? Come to europe.. we'll give you.. you're WELCOME! (really)
Their gizmo, "a matrix fault current limiter", just increases the resistance without arcing (and a number of parallel circuits to decrease power gradually). I dunno, I don't think I'd want to stand too close to it when it loses superconductivity. Keeping power circuits at 77 K will take some serious cooling!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Wow, I suppose this isn't too surprising, but it isn't every day you see an established company have their stock increase by 17% in one day.
-- jetlag --
Is it just me, for in this "New" world, everytime I see a coincidence, me thinks conspiracy ....
If Pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm could start walking on two legs, and a war could be staged for Halliburton to get billions in contracts .... could a power outage have been staged ...
please spare me the flames; I am already close to dying laughing at my own stupidity ....
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
says the cause of the blackouts were 3 OHIO transmission lines.
Lastest new reports:
Three failed transmission lines in northern Ohio are the likely cause of North America's largest power blackout, investigators said Thursday
Google news for additional stories
Ccircuit brakers are not limiting the amount of electrical power that can flow through a high-voltage line
The diameter of cables limits the current and the distance between cables limits the voltage. Lines are designed for a specific capacity. You can't upgrade them only by chaging the breaker.
Besides, they say that a normal circuit breaker would arc across. What would prevent an arc between the ends of their ceramic rods?
If they want to use semiconductors, why don't they use them for the entire line? Or for the coils in the generators? That would make a difference, not some circuit brakers...
by rapevictim (557748)
Was it as good for you as it was for me?
I could care less, but not without a lobotomy
This is a great start, especially with the way the power grid is now.
Essentially right now a surge large enough to damage substations creates a large chain effect, where the incoming substation sees the surge, shuts itself down to protect itself, which adds more power to the surge, which heads down to the next station, which shuts off to keep itself from being blown, which adds more power to the surge, etc etc.
With a way to contain a large surge into the system, we could prevent blackouts like the one that occured in NYC in 1977 (Exactly because of this reason). In 1977 a summer storm knocked several high-voltage power lines out of order. Because of the suddenly reduced load, the power tried to flow back to the substation, which knew it couldn't handle it and shut down. This added more power to the grid, which was sent to the next station along the line, which shut itself off, etc. This cycle of power overload, substation shut down happened for about 55 mins till it hit the main generators (which, although they could shut themselves down, had no way to offload this excess power down the line) and took them out for 25 hours.
I said it before, I'll say it again. Get rid of our 30+ year old nuclear reactors (no new orders for units since 1977) and replace them with newer more powerful solutions and second generation solar equipment.
When reactors are running at 102.41% capacity, it's time for an upgrade.
We've got the technology now to produce cleaner, safer, more powerful nuclear reactors - but that Three Mile Island paranoia still looms with us I guess.
Look at European nations, they derive up to 50% of their power from modern nuclear facilites without any problem and no blackouts. The USA? Just 20% of our power comes from Nuclear energy, the rest from coal fired power plants and "peak use" and "daytime use" gas turbine generators.
Hey, I don't want to live right next door to a huge nuke power plant myself, but if it means cleaner, safer, more reliable power I'd be more then happy to.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Niagara Mowhawk customers never lost power. I know this becuase I live there. I doubt it could have been caused by NM because like i said they never lost power.
I give it 2 months until Verizon runs the power grid for the east in a joint venture with SBC, GE, and AOL/TimeWarner, with Microsoft running the software that controls the power stations.
The new company formed will be called SCOnumber2 ultra LLC
And you will all have to buy licenses at $699 a pop to have electricity run to your home (one license per home).
"Bow to me" - Gates and friends
Energy traders, power producers and chemical engineers warned yesterday that the UK could face blackouts on the scale experienced in the US and Canada on Thursday night or substantial disconnections at the very least.
1 9996,00.html ' | tr -d ' '
echo ' http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,10
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Another story fingering First Energy in Ohio not Niagra Mohawk.
Key sentences : His organization is a nonprofit, industry-sponsored group that is supposed to oversee power line reliability. The council earlier had released documents showing four transmission line problems in the Cleveland area in the hour before the blackout spread Thursday afternoon across eight states from New England to Michigan.
Not a whole lot of information there.
Well, let me emphasize, this is a preliminary indication, not the final word. It's just a clue at this point. It could be coincidence; not the cause.
Furthermore, utilities have localized problems. The big problem is not a small subsection of the grid going down, it's why the problem wasn't isolated. First Energy may be the origin of the problem, but other utilities may not have followed proper procedure to contain the problem.
the us is already blaming canada
25Mhz 386
32Mb RAM
40GB ide
512k Trident 8900c
AT case
100W PSU
14" EGA Monitor
10BaseT BNC NIC
102-Key Keyboard
No mouse
and you can probably run it off a couple of AA batteries
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The day before the grid went down, this was probaly dismissed by the CEO of the powercompanies, politicans and other top brass as 'too expencive' to install.
Today the very same people are likely to ask people lower down in the system why such a device wasn't installed in the first place.
Human nature I guess...
Anyway, there are other systems out there that can prevent a cascading failure like we say in the US now. Trouble is, every system - including the one described in the article - comes with a pricetag and a set of drawbacks. In this cause, I would suspect that keeping the supercondutors superconduting isn't free, neither in money or in energy.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
the devices were installed outside of NM's grid. i bet if you were just on the other side, you'd be singin' a different tune
I could've spend a few hours in the safe warm darkness of the stable not worrying about visitors and having a good excuse of "watching out for horse thieves" for everyone who could suspect why I spend so much time with the mare...
Maybe someone should check their stories a little better before the next time they post a 'leading theory'.
Considering that one of the leading theories for the cause of the cascading blackout is a surge in the Niagara Mohawk power grid
This does not appear to be the case anymore...in fact, this seems like very old news...everything I've read suggests that all the interest focuses on Ohio and possibly Michigan...but somewhere in the great lakes [and on a side note, neither state is midwest, midwest doesn't start until central time, why doesn't CNN understand that?] not the N-M system.
I want to say that the blackout from years ago may have had the N-M system as a factor, so people jumped on that. This is clearly a different power failure.
The fix is to force MaxLoad less than Supply.
This can be done by replacing the local
stepdown transformers that convert from
17KVA Power Lines to the 220/110V 3 Phase
local Power Lines with saturation mode
transformers that will not allow more
than their maximum rated power to pass.
Power Stations can be protected by
Superconducting Air Gap Transformers
that inherently limit the transfer of
power to the rated capacity of the
station. Power Stations would then be
able to stay online through a major
overload without damage.
Any major overload or failure of the
Transmission Grid would cause a brownout
but would not cause a blackout.
Any localized overload would cause a
local browout without causing any
voltage or current instabilities on the
high voltage Power Lines.
for all of us who failed electronics/electrical engineering: blackouts for dummys
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Watch!
The Gaurdian
Whats so hard about this? Even the special school kids from Kuro5hin could manage that. Why can't you?
Utilities have been testing various superconductive devices for decades, but nobody has deployed them in volume. Superconducting generators have been built by GE and others, but they only offer an 0.5% efficiency improvement over conventional machines. That's not enough to compensate for the added complexity of running a big machine at cyrogenic temperatures.
If this technology worked at liquid nitrogen temperatures, it might have a chance. But anything that needs to go colder than that is probably going to be more expensive and less reliable than what's used now. Scroll down to the end of the article and see the comments from utility companies.
Look who's doing this: General Atomics and LANL, the senior activity centers for over-the-hill bomb designers.
If room-temperature superconductors are ever developed, all this will change, but right now, this is basically big-budget overclocking.
Greg Pallast has some Interesting Comments on the blackout. He cites energy deregulation, passed by George Bush, Sr. under lobbying pressure from Enron (Yes, them again!) Very intersting comments, if true. Politicians and Corporations teaming up to line their own pockets while endangering the public. Nice.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Source: Wired Mag September 2003 - paper copy
Talk about timely articles. The day of the blackout the September issue of Wired was in my mailbox. In this months infop0rn, it describes a plan that Buckminster Fuller dreamed up 30 years ago to connect the world on the same grid. "Electric companies dismissed the notion as pie in the sky - and then proceeded to build such a grid." The article states that all the contries in the Western Hemisphere will be interconnected within the next ten years. About half the countries in the world are interconnected in some way already. Those that aren't connected or can't be is because of a geographical, industrial infrastructure, or politcal nature, ie Cuba, a few contries in Africa like Ethiopia and Sudan and Polynesia, Austrailia, and New Zealand.
The article says that this should smooth out market spikes when demand is high in one region it is almost certainly to be low in another. The US uses about 3.8E+18 kilowatt hours a year with about 71% of the energy used produced from fossil fuels. The US is also the largets importer of electricity, most likely the majority from Canada which produces about 58% from hydropower. France is the leading producer of electricity from nuclear, about 75%, and Brazil from hydro, about 86%.
Once upon a time, it was discovered that if you cool certain materials below a critical temperature, they lose all resistivity, i.e. superconducting magnets are only superconducting below a certain temperature. Once their temperature exceeds that critical temperature, "quenching" occurs. The resistance suddenly becomes "normal," i.e. dramtically increasing. This can be catastrophic, the temperature and resistance suddenly becoming directly related and both increasing at accelerated rates. All that energy in the magnetic field suddenly becomes heat.
When I was an undergraduate at Rice University, I got to use the NMR machine in the chemistry department. Essentially, it's a large superconducting magnet that is used to investigate the structure of chemical samples with radio waves.
The superconductor is contained in a large steel thermos. The inner layers are cooled by liquid helium (4 K), outer layers by liquid nitorgen (78 K). Superconductors are used because a large amount of current can be used, producing a larger magnetic flux, etc. The more powerful the magnet, the easier the determination of structure.
Every few days the liquid helium and liquid nitrogen would have to be added to maintain the temperature control.
I was warned that if the magnetic every quenched, it would sound like a freight train. Remaining liquid nitogen or helium would boil and the magnet itself would probably melt. One moment it's a multi-million dollar instrument, the next it's a steam whistle with a heart of worthless slag.
I was told that if this happened on my watch, I should run to my car, drive to Mexico, and hope the my professor's hitmen never found me.
Magnets are transported to the location of installation before being cooled and and superconducting is initiated. Once installed, they are precarious to relocate. Major concerns:
1) slight bumps can disrupt internal structures causing annoying variations in the magnetic field- don't be the chemist who brings a wrench in the room and gets it permanently attached to the side of the container
2) loss of temperature control - the quenching phenomenon.
3) a very high-powered magnetic field- you can exactly push down the hallway without causing damage to nearby objects or its own the magetic field
If this quenching was used to control current, it would have to be carefully controlled to avoid catastrophic damage to the superconductor itself. This seems a nontrivial engineering problem.
In response to all the current and future posts talking about how this is too perfect to be accidental: this is a manufactured coincidence, which is not really coincidental at all.
At any given moment, there are many, many people working on a given problem. There are surely advances in science and engineering that could be applied to power grid management on a more or less continuous basis. When do we care? Right after a major failure of the power grid. So a story like this only rises to the top when there's something to interest the average person, creating these "amazing" coincidences.
Go back to your basements and keep working on that bigger and better tin foil hat.
Nuclear may be many things. It is (can be) safe. It is concentrated. It is (can be) cheap. It may be the lesser of two evils, but we won't know that for a few thousand years.
However, "Clean" it is not.
Doesn't suprise me at ALL. First Energy is the same company that operates the David Bessy nuclear plant that fell into such disrepair that the Federal Energy Commision ordered them not to restart it. The reason was an 8" hole in the reactor containment unit which had been eaten by corrosive acid! Even after the containment cap was replaced the commission was reluctant to allow the plant to restart as there were other worries about the plants safety and self-inspection records. Basically these guys suck and are the definition of what bad things happen when a formerly regulated monopoly is handed free infrastructure and told to make as much money as possible off it with minimal investment in a newly deregulated environment.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Link: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-08/vt- nsp081403.php
Semiconductor Emitter Turn-off (ETO) thyristor has similar properties with significantly decreased costs, above linked. When it is closed, it is capable conduction 10,000 amps of current in non permanent setting. In permanent installation, 1,500 amps could be conducted within interval below 125 degrees C. Advantage further in frequency possible, to 3 kHz from 60hz, permitting more efficient operation of motors at specific VA.
Correct. Because the entire world is continually reading US-based text. Stop going to US sites, stop allowing your local media to concentrate on North American affairs and you'll be fine, but first of all, Stop Sniveling. Nex
These devices don't have much to do with the recent US blackouts. They are intended to help manage high short circuit currents in electricity transmission and distribution networks.
As electricity transmission networks grow larger and more interconnected, the current that flows following a short circuit also grows. The maximum level of this short circuit current is a critical parameter when selecting circuit breakers, as all circuit breakers you have must be rated to interrupt the highest possible level of short circuit current that can occur. As transmission networks get larger, eventually you begin reaching circuit breaker short circuit ratings, and the fun begins. You can either start wholesale replacement of your circuit breakers at around $100-200k each, depending on the voltage, or you start splitting up your transmission network to reduce maximum short circuit currents.
What the devices in this article are intended to do reduce short circuit currents, without affecting normal load current. Under normal load conditions they will behave as a super conductor, but under fault current conditions they will rapidly revert to a high resistance, and hence reduce to fault currents to within circuit breaker ratings.
Unfortunately the 'liquid nitrogen' aspect of them makes them impractical for real world, large-scale use. Power transmission equipment routinely has uptimes measured in years (recent blackouts excepted of course), and until room temperature, uncooled superconductors come along, I believe this technology is unlikely to be more than an academic curiosity.
Interesting stuff, i am working at CERN (european particle physics facility)in a division that is designing system to make sure
the superconductors do not quench. The problem
is that most likely the superconductors will
burn very fast and destroying everything around them.
This is very serious here as the beam would no longer be bent around the ring and would therefore burn a lot of other stuff and make the tunnels extremely radioactive(it already has to cool for two weeks just from synchrotron radiation before people can go down there).
I think the most impressive thing is the interconnection of the superconducting wires and the regular power lines. In comes this enourmous cable as thick as my torso(i am 2m 120 kg) into a large metal contraption, which simply makes sure that all wires have a very large connection area and out goes this little thin wire that looks like a halfwidth ata100 cable.
If you read the troll, you would notice that the poster claimed to be female.
I tend to think that feasability studies are ways for politicians to put off projects that may or may not benefit them.
Where I live they wanted to build a bypass of a busy inner-city road.
They spent 3 years doing a feasibility study.
Based on what they learned from the feasability study they decided against the bypass.
The total cost of the 'study' was nearly 3 times the projected cost of doing the bypass.
What is wrong with this picture?
really i would like to know... are you drunk? you never make any sense...
Year 2000 testing planned for *Just * this.
Boy's - the infrastructure , and disaster plans were there 3 years ago.
Electricity systems must be balanced.
If a GM plant sucking huge gobs of power is 'cut', generator plants pumping energy in also have a major problem, and in cascade style, can fall over too.
There are electronic 'breakers',that will kick in, automatically.
The WTC event proved those in charge had a working contingency plan. Smaller electricity concerns have an incentive, not to tell the bigger fish their load variances.
In Australia, the failure of these trip breakers was simulated, as a Y2K bug was found in them, that prevented remote restart AFTER a 'real' break. The point is, the Y2K lessons have not been learnt, and disaster recovery cut because it is a cost, and no longer trendy . Well, this penny pinching just proved a point.
Dont expect the results of the investigation to be published, just as when New Zealand's cables 'melted'.
I've got an idea how we can stop this happening.
REGULATE the damn utility system, and kick out the British from owning Niagra Mohawk (the first thing they did when they bought NiMo is to fire 800 workers).
The power generation facilities are not exactly delicate; however, the are prone to destruction when electrical voltages get way out of range.
To protect the generation facility, they have sensors which automatically disconnect should a surge come along with "that generator's name on it". If big surges like this had to go through a portion of the circut which increase resistance, thus "leveling out" the spike, the generator may not need to disconnect to protect it's equipment.
It wouldn't have helped the Niagra Mowhawk situation much, as it's just in the beginning stages, and these things can take years to be built, test, installed, and fully operational.
A good installation time for something as mundane as a new remote transmitting unit at a power substation is around a year. As the equipment gets more exotic, the install times just seem to get longer and longer.
Remember, that there's a need to perform planning, documentation, building of equipment, factory testing (if possible), updating of electrical load flow databases, delivery of equipment, waiting for appropriate load and weather conditions, installation of equipment, onsite testing, and finally the acceptance of the equipment.
Each step has meetings, planning, deadlines, work, and it's own problems which may increase the delay of the equipment to the field. Buying a cable off the shelf at Radio Shack just won't do it, Power Engineering has the most conservative bunch of the lot. They want it to work, and they want to know it will work before they put at risk the entire company's revenue stream.
What's your fall back plan if you next step dosen't work? If you don't have one, you won't be allowed to do it. Welcome to your nation's power grid.
Hand me one o' them fuel cells! GE has a box the size of your dishwasher that makes enough electricity for your whole block, on natural gas!
http://www.encorp.com/ I was watching my local news a couple of days ago and they did a report on this company which is based not to far from where I live. The Spokesperson they interviewed said that if their hardware products were in use in the Niagra area this blackout this would've never happened, interesting.
Just not cost effective ones - just like the last generation. The government will eventually get sick of footing the bill for nuclear power - just like the UK government got sick of paying for British Nuclear Fuels. They got sick of the cost of construction decades ago. All those rare earths are rare and cost money. The Russian and Chinese plants don't cost a fortune to run because they weren't designed by Americans (the Chinese plants probably were - but that's the espionage issue) they cost a fortune because you use a lot of expensive materials to boil water - a great deal of which you have to keep carefully contained.
No it doesn't. Sigh - an entire generation sucked in by an advertising campaign.
Pump that shit into a bunch of flywheels that can act as a dampening system.
A few more observations if you don't mind..
French != Europe, unless you're french. Moreveover, even after severe physical damage to their grid, the blackout did not cascade beyond physically cut off locations. Instead the grid worked as it is supposed to and isolated the disturbance to as small area as possible.. Not letting it propagate to Germany and Belgium..
For what it's worth, up here in Finland we have severe weather all the time and it's considered a scoop if, 20000 people are without electricity for 12 hours after a blizzard. We also have competitive power infrastructure with separate entities owning power plants, distribution grid and consumer sales. Nothing like E.on which would keel over immediately without corporate welfare.