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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."
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.
well, if you would just RTFA.
from the article "the surge is so large that it will arc across the circuit breaker's contacts, defeating its purpose."
From what i can tell, you can only allow so much power to go through circuit breakers, otherwise it could arc across the breaker. With these new superconducting switches, you can push more energy through the grid.
"Allowing larger electricity flows through substations without fear of overpowering the circuit breakers would let power companies move more energy through the grid."
its amazing how much reading an article makes talking about it easier...
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
At a guess, since they "valve" the current rather than just chopping it, they can dampen out the inductive kick that a circuit breaker gets.
As for using superconductors for the whole line or generator coils, I think they need to keep their switch at 77 K.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is it just me, for in this "New" world, everytime I see a coincidence, me thinks conspiracy ....
To write off one coincidence as a conspiracy theory may be regarded as misguided; to write off more than one coincidence as a conspiracy theory is naivite.
You are not alone. The fact that we can't trust those in charge any more may have something to do with the lack of accountability and openness.
The lack of openness could be put down to justified fear, given global opinion of the United States at the moment. There is however no excuse for the lack of accountability. What happens to senior executives and politicians that mess up our lives? They retire with a fat pay-off. Therein lies the problem.
"Yeah, bulletproof doors would've really helped against those box cutters"
Uh...yeah. They'd have meant that there'd have been no way they could get into the cockpit, so the worst that could happen would be everyone on the plane except the crew dying, which would have reduced the death toll by 99%.
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.
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.
Very true - as a student I used to work at a superconductor research lab that did this kind of work. We would run 100kA through a superconducting coil cooled with liquid nitrogen as part of our experiments, creating a magnetic field with about 3 megaJoules of stored energy. One day a tech mis-wired part of a safety circuit that was used to dump the energy at the end of the experiment run (and then very nicely faked his check-off sheet afterward), and the superconductor heated up so fast it vaporized the one inch aluminum stabalizing rod it was attached to as well as several hundred gallons of liquid He. A nine inch port blew out of the top venting all the (now gasseous) helium into the lab and we all ran like hell to avoid being smothered by the sudden lack of O2 in the room.
Nobody got injured (except the tech, who got fired), but I couldn't help but think about the alternate scenario where the lab staff somehow got trapped inside the room, and the last thing I'd hear before passing out would be "We're all gonna die!" in a Mickey Mouse helium voice.