Slashdot Mirror
One Worldwide Power Grid
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
I'd imagine that the market forces in play here are a lot like the ones in play in the 80's for phone service. If given a monopoly, a company will fight to maintain exclusive control over its geographical domain, to the detriment of consumers.
The evolution of the internet is in stark contrast to this, where bandwidth can be bought from any one of many vendors (despite efforts of existing local telco's and cable providers to restrict the market by controlling the wiring).
The (U.S., at least) government needs to take the same steps as they took with AT open up the market for energy distribution. Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines, and this will grow much like WiFi is, starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there. Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had; with market forces in play a company is going to be very careful about making sure their customers don't lose power--the damage to a competing company's reputation from something like the recent blackout would be terrible for them to contemplate.
I'll look forward to the day I can have a box on the side of my house into which I can plug whatever sources of electricity I choose, and I expect that the costs of this commodity will then drop dramatically, much like telephone service did.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
One solution is to have distributed, smaller, RENEWABLE sources of energy generation. Windmills and Solar installations go along way to making a neighbourhood, or small city 'black-out proof'; further, it provides an opportunity for community self-sufficiency and de-centralized administration of a communities' infrastructure.
instead of building 10 new natural gas power stations, we should build 1000 new small wind installations, distribute them around liberally to off-set the heavy reliance on out-of-reach massively-capital intensive projects.
The good would also be that this would cause NO POLLUTION.
Seeing how reliant we are on electricity in the West a couple things come to mind: A) Conservation, as always, is being overlooked by the pro-consume propaganda of western consumer-culture advocates. and B) The Re-regulation of the NorthAmerican Hydro infrastructure will only lead to a culture of capitalist finger-pointing, profiteering and irresponsibility. If the Hydro system is COMPLETELY privatized, who would get power first after a blackout? Residents who need it to live or Industrial/Commercial Interests who will write contracts to assure their production?
Why move electrons across a grid and have to worry about cascade failures, power station accidents, etc?
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batteries.IMHO, if things were designed properly, all the power grids would be linked, but would be 'selfish' -- that is, if they started to reach their maximum load, they'd cut off surrounding areas. Kind of a "You can borrow some power from us, but only what we don't need."
I think it's no different than the Internet -- the big backbone providers 'peer' with each other, giving each other transit. But that doesn't mean that big DDoS attack aimed at one provider will cripple the whole Internet.
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suwain_2
Severe storms hit Memphis around 7AM on July 22. Hurricane force winds slammed the whole city, knocked over thousands of trees and power lines, damaged hundreds of homes/buildings, and immediately killed the power to 300,000+ buildings. Speaking of killed, I think the death toll wound up being 7, people died in fires started by candles, people died by carbon monoxide poisoning from generators, and one poor guy was crushed by a falling tree.
And nobody cared. Friends and relatives in other areas didn't see it on the news and call to see if we were okay. We had to call them, because it wasn't on the news anywhere else. I was lucky enough to have a good friend in a part of town with power, and went to his place by the afternoon, we were sitting watching all the news stations. The only place we saw any reference to it was the tiny ticker at the bottom of CNN Headline News, one blurb about "Thousands without power after storm slams Memphis." I think the only reason CNN bothered is that they're based in Atlanta (in the south) instead of NYC.
300,000 homes and businesses (more than half a million people in all) were without power for days. Most of us didn't see our lights come back on for 4-5 days. And it took more than 10 days to get everyone turned back on. But nobody noticed.
If NYC loses power, it's an instant media blitz, with all the networks scrambling to make new imposing music themes and clip-art for "Massive Outage: Are Terrorists Responsible?" And now, days later, it's still the top headline everywhere. But when half a million Memphians lost power for a week, no one cared. I guarantee if Fedex had lost power they would have cared..
When I was a teen in the 70's I went to visit some people that live in the desert of New Mexico.
The dude and his wife were typical peacenic, hippy types, long hair, shaggy beard, robes and beads and, *a college professor*.
Anyway, this couple dug a hole in the desert and built a log cabin in the hole. They then covered the cabin back over with the dirt from the hole so that from outside the place looked like a big dirt pile with windows.
You walked down a flight of steps from ground level to the enterance, 12' below ground level.
They had burlap on string for internal doorways.
Everything ran on low power battery lamps that they charged from solar panels on a big tower outside. They also had a huge hot water tank buried undergound that kept near boiling hot water year round. There was a HUGE hottub that would seat about 15 people lined with turquiose tiles they collected themselves from the desert.
Everything in there was handmade from logs, there was no store made furniture, just adobe and logs. The fireplace was about 3 feet thick and it was bloody hot even 20 feet away.
I was in awe of the place, it was mega cool and I decided then that I wanted to live like that too. Ever since then I've been a strong advocate of non-polluting, renewable energy sources. I would love to see the world powered by solar and geo-thermal power.
MOST of the methods in use today have horrific enviromental impact.
Even wind mills have serious drawbacks. There is a place where they landscape is littered with the damn things, they are huge, ugly behemoths and they make a veyr low rumbling sound that the residents are saying is causing them ill effects. Most things that man produces cause someone or something serious problems.
Imagine the world on solar power. Silent cars. No pollution. A clean sky to look at, clean air to breath. Quiet to enjoy, not noisy cars and trucks roaring around and stinking the place up, spreading more of the agents that cause cancer and other horrible diseases.
And last but not least, when the people can generate their own power for free then there would be no need for parasitic energy companies like Con-Ed, Entergy, etc...
The world is a parasitic circle jerk system, everyone screws the next little guy down the ladder and those at the bottom of the ladder are slaves for those above them. Those at the top are the oppressors and the tyrants.
Small Is Profitable - The Hidden Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size by the Rocky Mountain Institute covers the technical, financial and quality of service arguments for making a mixed power generation economy the standard approach to service provision.
What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.
It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhsap matching and energy futures.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Power losses are too great to ship electricity over very far distances. It makes cross-continental power delivery very expensive and inefficient.
A more-interconnected electricity grid will likely be one that is even less stable.
There is a cure for all of this, in two parts: regulation and decentralization. Electricity regulation worked much better than the current insane system. Ask California and now the Northeast for details. Decentralization allows for waste heat from power generation to be used for heating, improving efficiency (i.e. your office building could heat & provide power for itself with a small on-site plant). Solar and wind (but esp. solar) can be easily added to residential buildings, further insulating homes from grid instability.
More grids, more massive centralized facilities, less regulation: big power problems in the future. Guaranteed. Trying to do this on a world wide basis is general idiocy.
Geopolitically, a global power grid distributes risk and there are good reasons, hypothetically, to do so, particularly for mitigating the extremism that leads to violence. For example, if Iran, which has moderate tendencies, joins the grid, it would have a strong incentive to itself quash extermism precisely because if Iranian terrorists go Allah Mode in a place like France and try to knock out infrastructure, moderate Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, may suffer as well.
The problem is that the major global powers have not indicated that they are willing to obey or respect any international law or organization. In Rwanda, France, who has lately championed the use of the UN in Iraq, aided and abetted the genocidal army over and against the UN force working in the region to save a few beleagured Rwandans. The United States has similarly revealed little or no inclination to respect the UN or other international "decision" making bodies on critical issues.
Lately I've felt as if advocating isolationism makes some sense, and this power grid idea is a example of why: it seems likely that, like the U.N. and like a great deal of international law, the major powers will disingenuously support such structures for a variety of reasons (appearances, genuinely felt convictions and ideals, gains in prestige and power). Unfortunately, unlike the U.N., where flaunting it just means that geopolitics is like geopolitics without a UN, an international power grid is physical, and dependence on it and control of it could become dangerous and unwieldy.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
This article was pretty short and skimpy, certainly no earthshaking insights. Whether Buckminster Fuller or anybody else proposed it first, of course there will be a worldwide power grid eventually. Lots of things are evolving into worldwide nets, for example all the stock markets will be linked eventually. So the discussion veers into the merits of solar energy, living in a log cabin in the desert, etc.
Ok, how about this: what would it take for the distribution systems of various utilities, not just electricity but things we all need at some level -- food, water, medicine, communication -- to evolve into networks with uniform, demand-driven price structures? And if that happens why not collect a uniform payment from everyone, eliminating all the effort spent moving individual beans around between individual piles? I'm not talking about socialism, I'm talking about a 100% efficient market. Is that possible?
Networking spreads information uniformly. Could the business world as we know it even exist without the scarcity of information that enables one person to find a better deal than someone else?
A friend of mine from MIT was talking about one of the buildings there that was 18 stories tall but was on like 30 ft risers, and the wind gusts under there made it seem like a wind tunnel. Now, if we could cough up the money, we could get some wind power out of that and possibly provide some extra power to the building and cut costs in the long run. If EVERY home in the developed world ran a combination of solar and wind power, would we really need the electric companies? And no, I don't think it's actually feasible given the initial and maintenance costs.
OK, that's equivalent to an electric power system where every building is connected to a low voltage line. Highly wasteful, the amount of power wasted in the lines would be a significant percentage of the power used. it's the same thing with hydrogen, if you connect everything with small pipes the amount of power wasted in pumping the gas would be too much. If you want to reduce wastage in your hydrogen system, you would need large pipes, at high pressures, conducting large amounts of the gas. But then you would start getting the same stability problems you get with a large electric power system.
For every mile of huge arm thick copper wire linking .
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power plants across the nation, we could invest in
local power plants based on technology similar to
smith Cogeneration
http://www.smithcogen.com/aboutcogeneration.htm
There are other vendors out there as well, and throughout
alot of the US natural gas is plentiful and affordable
Each mile of copper wire carrying 100,000+ volts and
1,000's of Ampere lose alot of their power due to the
natural resistance in the wire
The costs of the giant towers, and the huge copper wires
is truly amazing, and could be better spent on local power
The Tranmission model allows for less human workers is
its biggest cost savings
In a time with a job crunch, and a weak grid in California
and the upper east coast, it is time to think differently
Smaller regional grids are less wasteful, and make more sense
10,000 miles of Transmission towers and wires must have
cost billions of dollars . It may have been a good idea
at the time, but the smaller Cogeneration model is better
under current political, financial, and economic conditions
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I would put it to you that no news source can honestly claim to report news from a perspective too far removed from that of the reporters.
The simple fact that you think Canada is "too far removed" for U.S. reporters speaks volume.
You can't take the sky from me...
Why would any country seriously want to increase america's arrogant hegemony by joining a electricity grid with them? Fat americans use more power tyhan anywhere else in the world - by a very long way. Mmmmmm - profit.
Leave it to wired and you slashdot wankers to screw up a perfectly good idea.
:)
The worldwide power grid idea was detailed in fuller's book Critical Path and its not a new idea by any stretch (
Yeah bucky was a ridiculous optimist, but the jist of this whole book (and his life's work for that matter) seems to be that if we can eliminate inefficiencies and work together on a global scale, there will be more than enough power/food/resources for everyone to live extremely well.
Of course the wired people decided to drop their grid on a truly crap-tastic map which kills the whole point. take a look at the worldwide grid on bucky fuller's dymaxion map which shows the earth as one giant continent without distorting the relative sizes of the landmasses.
Electricity demand is low on one side of the world at night, they send their excess capacity to the other side of the globe where it is day. and vice versa. same deal with summer/winter in the northern / southern hemisphere. of course we need to solve the sticky problem of transmission loss
and if you are whining about being without power for a day someone needs to unplug your ass and send you outside for a little nature.
"Tension is the great integrity" -- R. Buckminster Fuller
For the American economy to work, it is in the interests of society that everyone should have electricity. Therefor, availability that might otherwise be constrained by market forces - such as in rural areas, must be handled or at least guided by the government.
At the start of the 20th century, prior to regulation, there were in fact hundreds, if not thousands of electric companies. Anyone with sufficient capital can and did run wires. You could have homes with wires from five different systems! Accidents were common and thousands of linemen were killed each year. The government created the "natural" monopolies of phone and electric service to solve these problems. We have "one" set of wires because the government said it would be that way, and, in a completely unfettered free market, there would be wires everywhere..
This is my sig.
My thoughts exactly; while growing up ('burbs outside of Seattle), it wasn't uncommon to have multiple power outages during the fall/winter every year, each lasting 2-3 days. This was really fun since we were running on well water.
I'm not talking out in the sticks, either. I'm talking about 45mi North of Seattle, right off the freeway.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
You really need to go and talk to some Israelis.
I mean normal people. Almost all Israelis I have ever met are shocked by the bias of the American media. They still believe they are in the right, and have a right to live where they do - but they don't take the exceedingly unbalanced view of the American press. The really sickening thing is the white wash - the fact that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis who are presented to the American people look very European.
I was in New Zealand, traveling around for a while with an Israeli jewish guy. He, like a lot of Israelis, has a generally semitic look - ie he could pass for an Arab. We met some American girls in a hostel, and when he said he was from Israel, you could see the thoughts going through their heads - "You must be Muslim, I'm scared, you must be a terrorist! Argh!!!". He had to spend a good five minutes assuring them that he was in fact Jewish, but he had some Palestinian friends, and that not all Muslims are terrorists. It was embarrassing.
I don't claim that a large proportion of Americans would act this extreme, or are this ignorant, but I just wasn't that surprised by this behaviour after seeing the kind of media coverage the conflict gets in the US.
With a worldwide grid, and some parts of that grid extremely unreliable (go ahead, how much electricity does Bagdad have?), it would seem to risk massive cascades every single day.
... have you ever had this go out? ... the Great IceStorm, the recent blackout... ... this is crappy service
Order of reliablity of our local networks:
1. Telephone Landline Service
2. Electrical Service
3. Snail Mail / parcel service
4. Cable TV service
5. Cellphone Networks
6. internet service
7. WiFi connects
8. the grapevine