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?
From my perspective (Canadian) it's more accurate to say it was in the south-east. :)
One Grid to rule them all,
One Grid to find them,
One Grid to bring them all,
And in the Darkness bind them...
A world wide power grid mean that the whole world is connected with one power grid.
However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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?
Wow, this must've been a real ordeal. It's not like some people in Quebec missed electricity for a month during winter 5 years ago. I mean, not having power for a whole summer day must be so bad...
Once the grid is fully functional, the only excuse for power shortages will be greed.
Good thing we don't hafta worry about greed!
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.The problem is doing it correctly. Obviously NYC, Detroit, and a few other areas did not do it well. The grid in Massachusetts did what it was supposed to do.. Instead of feeding power everywhere else, overloading and shutting down, it set a limit and stopped where it should have, leaving some residents in Western MA without power, but overall did not fail like the flawed power systems in NY and elsewhere.
Nikola Tesla suggested a *wireless* worldwide power grid around (IIRC) 50 years earlier, and demonstrated the technology to make it posssible.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The power outage would have never occured if the power distribution system was distributed and centralized.
Uh, I think Distributed and NON-centralized is a better idea. Otherwise your just giving monopolies even more power to gouge consumers and make big mistakes. If it did go ahead. we should be able to use any supplier in the world, including ourselves. Like that's gonna happen.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
Disclaimer: I work in the power trading business.
;-( - into partially stored hydro... could be interesting.
This article has a few oddities. The idea that everyone will be connected to "one" grid is misleading. There will always be multiple grids, and interconnectors between them. This can be thought of similarly to ISPs peering arrangements.
The article is really saying that it may be economically feasible to have extremely long interconnectors, eg across Siberia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, or up the length of Africa.
I have some reservations with this. When power is transmitted, there is a loss through the resistance of the transmission lines. This clearly becomes more acute the longer the transmission. In most grids in europe, the costs of these losses ( and the requirement to cover them with reserve power) is built into the fees to become a trading company within those countries. There are exceptions -eg the UK -> France interconnector - there is ~ 1.5% loss which the trading party must bear. This is for a 26 mile link. So 3000 miles might be a bit hopeful... I can't be arsed to do the math, but...
It is very hard to see how exploiting the varying liquidity of these markets would offset the huge transmission losses. Especially when compared to the ability to ship huge amounts of oil and gas in pipelines and tankers, with little loss, even at the expense of flexibility.
If this is about some new technology for power transmission ( eg superconductors) this could be great.
Australia could do pretty damn well by covering WA with solar. This could be transmitted to China, converting the Three Gorges Dam - an ecological crime, but its there, I've seen it
Dubya was beginning
Davis: What happen?
SoCal Edison: Somebody set up us the blackout.
PG&E: We get bankruptcy.
Davis: What !
PG&E: Electricity turn off.
Davis: It's you !!
BC Hydro: How are you gentlemen !!
BC Hydro: All your power are belong to us.
BC Hydro: You are on the way to Stone Age.
Davis: What you say !!
BC Hydro: You have no chance to Chapter 11 make your payment.
PG&E: Governor !!
Davis: Take off every 'regulation' !!
Davis: You know what you doing.
Davis: Move 'regulation'.
Davis: For great darkness.
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.
A bad idea? In Wired Magazine!? Say it isn't so!
In the UK. The electricity all comes from the same place of course and comes in through the same set of wires, but the electricity companies don't have a monopoly on the customers in their region.
e ss_for_c hange/choose_green_energy/
It means that I can do stuff like buy "green" electricity. I use the electricity, pay my green supplier and how they handle the generation, top up supply to the grid and inter company billing is completely up to them.
e.g.
http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/pr
It'll be an interesting experiment.
Deleted
Solar and wind power less reliable than fossil and nuclear power? You must be kidding. If you're talking about the new solar energy power plants, well, they're just plain silly anyway. However:
Park a few solar panels on your rooftop, put a stack of deep-cycle batteries in a closet, and disconnect yourself from "the grid". Don't run major appliances after dark, and your batteries will last longer. Install 12V DC lighting around the house, use 12V appliances and accessories (e.g. designed for cars/boats/RVs) where possible, and run them straight off the batteries. Get large appliances (refridgerators, freezers, washing machines) that were designed to run efficiently, and use even less of it. A large part of the problem in converting an existing house to solar energy is is the task of replacing the house's infrastructure to one suitable for solar power.
Another part of the problem in converting the average modern house is that, although stick frame houses are cheap and inexpensive to construct, they cost a lot to keep cool in the summer, and heat in the winter. Think of them as one big heat sink. By orienting houses with large windows to the south, and roof overhangs designed to allow low winter sun in, and keep high summer sun out, (or with a few large deciduous trees to your south for the same effect), you save a big fat bundle of energy in climate control. Add a fair amount of thermal mass to your outside walls (cob, adobe, straw-bale, rammed earth, earthship), put some of your living space underground, and you might even survive year round with no climate control.
Don't want to go whole hog? Get a grid intertie system, park the solar panels on your roof, and connect them through the intertie straight to the local power grid. It won't power your house after dark, or through a local (or widespread) outage, but you'll be helping offset the electricity demand period during the day, when electricity usage is highest. Better yet, if you make more electricity than you use (and your state requires the participation of the electric company), you can get paid by the electric company for the surplus you generate. The power company pays me $15 a month for the ability to cycle my water heater and air conditioner off for up to 15 minutes an hour (25% load reduction) in the summer, I don't see why they don't offer me $30-$50 a month for the privilige of parking an extra 3-5kW power plant on my roof.
The whole point of solar/wind/geothermal/renewable power, IMHO, is that you wouldn't need a "larger, more expensive, grid". With sufficient distribution of solar panels, backup batteries, and (worst-case) backup generators, you wouldn't need a grid at all. Each neighborhood could be fairly self sufficient, houses with good solar siting would provide the panels, those without could provide backup batteries, or house generators for emergency power. With houses built for energy efficiency from the start, you'd need a lot less power (find the exact statistics yourself) to get through your day. All of which would mean less mass power generation, which means fewer fossil and nuclear plants, which means greater energy independence, all of which is good for the future.
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
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.
Ahhh, but the day will never, ever come where the laws of thermodynamics will stop, creating a way to not lose copius amounts of energy creating hydrogen. Can't get more out than you put in. Never going to so much as break even. Water is a very, very sound molecule. It doesn't even come close to trying to break it for energy. There is no energy solution, because we're talking the first law of thermodynamics, and we're talking basic science. Sounds great. "We've got whole oceans here!" So is it really going to be that much better if we went to it?
What about other chemical processes? Unless you want wholesale ecological disaster in exchange for your Playstation 2 time, I cannot imagine it. Acids? Bases? What else just makes a LARGE, CONSUMABLE AMOUNT OF H2? It would be great for a camp stove, but what about whole cities?
You can't flip a molecule and make water into hydrogen and oxygen so easily. Water is the ANTI-FUEL. It's not gasoline that is waiting to combust. It's a real nightmare to try to get the energy back. Electrolysis just doesn't cut it. We'd really need a magic bullet with hydrogen.
Are hydrogen lines better than power lines?
IMHO It's never been about the resource, it is all about the energy you consume. We need to learn to lower our overall energy usage. That is my solution to all of this.
Hydrogen sounds like the greatest idea ever, too bad physics doesn't seem to back it up, at least right now.
The solution was an art object - that huge Calder stabile ("the Great Sail") in front of the building, designed in cooperation with aerodynamics experts to divert the wind.
Since deregulation, there's no one to blame, of course. The invisible hand of the market is supposed to do it all. Generating companies, transmission companies, and retail delivery utilities are all separate organizations now.
It's not really economic to have reliable electric power. Would you pay 20-30% more on your power bill for 99.99% uptime vs. 99.9% uptime? That's about what it costs.
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
Yeah, the internet was deregulated, and the power system was regulated. But think about how generally unreliable the internet is compared to the power system. Parts of it go down all the time. Think about the last network outage compared to the last blackout. How long did that blackout last compared to the network outage?
The power system is much more critical then the internet. Without power, people can get stuck in elevators, AC goes out, the cellular phone system can go down, etc.
Another problem that showed up in the power system is that companies like Enron were, with no equivocation, bandits. They actually fucked with the California power system in order to extract better deals from the state, along with the well-known securities thieving they pulled off.
Any attempt at power deregulation should also require a much, much better standard for open-ness and honesty from the companies. Peoples lives are actually at state here and leaving our power grid in the hands of criminals is not a very good plan.
And we also need to design a much more fault-tolerant grid system as well. It's just ridiculous that one fuckup can shut down the entire east coast, especially 40 years (or whatever) after the exact same thing happened...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This all sounds well and good until we come down to the nitty-gritty of power engineering. Somehow, I don't think a 345kV, 60-Hz, 3-phase feeder is gonna cut the mustard in a 3,000 mile power link... But, ignoring that, there are many electrical standards in the world: 100V, 110/120V, 208V, 230V, 220/240V (which, in retrospect, wouldn't be much of a problem). What would be a problem is the whole 50/60Hz thing and the delta/wye issue. Not to mention that reinverting the power (or using rotary converters for that early 20th-century touch) would cause intolerable losses and clocking to ensure synchronicity of a world-wide grid would be...well...a mess.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."