Slashdot Mirror
Power Electronics Help to Control Electrical Grids
An anonymous reader writes: "IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article about how power electronics are proving necessary for the widespread connection of wind turbines to the electric power grid. It explains many issues that currently make it difficult to utilize wind power. Older articles discuss other issues affecting the nation's power grid."
Maybe what we need is more control over the power, we need better systems and routines to warn us before something goes wrong. Not after.
----- Friends, l33tists, l4m3z0rs! Lend me thy keyboards.
A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired.
:)
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article
It's kind of funny how articles about the power grid appear in magazines across the world every month of every year, but the ones that just happened to appear this month are "eerily prophetic".
WTF are "power electronics"?
Couldn't you at elast have given us some tiny hint, so that upon clicking your links we'd be going into the articles having some vague clue how to parse your summary?
Wakey wakey mod's. Can you spell T.R.O.L.L.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Moderate parent down:
look:
The installation, which feeds grids operated by the utility giant PacifiCorp, in Portland, Ore., includes 183 induction turbines installed over the last four years, which generate up to 135 MW--enough for 25,000,000 vibrators and lighted dildos.
Steady As She Blows
;-)
Looks like they're hard-up for readers.
The coolest voice ever.
Impressive as the gains have been, it isn't quite clear yet that the wind can blow a fat cock up the ass of the developed world's fossil-fuel dependence.
Righto-- I'd say this was a troll... unless having a cock up the ass would impact our global dependance of power.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Can you spell T.R.O.L.L.
Those of us who know basic English know that troll isn't an acronym and shouldn't be spelled as such.
T.R.O.L.L = spelling the word letter by letter.
Those of us who know basic syntax know a period can be used as a seperator. While clearly dashes are in order, i.e. T-R-O-L-L, I would not fault anyone trying to make it obvious to the mods that they F-U-C-K-E-D U-P!!!
Besides, how the fuck do you know it's not an acronym in another language? You sound a touch anglocentric to me.
Really? Hmm... these must be Germans?
The higher, the fewer.
Of course you spell a word letter by letter. How else would you do it? Its obvious what letters are in the word troll.
We either need more power plants, to curb demand, or a fairly efficient way of storing excess power capacity in the winter to be used in the summer.
Everything else might buy you time, but it is only delaying the inevitable.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The critical point here is that to have "exotic" devices, you have to be able to manage them to make the power grid meaningful stability. Often, the hip environmental crowd (okay, so I am often one of them), complains that there isn't enough use of alternative energy in the mainstream grid. However, if we dedicated a meaningful amount of the grid to energy extracted from yak dung, what happens if there are problems? The grid elsewhere has to make up the slack (often at a higher price and inefficient) or we have problems like last week. The more technology develops, the more we are likely to be able to use alternative energy...goo goo gah joob.
Impressive as the gains have been, it isn't quite clear yet that the wind can blow a fat cock up the ass of the developed world's fossil-fuel dependence.
What sort of tools would you use to determine that?..
http://use.perl.org
Steady As She Blows
Power electronics and exotic energy storage devices are making wind power steady enough to compete with conventional electricity sources
By Peter Fairley
In this season of discontent in the electricity business, only wind power seems to stand out as a global success story. While petroleum prices were convulsing in response to war and labor strife, and nuclear plants were stoking controversy in the Middle East and Asia, wind turbines were quietly becoming the fastest-growing energy source in the world. They now provide more than 31 000 MW of power, a total that has swelled by almost 30 percent in scarcely a year's time and that keeps more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year. Wind power's ascendance has been so stunning that advocates are now rallying around an idea that would have seemed preposterous just a couple of years ago: that the wind could supply 12 percent of the world's electrical demand by 2020.
Impressive as the gains have been, it isn't quite clear yet that the wind can blow away the developed world's fossil-fuel dependence. One of the most important reasons is that clean, renewable wind power comes with a serious hitch: while conventional power plants yield a steady stream of electricity, wind turbines often ply turbulent gusts and therefore spit out an irregular stream of electricity that is tough for power grids to swallow.
Now, though, high-tech solutions are at hand. Systems based on advanced power-electronics and energy storage devices are massaging and managing power flows from wind turbines, enabling them to contribute mightily to electricity grids without putting those grids at risk. Not only are the technologies making wind power more palatable to grid operators, they are even making it possible for engineers to finally harness wind energy's tremendous potential in wind-swept, remote locales.
Perhaps nowhere is this potential so evident as in the state of Hawaii, whose isolated power grids could not otherwise risk taking full advantage of the archipelago's abundant, renewable resource. In fact, with its lush, endless trade winds and growing commitment to wind power, Hawaii's Big Island is emerging as a laboratory of the future of the technology. As wind power becomes a steadier and more reliable resource, it could help wean power producers all over the state from their dependence on costly imported oil.
But, for now, says Karl Stahlkopf, chief technology officer at Hawaii Electric Co., in Honolulu, even the existing wind farms on the Big Island--putting out just
10 MW, the equivalent of four state-of-the-art wind turbines--make grid controllers hop on days when the palm fronds fly.
The utility and its contractors plan to build what Stahlkopf calls an "electronic shock absorber" to buffer the island's power grids against the wind's worst behavior. It's a development that engineers elsewhere are following closely.
The reason is that the solutions to integrating modest levels of wind power on small, isolated grids today may foreshadow the installation of truly large-scale wind power in mainland networks five or 10 years from now. "What's happening in the Hawaiian Islands is a peek at the future," says Bob Zavadil, an expert on wind power at the Arlington, Va.-based power systems analysis firm Electrotek Concepts Inc. "They're on the leading edge." And that's true not only of the technology but also of the new legal and regulatory conventions between utilities and independent power producers that will be needed before wind energy can truly thrive.
Reactive Power 101
Back on the mainland, wind farms have grown to dozens of turbines and hundreds of megawatts--rivaling the size of conventional power plants. To pave the way for installations like those, engineers had to grapple with the tendency of wind turbines to introduce voltage instability into electrical grids. That tendency follows from the intermittent nature of wind-generated electricity, which waxes and wan
Its obvious? Who's obvious? I didn't see obvious post. It's a mystery to me.
Please explain to me why the poster would post almost his entire message in English and then suddenly switch to another language.
There was no reason for periods to be used in the word troll since it is not an acronym (not in this context, anyway).
The use of hyphens is totally incorrect.
P.S. Slashdot is an American-centric website as you should know by now. If you don't like it, tough.
In other words, if CmdrTaco dumps a big load and consumes lots of feces, it will cause the dig to sag intolerably
Seems like the /. editors are on a bit of a power trip!
-
And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
We know shit about IT? This from a troll that thinks Information Technology is about hacking the Pentagon, and says "Y'all"
Do you think IT is some new invention that some guy made and over-hyped.
Or is IT you're complete lack of intelligence?
Maybe IT is your complete lack of a life. So bad that you spend your free time insulting a generalization of people you've never even met.
Ok, I've spent enough of my time insulting a troll.
About two years ago I went to the Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Association's Expo in Cincinnatti, OH. There, they had a number of seminars on fuel cell technology. There was much talk about the (at the time) brand new hybrid cars from Toyota and Honda, using fuel cell technology to power personal electronics, the challenges left to face in making fuel cell technology practical, etc. One possible future that was presented (15-20 years down the road, so they said) was having a large fuel cell power your entire home. I mean, it's your house, you could theoretically put it anywhere you want (even underground) so that it's out of the way, right? Residential electrical service might consist of a truck coming by to refill your home fuel cell every month or two. Anyway, if such a future were to come about, rolling blackouts like what we saw (or didn't see, come to think of it) in New England and eastern Canada could very well become a thing of the past.
Food for thought. But there's no guarantees that it's not half-baked. =)
Take the most common electrical generator most of us own, the alternator in your car. This item is driven by the engine's crankshaft, and it's speed goes uo as the crankshaft's revolutions speed up. Of course too fast, and the power the alternator makes will cook the battery (which it feeds). Hence the built in voltage regulator that all alternators have. Is the answer so obvious that they have missed it?
The problem with power distribution is the medium: electric power lines. It makes more sense to generate power cleanly and locally, with fuel cells at the core of the distributed power generaters. For fuel you use hydrogen reformed from fossil fuels or hydrogen rich biomass, or hydrogen created from excess wind, solar, or any other source. Then transmission lines don't matter so much, pollution is reduced, and the world is a happier place.
Is that some rich 'environmentalists' don't want wind power where they can see it.
h tm l
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4041637.
I guess that wind power is OK as long as it is in someone elses backyard...
It's much easier to regulate DC with power electronics. AC was needed back when the only way to change voltage was using a transformer. Now it is obsolete.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
http://www.offshorewindfarms.co.uk/
Check this one out - just put them on old oil rigs, or build new platforms, also , Isaw something recently about putting them underwater.
Here's a question that I haven't seen asked yet... everyone's comparing this whole thing to the blackout of 1965, but what about the backups that were supposedly put in place to deal with the much-feared and hyped Y2K bug?
Wired 7.04 published an issues entitled 'Lights Out' that detailed many problems, including the problem of a single failure spreading across the entire continent.
Billions were spent in the USA and Canada on solving this... so where did that money go?
YOU FAIL IT !
Hacking the Pentagon is all about information technology you fuckin' moron.
For those unaware of what's going on, here is a quick excerpt of President Bush denying money for a secure grid... (Source)
On top of this it was announced that grids would be targeted by terrorists.
(source)Here is a link to a mirrored doc of the Electronic Power Risk Assessment, there is going to be a huge amount of finger pointing, and political partisan bs behind this entire incident, but read it for yourself in plain english how your (P)Resident will not fund plan for a more secure system.
Off topic? I think not
MoFscker
Entergy here in north Louisiana told us that the power would NOT go out like it did in the North East, but just now, a power outage occured. .... makes you wonder.
The reason for this is that the constant electron drift in the wires breaks the wires down by moving the atoms slowly farther down stream by collisions. Eventually a point is created in the wire that is thinner than normal and the effect magnifies and dramatically increases the impedence in the wire. If the wires have currents traveling in both directions the effect has a tendency to canel itself out I guess.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
Rather than having massive acapcitor banks to balance the load, what's to stop us letting the windfarm run free, using all the energy to liquefy salts (by simple heating elements with low inductance, so phase-lag isn't an issue), then feeding the heat energy into the grid via turbines?
Either that, or have a big capacitance and an invertor on each windmill.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Yeah, but Gray Davis was the govenor in California who signed the deregulation bill that allowed Enron to manipulate the market in a house-of-cards sham.
The fact is, there's plenty of dumb regulatory moves on both sides to go around here. There all of the "rules" that apply to interconnecting grids are just industry standards, there's no punishment for breaking them. When such a weak regulatory system is in place, nothing much stops an Enron-like group of cheaters from stepping in and making a profit off of the mess at the expense of the public.
So, segment, you don't need to worry about off topic mods... it's -1 Flamebait that you posted. There's no room for either party to blame this on the other, they all failed and better get their act together and come up with something that keeps this from happening again.
Furtilizer Helps Grow Crops
Motor Oil Helps Reduce Friction in Engines
Story at 11
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
That's one way. I remember when superconduction came on the scene. One of the ideas was an underground superconduction coil. Basically an induction coil, on a much bigger scale.
Towards the middle the article explains how the europeans deal with the problem ... they just use improved turbine designs. After you see the following paragraph:
... isnt that how it was supposed to work. Shouldn't variable speed turbines be much more developed in the us because they were patented here?
"The idea has been slower to catch on in the United States, where GE Wind Energy, in Tehachapi, Calif., has deftly defended patents on variable-speed turbines that will be on the books through 2011. "
Nice to see the patent system working again. I guess the Europeans were lucky because GE Wind energy decided not to file their patents in europe (or they were not granted).
But then again, shouldnt patents help innovations
Frankly i dont know why GE systems does not promote variable speed wind turbines now that they have the protection, and if they cant, why they dont sell affordable licences to companies that can. It could be due to the usual burocratic inefficiency, or it could be something sinister.
Yet this is not the first time i see an owner of a patent sit on the technology and not develop it while other people are perfectly able to do so. We all remember how a company that does not take the trouble to make portable email devices, tried to stop a company that does make them.
Don't forget that technology mentioned awhile back on "/." about converting trash to a fuel source.
While it's true that most wind turbines use induction generators, they do so for several reasons, including:
All the turbines I have worked with have either had modest capacitor banks to correct for reactive power, or used insanely cool AC/AC back-to-back inverters to produce line quality AC.
I'm also concerned about the article's allegations of power intermittence. Wind turbine rotors have a fair amount of rotational inertia, so they're not capable of passing every flutter of the wind to the generator. It seems that this part of the article is a sales pitch for a new product that the vast majority of installations won't need.
I was also amused at the requirement of wind turbines to "ride through" grid frequency variations. This is basically a nice way of spinning the fact that wind turbine controllers are often far more picky about the frequency they'll accept or put out, than the rather poor regulation that applies to our power grids.
An finally, that picture. Where on earth did they get it? Apart from the fact that it's a contravention of every safety code to climb the tower of a running turbine, the climber must be a human sloth. To get that kind of motion blur on wind turbine blades, you'd have to have several minutes' exposure. Thus our perfectly sharp climber (and their horse) must be moving incredibly slowly ...
Public advocacy for U.S. member interests, and for women in engineering and ethics
I think I can speak for us all, when I say that I also advocate for women in engineering. Especially attractive ones.
aren't big on having coal plants in their back yard but, being a "conservative" myself, I wish that that power plant that was just built in my town was nuclear rather than a polluting gas plant. Nuclear, unlike all types of fossil fuel plants, does not release pollution into the environment when it is run correctly. But it seems that while rich environmentalists will file lawsuit after injunction after restraining order after lawsuit to prevent the construction of relatively clean energy, thew will (in fact they DID) nothing whatsoever to prevent, or significantly delay, the construction or certification of the "new" gas pollution plant. Go figure.
So, segment, you don't need to worry about off topic mods... it's -1 Flamebait that you posted. There's no room for either party to blame this on the other, they all failed and better get their act together and come up with something that keeps this from happening again. Flamebait? I don't necessarily think so. As stated above, I posted relevant information not to start a flamewar or political thread, if you took it as so `which find` /dev/perception | xargs fsck wasn't meant to be nothing more than a factual posting of relevance...
MoFscker
Who is this "Hacking the Pentagon" guy, and why does he like Information Technology so much?
And I'm the moron? You can't even make a sentence that is understandable. You ever hear of a comma?
True. However the upside is that it forces everyone to seek alternative paths. Paths that may yield a better way than what the original patent covered. In other words, the world senses "patent damage" and routes around it.
YHBT, YHL, HAND
While you obviously know your wind tech, image analysis is not your forte. This is obviously a composited pic. It has that classic "painted" feel.
GE manufactures a turbine rated for 3.6MW output. Ge is currently an industry leader in these types of turbines though, they are desiged primarily for offshore use. Smaller MW ratings between 1.5 and 2.8 are more common. Unfortunately, even with wind turbines producing @ 3MW it would require approximately 1.26 Million of them to meet the U.S.'s current power demands. Currently Coal plants are responsible for the majority of our power capacity in the U.S.
While the *idea* of wind power is certainly a nice one, and the notion of helping the environmement is well intentioned, the reality is that wind is insufficient as a power source and as a result - it's ability to displace the most polluting source, coal, will be ineffective. Other solutions will be required to truly solve the pollution/capacity problem that we face.
A potentially viable start to "solving" some fo these problems would be to distribute residential power generation, especially in dense urban areas. Technologies such as fuel cells, and compact turbines could be used for this. An added benefit of this strategy would be zero emissions and heat reclemation in the case of fuel cells, and better regulatory control over the emissions of compact gas fired turbines.
My two cents.
Well the problem with the "blame the enviromentalist" is that it doesn't cover everything. When was the last time you heard an enviromentalist rally against fuel cell generators? Or rooftop solar cells? I know we all like to have a "pet" group we like to blame failures for. e.g. Republicans, Democrats, Senior citizens, etc. But some things have more mundane reasons. e.g. economic, asthetic.
Has anyone from Slashdot researched a home version of these wind turbines? Anything that would decrease monthly power bills involving a clean energy source is alright in my books.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Surplus electricity that cannot be consumed by nearby grid users can be used for an electrolysis process to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored and distributed for fuel cells.
www.virtualeli.com
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
OK Mr two cents. Why is it, everytime we have this discussion? Everyone always focuses on the "alternative" completely displacing the mainstream? Why can't we solve our problems by using the best bits and pieces from all over? Wind out west. Nuclear out east. Solar in the midwest, etc. Now fusion, that's another matter.
How so? Oil accounts for only 2% of the electricity generated in the US (coal produces 55%, nuclear 20%, hydro 11%, and gas 8.5%). Oil prices are determined largely by demand for transport, which consumes 61% of the petroleum used in the US.
If we look at coal prices, we see that indeed they have fallen steadily over time and are projected to continue falling for the next few decades.
Would you conclude that this does mean that wind will replace coal as source of electricity in the near future? I would not jump to such a conclusion. Commodity prices are very poor indicators of future demand.
It's quite obvious that the image has been greatly enhanced. There's two possibilities as to the credit. Maybe this image is an in-house altered variant of the original Getty image. Credit would still be due. Or quite possibly Getty themselves own an altered version, then again it would have to be credited as well.
Whatever the case, the image is obviously altered greatly. The blades' blur looks so fake.
Airlifted? Jesus, and I thought Cowboy Neal was fat.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/08/16/blackout.chron.ap /index.html
The timely coincidence between MSBLAST and power blackout is certainly _there_.
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333505/2003 -08-13/2003-08-19/0 3 -08-13/2003-08-19/0 . php
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/333513/200
http://www.automationtechies.com/sitepages/pid641
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cybe rwar/view/
aspecially watch video #4. Just after 911 a cyber terroristic attack againts the powergrid was warned for by Gen. Clark from the Pentagon and other cyber security officials.
Robert
"Overseas transport of gas is much more difficult than petroleum. IIRC, Saudi Arabia produces enormous amounts of gas as a byproduct of their oil wells. Shipping it is so complex and expensive that they simply burn it off at the wells rather than trying to sell it. "
And yet people manage
I suspect they do it more because they already have the infrastructure for oil (which is making money for them now), than it being technologicaly difficult. After all gas can flow down a pipeline just as readily as oil. The main difference is the liquification plant, and the ships.
That won't need a lot of research. Folks at Niagara Falls have been using pumped-storage for years to balance supply and demand.
Please explain to me why the poster would post almost his entire message in English and then suddenly switch to another language.
i.e.: q.e.d.
"Sorry, I just don't see how terrorists would be motivated to try to cause blackouts."
For the same reason our military took out power lines in Iraq. As a prelude to military action.
"They managed to get the grid up mostly over the weekend. I'd say for something as complex as the power grid over 5 states that's pretty damn good. It'd cost billions upon billions to retrofit our power grid to something modern using some accelerated schedule, and I don't see how you expect our president to be jumping to spend any more money just because we had a so far isolated incident."
Our power grid didn't get into this state overnight. This problem should have been fixed along time ago. I think we both know all the "human" reasons that kept it from being fixed.
Basically, wind turbines may introduce other environmental problems, just as most other energy plants do. They're not entirely "clean" as many would like to believe at first glance.
The main problem, which has been quietly stepped aside by all wind power advocates I talk to, is the environmental effects of removing such vastly huge amounts of kinetic energy from wind flows, in order to harness the power. Think globally.
Wind is an important environmental factor, it equilibriates (sp) places around the globe. You can feel the 'north wind' around the changing of the seasons (up here in North America at least) when cold air rushes north or south, depending on whether Canada is heating up or cooling down. Trade winds flow across the oceans, the Jet Stream equilibriates around the globe over land and sea. Vast arrays of wind turbines will extract large amounts of kinetic energy from these streams, and can (note, I don't say 'will', but nobody has ever accurately affirmed or denied this) severely disrupt global equilibrium cycles.
The effect could be colder Canadian winters and warmer Mexican summers, and parallel for Europe/Asia and southern hemisphere. I'm sure many of the Europeans reading this right now are thinking of the heat wave currently encompassing Europe. From what I understand, this is a slow-moving pocket of hot air that is taking awhile to disperse. Imagine more effects like this, where there is reduced ability for thermal air equilibrium over large-scale continental distances. Canadians might not like to have more severely-cold winters, nor Mexicans with hotter summers either. But these are possible outcomes of massive installations of wind farms, yet few people want to think about them.
That said, if some modelled this sufficiently, perhaps the effects could be minimal. Perhaps they could even be beneficial, such as preventing hurricanes and tornadoes. But to deny any side effects of long-range wind extraction is foolish.
Someone here on slashdot tried making the argument that the area needed for windfarms exceeds the rate of deforestation, but (s)he just pulled stock quotes and numbers from wind websites, and didn't account for the fact that the turbines need to be spaced out, they can't be stacked one right on the other. Also, someone (same or different, I can't remember) tried implying that the amount of kinetic energy harnessed from the turbines is dwarfed by lost kinetic energy of forests swaying in the wind. If someone wants to make that argument again, please provide numerical rates of energy loss for these forest wind shears. Thanks.
Anyway, this is the primary concern of mine against large-scale deployment of windfarms. Hopefully these problems won't be an issue, but let's be careful about the potential problems before praising them as the end-all-be-all of our power problems.
make world, not war
A quote: The increasing frequency of electricity outages and outage duration are due primarily to lack of quick voltage support, leading to voltage collapse in many regions of the country and poor quality of power...
The ETO can switch in less than 5us and carry up to 10kA. When closed it blocks up to 6kV
My Step-fathers brother, a college professor at a major university, has created a software routine that will compute the transient stability of the entire North American power grid in a few seconds on a cray super-computer. With this software a loss of one line would keep the lose on that one line instead of cascading the problem throughout the grid. It would also have the benefit of maximizing the power that flows throughout the system. It has also been run on PG&Es old Apollo computers. They were doing a study with PG&E and it basically proved their engineers wrong. Which is what killed the project, since the engineers were making the decisions about the project. I have been trying to convince them to take up the project again and this time taking it to the federal government....I hope they do!
While this would be true if the power grid were wired in series, it is in fact wired in parallel, and although available current decreases when loads are added, the voltage remains constant.
Bullshit, we can blame ourselves for overconsumption and the NIMBY's (Not In My BackYard) more than the environmentalists. I hate that knee-jerk response to everything - "It's the environmentalists fault".
So often it is. Look at catalytic converters on cars if you don't believe me - they eat about 20% of your gas mileage by making the engine pump exhaust out against a restriction. Acid rain wasn't caused by cars until the tree-huggers pestered the EPA and got them on all cars. Before we had a little unburnt gasoline and a little NOx leaving tailpipes. Both are unpleasant, but nature copes with them because they're both inherently unstable in the atmosphere. Now, we have 20% more CO2 than is necessary from each vehicle, and the added bonus of sulphur hydroxide formed in the catalytic!
Or consider all the enviro-wacko laws on industry. Fine. Between enviromentalists and trade unions pushing up the cost of doing business, I don't blame them for moving to third-world hell-holes. And that's better? Love Canal is happening in China, and protesters demanding reasonable safety from industrial waste aren't being quietly placated, but they're being shot. Not only that, but now we have to waste energy shipping raw materials and finished product greater distances!
Environmentalism is too often about stupid band-aid solutions and silly platitudes espoused by people with arts degrees and toe rings. Real environmental solutions are about doing unpleasant things. Forget the crappy low-flow toilet that makes dimwits feel oh-so-good but takes 6 flushes to get rid of the Dark Matter. Use a regular toilet which takes 1 flush. Better still if you can, use the waste water from your washing machine or shower to flush it.
Even with all the technology that we've created to make lower power devices we just find a way to get more devices. I saw how they were working on LED's as a better, more efficient lightsource that can do task lighting for about 1 watt of power. I mention this at work and some jackass comes up behind me and says how cool it would be to be able to have a wall full of them and be able to change the color of his walls with his mood - POWER SAVINGS - what power savings?
Well, assuming he wants a comfortable quantity of light in his room, then he will only be able to stand to use so much power in his LEDs, right? If the guy wants to supplant his ordinary room lighting with this, isn't that fine, or do we no longer have a society based on personal freedom? The net energy consumption would be less than ordinary room lighting... woah, wait a minute. Have we considered the energy and environmental cost involved in processing all those little silion wafers being made into LEDs? When you consider the energy going into the whole system, incandescents aren't so bad.
It's a balancing act. First we have a grid that's just too old and extremely expensive to update. There's a mix of powerplants that are aging, there's poor planning, no incentive to change energy usage habbits, poor city design that promotes heat which in turn increases energy consumption due to airconditioners, extra showers, fans, and refridgerators. Then you have people who don't want a soot belching powerplant in their backyard, or off their favorite camping spot, nor do they want to pay extra for a more expensive cleaner burning plant, or pay extra tax dollars to have research into alternative plans like more efficient solar/wind/water/et al.
I agree with everything you've said there.
My feeling is that we need a decentralized system where power is created in much smaller "nodes" and distributed from those points. Nodes could be created in house basements or in larger buildings and be connected to more evenly distribute power over shorter distances reducing the waste that happens when power has to be transmitted over miles and miles of cable to a destination.
No. Not a good idea.
Power plants operate on a couple of principles, one of them being economy of scale. This economy of scale suggests,
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
This is one area that electric cars may be able to provide a valuable service in what's known as vehicle to grid. A small company in california has been doing a lot of research on the topic and it looks promising. Theoretically, if you get enough electric cars that are plugged into the grid whenever they're not in use, they can provide near-realtime load balancing by remote dispatching from the power company. Say the power surge that took out the grid happened, but this time with a few hundred thousand electric cars plugged into it. The company could send a broadcast to the cars to absorb the extra load within a few seconds, and stop the cascading failure. Conversely, if there's a sudden demand spike, the cars could be ordered to temporarily supply it until the spike subsided. Obviously there's many technical hurdles but the general idea is very cool.
If you like having a cock in your ass, more *POWER* to you. Just so long as he gives you the reacharound!
It has the added advantage of being storable and dispatchable. No wind? You've still got all that heat stored in the molten salt to generate superheated steam at a moments notice.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
GE may be one of the leaders, Vestas just makes more money doing wind power. The US is one of their most profitable markets.
http://www.vestas.dk/
I own some stock, so I'm biased.
-- From Denmark
"So often it is. Look at catalytic converters on cars if you don't believe me - they eat about 20% of your gas mileage by making the engine pump exhaust out against a restriction. Acid rain wasn't caused by cars until the tree-huggers pestered the EPA and got them on all cars. Before we had a little unburnt gasoline and a little NOx leaving tailpipes. Both are unpleasant, but nature copes with them because they're both inherently unstable in the atmosphere. Now, we have 20% more CO2 than is necessary from each vehicle, and the added bonus of sulphur hydroxide formed in the catalytic!"
Spoken like someone in rant mode, instead of hmmm... Try this. Assuming you've been in a large city. You may have noticed (more in some than others) trash alongside the road. Now do you think all that ended up there because a trash truck had an accident and dumped it's load? Or more likely over time individual drivers each threw a small amount out their windows gradually growing into an eyesore, that affected everyone. Enviromental pollution is like that. A little here, and a little there, and then you all wonder why you're having all these health problems.
"Or consider all the enviro-wacko laws on industry. Fine. Between enviromentalists and trade unions pushing up the cost of doing business, I don't blame them for moving to third-world hell-holes. And that's better? Love Canal is happening in China, and protesters demanding reasonable safety from industrial waste aren't being quietly placated, but they're being shot. Not only that, but now we have to waste energy shipping raw materials and finished product greater distances!"
Am I the only one who sees how wacked the above is? You complain about "enviro-wacko" laws and how they're driving business away. And in the next complain about how companies freed from the shackles of "enviro-wacko" laws are abusing their environment. So which is it?
"Power plants operate on a couple of principles, one of them being economy of scale. This economy of scale suggests, among other things, that it's a hell of a lot cheaper to build one generating facility which serves 100,000 people than it is to build 100,000 generators which serve one person. It's also a hell of a lot cheaper (and easier) to oversee maintenance of one than it is to oversee the maintenance of 100,000. What percentage of basement-mounted generators do you honestly think are going to be tuned frequently or properly? How about the energy wasted in shipping fuel to 100,000 homes rather than the economy of scale provided where a tanker pulls up to a dock and simply discharges a few million gallons of fuel into the tanks?"
I think I answered this same rant somewere else. You speak of economy of scale, but ignore it when it comes to fuel cells. Currently the technology isn't up to the standards that we would ask of a common power plant. But mass production can do for fuel cells the same thing that it does for everything else. It can make it cheaper to make, and operate. Improve it's reliability as well. Note as well that we presently get along well with individual gas furnaces without majour headaches. Same with other majour appliances (and that's what a fuel cell will be). Also when we talk about using fuel cells, we're talking at least a 1:1 ratio, maybe greater for greater individual demands. Second your fuel for the multitudes is handled quite adequately already. A lot of people already get their fuel (be it LNG or fuel oil) via a truck. In other words a nonissue, and if you still want to argue, there's in most homes a natural gas line.
"Okay. Here's a hint. Don't bother with those fluorescent screw-in bulbs. Why? They're cheap to buy, cheap to run. Ever consider what goes into them at the Chinese sweatshops they come from? Ordinary incandescents do less enviromental damage, but because the damage done by fluorescents isn't apparent to Joe Treehugger, they ignore it."
What a foolish thing to say. Incandescents can be made in a "chinease sweatshop" as any other bulb (not
In the UK we have at least one pump storage station for evening out loads - but not for months at time. Its basically two large lakes one above the other, excess power pumps water up, then when there is a surge in demand it goes back down through a generator.
In fact, DC is much more efficient to transmit long distances that AC, as there are less line losses.
It's used in Sweden and New Zealand that I know of. I've worked on the New Zealand link. It carries DC from the Benmore Dam (Largest earth dam in the Southern Hemisphere) several hundred km's to Wellington, including several km's of undersea transmission.
The DC is converted to/from AC using 2 poles, the original a mercury arc valve system, the new method is a gi-normous Thyristor.
The link runs at 270 kV, and there's talk of moving to 300kV
At peak capacity, it can run at over 1200 MWs, and it routinely uses the ground as a return path.
All in all, it's pretty cool tech !
-- You can't give it, you can't even buy it, and you just don't get it!
About a half-hour prior to the blackout, I was reading an article online--I forgot the URL completely--which discussed the use of superconductors to augment the circuit breaking elements of the power transmission system.
Now, IANA Electrical Engineer, however, I found it interesting, in hind sight especially, that these superconductive elements would be used to soften the blow on circuit breakers, which sometimes cannot react to an overwhelming surge, which will blow right through them.
I won't go into the details, especially as I don't have the article before me for cut-n-paste cheating. However, it was intriguing that superconductors, in this case, were proposed for use not as conductors, but instead to react by becoming less-conductive with the increase in flow, etc, in a much faster manner than the mechanical breakers.
Now, if we could only get some wind farms up and running here in Michigan, and in substantial numbers... (I've seen the one in Southeast Wyoming, and it was truly awe-inspiring!)
Mmmmmm... Bold, yet refreshing!
This reminds me of Tom Clancy. In one of those books (Patriot Games, I think it was) some guy who worked at a power company was affiliated with some terrorists, who wanted to damage the electric grid. Something about 'what would people think of a government who can't even keep the lights on?'.
Of course, they're being foolish, and they all end up arrested or shot, but even if they had been able to cause massive blackouts: People don't get mad at the government, they get mad at the power companies! Sure, there's a little bit of hostility directed towards the government, but only because they have been regulating the industry too [much|little].
And if terrorists DID blow up the power grid, we'd only get mad at the government for missing all the clues about it happening which were buried in the mounds and mountains of paperwork...
Finally, assume that terrorists do blow up some distribution node. Do massive blackouts follow? Perhaps not. Unless you really have the inside scoop on how the grid works, it would be iffy at best. Sure, you could guarantee knocking out something, but how much? If cascading failures like this one were predictable, someone would have fixed the problems.
I wonder if any of the "powers to be" have considred the possibility that organizing the national power grid into a set of isolated regional grids would be more fault tolerant.
In the IT server world, multiple servers (redundancy) is the key to uninterruptable service. Would it not stand to reason that we would want something so critical to our nation's welfare as our electricity to have a bit of redundant fault tolerance?
I suppose the paranoid, untrusting, conspiracy theorist in me would have something to say about this too...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You can feel the 'north wind' around the changing of the seasons (up here in North America at least) when cold air rushes north or south, depending on whether Canada is heating up or cooling down. Trade winds flow across the oceans, the Jet Stream equilibriates around the globe over land and sea. Vast arrays of wind turbines will extract large amounts of kinetic energy from these streams
I don't see how a wind turbine (or large collections of wind turbines) could interfere with the jet stream any more than a tree (or large collections of trees) would. It seems to me that deforestation and replanting will have at least as much impact on the wind as wind turbines.
Especially seeing as how the bulk of the jet stream is several miles above sea level anyway, and even the largest turbines are only a few hundred feet tall. Hey, so are giant sequoias.
First the number of nuclear plants in the United States is somewhat over one hundered not one thousand.
The nuclear industry in this country is in terrible financial shape, because even with generous government subsidies it is hugely uneconomical. Nuclear power happens to be a very expensive way to boil water. You may be aware that nuclear power creates something called "nuclear waste". The government has provided the largest subsidy to the nuclear industry by promising to dispose of this waste at government (read taxpayer) expense. Fifty years into the history we still do not have a open repository for high - level civilian nuclear waste. (I believe that a military repository in Carlsbad, New Mexico is open or will open soon.) This nuclear waste has some unfortunate properties, such as extreme toxicity and long-term persistance (thousands of years). Releases radiation (the kind from breaches of reactor containment and waste storage systems, not the venting of mildly radioactive gas that are a part of normal plant operation) can cause widespread health effects. The problem here is that continued use of nuclear power creates additional waste, piling up for thousands of years - all to boil some water. (Another subsidy is the services that the government provides to the nuclear industry in the forms of security and regulation.) Nuclear power currently provides 14% of the electric power in the United States.
As far as your comments about wind, solar and water go, I'll address them one at a time.
* Water - Hydroelectric power is currently providing about 12% of the electric power in the US, though there is little room for growth, due to opposition to new dams.
* Wind - Did you read the article? There are hopes that wind will provide up to 20% of US power. This may be a bit optimistic, but the interesting part is that wind power went from being from an eco-hippie dream in the 1970's to a serious business in the present - without government subsidy. (Note to bird-lovers the newest wind turbines are large enough that the blades spin slowly and harm very few birds.)
* Solar - Applications of solar power are booming as cost and efficiency of photovoltaic cells improve. In many cases it is cheaper to use solar than to connect to the grid, such as temporary highway signs and homes more than 0.25 mile (0.4 km) from the electric grid. It is, however unlikely to ever be a significant percentage of electric power in the US.
The gigantic oil reserves that the poster refers to may the the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, which has enough capacity to supply the US for 180 days. The percentage of domestically produced oil here is around 50% and has been falling for years and is porjected to continue to do so regardless of what the government chooses to do.
There was one source that is important that was not mentioned in the article or your post - conservation. This does not mean self-deprivation. It does mean higher standards in efficiency for all sorts of devives like the computer monitor you are currently staring at. It turns out that there's lots of savings to be had here and the additional cost to the consumer are greatly exceeded by the savings over the appliance life. The important point here is that we may not need to increase the amount of power generated to imporve standard of living (in the developed nations - developing world is a differnt case) even with moderate population growth.
Coal's technology has improved 300% from the 1970's with great advances in efficiency and emmission controls (scrubbers). Coal's tragic flaw it its C02 emissions. Unless someone figures how to capture and store the CO2(sequestration) then it will continue to be a problem if you are concerned about the greenhouse effect.
I have to agree with the poster's comments on the hydrogen economy. I just don't understand where the power is supposed to come from.
-Jon
Did you have to burn your keyboard afterwards? ;)
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
500 gallon tanks of propane for home heating are common in New Hampshire. Truck delivery is about once a month in the winter.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I'm going to take this opportunity to respond to you and the grandparent at the same time.
This is the reason for the Hydrogen economy. Instead of designing power-control electronics that throttle supply to meet demand, we can just design everything to provide for much more than peak and create Hydrogen with the excess during off-peak periods.
All of the curves fit together nicely, too. People need more gas for heating in the winter, but they need more gas for transportation in the summer. Using Hydrogen as that gas lessens the differences in peak demand. Even when it doesn't, fuel-cells are fairly responsive to changes in demand and the process for storing Hydrogen for extended periods is straightforward, if not very efficient.
But the best reason for Hydrogen is that it is already being used in small-scale co-generation units that create electricity and heat at something like 80% total efficiency, on-site and without transmission losses of a power grid. So, even if Hydrogen isn't the best fuel choice for automobiles, it does have it's benefits in a 'comprehensive' energy plan.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
American Superconductor purchased a little company called Integrated Electronics in 2000. Integrated Electronics developed/designed the majority of the power electronics that go into that DVAR system they are mentioning. The owner of the company was/is a power electronics genius. His name is Jeff Reichard. He now owns a new company called Tier Electronics which has a small home page at www.tierelectronics.com.
Chernobyl shows that nuclear power is safe and cost effective. The WSJ is spouting marxist lies when it says that the costs from Chernobyl were 4-5 times the benefits of all those commie nuclear power plants.
The rupture in the pipe at Indian Point didn't cause any problems and shows that skipping mandated inspections is perfectly safe.
To add further proof, Davis-Besse shows there wasn't any problem after a decade of failing to deal with a problem seen repeatedly during inspections. And it was perfectly ok to delay the NRC mandated inspection to look for a corrusion problem seen in the same model reactor elsewhere. There was a full 3/8 inch of stainless steel left to contain the 10,000 PSI steam after the 6-1/2 inches of carbon steel rotted away.
The incorrectly sized emergency pipes were never a problem, nor the failing pumps, or incorrectly trained operators have never caused a problem.
The computed safety factors in the nuclear plants shows that there is at worst only three releases of radioactive material likely in 10,000 years with the likelihood being closer to 1 in a million years, and the data proves it once you eliminate Three Mile Island release. TMI was a new plant, only one year old at the time, and everyone knows that infant failures are the thing you have to worry about. Once a computer or a car has reached 10 years old, they're good for another century.
We should be encouraging nuclear power in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, Libya, Cuba, so these poor countries can develop economically without competing with the US for oil. The Russian and China plan to build nuclear power plants on barges should be encouraged so that nuclear power plants can be easily deployed around the world.
Yep, nuclear is the road to peace and safety.