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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."
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".
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.
The key is nuclear power.
Coal power is ok, it is cheap it is cleaner then it use to be, like everything else technology has improved it 300% since the 1970's.
Natural gas/oil is the favorate right now. Unfortunatly our government isn't allowing us to tap the gigantic resources we have so we are running out of it. We have enough oil in our country to last us another 30 years easy(with projected increases in consumption), yet we depend on the dildo's from OPEC, but that is ending with eastern european countries and russia getting into the market.
Hydrogen economy. What a freaking joke. I can't beleive that people fell for this crap. The energy has to come from somewhere, right now it comes from oil. So hydrogen would actually be wastefull and increase pollution. Why don't we just power our cars from rocks tied to ropes on long poles? We lift the rocks up, tie them to cars, drop the rocks and the rope would be tied to a pully attacted to the wheels. WEEE!!!
Water, wind, solar. Most places do not have enough wind/sun/water to power anything meaningfull. Maybe if we kick everybody out of montana and fill the entire state full of wind farms me MAY just have enough power to run parts of californa. Well only during parts of the year.
Nuclear: Lots of power, lots of fuel. We can power a large city for ten years with a handfull of pellets. The waste is insigificant comparied to the waste from other sources of fuel. The only thing standing in the way is ingnorance. Pure and simple. We have thousands of nuclear plants all over the country, they have one minor burp of gas from one plant and people are freaked out for decades. All these plants are running from late 1970's technology at best and they are perfectly safe. Of course unless they are soviet power plants whose "waste" was designed to be nuclear weapons grade-able. Such a freaking joke. Ignorance is what is standing in the way and the vast majority (not all of course) of anti-nuclear freaks are the modern day equivelent of Luddites
The idea would be to make them hydrogen fuel cells. You'd use inconsistant power sources(wind, solar) to generate electricity for the purpose of electrolysis. Split water into its component parts and you've got a nice and(somewhat) stable way to store all that energy you've converted into electricity via solar/wind generators without using expensive batteries, or at least not so many. Then distribute the hydrogen to fuel-cell owners and let them burn off hydrogen to produce local electricty on demand.
e chanical energy) but it wouldn't be so bad once all the infrastructure necessary was in place.
Of course there's going to be a lot of loss due to all the conversion steps(wind->electricity->hydrogen->electricity->m
The only concern I'd have is building a working facility to use electricity to seperate water that's reliant upon the inconsistant power levels that solar and wind generators would provide. This would almost seem to be more useful for solar facilities. Sunlight is a bit more predictable than wind, or so I would think.
Um, anyone know what happened to polar-solar.com? Was that a hoax or did they just go belly-up due to lack of interest?
This would require that not only you had enough wind/solar/etc power to run your home during the day, but also to split water during the day, enough of it to run your home at night.
Would it not be easier to have enough wind/solar/etc power to run your home during the day, selling the excess to the power company and then pulling from the grid at night? You wouldn't have the up-front cost of electrolysis/fuel cell equipment, and you wouldn't pay for the power at night since you were being paid all during the day (at peak rates, even).
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.
Lots of stories about home fuel cells powered by natural gas, like this one. No trucks, since most local codes would not allow you to store two months worth of liquified natural gas in your garage or backyard. Heavy dependence on the natural gas delivery pipes. Some potential problems (all amenable to solution, I believe, just be prepared to spend money):
The power companies know very well how much power will be used. They have the necessary statistical data. When all the power use of tens of millions of people is added up, it fits very well into statistical predictions. So nobody is going to need to fill out any forms.
Of course something unusual could happen, and the power companies have to be able to deal with that as well.
But nothing unusual (as far as consumption)happened thursday afternoon. They just did not have their shit together.
So it is completely reasonable to demand that the system be improved. I know it is all very complicated stuff, but i also know that problems like this can and should be prevented.
Sorry, I just don't see how terrorists would be motivated to try to cause blackouts.
Sure, they cause inconvenience and economic losses: but these are people who want to mess with our heads. The lights go out, people walk home, a little miffed, life goes on. A major building blows up and people are quite a bit more afraid of the world.
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.
There's already plans in place to upgrade our systems over time, you can easily read about them in these articles. Bush may be a bad president but I don't see how any president should be so swaded policy wise by every incident that happens to a very large and complex country.