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Microgrids May Provide Distributed Energy
jobcello wrote to mention a BBC article discussing a new technique for power distribution that might provide electricity using a series of small "microgrids", in a manner similar to peer-to-peer software. From the article: "'This would save something like 20 to 30% of our emissions with hardly anyone knowing it ... A microgrid is a collection of small generators for a collection of users in close proximity ... It supplies heat through the household, but you already have cables in the ground, so it is easy to construct an electricity network. Then you create some sort of control network.' That network could be made into a smart grid using more sophisticated software and grid computing technologies."
the RIAA will never allow it...
Well, it would be nice to have this in that if lightning had struck one of the generators, it would affect a smaller number of people, compared to convention power lines and such.
from the post:
I believe if you'll check the documentation, that sophisticated smart-grid controller software is part of the new Office 12 release.
Hey, if TMM is an editor, that means he'll only post on here once every few years. No more ^_^ smileys and ascii art sigs!
TMM FOR EDITOR!!
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
a new technique for power distribution that might provide electricity using a series of small "microgrids", in a manner similar to peer-to-peer software.
And you can bet on countless participants finding ways to not share at a 1:1 ratio, just like on most P2P networks...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Then you create some sort of control network."
What sort, exactly; and, will it run Linux?
* * *
Why do sentences like that stick out and yell "inexperienced ding-dongs at work" ??
Considering you got such a long first post, you must be TMM himself. Hiding behind Anonymous Coward to bash an Editor while starting a "TMM for editor!" campaign for yourself? Man. I was going to mod you down, but someone got you before I did. Plus, I just had to point this out.
Bored? Browse Slashdot with a +6 modifier for Troll comme
I've been investigating solar and wind power generation for my home. I'm on an acre and a half, with well and septic. I run some web and mail servers. It would be really nice to be able to have a water supply and electricity supply independent of the grid. If this sort of grid system gets implemented, it may be incentive for me and others to go ahead with local power generation systems so that we can share. I've been reading about in-home control systems that can regulate when and how power is used so that you can immediately get a 15-30% power savings. If this is also done with these micro-grids, a cumulative savings of 50% might be possible. That would be a substantial factor in reducing entropy buildup (emmissions, heat, etc.). Cool stuff!!!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
With such an advanced soceity as we have, its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are. With the recent hurricanes, they estimate MONTHS before some places get electricity back. We have the ability to have blackouts the cover entire states.Havnt we learned from google that one huge supercomputer is not better than a million smaller computers? If each city, each neighborhood has a microgrid for power and communications that was burried and belowground, sealed against weather then our communications and electrical infastructure would remain even after huge natrual disasters such as these hurricanes that we have been so blessed with this season.
Problem with this is that 1) most DG networks are microturbines or fuels cells, the customer usually picks up the cost of the fuel 2) current natural gas prices make it expenive as heck 3) strong negative NIMBY because usually they are load (both fuel cells and microturbines) 4) high maintinence costs after a few years for membrane replacement and reconditioning of the turbine. 5) you have to hope your neighbors pay their fuel/usage bills... right now its only really practical for large customers like hospitals and factories and for utilities to reduce local overloads of their system while they wait the requisite 2 billion years to site a new substation
I have always thought that the real revolution in fuel cell tech will be with something like this. Either you can have a fuel cell powered generator at one house, or use a larger generator to power several houses.
In either case it would allow for what I believe is the greatest hinderance to this technology, true energy competition.
Think about it, your energy costs would be completely independent of where you live (except for shipping costs). We could build clean energy supply stations where they will be most effective (say the desert for example) and then contain and ship that energy anywhere using fuel cells.
There are a few hurdles to overcome such as local power monopolies and putting protections in place to make sure 1st world countries aren't just importing from poluting energy sources in 3rd world countries.
But when the technology becomes marketable, this will be a real possibility.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
People supplying energy for the people? Big electric companies will never allow it.
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My neighborhood has a set of fuel cell generators deployed at a transmssion site up the street. Runs on natural gas. It's an experiment, and probably would not be cost effective w/o state and federal grants.
[Insert pithy quote here]
3 concerns:
1) how much more/less will this cost?
2) is this going to affect, say, the data center that houses 300+ servers, and the guy down the block's electronics? who says the data center can afford the drop in power when he goes to turn on a few high-power units?
3) wouldn't this just make it that much easier for power to be cut as a whole?
"Crime fighters fight crime. Fire fighters fight fire. What do freedom fighters fight?" -George Carlin
http://www.powergen.co.uk/pub/Dom/A/ui/Residentia
They don't care, they're selling you the fuel anyway.
Deleted
When Brian Cohan created BitTorrent, I bet he had no idea that he just singlehandedly save the world!!!
/jumping up and down madly chanting "TAKE THAT RIAA!!!!!!!111!!!!11!"
Where is the dupe? Your post was a dupe to another one from last night. Please consider jumping on an MSN blog site. At this point, I would hate to see TMM get editing if for no other reason then to force you over to MSN.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Exactly! I vote for any scheme that's more robust than the current grid. However, I am not sure that anything that cause as much widespread damage as a hurricane is proofable in the slightest.
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
Your claim that one editor screws up more often is meaningless without statistical figures to back them up.
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 10 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment. Even though you've waited this much, Slashdot won't even tell you how much more you need to wait. What a waste of Slashdot server bandwidth, as you have to keep on trying to submit.
Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form, or Slashcode is poorly written. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.
It's really difficult to connect small generators together to form a power network. As any self respecting /. nerd knows, gnerators generate AC power... unlike connecting DC batteries together to form a more powerful source of power, generators have to be synched up exactly in phase. Only the more expensive generators have this capability, which usually requires them to synch up. If one generator puts out slightly more power then the other, the weaker one would act like a motor and suck the power from the stronger one. Getting them to match up and balance the load can be tricky
Tell you what, why don't you log into your account(be it TTM or whatever) , put your money where your mouth is by presenting justifiable evidences, and get beatdown like a man.
If you refuse, then stop trying to force other drink your special Kool Aids; we don't need idiots who chant the same PR for every story.
This seems somewhat far-fetched to me.
From what I remember of physics in highschool, the production and transport of electricity is much more efficient when it is done in high volume with high voltages. In a small grid, you'd lose the benefits of that efficiency. It would also require separate maintenance crews, hardware, etc.
It would also raise concerns about standardization. Will the product I just purchased work on a grid down the street? Would you have to replace your appliances when you moved? The biggest benefit of consolitation is, imo, that you don't have to ask these questions. The systems are large enough to span areas well beyond the majority of general user's environments and thus there are few, if any compatability issues (i.e. Currently, if you leave the country, you might need to change your plug type / voltage, but anywhere in the country it should be the same).
Interruption also raises an issue. I'm inclined to think that a larger factility is easier to keep in operation because it's consolidated and more easily accessed by technicians / engineers / etc.
There are some benefits.
Solar power is made feasible, at least partially, in this case. I've always wondered why we don't all just have solar panels on our houses and batteries in the basements. I suppose that living in Southern California gives me a bit of a bias in terms of estimating the feasibility of such a system, but it certainly seems more reasonable than burning copious amounts of fossil fuels.
There are also other "alternative" power sources listed in the article, although it seems to me that large-scale, consolidated power production is still superior, given that the production facilities are clean.
Having grids separated increases security of those facilities in a disaster as there is no single facility whose compromise would cause a power loss to an entire large grid. With small grids, even if your grid goes down, surrounding grids should still be operational. That does, however, raise concerns about maintenance and repair--who's doing it and when?
Why not nuclear?
Nuclear energy is some of the cleanest and most efficient energy production available. Even with the waste being very toxic, its concentration levels are high. It is arguably easier to control the pollution from nuclear by-products than from a coal power plant. In a well-maintained and operated plant, there is virtually no risk of a meltdown, and I'm sure modern technology can be used to further increase the safety of nuclear power.
Chernobyl is the bloody poster-child of anti-nuclear groups, but that's certainly not par for the course in terms of nuclear power. San Onofre is down here in SoCal, and I dare say we have any mutated sea bass or deathclaw walking around. ;)
My vote is for nuclear, hydroelectic, and other efficient, clean, large-scale power sources, or for solar panels on my roof. It'll be interesting to see how this issue plays out.
suggested this oh quite a while ago....
back in the day we didnt have no old school
an open system would follow an open society and *all* could benefit - wouldn't that be a nice/new way to look at rebuilding of places like NO, and other inner city places. hopeful perhaps, but it'd be a nice application and solve may of society's (current) ills.
fak3r.com
...is curently in space heating and hot water. Solar PV will catch up in a few years with low-silicon panels and mini CPV arrays, but other than the panels which will eventually come back down after the shortage ends, the grid-tie components are for the most part incredibly overpriced.
Even with the price gouging that goes on in the home power industry, though, you can still make solar hot water pay back in a few short years... and of course solar air daytime space heating is extremely cheap since DIY is for some weird reason the only real option available. Horizontal geothermal heat/cool banking ("slinky coils") can self-finance on a home equity loan with their power savings, if you are in the right climate... best to have a pro do a site survey before trying to crunch the numbers on a heat pump system, though.
It's astounding how much of the electricity and fuel we use is just turned straight to heat (or cold), and since heat/cold is much easier to collect/store than electricity, that's where the savings are to be had.
(Though a space heater that ran the current through a massive BOINC parrallel computing array might be an interesting way to avoid "wasting" electricity when heating with it.)
Someone had to do it.
Actually, BitTorrent was created by Bram Cohen (not Brian). You can find his website here.
I keep hearing that 1 large electric plant is better to power transportation than a million tiny gasoline powered generators. In fact, I hear that in here quite regularly.
Why the dichotomy?
Crack, my friend. Mods on crack.
Indeed, how is it relevant at all to this discussion? I suppose maybe, just possibly, the electricity on government owned grids could possibly be used to power a computer which could possibly have a government keylogger which could possibly be infringing on privacy, but come on...
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Microgrids cannot get very big unless the infrastructure gets much better. The great blackout of August 2003 was caused by one power plant screwing up and then all the other plants powering down to protect their networks. These are huge power plants we are talking about. Imagine one guy who didn't maintain his generator wiping out the microgrid every day!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
It's at least as relevant as the various comments about Microsoft Office, the RIAA, and various individual's dogs. And it's quite a bit more true.
Mutant Freaks of Nature: "Frighteningly Addictive"
Nice idea - I have heard that transmission takes about 20-30% of our electrical output (especially when California gets its electricity from the Northern Oregon border, if not even farther away) - so anything to move the generation plant closer to the people that actually use the electricity would be a huge benefit.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
what is up with this distributed server thing . . windows vista . . power companies . .
Oh well . . I guess individuality is over-rated anyway.
Resistance is futile.
I thought the reason we built big power plants was that:
1: By putting all your eggs in one basket and Watching That Basket, reliability was increased.
2: Many small generators would cost more and not be as efficient as one big generator, even allowing for larger transmission line losses.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...a Beowulf cluster of... oh wait, this is a Beowulf cluster ;-p
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Sounds interesting, but the idea in the article seems to be moving electric generation to houses so that they can take advantage of the waste heat that electric generation always entails. Problem is, where I live, it's 104F (40C) outside today (September 25). So tell me again why I'd want waste heat?
Around here, the peak power usage is in the summer, at which time this technology would do more harm than good. Power plants have to be built to handle the peak power usage, so the electric company would have to build just the same capacity as they do now, and electricity prices would remain the same.
I could use a system like this in the winter, and it would be efficient then, but given that I could probably only use it like 4 months out of the year, it seems like a large investment for not very much return. So, it would probalby be marginally better for the environment, but it's going to be a lot more expensive. I would probably be much better off financially if I were to just get a wood stove or something that makes it more efficient to heat the house during the few short months when I actually need to worry about it.
Sure it'll protect from hurricanes if it's underground, but what about earthquakes and underground monsters?
1729 = 9^3 + 10^3 = 1^3 + 12^3
This is all well and good, but how do you deal with situations when all nodes demand power, NOW? Like during winter for heating, or during summer for aircon? Power distribution companies have learned to anticipate demand for things like big sports games (tv) and everyone using their kettles in the morning. Will a p2p network be able to deal with such challenges as well?
A company in Australia (http://www.cfcl.com.au/) (and a couple of others) are developing ceramic fuel cells.
Natural gas + O2 = electriicity + high temp waste heat that can heat your water.
Seriously, that seems to be the key here. You will need controllers to synchronize all the generation, but once you do that, then each generator is just like the disks in a RAID array. They can be inexpensive and not super reliable, thereby reducing costs.
The efficiency issues I believe are being overemphasized. Yes, you want high voltage for long distances. But the whole idea here is that you are doing mostly local generation of power, so running power to a few of your neighbor's houses doesn't incur nearly the penalty that you'd get from running the same power many miles. And people often forget that even your efficient power company puts the transformer on a local pole or box in your neighborhood. So the idea actually makes a lot of sense.
Yet none have used to term "Peer-to-Power". I'm ashamed of you Slashdotters, and your lack of obvious punnery.
Actually, in Germany we have laws to support the development of this kind of decentralized power generation. If you've got solar panels on your roof, the electricity company is forced to buy any surplus energy from you at a price that is higher than the one regular customers pay for the electricity.
This is financed by a special tax on all energy called Ökosteuer (Steuer = tax)
I've already wondered if this system couldn't be abused. For example you could store some energy in large accumulators or fuel cells at night, and return them to the grid during the day, pretending it's photovoltaic energy. I'm not sure though, which efficiency you would need to actually profit from this.
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this post has been generated automatically
Google for "Sunny Boy inverter" and "Windy Boy inverter" if you want confirmation.
The reasons are many and varied and mostly center on physics. If you look at best case scenarios with current off the shelf technology and the efficiencies as you scale up, there's a sweet spot where the size versus distribution versus etc. all reaches an optimum level. Our present system is much closer to that sweet spot than microgrids or the other end of the spectrum, one giant planet-wide power station.
We could use high temperature superconductors, fission reactors and with fusion later when they get it to work, and a lot of clearing of the way by the federal government for deployment which is now held up by people using the environment as a smokescreen when what it comes down to is a lot of NIMBY and more to the point a bountiful opportunity for pitiful and pathetic unimportant people to make themselves feel important.
I live in a state where every highway project takes years longer and millions more because the enviros hold up everything *after* the damage is already done until they've milked out the publicity for themselves and finally it gets done in the end and there was no change and nothing saved in terms of environment and plenty of time and money wasted. All for their inane ego festivals.
Right now those same imbeciles are doing everything they can to keep the power transmission companies from fixing outdated and antiquated transmission lines and equipment which first keeps efficiency low and cost of the power transmission high, second it keeps jacking up the danger of massive local outages every year, third it increases the danger to the workers who maintain the system, fourth it increases the chance of creating a regional chain reaction outage, and fifth it increases the chance of a catastrophic failure on one of the big circuits going through the woods and starting a fire.
They are also trying everything they can do to prevent us from tying into regional grids through the west side of CT into New York and across the sound to Long Island. And lastly doing all they can to stand in the way of a gas tanker and pipeline facility. The sanity of putting liquid natural gas ships more than ten miles offshore is obvious in this new age of mega-terrorism and conversely the insanity of making the tankers put into ports near population centers equally obvious. They just don't care. It's all about them.
The best thing we can do with our end of things as consumers is insulate, make efficient use of what we consumer, and use solar electric, thermal, and hydro *where* economical and efficient on our homes. When superconductive storage systems finally come around, we can store the energy compactly that way onsite and until then, unless we want to deal with the danger of poisonous battery chemicals and five thousand pounds of them per home, we're better off simply having a system where we use the energy we generate first and the main grid's power secondly.
But generators aren't going to cut it. We're going from a few hundred stations to a few million and with less efficiency and more pollution and no inspection. Tack on inspection and you can add the psycho enviro leftists to the far right terrorist under every bed paranoids as one more group pushing us closer to a police state; no way would they let fossil fuel generators increase like that without mandating mandatory inspections on your property at any time for any or no reason with no prior notice and reserve the right to shut you down whenever they felt like it.
I don't see a need to create a massive new intrusion on our rights. Like I said, insulate, make efficient use, be efficient in generation where it is fitting to generate it yourself.
Fittingly a lot of the enviros of today were the Mother Earth News types of twenty-five years ago advocating that we all use wood and coal stoves, forge and smelt our own metals, and operate pig farms to feed methane stills. Their former zeal for old low tech is utterly incompatible with their stated beliefs of today. Much like the pictures of them in mullets, gold chains, and neon orange leisure suits were twenty-five years ago.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
It's true that a small generator is never going to get close to the 57% efficiency you can achieve with a gas-fired combined-cycle powerplant. It's also true that there are literally millions of things out there which are turning fuel into heat for the sake of the heat, and any electricity they might generate is gravy. Even 20% efficiency (about what the Climate Energy LLC. home cogeneration unit is supposed to get, and a long way from the best possible) is 20% more than a gas furnace gets.
If you can combine this efficiency with smart management which is e.g. able to keep isolated islands of the grid powered when there are widespread failures (think 8/14/03, and you'll need some frequency-adjustment command and control to resync before reconnecting to the grid), you can achieve greater efficiency and far higher net reliability than we "enjoy" today.
Your absolutely right!
These electric power companies need to stop messing around and wave their magic wands to rebuild the PHYSICAL infrastructure they have spent a 100 years building up with the lessons learned from a company that's been around for 7 years.
Perhaps IBM can supply them some fairy dust too.
The utilities will never allow it. Seriously, this is one of their worst nightmares, and one of the major reasons that they consistently oppose programs that promote distributed renewable. They are, for the most part, regulated monopolies. Their political power derives from the fact that, no matter how much they suck, they are the only game in town. Change that, and they start to become superfluous. And they know it.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
But in the States, a pole-mounted transformer may serve only two or threee homes. Here, the technical issues resulting from bridging multiple transformers might make the prospect of a neighborhood-wide grid less economically feasible.
I really like the possibility that this system would introduce some resiliency (security) into the powergrid, but it won't be replacing the entire grid. Huge powerplants will never disappear, we need water and nuclear power. It simply wouldn't be as efficient to move everything to a tiny scale.
Heh, no. Anarchy is "fend for yourself however you can". Communism is about uniformity and agreement.
Communism is the accurate term here.
In southern California paybacks on solar installations of 4 years have been achieved (This includes government subsidies). That is after 4 years the system makes you money. 8 is more common, but 4 has been achieved. Assuming you own your own house and plan to live there for a few years, then you should start doing site surveys and otherwise checking the math to see if it really can work out for you.
Of course there are many variables that I don't know. It is possible that your home in California actually would have a longer payback than mine in Minnesota. (For instance if you live in a valley surrounded by mountains) If you don't plan on living there for much longer you won't get the cost of your system paid back when you sell. If you are unwilling to do any basic maintenance the system could break down before you get it working. (Just a small list of reasons why this might not be a good idea, but you should check it out.)
.....its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are....
Why would the distributed generating systems be less frail? With the possible exception of solar generation, the primary energy to run the generator would still have to come from some external source. In most cases that would still be fossil fuels brought in by some sort of transport system. That transport system would still be subject to disruption by large scale disasters. The generators in the hospitals in New Orleans ran out of fuel and there was no way to re-supply them because of the disrupted transport system.
The main advantage of the distributed generation systems is the fact that the heat that is now wasted in distant power plants would be available to the customers. Thousands or even millions of small mechanical generators would likely require more total man hours for maintenance than the present electrical grids. In the absence of disruptive events, most of the non-mechanical transmission components are much more reliable than millions of mechanical generators. Pollution control is also more costly and technologically challenging for millions of micro-generators than a few hundred huge power plants. Maybe, if or when fuel cells become economical, that could change. Even then renewable power generated in sunny deserts or windy places and hydro doesn't mess up the environment anywhere near as much as the consumption of fossil fuels even in fuel cells. Hydrogen is not an energy source, only an energy carrier.
All theory is gray
Please get a clue. The only generators that approach that efficiency are combined cycle. Which are hellishly complicated.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Actually the Mother Earth News types of 25 years ago where exactly the same as they were now: hypocrites who didn't realize that their actions where hypocritical. They were always in favor of pollution restrictions on everything, and being self sufficient on your own wood heat. Both at once.
I remember (Just before the original mother went out of business) their shock when they realized that their efforts to prevent pollution had reached the point where their beloved woodstove was no illegal to make.
In otherwords they were like everyone else. I want to make the world a better place, so long as it doesn't effect me in any way. (Think greenpeace bumpersticker on a SUV)
This statistic isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since in many cases there is simply nothing left to restore power to.
If each city, each neighborhood has a microgrid for power and communications that was burried and belowground...
This is not likely to happen because underground lines cost more and don't last as long as their over-head equivalents. This combined with the fact that the government is continually requiring utilities to invest less money into their grids and you can begin to see why alot of underground services are beginning to be put overhead once again.
Actually, lightning would wipe out an under ground system, so such a system wouldn't really be any more secure from natural disasters than the over head system. Realize, too, that it is much faster to locate problems with over-head lines than it is to track down places where underground cabling has failed.
"Our present system is much closer to that sweet spot than microgrids or the other end of the spectrum, one giant planet-wide power station"
Actually a continent-wide power station could work, though it should not generate electricity directly (due to transmission losses over continental distances). Just build a giant spherical steel furnace, a mile or three in diameter, and drop hydrogen bombs into it 2 to 5 times per second. Use the heat to run a catalytic reaction which turns air, water, and carbon into methane. Pipe that around to all those existing natural gas generators, or to local fuel cells. No wait, divert some of the heat to run a similar catalytic reaction to generate ethanol, to run vehicles, and to drink.
Benefits: energy independance, no pollution (well, the furnace gets radioactive after a while, but f--k it, that's all localized), and best of all, think of who it would piss off! I would vote for it just so I could watch the dumbass demonstrations against it on C-Span (great stoopid-liberal anti-war anti-isreal anti-Bush demo on yesterday by the way, quite entertaining as background noise while I prepared dinner).
A 2 Hz system would require the capacity to manufacture 63,115,200 H-bombs per year. That capacity would improve our national security, and piss off nitwits even more. Bonus! Okay, that's probably going to require too much plutonium to actually make. So we'd need to build a fission-free ignition system, probably using ginormous particle beam cannons. The hot-swap spares could double as an antimissile system with suitable beam diversion equipment in place. In terms of pissoff value, triple-bonus!
-- MIRV
I may not be from this planet.On other planets, every one has a beach home and an inland home.The homes hexagonal they are layered and fit togeather to form long strait lines .The roofs are flat and slope to the center to hold water.they have personal meglev cars that ride on tracks that are part of the roof system.There are seperate smaller meglev cars that are used only for shipping.The homes form a continuos line allong the coast.They are on stilts in areas that may flood.Their indland homes are located 30 miles inland and are also conected in a line parallel to the coast with a transportation system on the roof.
They save time and energy by combining a tranportation system with a structuraly sound housing system.They are saving time and energy by using a tranportation system that is faster,lighter and safer .
The amazing part is that it was all built from the debris that was left behind from natural disasters, such as hurricanes and planetquakes.
The system is powered by wave,wind,solar and nuk subs stationed five miles offshore.There is no waisted electricity.When there is a shortage shipping is slowed down in short increments to offset any shortage.The subs can also be moved to areas of need.The subs can also be moved out of harms way.
I have question about grammer?
With such an advanced soceity as we have, its amazing how frail and utterly devistatable our communications and electrical utilies are.
Not really.
We may be advanced as a society, but the infastructure these services run on isn't. Remember, the NYC blackout was caused by a failure of the power grid, a failure attributable to lack of maintenance on the grid. During the blackout, the news organizations filled some of their round-the-clock-coverage time talking about the city's power grid and how this was built on top of that and that and that some of the lines were literally a hundred years old.
Why wasn't this maintenance being kept up? Obviously because every dollar not spent on maintenance can be added to the company's profit line. Lots of remote areas of the country were brought telephone and electric services with help from federal subsidy or low interest loans by the government decades ago, so it might be questionable how much utilities could actually afford proper maintenance of the system without rate hikes. Every board of the utility does the same thing, putting off or ignoring expensive maintenance, assuming things will keep humming along (at least until they move on to greener pastures, then their sucessors can deal with it). Then one day it does crash, then the utility suddenly finds itself caught when people realize all the work that's needed. Last I heard, the New York power conglomerates were asking the federal government for a bailout to pay for all the maintenance they've been dodging. So they skimp to line their pockets, and we the taxpayers pay for their mistakes. I hope the government grants them a LOAN personally.
Prediction: The government WILL give them the bailout. Electricty is too important in our modern society to let the biggest city's lines go dead. Granting a loan would cause the power company's stock to fall down the shithole under the weight of all that debt and the company would collapse.
You can't use waste heat to do work. That's why it's called waste heat. The engine that burns the fuel is already a heat engine, optimized for the conditions in which it is expected to operate. The stirling engine is another form of heat engine which is claimed by many proponents to be "greater than 90% efficient" or somesuch. If a hard number is specified, it most likely means "90% as efficient as the ideal heat engine: the Carnot cycle.
so the efficiency of a "90% efficient" stirling engine would be (.9)*(1-Tc/Th). where Tc (heat sink/cold source) and Th (heat source) are expressed in absolute temperature units (Kelvin or Rankine). But it gets worse. The stirling engine approaches this by approximating the Carnot cycle as closely as practical. The Carnot cycle will extract the greatest amount of useful work from any temperature differential, but one complete cycle is longer than the life of the universe. Stirlings, though efficient in principle, are generally low-power machines. The big advantage of a stirling engine afaik is simplicity. The minimum number of moving parts is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 so they could concievably be very reliable and easy to repair for remote locations.
Using two engines to extract energy from a single source is wasteful. The output of the first engine is at it's Tcold temperature. The second engine will impede the rejection of heat and raise the Tcold for the first engine, while extracting the leftovers at a much lower efficiency than the first (and the energy the first engine doesn't generate as a result of higher Tcold will be extracted at lower efficiency as well) unless the first engine was horribly poorly designed. In which case, the second engine should've been the first to begin with.
--
"If your plan 'B' is better than your plan 'A' then you've got your plans in the wrong order"
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Also, you set it up so that people can see whether they're making or losing money, which may be a powerful enough motivator to get people to turn off enough lights to get the meter to run backwards.
Anyone thought about DC in this sort of system?
At my university (University of Colorado at Boulder), we have an on-campus 33MW power plant. Waste heat from the plant is piped around campus to heat buildings, and the electricity generated is enough to power the campus, with 8MW left over that is sold to the grid. The facility also produces chilled water through a massive vapor-phase system that is used to cool the physics and other nearby buildings.
sorta. Edison originally had his generators intalled in the cities and used cogeneration to sell the waste heat and steam (for cooling) to nearby buildings. This was the case for a while until some enterprising mono'poo'lists engineered the govenerment 'mad'nated utility mono'poo'ly. Generation was moved to the countryside; we are now so used to this, we have a hard time imagining otherwise. The real new invention is a smarter power distribution grid. The old grid simply flowed power downstream to the pull created by the demand. With the new Grid, power is more deliberately distributed.
Treehugger.com has an aritcle on a low emmissions wood burning oven: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/09/glutos_low _emis.php
A new way to bill people for power. Whew! Thank goodness. For a moment there I thought we were talking about home electric on a per-home basis with no electric bill.
remember those old TV commericals, from back when there were only 3 channels...
Does anyone on this thread know anything about how much power is required to power cell phone handset transmissions or how power relates to antenna gain?