Slashdot Mirror
Superconducting Power Grid Launches In New York
EmagGeek writes "IEEE is running a story about a new superconducting power grid that was energized in April in New York State. The lines operate at 138kV and are cooled to 65-75K to maintain superconductivity. These lines are run underground and can carry 150 times more electricity than copper lines of the same cross section. The project is funded with taxpayer dollars through the Department of Energy."
A related story at MarketWatch indicates that this is part of a large-scale effort to upgrade aging infrastructure.
If I could get my pc on the cooling network..... mmmmmm, 65K. Should be enough for anybody!
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
I am going to go find a place where these lines aren't underground and see if I can get my neodymium magnets to levitate on it. Maybe even play some superconducting variant of hockey...
Besides economics, another advantage the company is touting is that the cables can prevent fault currents, surges that are caused by grid-scale short circuits. Superconductors have an inherent current-limiting ability in that if the current increases past a certain threshold, they lose their superconducting abilities and become normally resistive, damping the current.
Hmm, interesting, but there's more. simply follow the links in TFA and you'll come to these:
"So there's been a stir over the disclosure that AMSC is under investigation by the office of Representative John Dingell, a Democratic congressman from Michigan, one of the most influential U.S. legislators, and an aggressive inquisitor."
"The incident that aroused Dingell's suspicions was the award in 2006 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of a multi-million dollar no-bid contract to AMSC to develop and test what it's calling Secure Super Grids in New York City. Working with the local utility Consolidated Edison Co., AMSC plans to develop and install superconducting cables that would connect substations in a much tighter mesh, so that if stations or feeder cables fail, power can be instantly rerouted. Feeder cable failures were implicated in the 1999 and 2006 New York City neighborhood blackouts."
Wow, I didn't know the DHS was responsible for awarding no-bid contracts to energy interests. There ain't no business like no-bidness!
With the influx of superconducting articles I got a pretty good feel of "hight temperature" superconducting being vaporware. It's cool that we're seeing real world applications now. TFA even tries to trick you into not believing the summary by saying they were "commissioned", but if I read correctly they mean "was put on the power grid" by commissioned, not "was approved to be built."
This article talks a lot about costs but doesn't cite any numbers. A 500 KV distribution line costs about $1 million per mile. What is the cost of these superconducting lines per mile? And from what I've heard the energy savings from using superconducting lines are about twice that what it takes to refrigerate the lines. HVDC distribution can have better energy savings than that without the hassle. This really seems like a waste of money.
What happens when a 'Terrorist' finds a way to purge/rupture the coolant? *POOF*
What happens if lightning directly strikes the conductor's coolant jacket? Could that cause a coolant jacket leak?
So now they can blackout even faster lol. Remember the 1976 blackout or whatever? Yeah, they still haven't fixed the system's logic that caused that. If anything this makes it worse, although more efficient transmission is always good. But that of course makes me wanna wonder how much energy it takes to keep it cooled that low indefinitely. It is cooled by some sort of energy like a compressor or something, right?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Maybe the US will now leapfrog from an antiquated power distribution system to the most advanced in the world. Maybe. One positive aspect of this is the reduction of energy loss due to the superconductivity. This may also allow long distance lines to be run (even though the cooling will be a problem) which might help balance out the grid when needed.
According to Wikipedia, super conducting cables will use roughly half the energy saved for cooling, but since losses are around 7%, that's still a rather high amount of energy saved.
If I'm reading this article correctly, American Superconductor is in the process of making a 50 meter prototype to be completed before the end of the year. Next year through 2010, they'll construct a 300 meter span that will connect two substations on Manhattan Island.
To a large extent good old passive wires make for quite a robust system.
However with the addition of all the support equipment necessary for LN2, doesn't this make for a step
backward in terms of reliability ?
Decentralized power production, e.g., solar, still seems like a more worthwhile idea to me.
Absolute statements are never true
These will go perfect with a 150x increase in power plant construction!
that this may be enough power to run the machines that we will play Duke Nukem Forever on.
We need to move towards generating electricity locally, instead of trying to generate it all in one place and then move it to where needed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
how much energy does it take to cool those lines to that insanely cold value? In a standard copper line the value is zero: we don't cool them... So the cooling of the line from generator to user must be very energy efficient. Like, a lot. Somehow, given what I know of Thermodynamics, I kind of have my doubts this is of any real value. I could be wrong, but my back of te nvelope calculations tell me this is a boondoggle- i.e. something right up the poop shoot for halliburton.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Presumably a superconducting cable wastes less power than a copper one. Has anyone estimated how much energy the USA would save if, for the sake of argument, all the grid used superconductor cables like the ones in this article?
So what is the typical cost per year to keep a mile of 500 KV line running?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
in the lab you get things cold by pouring liquid nitrogen on them; that doesn't seem feasible w/ miles of line, so what's the method ? peltiers ?
How much is saved by carrying 150x as much vs. the cost of refrigerating the conduits to 65K?
Last I checked, refrigeration was not an especially efficient process, especially with large exposed surface areas such as a long series of wires.
But that's ok, it's just 65 Kelvin, can't be that cold, it's a double-digit number just like we're used to, just a K instead of and F or a C.
65K is -340F fer fucks sake! That underground wire's surroundings average about 50F, so it's cooled by a matter of 390F to get it to superconducting levels!
Heating it is much easier with well established industrial componentry. Could you imagine heating a lengthy wire by 390F to 440F 24/7 just to get better conductivity? Cooling it to 65K requires customized experimental cryogenic gear costing WAY more!
There is no way the superconductivity savings outweigh the costs of refrigerating the line. Any reasonable scientist would have determined this on paper long before implementation. This is clearly some ridiculously over-privileged geek's science fair project at best.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Has anybody thought that this project might be, at least partly, about building SDI defense to cities? If you want to take ballistic missiles with laser then that laser needs enormous amounts of energy. Having an superconducting power grid would allow routing of the needed energy to the laser system... and hey, if this world would be a game of Civilization, New York along with Washington, would be the first places to have the SDI defense city improvement :)
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
This is obvious proof that those back-lab R&D experiments aren't just the realm of fanciful experiments but also produce real world applications. Of course history is laden (like a swallow) with plenty of examples about this. However, it always makes me feel warm and fuzzy to see countless hours of lab coats getting applied to help humanity,.
ConEd (NYC's electric supplier) got approvale for a 23% rate increase yesterday
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Basically, one long, insulated pipe filled with liquid nitrogen, with the superconducting cables running through the middle.
And WTF is with your adding spaces before your question marks? Did you fail English or something?
how much energy does it cost to keep them so cool?
Not as much as you may think.
The whole point of using super conductors is that their resistance is incredibly low, almost 0 ohm. They are thus highly efficient and don't lose much energy into heat through Joule effect, compared to classical conductors used in regular power lines. They will naturally stay cool.
So it costs some significant amount of power to cool them down to their working temperature, but once there, the super conductors keep their temperature almost for free, you only have to make up for what is lost because of the insulation.
Similar superconductors are used in the high-field super-magnet inside medial MRI machines. And those machine doesn't need a whole nuclear plant's worth of energy to keep them cool.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The added logistical complexity to keep the low temperature on the whole network will do it all for you.
As I said a couple of threads above, the whole point of using superconductors is that they have almost 0 ohm resistance. They can't heat up through Joule effect. They keep cool for free.
You only have to make up for whats lost through the insulation. That's it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What would happen if the Fremont power line nest was replaced by 3 underground superconductors? 1000 houses would suddenly appear from under the wires & jump to $5 million. For the first time in 50 years, Automall Pkwy residents could see the sky.
You'll love the superconducting lines that can actually get that energy out of the desert. Conventional lines do not have the capacity to go extremely long distances.
God spoke to me.
I must misunderstand something. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconductor) says
"The simplest method to measure the electrical resistance of a sample of some material is to place it in an electrical circuit in series with a current source I and measure the resulting voltage V across the sample. The resistance of the sample is given by Ohm's law as R = V/I. If the voltage is zero, this means that the resistance is zero and that the sample is in the superconducting state."
So, no voltage implies no resistance implies superconductivity. But the reverse isn't true? We have a cable that has superconductivity yet still has voltage?
Being near high tension lines tend to cause interference in radio signals. More static, etc. This has almost zero resistance. So, does that mean less interference? In addition, by putting "receivers" close to high-tension lines, you can take energy from it. What is interesting is that it causes local heating on the lines. So, can somebody use some copper coils to do the same to these? If so, then it could be used to increase local heat to the point of causing a cascade loss; i.e. here is a way to bring down a line, and causes a massive release of energy. Is this true?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You are measuring the difference of electrical potential (voltage) on both ends of the suposedly super conducting sample since it is super conducting there is no difference --> voltage = zero ("means nothing was lost through resistance"). You can never measure a voltage over both ends of a super conductor. (You can measure zero voltage over a material with resisting properties only if the current flowing trough it is zero, too)
So, no voltage implies no resistance implies superconductivity. But the reverse isn't true? We have a cable that has superconductivity yet still has voltage?
There is a potential difference between the cable and ground because the cable is insulated from ground, ie, there is no superconductor to ground.
There is no potential difference along the cable because it has no resistance.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Supercooled water mains!
Wait...
WTH is a "nuclear reactor scramble"? Wikipedia sheds no light, and not even Google was my friend. In fact, your /. post is the only
Google hit for that exact phrase. (I suppose my post will be added to
that list soon.:) )
Excuse me, but it's a _transmission line_, miles long. Of course the voltage differs at various points along its length, bound to the magnetic fields along its lengths as well carrying the EM transmission.
Just because it's 0 resistance does not mean it is 0 impedance: remember this especially when working with long leads of any sort.
Yes, point taken.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There's still plenty of heat from the environment and that's why cooling is needed. The hotter the environment, the worse the thermal insulation, and the longer the power cable, the more energy you need to spend on cooling.
I hate to nitpick because I am sure they are referring to load voltage or some equivalent voltage, but superconductors by definition carry current at ZERO voltage otherwise they would not be superconducting now would they. Ok they still could have some supercurrent for non zero voltages.
SUPERCONDUCTING BPL!
Disclaimer: Evolution comes with NO WARRANTY, except for the IMPLIED WARRANTY of FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
If high tension wires can cause cancer or other problems, what about superconducting cables that transmit 150 times as much power?
Even though the conductors may contribute zero heat energy, it still costs a lot to keep them cooled.
A cable is a long thin tube buried under ground. It has a tremendous surface area. Heat leaks in from the ambient surroundings.
The article mentions the cost of cooling, but it did not give a figure. It is possible, that the energy consumed for cooling exceeds the energy losses in a non-superconducting cable of the same capacity.
Also, with a superconducting cable, one must include the cooling system's failure rate and the failure rate of the cooling system's power supply in reliability calculations. The power supply, of course, does not run at 138 KV.
Wait, so in the future, instead of throwing ice cubes to the oceans to reduce global warming, we will be running power grids? I hope they don't cause another ice age after freezing the poor underground creatures :(
The backhoe.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
A centralized solar array would be in the ballpark of an orbital elevator as a terrorist target.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
resistance produces a CHANGE in voltage between its two ends. If you have no resistance, then the voltage on the other end of the wire is the same as on the first end. "the resulting voltage V across the sample", they mean the difference in voltage from end to end.
This is also called "voltage drop". If a conductor's voltage drop is zero, then it has zero resistance. This is of course you are running a current through it. Because if "i" (current) is zero, then everything else is going to be zero also. e=i*r, (voltage=current x resistance) so r=e/i. Not possible to measure when i=0. This is why a nonzero current is required for the test.
Further, when current passes across a conductor (or a load, or whatever) it can dump some of its power. The more resistance in the load or conductor, higher the voltage drop. The higher the voltage drop, the more power is eaten up. If two loads are put in series, and you can reduce one load to zero resistance, the other load takes on the entire available voltage drop, and therefore you deliver 100% of your power to the load you want to be using the power. (the power grid)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ok, so they are touting as an advantage that at a certain maximum current, resistance sets in. Now take a look at the pictures of the fat copper cable with big area and of excellent heat-conduction and the tiny superconducting cable. Can you imagine what happens when resistance strikes at high current? The cable will heat. Boy will it heat. It will pretty much evaporate, and the liquid nitrogen is not exactly going to stay liquid either.
This sounds like one heck of an explosive and expensive fuse to have for limiting current.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Superconductor? What? Wait a minute, when did the Man of Steel get a job at the railroad?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I'm waiting for enough of these that these networks could be used, along with their switching systems, as calculating engines. Why?
So I can want a beowulf cluster of these, of course.
*ducks*
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Okay, from the top. ., and doing these lines might not be all that big a deal in some ways.
It looks like my impression of what those tanks were for was wrong. Kinda. We've seen enough references in this thread to cooling systems for power lines, and especially to the emergency cooling problems when something goes wrong, that I suspect that this is part of what I was hearing about.
But, of course, I always made it clear that I wasn't sure. You know, like when I wrote: Because, iirc, many of the . .
I never thought that this was a trivial problem. More importantly, I never *said* that this was a trivial problem. In fact, if you look around this thread you'll find something like four or five comments by me saying things like "wow, we really need some numbers before we can even estimate what this means" and "my, this sounds mighty complicated to me; we're going to have issues."
Nothing I wrote was "silly", nor something that would only be said by an ignorant 14 year old, let alone "pulled from nether regions" of anything, fuck you very much.
As for your basic point about how expensive cooling pipes can be, see my later post. I've now looked at the site linked to higher up in this thread and their info about what I suspect is the kind of vacuum-jacket pipe you seem to think is the only "real" option and I say again, you have no fucking clue whatsover. Just as I suspected, you are thinking of high-precision, lab quality and/or food-safe quality equipment meant to run to totally different specs than a case like this would require. Frankly, as I pointed out above, with a budget like this, on a scale like this, you could damn near just keep a few thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen pouring into each mile of pipe every day and if you could handle the venting somehow, it just wouldn't matter. Am I a cryogenics expert? No, but you might be surprised how much I do know about such things and how carefully thought out my conclusions here are. But then I'm used to operating in the world of doing very ambitious things on a tiny budget with whatever the frack works. Which is, I guess, appropriate for a guy who went to a school that had its own particle accelerator. Or used to live in a group house with its own machine shop, chemistry lab and (this was the eighties) minicomputer link.
Not to mention that I don't think you have any idea at all what constitutes "expensive" or "complex" relative to a project like this. Pipe costs, say, a hundred dollars a foot? Whatever. Half a million dollars per mile just isn't serious money in a case like this.
So, bottom line, you were sorta right about one particular and utterly idiotic about your conclusions. Like NASA engineers claiming that Virgin or Rutan's people can't possibly get work done for those budgets, you need to step out of your world and see how the rest of us are doing things.
Try it; you might like it.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
how much energy does it take to cool those lines to that insanely cold value? In a standard copper line the value is zero: we don't cool them...
Actually, this is really neat; New York City is a special case. --I have a friend who visited recently and saw a work crew doing something with a huge smoking excavation in the middle of downtown. The smoke was liquid nitrogen boiling off. My friend, being curious, asked what was going on, and the reply was that they were cooling the electric grid. He did some research and found out that certain sections of the New York City power grid, installed many decades ago, is simply not robust enough to deal with the vast amount of electricity being pulled through them today. The short term solution has been to rig them with system which continually bathes the key hot spots with liquid nitrogen 24/7 to keep the conductors from melting down and the whole system from failing.
When I saw this article I thought, "Ah, so they finally managed to find a solution to that problem. Good for them! They must have been really desperate to embrace such a new and expensive technology."
-FL
From TFA:
The Department of Homeland Security provided a grant for that project, which is expected to be operating by 2010.
WTF is the Dept of Homeland Security doing funding such a project? Sure, power grids are an attractive target for terrorists, but the consequences of an outage are not that serious. Unless you happen to be a politician and can't tolerate your New York City constituents sitting in a hot apartment for a few hours, that is.
In fact, such a high capacity line might make a more attractive target for an attack. Conventional grid systems are designed to be redundant and, with a limited capacity on each circuit, one outage (much more likely to be a plain old fault than an al Qaida attack) takes out a relatively small amount of capacity. A single superconducting feeder carrying a much larger load will be more difficult to reroute.
Additionally, the expense, complexity and delicacy of such a system might make it much easier to damage. Knock out the coolant supply ad the system goes down. I don't even want to know how much more complex it will be to splice this stuff than a standard polymer jacketed aluminum underground cable.
Have gnu, will travel.
I know because the magnetic field they create has not changed.
High voltage AC transmission lines are famously inductive, such that transmission line workers where metal mesh in their suits so they don't get the weird feeling of the oscilating magnetic field through their bodies.
That's wild... it is news to me that humans are able to directly perceive even very strong magnetic fields. For example, I don't think patients feel anything when undergoing an MRI procedure. Can you cite a source for this information? Thanks
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The American Superconductor CEO asserts that "in the long run, the cost of superconductor transmission cables will be below that of adding new aboveground copper power lines," but does anyone know of any independent studies which say this can be cost-effective?
What's in the composition of these cables which makes them a high-temperature superconductor? TFA says they are coated with silver, and the next-generation cables will be coated with copper, but neither of these metals are high-temp superconductors. The cable's core must be made of something more exotic.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductivity These HTSC have strange crystal structures, some common ones are Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide and Bismuth Strontium Calcium Copper Oxide. The main problems with these are that they are ceramic, which makes it very difficult to make wires out of them, as they are not malleable, just brittle. To combat this, the wires are multi-layered with conventional metals on top that conduct well to help hold everything together when it bends.
There are several exceptions in the USA. For example, there is also the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain serving los angeles. It is a 785 kilometer HV DC line.
I suspect there are move HV DC lines in the US. However, listing two counterexamples is more than sufficient to counter 'there are none'.
Liquid Nitrogen is very cheap. We got it for free, minus the electricity to run the compressor. I'm glad this technology has finally reached the market. The high-temperature superconducting material can be a little pricey but it's probably the same as high-grade copper. Besides, you only need a small cross-section compared to copper. I think this will be a big deal once power companies find out about it and do the math.
One of the characteristic sights on New York City streets is big tanks of liquid nitrogen standing on the sidewalk, steaming away, with lines running from them down a manhole. Why? Because, iirc, many of the telephone company switching systems already run supercooled and when a repair needs to be done they need supplementary chilling.
Actualy many of these tanks are there to supply pressurised dry nitrogen into telephone cables to keep moisture out or dry cable that has gotten moisture in them. Plain PVC insulation on telephone wire conductors will become slightly conductive when wet creating a leakage path that is often very noisy. If you ever used a phone that tended to whistle, pop, click and have other noise on it, it is often from a wet line. The the worst case, the leakage is bad enough to produce an off hook condition preventing you from receiving calls and corroding the conductors.
The thick outer jacket on the phone wire is HDPE which is highly water resistant, but almost all plastics allow some moisture migration. Sometime installation will snag an underground cable and damage the outer jacket or rodents use it as a chew toy.
The truth shall set you free!
Any physics doctorates want to straighten me out? It seems as though if the line every lost the super conductivity it would go crazy and vaporize. Did they cover that in tfa that I didn't r? Or what?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
stick your hypothetical voltmeter across two of the phases, not across the same piece of superconducting wire at a distance between the measurement points.