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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.
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."
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!
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
what if it's not a matter of cost, but of resources? just assume for a moment that we somehow manage to wean ourselves off of the internal combustion engine and everyone is driving hybrid or full electric vehicles. where are we going to get all that copper from?
Erm. Underground?
I'd like to see lightning hit down there.
This is all very well, but how much energy does it cost to keep them so cool?
The Department of Homeland Security is just amazing. I admit I haven't been paying as much attention as I could have, but, so far, I have only heard about _one_ thing they did that I thought would actually...improve homeland security. For the rest, they have embarked on numerous projects that range from interesting to horrible, but that are all very expensive and do little to improve security.
On the one hand, I am glad to see a large portion of the money that DHS gets goes to interesting projects, rather than everything being spent on spying on innocent people. On the other hand, I am sad to see all the things that are done under the (_very_ thin) guise of security...
If the government wants to sponsor certain pet projects of theirs, why don't they just say they want to sponsor them, because they find them interesting, or some such, instead of trying to pretend it's all in the name of security?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Until they get unsealed, or need maintenance. Cooling them down is not a one-off: I've no idea how often they may have to be cycled, but repairs and maintenance demand that they be warmed up on some kind of expectable basis.
I wish that was funny and not depressing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Actually, in Type-II (high temperature) superconductors there can be a small but finite resistance. From wikipedia:
In a class of superconductors known as Type II superconductors, including all known high-temperature superconductors, an extremely small amount of resistivity appears at temperatures not too far below the nominal superconducting transition when an electrical current is applied in conjunction with a strong magnetic field, which may be caused by the electrical current. This is due to the motion of vortices in the electronic superfluid, which dissipates some of the energy carried by the current. If the current is sufficiently small, the vortices are stationary, and the resistivity vanishes. The resistance due to this effect is tiny compared with that of non-superconducting materials, but must be taken into account in sensitive experiments. However, as the temperature decreases far enough below the nominal superconducting transition, these vortices can become frozen into a disordered but stationary phase known as a "vortex glass". Below this vortex glass transition temperature, the resistance of the material becomes truly zero.
Even if it took alot of energy to cool the lines, these would still make sense in NY. Long Island is like the epicenter of the NIMBY philosophy, so no new power generation has been added for 30-40 years. Most new power is actually transported from the large hydro projects in Quebec. Using the existing power rights of way, 60-75% of each marginal increase in power transmission is lost in transit. So if you send 10 units of electricity from Quebec, 2-4 units will come out on the other end.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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In regard to projects like this, you have it all wrong. Let's think for a minute.
New York City and its tri-state metro area is the largest in the country, and essentially the world's financial capital. Its arguably one of the most important areas in the country.
For a variety of reasons like NIMBY, the dysfunction of NY state government and rapidly increasing demand, an increasing proportion of the electricity supply is coming from places hundreds of miles away in Upstate NY and Quebec. The geography of NYC and Long Island (and the high cost of land) makes it very difficult to add transmission lines, and makes it relatively easy to attack the existing lines.
So, if a technology like superconducting transmission lines would allow you to increase capacity and better protect these lines by burying them, it seems like a valid security measure to me.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
A centralised solar array of this nature would be huge. A terrorist with a bomb capable of doing significant damage to it would be better off using it to destroy a city or two.
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I'm not trying to disagree with you, just get information. Can you point me to documents that, erm, document those "60-75%" numbers?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Okay, maybe this is a stupid question but I really don't think that it is.
- Liquid nitrogen is cheap. The more of it you need, hence the larger your machinery for making it, the cheaper it gets.
- We're talking about a hundred million dollar system here, just in construction and maintenence costs. Not to mention the billions of dollars worth of services that would depend on it.
- If your insulation is at all effective, the amount of liquid nitrogen required to cool a given stretch of cable is pretty small, since the whole cross-section of cable is something like two centimeters, including part of the cladding.
This being the case, maybe it would be cheaper all around to just keep two or three hundred liters of "extra" liquid nitrogen in tanks connected to the system every mile or so. If the system is leaky, who cares? As long as you're making liquid nitrogen faster than you're leaking it and you are keeping the stuff flowing effectively to the leak, it's just not that big a deal. Keep in mind that at retail prices "two or three hundred liters" is about four hundred bucks worth. Maybe. Relative to the cost and importance of a system like this, a few hundred bucks, even the cost of the equipment to make that liquid nitrogen, is a rounding error.
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.