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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.
If I could get my pc on the cooling network..... mmmmmm, 65K. Should be enough for anybody!
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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."
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!
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.
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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?
Well, in a perfect world (we can at least hope) lines would be kept a bit below theoretical optimum temperature and surrounded with some high thermal mass cladding within the insulation. That would at least buy some time for the system to get repaired. Since you're dealing with a cylindrical cross-section your surface area to volume ratio is at least as good as it can get to minimize heating.
There are many, many ways to build a system to manage loss of coolant, nuclear reactor scrambles being obvious extreme versions. Some of these approaches could be used in a case like this. But we're dealing with Con Ed here, the guys who neglected maintenance such that we ended up having three major blackouts in ten years. So I'm not optimistic. The only thing that we should remember is that at least in theory such problems are somewhat addressable, not least by just the kind of rerouting that this system is supposed to make much easier and faster.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Erm. Underground?
I'd like to see lightning hit down there.
People have been blowing up conventional electricity pylons for decades. They make great targets because a single tower collapse takes out the whole circuit. Of course we call them 'heroes' not 'terrorists', but the principle is the same: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501EFDC1330F935A15757C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=
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In a standard copper line the value is zero: we don't cool them
Conventional underground transmission lines are oil cooled. Superconducting transmission lines have almost zero resistance and should require less cooling once they reach working temperature.
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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
Correct on all accounts.
And additionally, oil cooling of traditional powerlines is nasty business, because these lines get hot, and sometimes so hot that the oil boils and/or hydrolizes, and when THAT happens, you have carbon - which is conductive - and then, well, you got yourself a blackout.
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Underground power cables are struck by lightning amazingly often - I think more often than high-tension lines. Lighting strikes originate quite deep - given they cross 8 km of air gap, several meters of damp earth should come as no surprise.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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Of course, a terrorist could blow up any sort of power line with a big enough bomb, but so what - there are far higher-value targets.
Aside from bombs, a coolant leak would be easily stopped in the short term by a water jacket. Do you know how you insulate liquid helium pipes in a lab? You pump liquid helium through them, and a 4 inch thick layer of ice forms in a few minutes, insulating the pipes just fine. At higher temperatures you'd want to provide the water, but I'd bet liquid nitrogen escaping through a layer of water would self-seal very quickly.
Lightning strikes are a problem for all buried power cables, but it's a well-solved engineering problem.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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 ]
The Germans arrested him early in 1942, but let him go for lack of evidence.
That's where they nazis lost it. They should have just rounded up all suspects and put them in a freedom camp or something.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Supercooled water mains!
Wait...
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.
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.
Try scram instead.
The hotter the environment, the worse the thermal insulation
They run it through New York state to take advantage of the Hillary Cooling Effect.
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I wish that was funny and not depressing.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
That's cold.
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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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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.
Why is the voltage so high ?
Surely, if there is zero resistance, then there is no need to reduce the current to save on energy loss, so why still transmit at such a high voltage with the superconductor ?
TIA
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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.
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
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