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High-Temp Superconductors To Connect Power Grids
physburn writes "Somewhere in a triangle between Roswell (UFO) NM, Albuquerque (Left Turn) NM, and Amarillo (Do you know the way?) TX, a 22.5 square mile triangle of High Temperature Superconductor pipeline is to be built. Each leg of the triangle can carry 5GW of electricity. The purpose to load-balance and sell electricity between America's three power grids. Previously the Eastern Grid, Western Grid and Texan Grid have been separate, preventing cheap electricity being sold from one end of America to the other. The Tres Amiga Superstation, as it is to be called, will finally connect the three grids. The superstation is also designed to link renewable solar and wind power in the grids, and is to use HTS wire from American Superconductor. Some 23 years after its invention, today HTS comes of age. "
There is No America. There is Canada. There is the United States of America. There is Mexico.
Stupid Gringos.
Yours In Petrograd,
Hector Burrito
You know what else is shocking? The niggers! The african jungle bunnies are taking all the fat white women! Oh wait, we weren't doin nothin with those anyway. Nevermind. False alarm.
Everything is done for money don't think for a second it is otherwise. The only time safety plays a part is after people die. Pick any major failure. Even then the fix is for marketing purposes.
This Grid exists to allow the sale of more power. BTW knocking out this section wont' take down the grid (or so you hope, see north easter black out) but it will destabilize supply, and cause a nice ripple effect in one of the US critical resources.
I'm sure behind this whole thing are a few lobbyist and policy makers carving up who can sell electricity where.
Neat. You'd better cross your fingers that the rest of the country doesn't do the same to you when Texas suddenly suffers a massive outage because the wind drops off at the exact same time there's an increase in demand.
And going on to this whole insane thread: I cannot believe how much nonsense is being spouted off by people who evidently have zero clue what they're talking about.
The outage in 2003 that some people are pointing to was an example of how RTOs work in a best case. Remember how it only essentially went north from NY, except for about 7% of northern PA and NJ. That's because the grid operators in PJM caught it and stopped it, whereas NYISO wasn't able to get there in time. (Although that's another story; combination of local utilities not doing their maintenance (e.g. pruning trees) and a mix-up because First Energy was transitioning into NYISO but hadn't completely made the switch yet.)
The guy who's behind this, Phil Harris, used to be the CEO of PJM, the largest whole-sale electric market in the world. He has a bit of an idea how these things work, and more to the point is certainly going to get people on board who REALLY know how these things work.
As for the viewpoint of "it's all about money, some lobbyists, etc", the main rationale behind having grid operators is more efficient management of the market. You can route power based on locational marginal prices (LMP) and, as the article points out, do a great deal with looking at where the supply is versus where the demand is. (E.g. - if you have a lot of wind inland, it tends to die down during the day, which is when you need it the most, and pick up during the night. Gulf coast wind is the other way around. It's about judicious playing with the time zones and demand patterns, which are forecast with extraordinary accuracy by very complicated algorithms...the kinds of technologies running these markets is just phenomenal.)
Right, rant over. I'm bored now.