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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. "
That's enough to power slightly more than four time machines.
This is why I come to slashdot! A technical article with the right units! 5 GW of electricity. Not 100,000 volts of electricity, not 50,000 Amps of electricity, but 5 GW. Now, that's useful!
It's a great thing, but the cynical part (85.6%) of me wonders if this means we'll now be able to have national blackouts rather than just regional ones.
Seriously, Roswell?
More likely this is going to be the supragrid where the huge alien craft will come to suck our energy away. (Think "V" The mini-series)
I wonder if there is a difference in the potential of this technology and other high throughput power transferring systems. I think being able to distribute power has the capacity to put us on the road to using more electricity as opposed to oil based fuel. That's all we've needed: a kick in the joules to get us on a better path.
Shocking times indeed. I just need to remember to stay grounded; You can never know exactly when and where technological progress will come from.
Each leg of the triangle can carry 5GW of electricity.
5GW is a lot of power; to put that into perspective, the entire state of New York uses about 30GW at peak load on a hot summer day; the great power of Niagara Falls gives us about 5GW (Canadian + US generators).
The three power grids are out of phase with each other. Are they doing a AC->DC->AC conversion? It was my understanding that the biggest technical hurdle to connecting the grids was the difficult problem of shifting the phase of one grid to another.
Oh no, they've disabled our ability to sell electricity from one grid to another!
Meh, why is that getting flagged as insightful.
The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is
a) only for the money
b) going to ruin the planet
c) a target for terrorists
d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what. If you want to curl up in a little ball because the terrorists might get you knock yourself out.
BTW, knocking this section out doesn't take all 3 grids down.
You're not right. From TFS/TFA, there's currently no link between the three different power grids. The incentive for the corporations to back this is the potential for them to save money (by buying power from other grids during peak times, rather than building more power plants to make up for the shortfall), and the potential to make money (by selling power to other grids during off-peak hours).
As an example, TX can sell power to the north during the winter to help cover the increased cost of heating, and they can buy power in the summer to help cover the cost of air conditioning. Also, the East can sell to the West when it's 1am on the East Coast (most people in bed, off-peak hours), but still 10pm in California. Likewise, California can sell to the east when it's 5am there (people are still asleep), but 8am in the east.
All in all, it should make a *huge* difference for their bottom lines, while also helping the environment by reducing the amount of power that we have to generate. :)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
For those who aren't sure where that triangle is, a map.
Native and current resident. New Mexico is no different than the rest of the states. The rural areas are seeing a steady migration out, the urban areas are seeing a steady migration in.
Some areas like Farmington (North west) or Artesia, Roswell, Carlsbad (east side) are highly susceptible to boom/bust natural gas/oil cycles. Areas like Albuquerque are chugging right along and were hit about the national average by the recent recession. Most of the state is agricultural and is slowly sliding into oblivion like the rest of the nation's non corporate-run agriculture though not merely so hard hit as the wheat belt region.
The current governor is a bit of a twit at times but he's done a decent job getting some higher tech interest in NM. The combination of alternative energy as both a producer of energy and producer of materials, light rail interconnect for Rio Grande corridor and of course the space port may end up putting NM in an promising position.
The state isn't overly rich in resources/industry and agriculture is not a money making proposition for any state/country. The state's future is either in energy or tech or it's doomed to a tail end of the pack future much like most other low pop poor states.
In short I think you've overstated the destitute nature of the state compared to most other comparable states. On the other hand I agree that this newest venture is yet another energy/tech venture within the state which is needed or your observation regarding the state may be prophetically accurate.
Then again all the above it's pretty much true for the nation as a whole.
You need superconducters because of the amount of current that will be transported. The loss across the wire increases with the square of the current ( p = (v)i or p = (i/r)i ). That's not a big problem when you're running a vacuum cleaner (although the wire will ususally get warm). It's a huge problem when you're talking about moving thousands of amps. The longer the wire, the more losses there are. In fact, it's common for the main conductors coming out of power plants to be made of pure sodium metal submerged in oil, due to the fact that sodium has a very, very high conductance at normal temperatures.
That's why electric companies sink so much money into transformers. You step up the electricity to high voltage / low current for transmission, then back to low voltage / high current for consumption.
...The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is a) only for the money b) going to ruin the planet c) a target for terrorists d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what. ...
How about this criticism: poorly described technology from a dubious source.
First of all, I don't think this interconnect is intended to prevent one of the three major grids going down...if that were to happen, you'd want to disconnect the other two pronto so they don't go down with it. This is being sold as a way to efficiently move cheap electricity to places that need it and are willing to buy it. The article refers to it as a "renewable energy market hub". That's fine, in principle (and who dares oppose anything with the word "renewable" in it?).
But how does it work? There's generalities about how electrical transmissions and interconnects between the major power grids work, but nothing really about the superconducting cable, and why it's better than regular cable. That's not too surprising, if you consider that this is "financial news" aimed at getting people to buy stock in this exciting new venture. What's more disturbing is that when you follow the link to the company that's supposed to be doing this wonderful thing—American Superconductor—you don't get any better answers to these questions.
You do realize that we're not talking about room temperature superconductors here, right? "High temperature superconductors" is a relative term. Unless they have indeed invented something totally new and kept it totally secret, what we're talking about is a pipeline carrying liquid nitrogen with some superconducting tape wrapped around it. (See, for example, this more informative article from another company selling the same thing. (PDF!)
One major issue right off the bat is how much of the efficiency gained by using the superconductor is consumed by the coolant system. The article doesn't say exactly how long these superconducting conduits will be, and it seems you still need AC/DC/AC conversion, so what's the real gain over using regular cables, especially if we're only talking a mile or so?
It's also not clear just who is paying for this project. Is it the State of Oklahoma? The US Government (in "stimulation" mode)? Is it a private venture? Is it really a done and financed deal? This is a most unsatisfactory article, and I think some cynicism is warranted.
Disclaimer: The fact that I am a Texan and intend to give up my megawatts only if you pry them from my cold, dead fingers has not in the least influenced my position on this matter.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Does that honestly seem to you like such a huge and difficult problem
Yes, as a matter of fact, it does.
During a sudden large drop in demand you have fractions of a second before the turbines spike the hell out of the voltage frying unprotected electronics and maybe a few seconds before the turbines start to tear themselves apart. That's how much time the grid controller has to receive messages from and analyze the system state across the entire grid and decide which turbines across the entire grid to slam the emergency brakes on so that the remaining ones are properly loaded.
It isn't possible, not with any kind of safety margin. As a result, the grid isn't built that way. Instead, each generating plant has a local safety system on the turbines. If the demand changes faster than the speed regulator can compensate they go into emergency safe mode and shut down entirely, after which it takes days to run through the startup checklist and come back online. The grid controller can affect this only indirectly - by stabilizing the demand hitting each generating plant before the safety systems trip.
Which means that any time a sufficiently large capacity set of transmission lines fails, that failure cascades through the system dropping plant after plant.
This isn't just speculation, by the way. Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003 . When the cascade failure finally gets underway, it moves really fast. 150 seconds for the whole blackout in 2003. There's no time to fix it. Either your local portion of the grid transmits or receives so little power from the rest that it can instantly disconnect and absorb the change in demand or else it collapses along with the rest.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.