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Legacy From the 1800s Leaves Tokyo In the Dark
itwbennett writes "East Japan entered its fifth day of power rationing on Friday, with no end to the planned blackouts in sight. The local electrical utility can't make up the shortfall by importing power from another region, though, because Japan lacks a national power grid, a consequence of a decision made in the late 1800s."
Dark (and hopefully) clear skies...
Half of Japan used 50Hz and the other side uses 60Hz. They have three conversion stations with a combined capacity of just 1GW, so power from one side can't power the other.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... this situation changes. And Japan will leap to the forefront of HVDC transmission gear manufacturing.
Have gnu, will travel.
...so many to choose from.
if we get to 88Hz can we go back in time to fix this?
Boy, imagine how we'd laugh if the punchline was funny!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Very interesting article. I had no idea that Japan was effectively split in half thanks to 50Hz and 60Hz power grids. So does every home that is hooked up to 50Hz have a converter to switch it to 60Hz or vice versa since some electronic devices are rather dependent on the AC frequency? What happens when somebody decides to move across the country from one power source to the other? Do you just throw out all your old clocks that relied on the AC frequency for its timing source and buy new ones? I also wonder if the disaster unfolding there might encourage them to try to migrate the entire country to a single standard, whether 50 or 60. It has certainly demonstrated a major problem with their current infrastructure...
Hey, just because they did things differently doesn't mean you should call people from Coventry England backwards.
TV's don't sync to the power line. They convert incoming power to DC then work from that.
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They do, but they don't have the capacity to convert the amounts of power that the Kanto side suddenly needs. It's unfortunate that they didn't invest in more conversion capacity before this disaster, but then again, it probably would have been viewed as a waste of money, as few people could have imagined a power shortage of this scale before.
A few years ago the government began urging offices to keep their indoor temperatures at 28 degrees C (82 F) to save energy; there are doubts as to its efficacy as the increased sweat and lethargy bring greater water usage (more laundry) and lowered productivity.
I despised this program but could certainly endure it this year when there are so many people suffering from a lot more than an overheated working environment, but the silver lining is that when power capacity does finally get back up -- the Fukushima reactors were nearing end-of-life and new ones were already scheduled for 2013 -- regular folks might be able to work in air-conditioned offices again. After what we've been through, it sure will feel like a luxury.
They can't really change it now, can they?
The wire doesn't care very much. In the areas that are destroyed, they have to buy all new equipment anyway. Seems like a good time to standardize.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
FTA: "Japan's electricity system got its start in 1883 with the founding of Tokyo Electric Light Co. Demand quickly grew and in 1895 the company bought electricity generation equipment from Germany's AEG. In west Japan the same evolution was taking place, and Osaka Electric Lamp imported equipment from General Electric."
Wait: I thought the free market solved all problems and never needed government intervention.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Other than poorly designed clocks, what other devices actually care about the power line frequency? My parents in Virginia have very bad 60Hz power, they have a few clocks that are often off by 10 minutes or more each way, so it's not a good idea to base your clock frequency source on the power line in the first place. Most devices not either don't care (light bulbs) or put their power through an AC/DC conversion step anyway. So what would really need to be thrown out if you switched from 50Hz to 60Hz standard? And wouldn't now be an excellent time to make the change?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Tachi Station sells power converters.
Other than poorly designed clocks, what other devices actually care about the power line frequency?
Motors. Big motors, like the kind you find in your furnace, A/C compressor, elevators, and other places. Nobody cares about the consumer electronics because all that stuff either auto-ranges or can be manually switched. But big industrial equipment is everywhere and lasts a long time.
Wait: I thought the free market solved all problems and never needed government intervention.
You seem to have a stunning amount of faith in government, including 1800's feudal Japan, to accurately plan for catastrophes 130 years in advance.
Actually, the 50 Hz transformers would work just fine on 60 Hz (but they would be heavier than necessary). It's when you run a transformer on a lower-than-rated frequency that you need to derate its power-handling capacity.
Of course, there would be plenty of other problems with a frequency switch, especially changes in motor speeds. A whole lot of equipment would need to be replaced, or remotored and regeared. The logistics of switching half of Japan would dwarf that of Ontario's 1950s-era switch from 25 Hz to 60 Hz.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
This earthquake/tsunami/meltdown/etc could be a Catastrotunity in that regard -- finally providing the impetus to modernize their grid. Laying new power lines should be far faster than building new power plants, and since we're talking high power/long distance and they'll need to match frequencies, I would expect that they'll be HVDC.
Another thing that they should be able to do faster than building new thermal power plants is to build power storage facilities to buffer day/night demand (battery storage, mini pumped-hydro, etc). China already uses these for demand buffering quite extensively. But they have a nice side effect of also helping support more intermittent power generation as well, because there is little difference between buffering supply and buffering demand. Which is great, because installing new photovoltaic capacity is also much faster than building new centralized thermal power plants (at least if global solar production can keep up).
If speed of getting new power into the region is of the essence, they may well end up with a very modern, very green grid purely as a side effect.
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The US has mostly unconnected power grids too.
Two major and three minor grids, the grid I'm on, Alaska isn't connected to anything else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interconnection - has more information
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398
But theres a plan to connect the Eastern and Western Interconnections at Clovis NM in the next couple years.
You seem to have a stunning amount of faith in government, including 1800's feudal Japan, to accurately plan for catastrophes 130 years in advance.
1890's Japan was very well post-feudal. Remember, it was only ten years after they bought the incompatible GE equipment (I should make a nasty comment here, since my family worked for Westinghouse) to where they defeating the Russians in 1905.
Also, this dual grid prevents countrywide cascade failures :-)
Other than poorly designed clocks, what other devices actually care about the power line frequency?
Actually, mains power should normally be a very good frequency source for a clock. Utilities periodically adjust the frequency such that the long term clock drift is near zero. From wikipedia:
Network operators will regulate the daily average frequency so that clocks stay within a few seconds of correct time. In practice the nominal frequency is raised or lowered by a specific percentage to maintain synchronization. Over the course of a day, the average frequency is maintained at the nominal value within a few hundred parts per million.
Pfft, we don't need no national power grids! That's socialism! The free market will sort it out!
Actually the electric companies are typically for improved transfer capacity, as long as they're not paying too much for it. That allows them to sell the power some other place where prices are higher then turn around and demand higher prices locally too because reserves are low.
What they don't build is emergency capacity, because to a corporation they typically don't have to care about the consequences except to their bottom line. You saw it a lot in the financial crisis, if it's not profitable to lend money we'll simply stop. That it's choking the rest of the economy doesn't matter. Nor would they ever get to charge the costs either, imagine if in this crisis they said "Finally we ended up using those expensive converters, now to pay them off on this crisis we'll increase prices 10x" and you'd see a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks even in overly polite Japan. It's something people want to have, but they're not willing to pay for it. "The government" has to step in and be the collective responsibility that the country has emergency systems, because the consumers failed to make those demands to the producers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Where do you get that? I just did a search for HVDC link construction times, and ran into this, which cites the time to build the whole Cross-Sound Cable (CSC) project, which involved two terminals and a 40km submarine cable to transmit 330MW HVDC, at nine months. Sure as heck beats building a new nuclear power plant or whatnot.
I imagine the limiting factor will be global high-power thyristor production and stocks.
Santa Ana Winds: Like the Dustbowl, but with awards shows.
TV's used to sync to the power line until well into the 1960's. The tolerances needed for color put an end to that,
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
In the 1800's, Japan was just practicing eXtreme Engineering (XE) and employing the principle of YAGNI. It was deemed more important to electrify the country and then iterate the solution later, than it was to design for future expansion, let alone consider the risks of human life dependence upon the early choices.
If the USS Ronald Reagan had a couple Mighty Pumps in its inventory, these could be attached to the catapult steam lines. An electrical generator could be attached to the pump's drive shaft, generating power. Then they'd just run a cable to the shore to power the cities affected by the disaster.
The USS Enterprise has 310 megawatts of thermal power. I don't know how much of this could be sent to the catapult lines... Nimitz-class carriers have 2 reactors instead of 8, and generate ~190 MW of thermal power.
There is some historical legacy for using an aircraft carrier to power a city:
Lots of people have found my site this week (/. post on Sunday, google, etc), and the link about the MYT engine was one of the more-commonly followed links. This page has better information about the MYT pump/engine:
When Disaster Strikes, Send the Enterprise. I just did my first newspaper interview this morning. :)
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>>>TV's don't sync to the power line. They convert incoming power to DC then work from that.
That is so horribly wrong. "The NTSC field refresh frequency in the black-and-white system originally exactly matched the nominal 60 Hz frequency of alternating current power used in the United States. Matching the field refresh rate to the power source avoided intermodulation (also called beating), which produces rolling bars on the screen......
"Synchronization of the refresh rate to the power incidentally helped kinescope cameras record early live television broadcasts, as it was very simple to synchronize a film camera to capture one frame of video on each film frame by using the alternating current frequency to set the speed of the synchronous AC motor-drive camera.....
"The actual figure of 525 lines was chosen as a consequence of the limitations of the vacuum-tube-based technologies of the day. In early TV systems, a master voltage-controlled oscillator was run at twice the horizontal line frequency, and this frequency was divided down by the number of lines used (in this case 525) to give the field frequency (60 Hz in this case). This frequency was then compared with the 60 Hz power-line frequency and any discrepancy corrected by adjusting the frequency of the master oscillator." - wiki
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Magic to you perhaps. To those who actually know anything about the subject, transformers take an AC source at a certain voltage and current, and generate an output of a different voltage and current AT THE SAME FREQUENCY.
There may be phase shifts, and there are always energy losses, but the frequency stays the same.
Most AC motors are frequency locked to the power source, hence will operate at different RPM at 50 Hz than at 60 Hz. If that is an issue in the application, then a motor change would be required. Many TVs were also locked to the power signal - PAL vs NTSC.
However east and west Japan were still relatively independent even in the 1890s. It wasn't really until after the Russo-Japanese war that the country really started to become just that, a unified country. Humans have this odd way of thinking about countries, namely that the government/political structures and geographical boundaries of countries today are the same as they were over 100 years ago, they are often much different. Japan was very much like Germany, essentially a very loosely affiliated set of states bound by geographical, linguistic, and cultural ties but often separated by bitter political and military rivalries. I doubt that even if someone had the foresight to force both sides to use the same standards they would have had the political capital to make it a reality. That sort of political capital didn't really exist until after the Russo-Japanese war towards the end of the Meiji era.
Monstar L
To know that, we'd have to know if the Japanese government got involved and locked in the choices before the market had a chance to correct it. After all, until the two systems met it didn't matter what frequencies they used.
Uh. Smart meters don't fix shortages of electricity. All they do is cost the consumer more money when they're using it at peak. That's a retrograde punishment system. The solution is to build more power plants, or import more when you need it. If you live in Ontario and Quebec you already know this, since we sell most of our power to the US. Because Americans can't be bothered to build more power plants.
Om, nomnomnom...
Poorly designed? In the UK, power line frequency is very tightly controlled and fluctuations are corrected for during the night, so clocks that were synchronous to the power were very accurate. The problem isn't the clocks, its the power generation. Also, sotting in my garage, I have an old turntable, with a synchronous motor. Again, any frequency error is far less than one's ability to distinguish from the correct frequency.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The UK has off-peak electricity (white meters), while the regular-rate electricity goes through the standard meter (black meter). It usually means that people run their dish washers, washing machines and dryers in the early hours of the morning, and cook their evening meal after 6.00pm.
Smart meters in the UK let you know how many Kilowatts of electricity you are using at any moment, which encourages home-owners to switch off lights or to purchase dual motion-sensor/dimmer switches. One setting has the light off, another has the light on only if there is motion, and the third has the light permanently on.
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The 50/60 Hz split posed a problem for air conditioner manufacturers in Japan. Their solution was frequency-converting air conditioners that would work on either 50 Hz or 60 Hz. When they were first being installed it was not noticed that their characteristics over their range of operating voltages were not the same as conventional air conditioners.
The problem became clear on a hot summer day in the late 1980's. TEPCO was importing power to the Tokyo area from nuclear plants a considerable distance away. Long distance transmission of electricity requires reactive power to maintain voltage at the receiving end. The frequency-converting air conditioners increased the need for reactive power in the Tokyo area.
In early afternoon, TEPCO ran out of reactive power and the voltage collapsed, causing a major blackout. It was the first major blackout that happened without some kind of event such as a lightning strike or a piece of equipment failing.
Looks like the invisible hand of the free market really dropped the ball that time....
Transformers are effectively radio transceivers. The transmitter and receiver are so close together that energy is transmitted from one to the other with high efficiency. Every transformer is wound to work at a particular frequency so when talking about big power transformers you can't just change the frequency. Having said that a lot of consumer equipment would cope fairly well. Computers, light fittings, etc are pretty tolerant. Big electric motors in factories, not so.
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You've just described how supply and demand prevents shortages, while claiming that it doesn't prevent shortages.
Think about it this way. Would you use less electricity if it cost more? If electricity cost enough, wouldn't it lower demand for electricity below the level of supply?
A shortage exists only when demand exceeds supply, and when that happens, it means the price is too low. Smart meters bring real-time price information to consumers, which helps reduce demand for electricity during peak times, and that eliminates the shortage.
But you can only reduce your demand up to a point. After that, you will need to pay the electricity no matter the price. Is like trying to live without air conditioners in Phoenix's summer or heaters in nordic countries at winter. You don't have choice. Even so, for the Japanese market, the least significant component of demand will be household demand; industry, transport and commercial customers have a far higher demand of electricity. That's why with the current energy shortages are many train lines stopped. If you had ever been in Tokyo, you will be aware that the city without trains will collapse, just like is happening at the moment.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Wait: I thought the free market solved all problems and never needed government intervention.
The Free Market *WOULD* solve all these problems, if it weren't for all that pesky government intervention.
There are few activities so strongly regulated anywhere as the electric power industry. I should know it, for the first five years of my career as an electronics engineer I worked for a power company.
The situation is so bad that when people say the power industry has been "deregulated" somewhere, like in California, for example, the industry is actually still more regulated than any other industry.
Had Free Market forces prevailed in Japan there would exist many interconnection points between the 50hz and 60hz zones. After all, what good is a market if you are unable to buy and sell stuff?
The problem in Japan is not the Free Market, but the fact that the industry was divided in two segments that weren't allowed to trade their product freely among themselves.
Many things, such as lights, don't care.
Most modern built-in power converters and supplies can handle pretty much anything - if you look at the power brick for your computer, chances are it says "100-240V, 50-60Hz". It's expensive to run separate production lines, so companies have tried to make stuff as universal as possible.
Older things here in Japan often have a small switch at the back, marked "50/60". You set it according to where you live.
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