One Worldwide Power Grid 464
randomned writes "A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired. With the recent outage on in the northeast, think of what could've happened if the entire world was on one grid." As someone who spent 23 and a half hours without power, I'm thinking this is a brilliant plan!
The Internet model (Score:5, Interesting)
The evolution of the internet is in stark contrast to this, where bandwidth can be bought from any one of many vendors (despite efforts of existing local telco's and cable providers to restrict the market by controlling the wiring).
The (U.S., at least) government needs to take the same steps as they took with AT open up the market for energy distribution. Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines, and this will grow much like WiFi is, starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there. Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had; with market forces in play a company is going to be very careful about making sure their customers don't lose power--the damage to a competing company's reputation from something like the recent blackout would be terrible for them to contemplate.
I'll look forward to the day I can have a box on the side of my house into which I can plug whatever sources of electricity I choose, and I expect that the costs of this commodity will then drop dramatically, much like telephone service did.
An oldie, but a damn fine goodie (Score:5, Funny)
Dubya was beginning
Davis: What happen?
SoCal Edison: Somebody set up us the blackout.
PG&E: We get bankruptcy.
Davis: What !
PG&E: Electricity turn off.
Davis: It's you !!
BC Hydro: How are you gentlemen !!
BC Hydro: All your power are belong to us.
BC Hydro: You are on the way to Stone Age.
Davis: What you say !!
BC Hydro: You have no chance to Chapter 11 make your payment.
PG&E: Governor !!
Davis: Take off every 'regulation' !!
Davis: You know what you doing.
Davis: Move 'regulation'.
Davis: For great darkness [pge.com].
Re:The Internet model (Score:5, Informative)
The technology is there to do it safely and reliably. It just costs money. Right now the major utilities have no profit motive to deploy technologies to harden and protect the power distribution and transmission systems.
In most states you can now sell power back to the utilities. A local generation plant (solar, hydro, wind, etc) can be connected to the power system via a utility intertie rated device.
This can as simple as a utility intertie rated inverter as part of you home solar system. Unfortunately for everyone else on your block, as soon as commercial input fails your system will stop providing power out to the utility side. This is to protect power company personnel during line repairs.
Re:The Internet model (Score:2)
"No profit motive to deploy". Exactly.
You can sell back power to your utility (singular), yes, but this doesn't create any competition for the utility.
The fact that I can invest major dollars in my own power source is a different thing; many people would no
Correction, Utilities no longer required to buy... (Score:3, Informative)
Utilities are no longer required to buy power from producers, since an act of congress in 1990s...
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
Let the market decide where and when it's economically feasible to lay new power lines
And leave most of the rural areas of the coutry to what? Where one can set-up some kind of home-grown solution to the networking, you just can not expect every community that wants and needs electricity to build its own nuclear/coal/gas power plant just because they dont have rivers, wind, coal, gas, or sun in the amounts needed to produce electricity. If you will leave this area to completely free market, you will essentialy widen the gap between metropolis areas and rural areas, producing something to the effect of true Mad Max style civilization. Thank you, but count me out.
and this will grow much like WiFi is
You mean like Wi-Fi hot-spots that you can find around most frequented areas in cities (airports, hotels, cafees, ...) If you find economic viability in setting up those everywhere where there is electricity available at this instance, please do call me. I want to move to your country.
starting in the most-demanded areas and spreading out from there
I'm listening about the broadband for everybody, Wi-Fi for everybody, spreading the connectivity to everybody, ... Well, I just don't see this happening. I just don't like to have American Dream include power generator in the basement. Governments can be good for some things that are not economicaly sane in the short run, but bear fruits in range of 20-50 years down the road. I'm sorry, but electricity is not about competition and free market, it's about common good that has to be provided to everybody for a fair price. This ideally means that country takes more taxes from the richer and builds infrastructure that can be used by all equaly. I guess the next thing you will probably suggest is to dissolve the coutries all together and let the corporations run everything. Including printing the money. Why don't we liberalize priting the money? Why don't we have, say, 4 or 5 money printing companies that are fighting each other for the market share of the paper notes. I don't think so. Either go anarcyh, or leave the democracy alone, please.
Along with this will come the kind of redundancies that the northeast U.S. and Canada should have had
You must not be serious? I guess California has those redundancies? The only thing that California gained is some spare power in the production part of distribution grid due to people moving out businesses to more 'regulated' areas of USA, where they were fairly shure there will be no regular rolling blackouts happening and prices set on more manageable level. This and tech bubble bursting. Since it is a fact, that accidents do happen (and it's not like they are happening on year, by year basis) what do you think what happens when some bean counter disconnects your part of the grid since it is not economicaly viable any more. Haven't you listened for past few days? Redundancies are basicaly wasted resource. If you host some small web server with couple of pages, do you plan it for ./ effect? If you do, you are wasting enormeous resources (bandwith lease, CPU power to cope with serving, memory, storage requirements for logs, ...), but if you don't you're living with a threat that one sole link will kill (not premanenlty we hope) your connection and server. Redundancies don't make much of economic sense if you are profit oriented. On the other hand, if your paycheck depends on people voting you in or out of office, you want to be service oriented. I do not want to debate current political situation in USA (I don't care sh**t about it actually), but the idea is that you want to please the people. In this instance you please them with balancing their mandatory part (governement taxes) against their infrastructure expectations (no blackouts) against their participatory part (electricity bills). Do you really want to risk having this balance to be taken by some unscrouplus corporate entity going
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure how we get from "applying market forces" to "leaving the rural areas to build their own power plants". Other technology infrastructure types have shown that market forces result in greater availability, not less. Rural areas would not compelled to switch to a local power generation source, but if that was more efficient, the market is the only thing that's going to make it happen, and would result in cheaper prices for its residents.
Redundancy is not a waste of resources, and the only thing determining what is or is not a waste is... the market. The Slashdot example is contrived; what I would want is enough server capacity to handle the full demands *and* have a failover.
We can go with the "fair price" as defined by the utility companies, or the "fair price" as determined by competition. Option 2 is lower.
Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value (but that's a whole other thread...).
Illegal activity of people in a free market isn't really an argument against the concept. I think even with the Enron's of the world, it's pretty clear that government management leads to more corruption, rather than less. Government-controlled methods usually don't have effective checks or balances, as the collapse of the Soviet Union on all levels helps demonstrate.
The final paragraph seems to be arguing my case, so I'll leave that one alone...
And with that, I'm out!
Re:The Internet model (Score:5, Insightful)
you mean like phone service? since they've privatized phone service in Ontario I have yet to see any improvements on rural lines. It costs WAY too much to lay lines over such a large area, and there aren't enough people to provide the necessary returns. The same would be true for electricity.
Electricity generation and distribution has been privatized in Ontario (albeit only one company "owns" the infrastructure: Hydro One) and as I understand it many of the states affected by this blackout have a similar system in place. Hydro One has not increased generation capacity significantly in recent years, and it has several nuclear plants down for maintenance right now...I have no idea what's going on in the US system.
Note that this did not help (though I won't suggest it hurt just yet). I think once the Ohio system went down we basically saw a simple case of overload on the rest of the system, which took things down. The overload was partially due to a lot of use -- it was a HOT day, but also due to a lack of generation.
What *should* have happened is bits of the grid should have been shut off, but instead the plants went down, causing a cascading effect. Note that this is all conjecture on my part as I don't have all the facts I'm sure.
Money is a *very* special case, and I'd be happy to liberalize the printing of money if that meant the dollars would have to be backed by something, rather than paper fiat-money. I wouldn't care who stamped my coin of actual gold, I know it's of value
Is it? What makes gold of value where fiat money has none? Gold is just a mineral, paper money is just paper, most money is nothing but numbers on a computer. Gold hasn't backed anything or had any "value" for a large number of years now (except as a commodity), sorry to burst your bubble my friend.
Also, what about water, etc? Seems to me that like water, electricity has become a basic necessity. Yes, it is possible to live without, but probably over 99% of people use electricity on a daily basis and cannot function without it. Roads, education, and (in Canada) health care all fall into this category too. The role of the government in a democracy is, among other things, to provide the basic necessities so they are available to everyone at a fair price. For a government to not have regulations and some control over the electricity distribution system would simply be negligence imho.
Re:The Internet model (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Internet model (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at the telephone industry. You don't have multiple telephone lines. This is because the phone companies rent time on each others line cheaper than they charge us. They make a profit off the
Think about reliablity... (Score:5, Insightful)
The power system is much more critical then the internet. Without power, people can get stuck in elevators, AC goes out, the cellular phone system can go down, etc.
Another problem that showed up in the power system is that companies like Enron were, with no equivocation, bandits. They actually fucked with the California power system in order to extract better deals from the state, along with the well-known securities thieving they pulled off.
Any attempt at power deregulation should also require a much, much better standard for open-ness and honesty from the companies. Peoples lives are actually at state here and leaving our power grid in the hands of criminals is not a very good plan.
And we also need to design a much more fault-tolerant grid system as well. It's just ridiculous that one fuckup can shut down the entire east coast, especially 40 years (or whatever) after the exact same thing happened...
Re:The Internet model (Score:2)
Re:The Internet model (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity is only slightly different. You only have one source of electricity going to your house. It would cost A LOT of money to run new wires to your house so you could use someone else's electricity. And no one wants two ugly wires in their backyard instead of one. It's not really worth it to set up a new grid, the money would be better spent upgrading the current one. And as far as blackouts go, things like that happen, but not very often. Let's see, their power was out for 24 (maybe a little more) hours. That's 24 hours out of roughly how many hours per year? It's good reliability, and I doubt you could really get much better. Weird things can happen, and the equipment is designed to shut off rather than risk getting fried. Sometimes things don't work quite the way they're supposed to, but it's not like they could test the stuff (oh, sorry about that last blackout, we were just testing stuff. It didn't really have to happen, but we needed to see what would happen if you got a real blackout.)
Re:The Internet model (Score:2)
But in the case of phone wiring or electrical wiring, I would argue that whether it gets deployed should depend on market forces, not because the local utility doesn't want it. I'd take the second set of wires if it meant my bill was going to be quite a bit lower.
Blackouts are rare, as you said, but a hu
Re:The Internet model (Score:2)
Northeast? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, if I want to read a straight-up unadulterated Iraqi viewpoint of the war, or the outage, or anything, I'm not going to go to Fox News, I'm going to go to an Iraqi news source. British? I'll go to the BBC, or the Telegraph, or something like that. Canadian? Well, there's a-plenty of Canadian news sources on the web.
Likewise, if I want to read American perspectives on anything, I'm not going to be reading the BBC.
In fact, I'd propose that when a news source goes too far out of their way to show "the other side", they risk covering up important truths altogether. Look at how CNN deliberately squelched stories that might make the Hussein regime look bad, all to keep their "access" to Baghdad.
It is as it is. Reporting facts is one thing, reporting "perspectives" is another. It ain't an American thing, it's a human thing.
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, because we all know just how well informed the Iraqi Information Minister is. I'm still pretty sure the Americans haven't been into Baghdad yet.
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference with American news sources is that this cultural distortion seems to be ignored, and as a result, much greater in effect. As a Brit, I was shocked when in New York at the one sidedness of reports on Israel-Palestine. And the whole NYT fabrication stuff - this would not have been so big an issue in almost any other country, because the assumption is that all the media has some slant. I was surprised at how a lot of Americans were so shocked that journalists are not transferring direct knowledge of deep reality into their minds.
I would say that American media is far more insular, and far more likely to distort the truth. They are not uniquely different in having a bias and twisting the truth - they are just plain worse than a lot of the rest of the western worlds media.
Re:Northeast? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean normal people. Almost all Israelis I have ever met are shocked by the bias of the American media. They still believe they are in the right, and have a right to live where they do - but they don't take the exceedingly unbalanced view of the American press. The really sickening thing is the white wash - the fact that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis who are presented to the American people look very European.
I was in New Zealand, traveling around for a while with an Israeli jewish guy. He, like a lot of Israelis, has a generally semitic look - ie he could pass for an Arab. We met some American girls in a hostel, and when he said he was from Israel, you could see the thoughts going through their heads - "You must be Muslim, I'm scared, you must be a terrorist! Argh!!!". He had to spend a good five minutes assuring them that he was in fact Jewish, but he had some Palestinian friends, and that not all Muslims are terrorists. It was embarrassing.
I don't claim that a large proportion of Americans would act this extreme, or are this ignorant, but I just wasn't that surprised by this behaviour after seeing the kind of media coverage the conflict gets in the US.
Re:Northeast? (Score:4, Interesting)
The simple fact that you think Canada is "too far removed" for U.S. reporters speaks volume.
Re:Northeast? (Score:2)
I'd personally rather know what a reporter's bias is up front, so I can decide for myself how many grains of salt I should take with any particular claim.
One Power Grid... (Score:5, Funny)
One Grid to find them,
One Grid to bring them all,
And in the Darkness bind them...
I think this is very dangerous. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, we all know that there are conflicts between many countries of the world. The world wide power grid would be soon a strategic element in such conflicts. One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them. But such tatic move wouldn't only affect the conflict members but the whole world. So if Bush strikes Iraq, then France, Russia and China would be sitting in the dark.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
Re:I think this is very dangerous. (Score:4)
Just short 'em together. It should make for a spectacular fireworks show.
Realistically, though, I forsee this having advanced 'routing' and even 'firewalls' like the Internet. In other words, when Iraq suddenly starts using 10x the normal power, we simply say "Okay, we're going to cut back on how much power we 'share'"
It'd be more advanced than just wires run all over the place. I'd think you'd be able to say "Only share 10 megawatts" or whatnot.
It also gives us the ability to say "Iraq's been using too much power. We're about to go war with them." And get all the other providers to stop sharing power.
IMHO, this works perfectly if, and only if, it's just a means of sharing _excess_ power, but preserving (and steadfastly refusing to share) the power we need. When we have excess power being generated, we can share some. When we need a little more, we can borrow some. Like those "Take a penny, leave a penny" things. (Okay, strange example, I know.) Someone's not going to clean out your savings account by taking everything in the penny thing. All it does is helps others.
Re:I think this is very dangerous. (Score:2)
Why is it that when I read this, the first thing that came to mind was Bittorrent [bitconjurer.org]? Maybe we should get Brahm to work with the electric companies.
Correction: Sorry Bram (Score:2)
s/Brahm/Bram
Re:I think this is very dangerous. (Score:3)
now, taken all that into consideration i must say that i was amaz
Re:I think this is very dangerous. (Score:5, Funny)
A world wide power grid mean that the whole world is connected with one power grid.
Mensa member, beware of stating the obvious.
One country could e.g. try to suck all power out of the grid to black out an opponent and make a preventive strike against them.
No, that would be an offensive strike. There is no such thing as a preventative strike, only those who strike first.
I think I dodn't have to point out further how dangerous this would be.
You're right, you dodn't.
Mensa member, beware of the high IQ
Mensa member, beware of the grammar.
Re:I think this is very dangerous. (Score:2)
a few thoughts... (Score:5, Interesting)
instead of building 10 new natural gas power stations, we should build 1000 new small wind installations, distribute them around liberally to off-set the heavy reliance on out-of-reach massively-capital intensive projects.
The good would also be that this would cause NO POLLUTION.
Seeing how reliant we are on electricity in the West a couple things come to mind: A) Conservation, as always, is being overlooked by the pro-consume propaganda of western consumer-culture advocates. and B) The Re-regulation of the NorthAmerican Hydro infrastructure will only lead to a culture of capitalist finger-pointing, profiteering and irresponsibility. If the Hydro system is COMPLETELY privatized, who would get power first after a blackout? Residents who need it to live or Industrial/Commercial Interests who will write contracts to assure their production?
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:2)
It got to start from the government..
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:2)
For the more power consious attach a battery farm in the middle (ok
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
The entire reason we have a power grid is to improve reliability. When a power plant needs to be taken down for maintainance, power is brought in from somewhere else; without the grid, we'd have blackouts every time plants were shut down for maintainance.
Solar and wind power are far less reliable than fossil and nuclear power. As a result, using them would require a larger, more expensive, grid in order to maintain the same qu
Re:No. (Score:2)
Huh? What are you smoking? They are very VERY low maintenance and incredibly reliable (low maint because of few problems).
where nuclear, gas and coal, because of their risks (explosion/meltdown) require MUCH maintenance. Also, this maintenance requires that they be shutdown, monitored and generally have $ dumped on them to keep them from going BOOM!
Coal/Gas and Nuclear are *not* cheaper either, this 'avert explosions' maintenance and built-in-capital-inve
Re:No. (Score:2)
Nuclear, gas, coal, and hydro power can all run at 90%+ of their peak capacity 90%+ of the time. With solar and wind power, you're lucky to be above 50% of peak capacity more than 50% of the time.
Actually, YES. But you need a mix. (Score:2)
And as we've recently seen, you can't put complete faith in the Grid. It is not a completely secure system, nor can it be made so.
Solar and Wind are both *very* reliable - over a long enough baseline period. Over a period of, say, a year the total solar energy available varies by only a few percent.
So what does that mean? Well, either you need energy st
Re: Yes. (Score:5, Informative)
Park a few solar panels on your rooftop, put a stack of deep-cycle batteries in a closet, and disconnect yourself from "the grid". Don't run major appliances after dark, and your batteries will last longer. Install 12V DC lighting around the house, use 12V appliances and accessories (e.g. designed for cars/boats/RVs) where possible, and run them straight off the batteries. Get large appliances (refridgerators, freezers, washing machines) that were designed to run efficiently, and use even less of it. A large part of the problem in converting an existing house to solar energy is is the task of replacing the house's infrastructure to one suitable for solar power.
Another part of the problem in converting the average modern house is that, although stick frame houses are cheap and inexpensive to construct, they cost a lot to keep cool in the summer, and heat in the winter. Think of them as one big heat sink. By orienting houses with large windows to the south, and roof overhangs designed to allow low winter sun in, and keep high summer sun out, (or with a few large deciduous trees to your south for the same effect), you save a big fat bundle of energy in climate control. Add a fair amount of thermal mass to your outside walls (cob, adobe, straw-bale, rammed earth, earthship), put some of your living space underground, and you might even survive year round with no climate control.
Don't want to go whole hog? Get a grid intertie system, park the solar panels on your roof, and connect them through the intertie straight to the local power grid. It won't power your house after dark, or through a local (or widespread) outage, but you'll be helping offset the electricity demand period during the day, when electricity usage is highest. Better yet, if you make more electricity than you use (and your state requires the participation of the electric company), you can get paid by the electric company for the surplus you generate. The power company pays me $15 a month for the ability to cycle my water heater and air conditioner off for up to 15 minutes an hour (25% load reduction) in the summer, I don't see why they don't offer me $30-$50 a month for the privilige of parking an extra 3-5kW power plant on my roof.
The whole point of solar/wind/geothermal/renewable power, IMHO, is that you wouldn't need a "larger, more expensive, grid". With sufficient distribution of solar panels, backup batteries, and (worst-case) backup generators, you wouldn't need a grid at all. Each neighborhood could be fairly self sufficient, houses with good solar siting would provide the panels, those without could provide backup batteries, or house generators for emergency power. With houses built for energy efficiency from the start, you'd need a lot less power (find the exact statistics yourself) to get through your day. All of which would mean less mass power generation, which means fewer fossil and nuclear plants, which means greater energy independence, all of which is good for the future.
Putting the numbers under this idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
What does that mean in real terms? Not windmills and solar everywhere, but about 8 - 15% wind and solar at carefully picked positions, augmented by microturbines.
It's a good book, if you can make it through four hundred pages about loadhs
Some articles... (Score:2, Informative)
An Industry Trapped by a Theory [commondreams.org] by Robert Kuttner
The Latest Bogus Fossil-Nuke Blackout: This Grid Should Not Exist [commondreams.org] by Harvey Wasserman
Power Outage Traced to Dim Bulb in White House [commondreams.org] by Greg Palast
A Tale of Two Power Outages [commondreams.org] by John Turri
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:2)
Besides, this suffers from the NIMBY syndrome. Nobody wants it sitting in their back yard. Distributed small scale generation would improve reliability, but nobody wants an ugly, noisy diesel generator operating near their house. Small scale hydroelectric projects wo
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, windmills and solar panels just appear out of thin air...
Actually, these things have to be manufactured, a process which causes pollution.
I recall the manufacturing of a solar panel takes more energy than it'll ever give back.
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:a few thoughts... (Score:3, Insightful)
I read somewhere (can't find the ref, WSJ maybe) that California might have avoided its electricity shortage last summer simply by painting the roofs of all public buildings white.
I would advocate solar cells and solar water heating systems mandated for all public buildings, and make a tax incentive to home owners to install them on new or existing properties. Add to that fuel cells in the basement to store excess power for use at night or in cloudy weather. (It should be no
No. Carbon payback time is usually three years. (Score:2)
Porr little you (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, this must've been a real ordeal. It's not like some people in Quebec missed electricity for a month during winter 5 years ago. I mean, not having power for a whole summer day must be so bad...
Re:Porr little you (Score:2)
Re:Porr little you (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not talking out in the sticks, either. I'm talking about 45mi North of Seattle, right off the freeway.
One worldwide power grid would help (Score:2)
Ok, hold on... what I meant to say was, if it were implemented like the internet was supposed to be implemented. If the entire world was on one power grid, then a failure could be averted by pushing excess power to other locations, with multiple failsafe routes. Obviously the cause of the power failure was that transmission lines became over saturated, and generators could not pump their power anywhere (Electricity must be consumed the instant it's generated, unli
greed (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing we don't hafta worry about greed!
Power Grid will be obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
Why move electrons across a grid and have to worry about cascade failures, power station accidents, etc?
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batteries.Simple. (Score:2)
Simple. One nitwit that can't read a sign. One backhoe.
Re:Simple. (Score:2)
One-Call is a free system which will come by and mark out all known utilities on an area of land prior to any earthwork.
Information on New Jersey's One-Call program [pemberton-twp.com]
Re:Power Grid will be obsolete (Score:2)
Re:Power Grid will be obsolete (Score:2)
The dangers of nuclear power are overrated. I'd much rather have a Plutonium RTG in my basement than a hydrogen fuel cell (and associated fuel lines).
Re:Power Grid will be obsolete (Score:2)
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batter
Not so sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Ahhh, but the day will never, ever come where the laws of thermodynamics will stop, creating a way to not lose copius amounts of energy creating hydrogen. Can't get more out than you put in. Never going to so much as break even. Water is a very, very sound molecule. It doesn't even come close to trying to break it for energy. There is no energy solution, because we're talking the first law of thermodynamics, and we're talking basic science. Sounds great. "We've got whole oceans here!" So is it really going to be that much better if we went to it?
What about other chemical processes? Unless you want wholesale ecological disaster in exchange for your Playstation 2 time, I cannot imagine it. Acids? Bases? What else just makes a LARGE, CONSUMABLE AMOUNT OF H2? It would be great for a camp stove, but what about whole cities?
You can't flip a molecule and make water into hydrogen and oxygen so easily. Water is the ANTI-FUEL. It's not gasoline that is waiting to combust. It's a real nightmare to try to get the energy back. Electrolysis just doesn't cut it. We'd really need a magic bullet with hydrogen.
Are hydrogen lines better than power lines?
IMHO It's never been about the resource, it is all about the energy you consume. We need to learn to lower our overall energy usage. That is my solution to all of this.
Hydrogen sounds like the greatest idea ever, too bad physics doesn't seem to back it up, at least right now.
How the hydrogen economy really works. (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, all of this is answered quite comprehensively in 20 Hydrogen Myths [rmi.org] a paper by the Rocky Mountain Institute [rmi.org].
The short answer to your questions is this: you make hydrogen from methane. Why do you bother? Because in an electric car, hydrogen-from-methane is still twice as efficient as any other fuel source: i.e in dollars per vehicle mile, it costs half of gasoline. Why? Because electric motors are just much, much better than internal combustion engines, and probably always will be.
Good enough? But
How to get a cascade failure with H2 (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, that's equivalent to an electric power system where every building is connected to a low voltage line. Highly wasteful, the amount of power wasted in the lines would be a significant percentage of the power used. it's the same thing with hydrogen, if you connect everything with small pipes the amount of power wasted in pumping the gas would be too much. If you want to reduce wastage in your hydrogen system, you would need large pipes, at high pressures, conducting large
Re:Hydrogen Sulfide (Score:3, Informative)
and is considered VERY explosive, and the famous movies
about poison gas wells are talking about this gas
Oil refineries actually end up making more of this
stuff in their processes, this would turn it into a
revenue stream like they did with Carbon Fiber
Carbon Fiber, Stronger than steel, lighter than Titanium
Excerpt:
http://www.cas-bikes.com/page9.html
The carbon fiber and the epoxy matrix has the best strength to weight ratio of any material in the
More good than bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
The blackout is far more likely the result of aging and inadequate infrastructure in the Northeast, and not the interconnected nature of the grid.
Re:More good than bad. (Score:2)
This cascading failure was a result of the grid trying too hard and failing. The grid should have cut off the first failed area, whatever it was, instead of allowing it to send its demands further down the chain. Some safety feature that was supposed to be there didn't kick in when it needed to... why it didn't is
Should Be Okay (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's no different than the Internet -- the big backbone providers 'peer' with each other, giving each other transit. But that doesn't mean that big DDoS attack aimed at one provider will cripple the whole Internet.
Interconnected power-grid not a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Tesla suggested this *long* before Fuller (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tesla suggested this *long* before Fuller (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tesla suggested this *long* before Fuller (Score:2)
23 hours? Try 5-10 days... (Score:4, Interesting)
And nobody cared. Friends and relatives in other areas didn't see it on the news and call to see if we were okay. We had to call them, because it wasn't on the news anywhere else. I was lucky enough to have a good friend in a part of town with power, and went to his place by the afternoon, we were sitting watching all the news stations. The only place we saw any reference to it was the tiny ticker at the bottom of CNN Headline News, one blurb about "Thousands without power after storm slams Memphis." I think the only reason CNN bothered is that they're based in Atlanta (in the south) instead of NYC.
300,000 homes and businesses (more than half a million people in all) were without power for days. Most of us didn't see our lights come back on for 4-5 days. And it took more than 10 days to get everyone turned back on. But nobody noticed.
If NYC loses power, it's an instant media blitz, with all the networks scrambling to make new imposing music themes and clip-art for "Massive Outage: Are Terrorists Responsible?" And now, days later, it's still the top headline everywhere. But when half a million Memphians lost power for a week, no one cared. I guarantee if Fedex had lost power they would have cared..
Re:23 hours? Try 5-10 days... (Score:2)
stupidity(letting the grid age so that you have seemingly no idea what brought it down) == bad reason for failing to deliver.
oh yeah, one lighting wouldn't count as a natural disaster. even a goddamn hurricane shouldn't cause power outage this big.
you know, a 'smallish' natural disaster in usa isn't enough to have extra tv-news in finland, but when something so bizarre like the (25million?)outage happens we knew here in finland few minutes after it
What is so hard to understand? (Score:2)
But what we don't want to hear about is stuff that we expect. Stuff like tornados and hurricanes in places where you chose to live. Yes, even when it happens in other places it's newsworthy, but the NYC thing was MORE newsworthy and strange
Re:23 hours? Try 5-10 days... (Score:2)
For those not good with math, that's 100 TIMES as bad as what you're describing, although admittedly for a shorter period of time. I'd call it major news too.
BAD idea.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The dude and his wife were typical peacenic, hippy types, long hair, shaggy beard, robes and beads and, *a college professor*.
Anyway, this couple dug a hole in the desert and built a log cabin in the hole. They then covered the cabin back over with the dirt from the hole so that from outside the place looked like a big dirt pile with windows.
You walked down a flight of steps from ground level to the enterance, 12' below ground level.
They had burlap on string for internal doorways.
Everything ran on low power battery lamps that they charged from solar panels on a big tower outside. They also had a huge hot water tank buried undergound that kept near boiling hot water year round. There was a HUGE hottub that would seat about 15 people lined with turquiose tiles they collected themselves from the desert.
Everything in there was handmade from logs, there was no store made furniture, just adobe and logs. The fireplace was about 3 feet thick and it was bloody hot even 20 feet away.
I was in awe of the place, it was mega cool and I decided then that I wanted to live like that too. Ever since then I've been a strong advocate of non-polluting, renewable energy sources. I would love to see the world powered by solar and geo-thermal power.
MOST of the methods in use today have horrific enviromental impact.
Even wind mills have serious drawbacks. There is a place where they landscape is littered with the damn things, they are huge, ugly behemoths and they make a veyr low rumbling sound that the residents are saying is causing them ill effects. Most things that man produces cause someone or something serious problems.
Imagine the world on solar power. Silent cars. No pollution. A clean sky to look at, clean air to breath. Quiet to enjoy, not noisy cars and trucks roaring around and stinking the place up, spreading more of the agents that cause cancer and other horrible diseases.
And last but not least, when the people can generate their own power for free then there would be no need for parasitic energy companies like Con-Ed, Entergy, etc...
The world is a parasitic circle jerk system, everyone screws the next little guy down the ladder and those at the bottom of the ladder are slaves for those above them. Those at the top are the oppressors and the tyrants.
Re:BAD idea.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You should seek professional help for your paranoia.
Human society is a system where people collaborate to achieve more than they could by themselves. So instead of having to learn how to hunt and cook and make shoes and build a home and make clothes, people can specialize in a single skill, perform it more efficiently and achieve more collectively. Money is what you use to facilitate this trade.
total blackout's now possible? (Score:3, Funny)
Serious conceptual muddle... (Score:5, Informative)
This article has a few oddities. The idea that everyone will be connected to "one" grid is misleading. There will always be multiple grids, and interconnectors between them. This can be thought of similarly to ISPs peering arrangements.
The article is really saying that it may be economically feasible to have extremely long interconnectors, eg across Siberia, the Atlantic, the Pacific, or up the length of Africa.
I have some reservations with this. When power is transmitted, there is a loss through the resistance of the transmission lines. This clearly becomes more acute the longer the transmission. In most grids in europe, the costs of these losses ( and the requirement to cover them with reserve power) is built into the fees to become a trading company within those countries. There are exceptions -eg the UK -> France interconnector - there is ~ 1.5% loss which the trading party must bear. This is for a 26 mile link. So 3000 miles might be a bit hopeful... I can't be arsed to do the math, but...
It is very hard to see how exploiting the varying liquidity of these markets would offset the huge transmission losses. Especially when compared to the ability to ship huge amounts of oil and gas in pipelines and tankers, with little loss, even at the expense of flexibility.
If this is about some new technology for power transmission ( eg superconductors) this could be great.
Australia could do pretty damn well by covering WA with solar. This could be transmitted to China, converting the Three Gorges Dam - an ecological crime, but its there, I've seen it
Reminds me of something (Score:2)
This proposal reminds me of Asimov's short story Sha Guido G [mac.com] in which the main character "saves humanity from oppression by overtaxing the generators of the flying capital city, crashing it to the ground and killing everyone on board".
Seriously, it looks like the incentives to a potential terrorist of a successful attack on a worldwide power grid would be tremendous, so the security should be the very first priority. Which never is, of course.
backwards (Score:2)
Power loss (Score:4, Interesting)
A more-interconnected electricity grid will likely be one that is even less stable.
There is a cure for all of this, in two parts: regulation and decentralization. Electricity regulation worked much better than the current insane system. Ask California and now the Northeast for details. Decentralization allows for waste heat from power generation to be used for heating, improving efficiency (i.e. your office building could heat & provide power for itself with a small on-site plant). Solar and wind (but esp. solar) can be easily added to residential buildings, further insulating homes from grid instability.
More grids, more massive centralized facilities, less regulation: big power problems in the future. Guaranteed. Trying to do this on a world wide basis is general idiocy.
Distributing risk... and responsibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Geopolitically, a global power grid distributes risk and there are good reasons, hypothetically, to do so, particularly for mitigating the extremism that leads to violence. For example, if Iran, which has moderate tendencies, joins the grid, it would have a strong incentive to itself quash extermism precisely because if Iranian terrorists go Allah Mode in a place like France and try to knock out infrastructure, moderate Iranians, who make up the majority of the population, may suffer as well.
The problem is that the major global powers have not indicated that they are willing to obey or respect any international law or organization. In Rwanda, France, who has lately championed the use of the UN in Iraq, aided and abetted the genocidal army over and against the UN force working in the region to save a few beleagured Rwandans. The United States has similarly revealed little or no inclination to respect the UN or other international "decision" making bodies on critical issues.
Lately I've felt as if advocating isolationism makes some sense, and this power grid idea is a example of why: it seems likely that, like the U.N. and like a great deal of international law, the major powers will disingenuously support such structures for a variety of reasons (appearances, genuinely felt convictions and ideals, gains in prestige and power). Unfortunately, unlike the U.N., where flaunting it just means that geopolitics is like geopolitics without a UN, an international power grid is physical, and dependence on it and control of it could become dangerous and unwieldy.
OMG (Score:3, Funny)
Not much to discuss (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, how about this: what would it take for the distribution systems of various utilities, not just electricity but things we all need at some level -- food, water, medicine, communication -- to evolve into networks with uniform, demand-driven price structures? And if that happens why not collect a uniform payment from everyone, eliminating all the effort spent moving individual beans around between individual piles? I'm not talking about socialism, I'm talking about a 100% efficient market. Is that possible?
Networking spreads information uniformly. Could the business world as we know it even exist without the scarcity of information that enables one person to find a better deal than someone else?
Private power sources (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Private power sources (Score:4, Interesting)
The solution was an art object - that huge Calder stabile ("the Great Sail") in front of the building, designed in cooperation with aerodynamics experts to divert the wind.
I can buy electricity from any producer. (Score:4, Informative)
It means that I can do stuff like buy "green" electricity. I use the electricity, pay my green supplier and how they handle the generation, top up supply to the grid and inter company billing is completely up to them.
e.g.
http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/climate/pr
It'll be an interesting experiment.
Transmisson model is wasteful (Score:3, Interesting)
power plants across the nation, we could invest in
local power plants based on technology similar to
smith Cogeneration
http://www.smithcogen.com/aboutcogeneration.htm
There are other vendors out there as well, and throughout
alot of the US natural gas is plentiful and affordable
Each mile of copper wire carrying 100,000+ volts and
1,000's of Ampere lose alot of their power due to the
natural resistance in the wire
The costs of the giant towers, and the huge copper wires
is truly amazing, and could be better spent on local power
The Tranmission model allows for less human workers is
its biggest cost savings
In a time with a job crunch, and a weak grid in California
and the upper east coast, it is time to think differently
Smaller regional grids are less wasteful, and make more sense
10,000 miles of Transmission towers and wires must have
cost billions of dollars . It may have been a good idea
at the time, but the smaller Cogeneration model is better
under current political, financial, and economic conditions
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
Restart was way too slow (Score:5, Insightful)
Since deregulation, there's no one to blame, of course. The invisible hand of the market is supposed to do it all. Generating companies, transmission companies, and retail delivery utilities are all separate organizations now.
It's not really economic to have reliable electric power. Would you pay 20-30% more on your power bill for 99.99% uptime vs. 99.9% uptime? That's about what it costs.
monopolies (Score:3, Insightful)
monopolies destroy competition in the market and when that happens a market economy fails to be the most efficient which i
worldwide grid (Score:4, Interesting)
The worldwide power grid idea was detailed in fuller's book Critical Path [amazon.com] and its not a new idea by any stretch (
Yeah bucky was a ridiculous optimist, but the jist of this whole book (and his life's work for that matter) seems to be that if we can eliminate inefficiencies and work together on a global scale, there will be more than enough power/food/resources for everyone to live extremely well.
Of course the wired people decided to drop their grid on a truly crap-tastic map which kills the whole point. take a look at the worldwide grid on bucky fuller's dymaxion map [oberlin.edu] which shows the earth as one giant continent without distorting the relative sizes of the landmasses.
Electricity demand is low on one side of the world at night, they send their excess capacity to the other side of the globe where it is day. and vice versa. same deal with summer/winter in the northern / southern hemisphere. of course we need to solve the sticky problem of transmission loss
and if you are whining about being without power for a day someone needs to unplug your ass and send you outside for a little nature.
Hmmm... decentralized backup? (Score:3, Insightful)
In my home town (pop. 325) the power often goes out in the winter. When it does, most of the time they get the big old diesel generator up and running and the town has power again within an hour or so. Day-long blackouts are really rare, even if it takes them that long to find and fix the downed line.
Is there some reason why cities can't have relatively local (say, block by block) emergency backup for things like power?
Or is it just habit, or maybe just being cheap?
I doubt the folks in Downieville [mapquest.com] have more money than the folks in [big city of your choice].
Resistance of just wire ... (Score:3, Informative)
If you consider one loop at just 5,000 miles,
and 3 strands one for each phase of AC
then you are looking at 79.2 million ft. Transmission
line
As the size of the wire goes up so does the resistance,
and as the heat of the line goes up so does the resistance
Summer heat can cause "sag" which actually makes the
wires longer for the equation as well
The only figure I have found is about
So at optimal conditions we have 72.2 million ft. x
198K ohms and that is if you figure in Zero resistance
in interconnection
198,000 Ohms * 1,000's of Ampere of current, you get the idea
All so we can build centralized power plants, and have
lower staffing levels
Local power is honestly a better way to go, and I think
deregualtion leads to corporate corruption
Ask Enron !
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
Bad Link (Score:3, Informative)
a better one , with better numbers
http://www.ramgen.com/about_doe.html
9 - 15% loss is the overall factor they think
At 12 trillion watts of usage, that is a GREAT deal of power
Thanks,
Ex-MislTech
What about compatibility? (Score:4, Insightful)
One grid doesn't mean everyong goes down. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
The power outage would have never occured if the power distribution system was distributed and centralized.
Uh, I think Distributed and NON-centralized is a better idea. Otherwise your just giving monopolies even more power to gouge consumers and make big mistakes. If it did go ahead. we should be able to use any supplier in the world, including ourselves. Like that's gonna happen.
Re:how does it work? (Score:2)
That should be here [howstuffworks.com], methinks :-)
Re:ianaee (Score:2)
In the global power grid it would operate more like(simplified): there is a power deficit in new york, it pulls in power from the west of north america, creating a deficit there, which will then pull extra power from (say there is an interconnect to) eastern russia, they will then pull power from central russia, and they from the middle east, and they will pull some from afric
Re:ianaee -DC dude. (Score:2)
But anyway, that's the answer to your question --HVDC. It's a well known and old idea that was never implemented for political rather than engineering reasons.
But another idea right along these lines of
Re:Office Space (Score:2, Funny)