Superconducting Power Grid Launches In New York 264
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.
Wow, !vaporware? (Score:5, Insightful)
With the influx of superconducting [slashdot.org] articles [slashdot.org] 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."
reliability ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Just the thing we need, 150x power usage (Score:2, Insightful)
These will go perfect with a 150x increase in power plant construction!
Forget wires (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Forget wires (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean apart from the kilowatts available on every electrical outlet in the house?
Re:Wow, !vaporware? (Score:3, Insightful)
"I got a pretty good feel of "high temperature" superconducting being vaporware."
You might want to ask anyone who's ever been in a MRI why the dang thing works at all without it's superconducting super magnets.
by 'high temperature' right now we mean somewhere around 90-110K prior to 1986 high temperature meant 'below 22K'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSCCO [wikipedia.org] BSCCO is the most common superconductor, at least for lines, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YBCO [wikipedia.org] YBCO is better for super conducting super magnets. at least if I'm understanding the wikis on them correctly.
although, according to some website, they claimed that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niobium-tin [wikipedia.org] (used with liquid helium cooling) was the superconductor used with MRI machinery.
oh hey, and what about the maglev train in japan, or various ones in germany?? do you honestly think that doing magleg based on normal electromagnets would be energy efficient?
yeah, yeah superconductors that require LN or LH cooling, automatically cost a lot of money, but here's the thing, these LN2 superconductor lines, aren't going to run 24/7 365... they of course are going to load test them, but after that because they're part of a redundant backup power grid setup, they're just going to not cool and not use them, expect when the grid really needs them to not fail.
most likely this project was just to line the pockets of someone who was friends with the right people, since DHS paid for it in a no-bid contract! all the tech on superconductors is fairly simple, we're using them in maglev trains and MRI machines every day...
Re:Possible new 'Terrorism' target? (Score:3, Insightful)
Erm. Underground?
I'd like to see lightning hit down there.
Re:I'd contribute funds to that... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Department of Homeland Security is just amazing. I admit I haven't been paying as much attention as I could have, but, so far, I have only heard about _one_ thing they did that I thought would actually...improve homeland security. For the rest, they have embarked on numerous projects that range from interesting to horrible, but that are all very expensive and do little to improve security.
On the one hand, I am glad to see a large portion of the money that DHS gets goes to interesting projects, rather than everything being spent on spying on innocent people. On the other hand, I am sad to see all the things that are done under the (_very_ thin) guise of security...
If the government wants to sponsor certain pet projects of theirs, why don't they just say they want to sponsor them, because they find them interesting, or some such, instead of trying to pretend it's all in the name of security?
Re:Forget wires (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only a 150 metre prototype, but if the technology scales then it will have a major effect on the economics of power distribution.
Re:OK - 150x capacity, BUT: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Forget wires (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
As soon as you're pleased to manage high-temperature reactors (>700deg Celsius) in your basement, sure.
Of *course* you can generate electricity easier than that. It's only that you're wasting a whole bunch of ressources in doing so. Current power plants (both nuclear and coal-based) are designed to be highly efficient -- but this efficiency is bound to all kinds if physical upper and lower bounds in temperatures and temperature gradients. And then there is also the argument of advanced filtering systems designet to (try to) protect the environment... Making your own electricity means by default working with worse filters, simply because the expensive filters wouldn't be affordable for mere mortals.
So generating energy at a nano-scale currently means wasting ressources and destroying the environment more than necessary for things that could be done many times more efficiently when implemented at a larger scale.
Generating electricity at home -- at lest with currently available technology -- would not be doing anybody any favors.
Instead, building a world-wide superconduction backbone grid and generating energy wherever it's most favorable (in the mit of deserts or of oceans...), distributing large masses of energy to wherever it's needed, and then distributing the "last mile" through copper would bring us a giant step forward. Kind of like the Internet is built... Proposals going in this directions have existed for decades BTW. Just didn't go mainstream yet.
Re:Possible new 'Terrorism' target? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish that was funny and not depressing.
Re:Superconductors = almost no heat (Score:3, Insightful)
In a class of superconductors known as Type II superconductors, including all known high-temperature superconductors, an extremely small amount of resistivity appears at temperatures not too far below the nominal superconducting transition when an electrical current is applied in conjunction with a strong magnetic field, which may be caused by the electrical current. This is due to the motion of vortices in the electronic superfluid, which dissipates some of the energy carried by the current. If the current is sufficiently small, the vortices are stationary, and the resistivity vanishes. The resistance due to this effect is tiny compared with that of non-superconducting materials, but must be taken into account in sensitive experiments. However, as the temperature decreases far enough below the nominal superconducting transition, these vortices can become frozen into a disordered but stationary phase known as a "vortex glass". Below this vortex glass transition temperature, the resistance of the material becomes truly zero.
Re:Superconductors = almost no heat (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
In regard to projects like this, you have it all wrong. Let's think for a minute.
New York City and its tri-state metro area is the largest in the country, and essentially the world's financial capital. Its arguably one of the most important areas in the country.
For a variety of reasons like NIMBY, the dysfunction of NY state government and rapidly increasing demand, an increasing proportion of the electricity supply is coming from places hundreds of miles away in Upstate NY and Quebec. The geography of NYC and Long Island (and the high cost of land) makes it very difficult to add transmission lines, and makes it relatively easy to attack the existing lines.
So, if a technology like superconducting transmission lines would allow you to increase capacity and better protect these lines by burying them, it seems like a valid security measure to me.
Re:Dream target for muslims (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Superconductors = almost no heat (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Possible new 'Terrorism' target? (Score:4, Insightful)
- 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.
Okay, one last time. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.