Wireless Sensors To Monitor Power Grids 72
Roland Piquepaille writes "Major power outages like the ones which affected the New York state last month or Western Europe ten days ago are becoming more frequent — even if their causes were different. In some cases, the utility companies have to dispatch electricians all over the place to discover the cause of the power failure or simply to restore power. Engineers at the University of Buffalo think they have a better solution: deploy wireless 'nanotech' sensors to monitor the networks and to find the exact location of a failure. They also say that even if the technology is almost available, several years of research are necessary before such a solution can be used by electrical companies. Read more for additional details about this attractive solution."
Batteries not included (Score:3, Interesting)
Nanotech? (Score:3, Insightful)
Power (Score:2)
is this really necessary? (Score:5, Funny)
I'll give you a hint. It's the area where nobody seems to be able to use any electrical equipment.
Tag this as blogspam (Score:4, Informative)
and call its by its name
Read more for additional details [google.com]
or perhaps Roland is a script ? from the google search results it seems it just copies large chunks of other peoples articles and presents them on an advertising laden website and intersperses them with 20 word linking statements
should take about 5min for a perl programmer to replicate this Roland script
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Bah (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wireless? (Score:3, Insightful)
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They've already planned for that. (Score:1)
Until their batteries die, that is...
Batteries? (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely intended to be a funny, not an interesting (Score:2)
This is nanotechnology? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Autonomic Computing (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I was reading about so-called "autonomic computing" with "dynamic resource allocation" and "self-healing capabilities". It was this fluffy, buzzword-laden stuff that just didn't quite dig with me.
Just when I thought that there might actually be something here for me to look into, I noticed an example and jumped on it.
The example was of an "enterprise" backup that had to be done nightly, and some tech weenie had to remote in at 1:00 AM every night to check disk space and kick off the backup. How did they do it the autonomic way? Well, they set up a background scheduler that would automatically check for disk space and start the process!
Yep, that's right. A cron job that did about 5 lines of shell scripting. WTF?
This sounds to be just as buzzword laden and content poor. I've come to conclude that the number of buzzwords used to describe a particular application are inversely proportional to the substance of said application.
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On the same note, the biologists can cure Cancer, HIV, hepatitis, Parkinsons', and the spinal cord injuries. Well, the "technology is almost available", but we need some money and a few years to complete the research...
Which is actually true.
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isolation (Score:2)
the blackouts that happen are mostly cascaded effects with one circuit overloading and all others tripping and everybody has no power. is there any way of limiting the tripping to just a particular area or circuit instead of tripping the entire system? or there are systems in place to avoid that (which i believe is likely) but it doesn't work as planned? it always confuses me why a small problem causes huge di
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This is new? (Score:5, Informative)
>
Uh.. we also have such technology already, and in fact it's quite old. The same signal reflectors that are in a LAN cable tester and tell you the length of a cable, are used on an industrial scale to tell you where the end of a power line is. Program the monitor with "this line is 9,374 feet long" and it sees "8,124 feet long" then it can, in fact, tell you exactly where the break is, right down to the foot! Now, these industrial grade units are highly expensive (partly by their shear power and range, because I'm grossly underestimating; line lengths can reach over 20 continuous miles), so it MIGHT be news if these little "nano" buggers are cheap and plentiful but can still do the job.
Virtually every piece of equipment we have on the line has remote monitoring capability. Now, whether the power companies are USING it is another matter, because of cost and infrastructure and such. My own company has substations we have no remote monitoring on, just because they were deemed low priority enough to not spend money on enabling it. So needing to send crew door-to-door to find a downed line or a damaged power box is just not necessary (though barring major disasters, it can be cheaper than installing all that remote monitoring equipment).
The one thing I do see in the "additional details" article is the idea of using these things, because they're so small, to monitor every single home and business on the grid. That's something we don't currently do, mostly for cost reasons. We can see a neighborhood is down, but not a house. THAT would be news worthy I suppose. Otherwise, I see nothing in this article that is new, just "we've made it smaller!" and they therefore tacked the "nano" buzzword onto it and acted like it was the first time anyone ever created such a device.
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I called the power company once and I said the power was out due a transformer blowing.
I said, I just watched the transformer produce some fairly nice fireworks and they might want to come fix it.
The lady told me as soon as they could find the transformer they would take care of it.
I had to repeat myself, I just watched it blow... would you like the address?
At that point she realized I wasn't calling in to complain, but rather report the location.
Nah, they really do need
nano wireless sensors? what is that (Score:1)
Who's gonna change battery in nano device?
Not really... (Score:2)
Sensors with GPS units (used for their accurate timers) are placed on various different towers and connected via radio. They detect power spikes resulting from a line breaking / lightning hitting. Based on the times recorded when the spike passes over the two closest towers, the exact position of the fault can be deduced. If it's a break, a crew is sent out to repair the damage. In the case of a lightning strike, line switches can be signaled to disengage on
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When the power fails the devices stop monitoring volatage/ amperage, but also stop transmitting. The equipment you use to monitor all the transmitters would record which devices failed first, and that's where you start., combine that with a couple of databases, and an overlay map of the area, and you can literally watch the power fail, and where you need to go to get started. The final signals would give a clue as to what happened. with various voltage current,
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These are certainly NOT "nanotechnology". In my experience, PR people like to tack on the "nano-" prefix to anything that is small.
At my research group at Harvard, we did a press release on our use of wireless sensors for monitoring volcanoes, and the PR guys
used the term "nanotechnology" in the same way. I pointed out to them that this was not technically correct...
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I've wondered why the utilities don't respond to overload by doing controlled load shedding. There are several possible reasons..
we have monitors in California. (Score:3, Informative)
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*ducks*
The link is there (Score:2)
I wonder if he used "250+ submissions accepted on Slashdot [google.com]" as a bullet point on his resume...
And for those who don't know the backstory, Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot [slashdot.org] will fill you in.
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Energy costs are a constant in the headlines. Fluctuate the price a penny per unit in either direction and the
electrical blackouts (Score:2)
the blackouts that happen are mostly cascaded effects with one circuit overloading and all others tripping and everybody has no power. is there any way of limiting the tripping to just a particular area or circuit instead of tripping the entire system? or there are systems in place to avoid that (which i believe is likely) but it doesn't work as planned? it always confuses me why a small problem causes huge disruptions (been in that situation a lot of times.) the behavior appears that there is just one circ
Not In Europe (Score:2, Informative)
Link [chicagotribune.com]
Broadband over power lines? (Score:2)
The plus side is, they can fire a bunch of meter readers, have the above troubleshooting added...and they can sell the servi
I interned for a power company this summmer... (Score:3, Informative)
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when an outage occur, they can order the breaker back on remotely. which they are required to do only once. if it shut out again, there's a physical problem (read, tree branch on the line
i know ontario has a similar system
why exactly do we need wi
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If we instead assume that common transistors are, on the order of 1 micrometer in size (1000 nanometers), then this simply means they are off by a factor of a mere 1.2 million. So if we correct their units and divide a 3 inch device by this, then it would clearly qualify as nanotechnology!
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Huh? (Score:1)
Perhaps the arti
how to secure funding if your science is crap (Score:1)
Step 2: Use the word nano an awful lot
Step 3: Come up with an outrageous bill and say you need political support
"The necessary research must be completed, four to five years, at (a cost of) five to six million dollars per annum here at UB," Sarjeant said.
Check out the USA's flagship neutron scattering facility [sns.gov], which will churn out hundreds of scientific papers per year and put the USA at the front of materials science, on real science at the atomic scale (not inches, Sar
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The primary cause was overload of the network due to excess production of wind energy. In Germany the wind turbine operators are allowed to pump all the electrcity into the net that they can produce and the utilities are compelled by law to deal with it. Overloads will become more frequent as more and bigger turbines are brought online. The latest multi-megawatt turbines can produce electricity relatively economically but they are not so economical if one includes the hidden costs of compensating for t
They already do this... (Score:2, Informative)
The Point Was (Score:1)
Did you read the linked article? The same news was written in newspapers all over Europe. Even my quote says it was "possibly" the cause.
Regardless of the cause it is still not a case for extensive monitoring of the network. My point was that the Americans have problems identifying where their problems begin - in Germany and Europe that does not seem to be the case.
P.S. Thanks to Deutsche Welle TV I know a little about the German windpower issues. Howeve
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For me this was an opportunity to draw attention to the widespread misconception that all forms of solar electricity production are equal in the sense that they only work when