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UK National Grid transfers power from North to South reflecting the population density gradient (not because of drought!). The Wikipedia article on National Gri
by keithpeter 11y ago
UK National Grid transfers power from North to South reflecting the population density gradient (not because of drought!). The Wikipedia article on National Grid will give you a ballpark figure on line losses and distances involved.
"There is an average power flow of about 11 GW from the north of the UK, particularly from Scotland and northern England, to the south of the UK across the grid. This flow is anticipated to grow to about 12 GW by 2014.[12]
Because of the power loss associated with this north to south flow, the effectiveness and efficiency of new generation capacity is significantly affected by its location. For example new generating capacity on the south coast has about 12% greater effectiveness due to reduced transmission system power losses compared to new generating capacity in north England, and about 20% greater effectiveness than northern Scotland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_%28UK%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_%28UK%29
Another quote I can't resist...
"Following the unauthorised but successful short term parallelling of all regional grids by the night-time engineers in 1937, by 1938 the grid was operating as a national system."
Imagine hacking the electricity supply for a whole country?
- msandford 11y ago> Following the unauthorised but successful... I love how it's the engineer's job to keep everything running, but not to do anything too forward-thinking, lest management get all uppity that it wasn't their idea.
- tedunangst 11y agoWhat does that last quote mean?
- oh_sigh 11y agoTheir original grid was actually more like a bunch of little grids with no connections except a few for emergency use only. The night time engineers apparently just said fuck it, lets make it one big grid and turned those emergency connections into normal connections.
- keithpeter 11y agoGood question. I've been googling and found nothing. I think it means that they had regional power grids running with emergency links between them (nearest neighbour basis?) already in case a large part of the generating capacity in one region was lost or in case a site near the boundary of one region became disconnected from that region's main line. One night they decided to try to activate all the inter-regional links so that power from all the power stations was available across the whole country. I got confused by the 'in parallel' bit, but then you would hardly be connecting them in series! The grids would have been 3-phase and the frequency was controlled to be near exactly 50 Hz, but then you would have to synchronise the phase of each pair of grids before you made the link active... Any electrical engineers around? This historical incident would make a good magazine article I think.
- jessriedel 11y agoRight, so it seems to me that a ~20% loss is acceptable in order to weather the occasional drought. So I don't think the droughts and their interference with the hydro power storage are super important.