3 ms·

There’s so much we don’t know about high voltages. I never understood why we don’t research it more. I guess too dangerous. Even a phenomenon like this. Could

There’s so much we don’t know about high voltages. I never understood why we don’t research it more. I guess too dangerous. Even a phenomenon like this. Could we use it for lighting a whole City for less power than streetlamps?

complector 8y ago
Uh, well, for starters, you've got this blazing, uncontrolled discharge of energy, and it's just dumping tons of heat, untraviolet light and irregular magnetic force and radio transmission in all directions. So there's a lot of waste and noisy interference being unloaded in all directions. In fact, it's so wasteful that it's dumping audible noise for miles beyond even the limits of its kinetic heat. Why waste that much energy? It's obviously costly to produce, no? We don't even have a report on how much of the grid's juice went up in smoke. Certainly more than one hour of a 100 watt lightbulb. Maybe a megawatt hour? Maybe one hundred megawatt hours? An hour's worth of one hundred million lightbulbs? Not impossible. And then, of course, there's the fact that night time is a good thing. All vertebrates sleep. All plants need a night cycle, for the dark phase of photosynthesis. Sure, the city is this unnatural human social landscape, but, uh... I think the novelty of a constant high intensity electrical arc's discharge will wear off in about a week or less, for pretty much everybody, and nobody would want to live near it.
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
> There’s so much we don’t know about high voltages. I never understood why we don’t research it more. I guess too dangerous. High voltage is quite well-researched. I'm sure there are experts who understand exactly what is happening here. We might not know the immediate cause of the explosion yet. > Even a phenomenon like this. Could we use it for lighting a whole City for less power than streetlamps? I'm a total layman, but it seems like the large majority of the light generated is wasted lighting up the sky instead of the ground. It's only producing as much groundlight as it is because there happened to be low clouds that night. That's why street lamps have reflectors above them to focus the light downwards. That's not even considering the amount energy wasted as heat.
dcision 8y ago
Like the Moonlight Towers that used arc lamps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower
specialp 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp. These were used for a while before the incandescent bulb for street lighting. They aren't very power efficient. I used to work on one in a large projection system and I had to wear protective gear when changing the bulb because it could catastrophically explode. BTW if anyone is interested in the voltage involved here, my friend works for ConEd and was on the scene. It was a 246kv step down transformer to 27kv. They have a lot of redundancy so it was fixed pretty quickly.

complector 8y ago

Uh, well, for starters, you've got this blazing, uncontrolled discharge of energy, and it's just dumping tons of heat, untraviolet light and irregular magnetic force and radio transmission in all directions. So there's a lot of waste and noisy interference being unloaded in all directions. In fact, it's so wasteful that it's dumping audible noise for miles beyond even the limits of its kinetic heat. Why waste that much energy? It's obviously costly to produce, no? We don't even have a report on how much of the grid's juice went up in smoke. Certainly more than one hour of a 100 watt lightbulb. Maybe a megawatt hour? Maybe one hundred megawatt hours? An hour's worth of one hundred million lightbulbs? Not impossible. And then, of course, there's the fact that night time is a good thing. All vertebrates sleep. All plants need a night cycle, for the dark phase of photosynthesis. Sure, the city is this unnatural human social landscape, but, uh... I think the novelty of a constant high intensity electrical arc's discharge will wear off in about a week or less, for pretty much everybody, and nobody would want to live near it.

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

> There’s so much we don’t know about high voltages. I never understood why we don’t research it more. I guess too dangerous. High voltage is quite well-researched. I'm sure there are experts who understand exactly what is happening here. We might not know the immediate cause of the explosion yet. > Even a phenomenon like this. Could we use it for lighting a whole City for less power than streetlamps? I'm a total layman, but it seems like the large majority of the light generated is wasted lighting up the sky instead of the ground. It's only producing as much groundlight as it is because there happened to be low clouds that night. That's why street lamps have reflectors above them to focus the light downwards. That's not even considering the amount energy wasted as heat.

dcision 8y ago

Like the Moonlight Towers that used arc lamps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower

specialp 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp. These were used for a while before the incandescent bulb for street lighting. They aren't very power efficient. I used to work on one in a large projection system and I had to wear protective gear when changing the bulb because it could catastrophically explode. BTW if anyone is interested in the voltage involved here, my friend works for ConEd and was on the scene. It was a 246kv step down transformer to 27kv. They have a lot of redundancy so it was fixed pretty quickly.