5 ms·
Replacing Wires Could Double How Much Electricity the US Grid Can Handle
- gok 3y agosee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485940
- briandw 3y agoSounds so much more realistic than putting up new lines. I imagine that replacing the conductors doesn't need environmental review and NIMBYs can't go to court to stop an existing project.
- zbrozek 3y agoIf they're estimating costs up to 50% of building new corridors to reconductor existing ones, it seems pretty likely that wading through an enormous amount of nonsense is involved.
- barryrandall 3y agoTo the NIMBY, any change is an opportunity to obstruct.
- coldtea 3y agoAnd to the FISEBYWAYNIMBYCA (Fine In Somebody Else's Backyward, What Are You NIMBIs Complaining About?) any change is fine since they're not affected...
- blurri 3y agoYeah thats not a thing.
- coldtea 3y agoIt's very much a thing. It's common for people to look down upon NIMBY protests concerning stuff others would have to put up with. "I, myself would totally welcome it, see" - never mind that the things that they scold others for not accepting, are things planned for nowhere near their backyard, so their openess conveniently wont be put to the test. Most of the talk down of NIMBY protesting comes from such types, not from people local to the projects/changes that do welcome them.
- ars 3y agoPossibly a stupid question, but is it possible to add a new wire in addition to the old one, on the same holder? Are wires that heavy that the structure that holds them is always maxed out?
- GauntletWizard 3y agoIt's a combination of heavy and tense, but yes - Trasmission towers are typically overengineered for their load, but not so much that you can go adding additional conductor strands to them. Further, there's significant distance requirements between strands - otherwise you get arcing.
- eru 3y agoThey are overengineered also to have a margin of safety, and you don't want to eat into that margin of safety without good reason.
- Ekaros 3y agoSpecially when that overengineering is for things like wind load which of extremes we can expect to become more common.
- ars 3y agoThe distance doesn't matter, the additional cable would be at the same voltage as the one adjacent to it.
- GerryB 3y agoThe different lines are at the same AC voltage, but have different phases (almost always three phases), so there's an instantaneous potential difference between them. The lines need to keep the conductors seperated to prevent potential arcing chances to essentially zero even in wet weather. The higher the voltage, the more seperation is needed.
- 3y ago
- purpleblue 3y agoReplacing the wires cost half as much as adding new wires. So I think it actually makes more sense to add new wires. It will give some level of redundancy for only double cost and you don't need to impact current electricity delivery.
- tstrimple 3y agoI know absolutely nothing about transmission lines and the like. I'm curious about whether the asymmetric nature of new lines on top of old line capacities causes problems. Much like you've got to pay attention when mixing 10gb networking devices and 1gb devices.
- pixl97 3y agoI'm assuming you'd replace all the wires on the transmission tower set before applying higher power rates to it. Think of each wire on a power pole like a single wire inside of a cat5 bundle. You wouldn't plug it in to a 10Gb nic until they were all upgraded to cat6/7 capability.
- toast0 3y ago> Much like you've got to pay attention when mixing 10gb networking devices and 1gb devices. Maybe with fiber transceivers, sure. But twisted pair is fine... Some of the 10G equipment doesn't go all the way down to 10M anymore, but just put your old 10M equipment on the 10/100/1G ports, and the 10G equipment on 10G ports. It can be on the same subnet, no big deal, as long as you're not running jumbo packets or at least only using jumbo with MTU discovery. (You can usually even run 10G on cat5e, as long as it's not too long, and not in dense conduit)
- specialist 3y agoAlso, retrofitting (reconductoring) can be done today, incrementally. Whereas new adding lines takes years, decades. Hurdles like permitting, environmental reviews, NIMBYs, getting stuck in the interconnection queue. Weirdly, how utilities were financed blocks retrofits. Public utilities make money by building new stuff. Increasing efficiency actually loses them revenue. Eventually, we have to reboot their businesses models. Meanwhile, we need legislation (and subsidies) to compel retrofits.
- quantified 3y agoTerawatt-miles. A unit of measurement I'm glad to have been exposed to today.
- klysm 3y agoIf a watt is 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3, and we multiply by distance we get 1 kg⋅m3⋅s−3. I wonder what that means
- westurner 3y agoHere's that with Pint for Quantities and Units with `%pip install -q` for Jupyter notebooks with e.g. Google Colab or vscode.dev+pyodide or JupyterLite or ... in Jupyter notebook Percent format with the %%ipytest cell magic function to upgrade test assertions (and @pytest.fixture s) and run everything starting with test_ with the pytest test runner: # %% %pip install -q pint ipytest pytest-cov import ipytest ipytest.autoconfig() # %% %%ipytest -v # --help def test_pint_units_for_watt_meters(): import pint ureg = pint.UnitRegistry() unit1 = ureg.kilogram*(ureg.meter**2)*(ureg.seconds**-3) unit2 = unit1 * ureg.meter assert 1*unit1 == 1*ureg.watt assert 1*unit2 == 1*ureg.watt*ureg.meters
- quantified 3y agoThis is where simply multiplying the units through can be misleading as it hides semantics. The distance/area of m in the watt is not necessarily the same as the distance of the m in the length of conductor. But an interpretation would be volume which seems intuitive, double the length or area of a cylinder and you double its volume.
- rmdes 3y agoBreaking : Also works with bridges, train tracks , roads and most old infrastructures
- radar1310 3y agoWe can’t even get fiber to everyone in the US. What makes anyone think we can rewire an entire country and who’s going to pay for it? You and I with higher rates. How long would it take 30 years 40 years?
- bombcar 3y agoWe could get fiber to everyone in the US, if we wanted to. We did rural electrification and telephone decades ago. The problem is that the marginal utility gets smaller and smaller as the rollout continues. Most places in the US have some form of communication wire available, so you're not going from "nothing to fiber" but from "something slow to fiber" which is significantly different.
- bequanna 3y ago> We did rural electrification and telephone decades ago. We used to do things like that, sure. Unfortunately, Government "Works" projects aren't like they were in the 30s-50s. Outside of rebuilding a few crappy bridges, almost nothing useful is being created. At this point, don’t think we can trust the government with more money regardless of what they promise to do with it. The vast majority of new Federal Gov jobs are build-nothing, do-nothing, buerocratic paper pushing roles that create nothing of lasting or even temporary value. The net effect of the massive Federal budget increases over the past ~4 years has been a sharp decrease in our overall workforce efficiency which has been the main driver of inflation.
- imoverclocked 3y agoYa know, we could make daytime energy usage cheaper than night time usage and then shift production to mostly solar without such an emphasis on storing it. Then we wouldn’t need to solve the problem of transporting so much energy.
- llsf 3y agoLots of energy is consumed by the industry and some industries do not sleep at night. Blast furnaces for instance need a huge amount of energy (https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-energy-use-us-steel-industry-historical-perspective-and-future https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/articles/itp-steel-energy-us...) continuously.
- itsoktocry 3y ago>Lots of energy is consumed by the industry and some industries do not sleep at night. People think you slap some solar panels on your roof and it's "problem solved". Apparently they have no idea how the world consumes energy, or the scale: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/666342/how-the-world-really-works-by-vaclav-smil/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/666342/how-the-worl...
- imoverclocked 3y agoOther people think that we need an all encompassing solution that solves every problem without changing the way the world works.
- llsf 3y agoI agree it works both ways. I just wanted to remind that electric transportation is a small part of the overall electricity consumption (0.02 Quads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_(unit)), while industry & commercial accounts for 13.3 Quads, 3 order of magnitude lower. In "Transportation", there are a lot of non-electric consumption (in US in 2022: 89.45% oil, 5.7% biomass, 4.69% NatGas, only 0.08% electricity, and other) because only few trains and individual cars are using electricity the rest like boats, planes, and most trains in US runs on oil. So, yes it is good for electric vehicles to charge during the day when solar produces the most. But the vast majority of the electricity consumption (in US 99.9%) is from the Industry, Commercial and Residential while the transportation is only in US 0.1% (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). Most of the Industry, Commercial and even Residential needs electricity at night, and storing that kind electric energy (48.57 Quads per year... that is 9,246,178,571 barrel of oil or 0.2 barrel of U235) is currently difficult.
- formvoltron 3y agodr. copper to da moon
- nickwarren 3y agoAs I understand it, reconductoring main benefit is it allows you to fit more aluminum in the area. NEC specifies conduit has acceptable % fill value that I could see this optimization having for retrofits, but long haul transmission lines are not underground - they're dangling in the air where it doesn't seem material if the wire is a bit bigger on replacement. Am I missing something?
- devanl 3y agoAs hinted at, but not elaborated on by the first part that mentions temperature monitoring, those wires in free air expand and contract with temperature changes. The cables need to be able to support their own weight without collapsing or touching other conductive objects like other cables or trees. Adding more conductive material helps with the resistive losses, but also makes the cable heavier. Using an advanced cable that has better tensile strength for the same or better conductivity accounts for those second order effects better than just adding more aluminum.
- tomohawk 3y agoInstead of industrializing rural and wild landscapes, put solar on existing urban hardscapes, lessening the need for long distance transmission. Target the grid improvements to where the demand is.
- culopatin 3y agoAlso increasing the voltage no? You’d need to replace the transformers instead of the wires I guess.
- tuatoru 3y agoProbably need to increase wire spacing and upgrade insulators as well.
- timka 3y agoA economic decline has been happening in the US since fall 2021 and there's no good way out of it. Reducing the key rate would worsen the inflation that is already high. Increasing the key rate would accelerate the decline in production that is already bad enough. That means the overall demand in the economy will keep falling and thus at some point the costs of running the existing grid at such a low level of congestion will put it way bellow its point of profitability. This whole situation would require building a completely different infrastructure for this new structure of economy.