A More Robust Grid for Manhattan

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• 	itrium? ms on 05/29/2007 at 1:16 PM
  Posts: 73 Avg Rating:	Perhaps you mean yttrium (chemical symbol Y)? Rate this comment: (Reply)

• Sorry, completely nuts idea - begs for catastrophic failure nekote on 05/30/2007 at 6:40 AM

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  Sorry to say. But, this is nuts. More robust? Exactly the opposite - more brittle. The devil here is the absolute necessity for a continuously operating active element - cooling - that millions of people would be depending on. Murphy's law says it's gonna' get screwed up. It begs for a catastrophic failure. And worst, 10 or 100 times as many customers will be affected, whenever the required cooling fails. In the 1965 and 1977 NorthEast blackouts, underground power distribution cables cooled with oil almost suffered catastrophic burn out because there was no emergency source of power to pump the cooling oil.  It took *2* massive power failures, *BEFORE* that shortcoming was corrected!!! And this is going to operate at 90 degrees Kelvin? A relatively unknown temperature region, in the vast commercial and industrial sectors. The wider the area serviced by fewer extremely high capacity links run ever closer to their capacities, the greater the risk of longer term / extended failures (months / years, until destroyed links can be replaced) that will affect greater numbers of people. Very substantial redundancy and seemingly un-naturally generous excess capacity are needed to minimize that disaster probability.  That means greatly increasing the total costs of such an already expensive active cooling system. It sounds very attractive to be able to increase the amount of power on a single link by a factor of 10 or 100 or 150.  The down side is the unacceptible impacts to those dependent on such links, when they fail.  Even more so when catastropic failure may literally mean no electric power during the many months (years?) to replace the failed (underground!) links. To make an extremely exagerated case to illustrate, what if all of NYC's electrical power passed through a few super massive ultra high capacity links?  And one link catastrophically failed?  Overburdening the remaining fewer links?  And required, say, 3 years to replace? It would seem the obvious alternative is for there to be many more, smaller, electric power "generators", rather than ever higher capacity / density electric power transmission lines. Rate this comment: (Reply)

  • Re: Sorry, completely nuts idea - begs for catastrophic failure james_filippi on 06/21/2007 at 1:30 PM

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    How about a stationary 1kw fuel cell unit for every apartment.  Small in size, fueled by natural gas?  Independent power supply w/ no chance of blackouts to many... No more cables period... telephone poles which carry electricity gone, underground electricity cables gone.  Less moving parts equals reliability, quiet?  The byproduct is heat and water which can both be re-used!!!  Cost savings?  Instead of spending all that money on an infrastructure which is sure to cost even more to maintain as time goes on... Fuel Cells in my opinion have the ability to solve multiple problems at once... Japan will be installing thousands of 1kw apartment units in 2008, what are we waiting for?   Rate this comment: (Reply)

• 	OK if used for emergencies dmm on 06/05/2007 at 12:46 PM
  Posts: 149 Avg Rating:	Above poster is wrong if the proposed interconnect is reserved for emergencies, but is right if the "emergencies" start to become commonplace. Rate this comment: (Reply)

  • Supercooled "standby" system? nekote on 06/07/2007 at 8:20 AM

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    I can't imagine this actively supercooled system would *not* be used primarily for normal operations, expecially given its likely expense. Further, what sense does would it make to have an *active* / high maintenance / cantankerous / less than 100% available "emergency" system?  It is not going to be activated / charged up / cooled down, for use, in the midst of an emergency. So, pay to keep such a system up and running, but not in operational use?  Left in "standy" and not used? In practice, it would work the other way around.  The old style (current) *passive* conductors would more likely be kept as the fall back "emergency" (albeit more limited?) alternative. Rate this comment: (Reply)