| 5.
America Plugged In
Archive of Past Articles for Chapter
5
2009 June 10. Building
an Interstate Highway System for
Energy. By Peter
Fairley, Discover Magazine. Excerpt:
President Obama plans to spend
billions building it. General Electric
is already running slick ads touting
the technology behind it. And Greenpeace
declares that it is a great idea. But
what exactly is a “smart
grid”? According to one big-picture
description, it is much of what today’s
power grid is not, and more of what
it must become if the United States
is to replace carbon-belching, coal-fired
power with renewable energy generated
from sun and wind.
Today’s power grids are designed
for local delivery, linking customers
in a given city or region to power
plants relatively nearby. But local
grids are ill-suited to distributing
energy from the alternative sources
of tomorrow. North America’s
strongest winds, most intense sunlight,
and hottest geothermal springs are
largely concentrated in remote regions
hundreds or thousands of miles from
the big cities that need electricity
most. “Half of the population
in the United States lives within
100 miles of the coasts, but most
of the wind resources lie between
North Dakota and West Texas,” says
Michael Heyeck, senior vice president
for transmission at the utility giant
American Electric Power....
Power engineers are already sketching
the outlines of the next-generation
electrical grid that will keep our
homes and factories humming with
clean—but
fluctuating—renewable energy.
The idea is to expand the grid from
the top down by adding thousands
of miles of robust new transmission
lines, while enhancing communication
from the bottom up with electronics
enabling millions of homes and businesses
to optimize their energy use....
2008 August 26. THE
ENERGY CHALLENGE: Wind Energy Bumps
Into Power Grid’s
Limits. By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New
York Times. Excerpt: When the builders
of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent
$320 million to put nearly 200 wind
turbines in upstate New York, the
idea was to get paid for producing
electricity. But at times, regional
electric lines have been so congested
that Maple Ridge has been forced
to shut down even with a brisk wind
blowing.
That is a symptom of a broad national
problem. Expansive dreams about renewable
energy...are bumping up against
the reality of a power grid that
cannot handle the new demands.
...The grid today, according to experts,
is a system conceived 100 years ago
to let utilities prop each other
up, reducing blackouts and sharing
power in small regions. It resembles
a network of streets, avenues and
country roads.
...While the United States today
gets barely 1 percent of its electricity
from wind turbines, many experts
are starting to think that figure
could hit 20 percent.
Achieving that would require moving
large amounts of power over long
distances, from the windy, lightly
populated plains in the middle of
the country to the coasts where many
people live....
...The basic problem is that many
transmission lines, and the connections
between them, are simply too small
for the amount of power companies
would like to squeeze through them.
The difficulty is most acute for
long-distance transmission, but shows
up at times even over distances of
a few hundred miles.
...Wind advocates say that just two
of the windiest states, North Dakota
and South Dakota, could in principle
generate half the nation’s
electricity from turbines. But the
way the national grid is configured,
half the country would have to move
to the Dakotas in order to use the
power.
“We still have a third-world
grid,” Mr. Richardson said,
repeating a comment he has made several
times. “With the federal government
not investing, not setting good regulatory
mechanisms, and basically taking
a back seat on everything except
drilling and fossil fuels, the grid
has not been modernized, especially
for wind energy.”
January 2008. Souping
Up Superconductors. by
Kathleen M. Wong. Excerpt:
Imagine a world where electricity
was virtually free and the means
to store it limitless. Alessandra
Lanzara, a Berkeley professor of
physics, sees a way to reach this
goal: by restringing the power grid
with high temperature
superconductors. "There is a
lot of waste getting electricity
from its production site
to your home. This is because materials
that carry a current have resistivity;
their conduction isn't perfect," Lanzara
says. Superconductors, on the other
hand, can transmit a current without
loss when chilled below a critical
temperature. Power lines made of
superconductors, Lanzara argues,
could retain the energy now lost
to waste, drastically increasing
the amount available for use and
decreasing its cost. Superconductors
can also hold a current indefinitely
without any loss of power, making
them ideal for storing intermittent
energy from sources like the sun.
There is a catch, however-the expense
of keeping power lines cold
largely offsets any gains in energy
efficiency. The first
superconductor, discovered in 1911,
operated at a phenomenally cold
-269 degrees Celsius. Since then,
scientists have hit upon so-called
high temperature superconductors.
Made of ceramics mixed with other
elements such as copper and oxygen,
these materials must still be
chilled to below -140 degrees Celsius
to conduct electricity freely.
...A superconductor's remarkable
properties derive from the flow of
electrons within it. Lanzara observes
this movement in
superconductors using a technique
called photoemission spectroscopy.
Using light, she excites electrons
to emerge from her sample. By mapping
the angles and velocities of exiting
electrons, Lanzara can deduce how
they were moving inside each material.
Under normal conditions, electrons
are negatively charged and should
repel one another. But when a metallic
superconductor drops below a
critical temperature, its electrons
suddenly begin traveling in
pairs. The movement of these particles
is akin to two bowling balls
rolling across a mattress. The first
electron deforms the energetic
space through which electrons travel.
This makes a second electron
following close behind likely to
follow the same path. In traditional
superconductors, the mattress effect
can be identified by the atomic
vibrations, or phonons, it triggers.
"The big question is whether
this mattress effect is still at
work in
the new ceramic superconductors," Lanzara
says.....
26 June 2007. U.S.
Is Creating 3 Centers For Research on Biofuels.
The New York Times. By Matthew L. Wald. Excerpt:
Energy Department is creating three bioenergy research centers
to find new ways to turn plants into fuel; three centers, which
department describes as three start-up companies with $125
million each in capital, will be in Oak Ridge, Tenn, Madison,
Wis, and near Berkeley, Calif; they will involve numerous universities,
national laboratories and private companies; goal of centers
is to bring new technologies to market within five years; new
approach supports Pres Bush's goal of reducing gasoline consumption
by 20 percent in 10 years; centers will focus on finding naturally
occurring microbes that can break down lignin, component of
plants and trees, to give access to material inside, called
cellulose…
Archive
of Past Articles for Chapter
5
Health Effects of Electromagnetic Fields
-- Studies
Superconductors
- Magnesium
diboride, MgB2
-
Aug 15. 2002 BERKELEY, CA. Magnesium diboride
(MgB2) becomes superconducting at 39 degrees
Kelvin, one of the highest known transition
temperatures (Tc) of any superconductor. What's
more, its puzzling characteristics include more
than one superconducting energy gap, a state
of affairs anticipated in theory but never before
seen experimentally.
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