It's miserable. The fact that it works (usually) just hides the fact that it's fragile and very leaky.
A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting. By any rational measure in this day and age, that alone qualifies our grid as "crap" already, but the fact that a software bug shut down most of New England for several days three or four years ago doesn't cast any positive light on our pitifully outdated infrastructure.
> A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting.
"Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 [13] and 6.5% in 2007[14]. In general, losses are estimated from the discrepancy between energy produced (as reported by power plants) and energy sold to end customers; the difference between what is produced and what is consumed constitute transmission and distribution losses."
My physics is getting a bit foggy, but I'm pretty sure I remember a lecture in which we were told that 30% transmission efficiency is actually about the best we can achieve with current materials science (without going to insanely expensive exotic solutions that don't scale or require non-room-temperature conditions).
This is part of why the idea of switching from big centralized power-plants to small localized plants is a big potential win.
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It's miserable. The fact that it works (usually) just hides the fact that it's fragile and very leaky.
A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting. By any rational measure in this day and age, that alone qualifies our grid as "crap" already, but the fact that a software bug shut down most of New England for several days three or four years ago doesn't cast any positive light on our pitifully outdated infrastructure.
> A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting.
"Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 [13] and 6.5% in 2007[14]. In general, losses are estimated from the discrepancy between energy produced (as reported by power plants) and energy sold to end customers; the difference between what is produced and what is consumed constitute transmission and distribution losses."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission
My physics is getting a bit foggy, but I'm pretty sure I remember a lecture in which we were told that 30% transmission efficiency is actually about the best we can achieve with current materials science (without going to insanely expensive exotic solutions that don't scale or require non-room-temperature conditions).
This is part of why the idea of switching from big centralized power-plants to small localized plants is a big potential win.