[TML] [Merchant Shipping] Some ideas I came up with to make merchant shipping more interesing

[Bruce Johnson]

On Apr 16, 2008, at 8:06 PM, Jerry W Barrington wrote:

> You have to have a distribution network in each neighborhood, which is
> *most* of the network expense.  Then you need connections between
> neighborhoods, for enough redundancy when a plant *does* fail (and  
> with
> 100,000's to millions of them around on 1 planet, that's going to be  
> a lot
> of failures every day).
>
> That doesn't look much different from the full grid we have now.

Oh yes it does! Our local electric company had a large substation  
transformer blow yesterday. In the distributed power system, that's a  
couple trucks and a few hundred customers without power.

In our electrical grid, that failure rippled out to encompass half the  
city for an hour and a half, accompanied my several shorter outages  
after they initially restored power; 35,000 customers without power.

(and no, that's not 35,000 PEOPLE without power...the U of A,  
population roughly 35K itself, counts as ONE customer...)

The wiring grid is similar, but the mode of action in the event of  
failure is completely different.

Remember the huge blackout in 2001? That was caused by some trees  
falling over a single high-tension line in Ohio; the subsequent  
blackout rippled across the grid to encompass half the east coast.

In a grid with distributed local power generation, neighboring power  
stations can take up the slack ensuring that more distant stations  
aren't affected.

There was an electrical company in California a few years back testing  
this idea...they had a natural-gas fuel cell generator that was about  
the size and power output of a local neighborhood substation.

This solves two problems: there are vastly smaller transmission losses  
when dealing with natural gas, and the infrastructure for the  
replacement is already there.

I can't find the ref any more, the trial, iirc was in 2004 or so.


-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs