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

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 4/17/08 1:24 PM, "Bruce Johnson" <johnson at pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:

> 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.

Your assuming they'll do far better at building their network than we have
ours.  Frankly, ours is crappy, and that has nothing to do with the
distributed/central argument.  Our power companies aren't motivated to do it
better.  There's no excuse for that kind of ripple effect, and it could be
prevented.  What makes you think it can't happen in a more distributed
system?

But I've seen a transformer blow at the factory I used to work at.  It was
repaired inside an hour, and this was on the night shift.  I guess the
factory pays a pretty big bill, so they find it kind of important.  :)

> 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.

Well, the US grid *is* distributed.  Not to the suburb level, but there are
thousands of plants scattered all over the place.  Hell, we have a peaker
right across town, and this place only has population 9318 (3813 households)
[2000 census].

> 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.

Thing is, the long-distance transmission of electricity (thousands of
miles), if cheap: US$ 0.005 to 0.02 per kilowatt-hour.  That can be quite
cheap compared to local generation costs.  If Traveller can assume vastly
cheaper generation, it can also assume vastly cheaper transmission.

And many renewable energy sources can't come to the consumer: hydro, wind,
and solar are most efficient in certain places, usually not where lots of
people live.