Calling all EE's in utility field

[Fav10]

I am sorry I started this thread. I should have known the can on worms I would open up. Sure I would love to be self sufficient and generate my own power source. There are too many issues with the idea of people sustaining there own energy source. Most people do not have the resources to implement or maintain the system. The grid is maintained and owned by an entity, right? How will the excess energy that people produce back feeding the grid be estimated? Will it overwhelm the capacity of the grid? Who pays for the maintenance of the grid? How many "do it yourself" people will die trying to troubleshoot their household outage?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
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There are many other questions. As for Pre........I am sorry for insulting you, but look at the title. I do not have all the answers. I was soliciting the technical expertise of electrical engineers.<o></o>

 

[Mistermj]

geothermal probably the best option for the average joe as far as providing energy to his home....but it costs quite a bit and takes many years to pay itself off

and that's not completely electricity free either need electricity to move heat from ground into your house or the opposite direction to cool your home but uses alot less....

probably could pop on some solar panels to provide the electricity to run the geothermal pumps to get yourself completely off the energy grid

:lolBIG: Uhm...no.

 

[Conan]

I happen to be an EE.

Solar energy is fine but if you compared the cost to produce it to oil, you'd be paying about $1000/barrel. It's a good technology but creating an efficient cell that can put out enough juice to be worth the investment is not within the reach of science at this time. However the good news is that it's twice as efficient now as it was 10 years ago. They are working on it.

 

[piccolo]

It would require too much area in most places. Our current electrical utility is alternating current. There is no way that I know of to store AC power, like if there was cloud cover for several days and generation was not possible. That would take one hell of a capacitor. Direct current is more capable of storage, but it is extremely dangerous. I would not what to see a child putting a pair of tweezers into a socket with DC power. I am hopeful for new energy solutions, but solar will not be the answer. Nuclear is a powerful source, but disposal is the biggest concern.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>

I agree with most of what you say. But fella you gotta revise that worn out argument. For crying out loud Thomas Edison used that same old worn out line trying to discredit TEsla. Way back when milk cost 2 cts a gallon and women used corn husks for tampons!!

Jeez bro, alot of countries use DC. (i think all of Europe does that)
we dont get reports of kids roasted playing the ole tweezer in the socket game)

You get a nasty shock and thats it..(i know because i have lived in a DC country before:lol



Ps..I believe a bio/chemical solution might be available in helping to enhance solar power so that all one would need is a smaller square footage that can excite some kind of element into producing way more power than we can generate right now.

 

[piccolo]

I agree with most of what you say. But fella you gotta revise that worn out argument. For crying out loud Thomas Edison used that same old worn out line trying to discredit TEsla. Way back when milk cost 2 cts a gallon and women used corn husks for tampons!!

Jeez bro, alot of countries use DC. (i think all of Europe does that)
we dont get reports of kids roasted playing the ole tweezer in the socket game)

You get a nasty shock and thats it..(i know because i have lived in a DC country before:lol




Ps..I believe a bio/chemical solution might be available in helping to enhance solar power so that all one would need is a smaller square footage that can excite some kind of element into producing way more power than we can generate right now.

Correction. It was Tesla for AC and Edison for DC... (my bad..):lol:

 

[Conan]

DC is so very impractical to use because the voltage cannot be altered without using some power to do that and it's inefficient to do. You would need either a humongous inverter or a bunch of giant DC motor generators that put out AC.

AC voltage can be changed up or down with a simple transformer. Utilities use many types of transformers to switch the voltage up or down.

If you chose the DC voltage you wished to use, say 100 volts as an example, then (for example) you would use 10 amps to run a 1000 watt heater. By the time the whole neighborhood plugged in their heaters, they would require about let's say 1000 amps for 100 people to keep their houses warm, assuming that 1000 watts of heat would be enough. The gauge of copper wire required to carry 1000 amps would be approximately 1000MCM (one thousand circular mils) or about a 1" diameter piece of copper extruded into a wire of that dimension. That's huge and unaffordable for utilities. There are hundreds of thousand of miles of "hi-line" copper (or aluminum) cable used by the electric utility in an average city. Imagine if that was all 1" diameter copper wire running up every street because it was on a DC grid? Absurd. (If it was aluminum, it would need to be about 1500 MCM gauge.)

The way they accomplish the job of distributing power using AC is to run the same amount of power through a smaller wire but the wire carries (for example) 13000 volts with a much lower current (amps) thus requiring just a small wire to accomplish transmission of the same amount of power as in the DC example. Next, transform it to the desired voltage (that's called stepping it down, a unique feature of AC) with a transformer (which proportionally increases the available amps) and jack up the wire gauge for just a short distance where it enters the building where higher current is required to match the need of the building. Say good enough for 200 or 400 amps, 1/4 the size of the wire used in the DC example and just a fraction of the quantity.

AC is MUCH cheaper to distribute than DC... just the cost of the copper itself would make DC transmission on a wide spread utility grid prohibitively too expensive.

BUT--
You can send a million volts of DC 500 miles cheaper than doing it with AC because the voltage drop is smaller, provided that you didn't do anything but change it to AC when it got to where you were going. You need to change it all over to AC at the other end to distribute it locally.

Tesla was a genius to figure all of this out and then create the gadgets that could do what he envisioned. He and George Westinghouse created the first hydro AC generating station at Niagra Falls early in the 20th century and we've duplicated that method nearly exactly the same way ever since. Edison was more of an entrepreneur. Tesla was a genius. AC is the superior way of distributing electricity around. DC is only one way of using it (mostly in electronic devices that require DC like computers, TVs microwave ovens, etc. Hence they all require an internal DC "power supply.") Motors, light bulbs and heaters use AC directly.

 

[Fav10]

DC is so very impractical to use because the voltage cannot be altered without using some power to do that and it's inefficient to do. You would need either a humongous inverter or a bunch of giant DC motor generators that put out AC.

AC voltage can be changed up or down with a simple transformer. Utilities use many types of transformers to switch the voltage up or down.

If you chose the DC voltage you wished to use, say 100 volts as an example, then (for example) you would use 10 amps to run a 1000 watt heater. By the time the whole neighborhood plugged in their heaters, they would require about let's say 1000 amps for 100 people to keep their houses warm, assuming that 1000 watts of heat would be enough. The gauge of copper wire required to carry 1000 amps would be approximately 1000MCM (one thousand circular mils) or about a 1" diameter piece of copper extruded into a wire of that dimension. That's huge and unaffordable for utilities. There are hundreds of thousand of miles of "hi-line" copper (or aluminum) cable used by the electric utility in an average city. Imagine if that was all 1" diameter copper wire running up every street because it was on a DC grid? Absurd. (If it was aluminum, it would need to be about 1500 MCM gauge.)

The way they accomplish the job of distributing power using AC is to run the same amount of power through a smaller wire but the wire carries (for example) 13000 volts with a much lower current (amps) thus requiring just a small wire to accomplish transmission of the same amount of power as in the DC example. Next, transform it to the desired voltage (that's called stepping it down, a unique feature of AC) with a transformer (which proportionally increases the available amps) and jack up the wire gauge for just a short distance where it enters the building where higher current is required to match the need of the building. Say good enough for 200 or 400 amps, 1/4 the size of the wire used in the DC example and just a fraction of the quantity.

AC is MUCH cheaper to distribute than DC... just the cost of the copper itself would make DC transmission on a wide spread utility grid prohibitively too expensive.

BUT--
You can send a million volts of DC 500 miles cheaper than doing it with AC because the voltage drop is smaller, provided that you didn't do anything but change it to AC when it got to where you were going. You need to change it all over to AC at the other end to distribute it locally.

Tesla was a genius to figure all of this out and then create the gadgets that could do what he envisioned. He and George Westinghouse created the first hydro AC generating station at Niagra Falls early in the 20th century and we've duplicated that method nearly exactly the same way ever since. Edison was more of an entrepreneur. Tesla was a genius. AC is the superior way of distributing electricity around. DC is only one way of using it (mostly in electronic devices that require DC like computers, TVs microwave ovens, etc. Hence they all require an internal DC "power supply.") Motors, light bulbs and heaters use AC directly.

That is what I was looking for......thanks Conan