ROCKMAN wrote:Perhaps there is a NATIONAL practical approach to deal with that approaching beast. In case some missed it in the News section I wanted them to be aware of a book our cohort Energy Investor just made the Rockman aware of:
"The Grid - The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future". Perhaps someone should send President-elect Trump a copy. Perhaps a much better infrastructure investment then much the many the tens of $BILLIONS spent on "shovel ready" projects in recent years. Maybe the new POTUS could appoint a czar of a new national EXCOT group. LOL. From a review:
"America's electrical grid, an engineering triumph of the twentieth century, is turning out to be a poor fit for the present. It's not just that the grid has grown old and is now in dire need of basic repair. Today, as we invest great hope in new energy sources--solar, wind, and other alternatives--the grid is what stands most firmly in the way of a brighter energy future. If we hope to realize this future, we need to re-imagine the grid according to twenty-first-century values. It's a project which forces visionaries to work with bureaucrats, legislators with storm-flattened communities, moneymen with hippies, and the left with the right. And though it might not yet be obvious, this revolution is already well under way."
See more at:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-grid-9 ... Ypttu.dpuf
EI's post also allows the Rockman to point out for the umtenth time that the big alt energy build out in Texas would not have happened without $7 BILLION in tax payer monies being spent to improve the Texas grid.
The Texas grid that is not part of the two national electric grids the book discusses.
This is actually one of those places where America falls behind simply because most countries treat the Electrical grid like any other piece of infrastructure, roads, seaports, canals are seen as government responsibilities. In the good old USA with our apple pie and so on Electricity and Railroads are the exception to the infrastructure rules, both are owned and maintained by private entities to standards set by private entities subject to government regulatory standards.
I would wager that 90 percent plus of the Joe6P Americans and Canadians think all those wires on the high tension poles all the way to the breaker box in their wall are made of copper. The truth is the lines from the local substation around town and to your home used to be copper and if you have an older home might well still be because nobody went back and changed things after the fact. But pretty much everything built in the last 30 years and a lot of stuff built earlier has aluminum drop lines tracing all the way back from your breaker box to the pole and through the different sub stations right back to the big generator at the local power plant. Why? Well for one thing aluminum is a heck of a lot cheaper than copper. For another it is also a heck of a lot lighter, which means a lot less stress on the power utility poles 24/7/365. In fact if you know for certain you will be stringing Aluminum you can set the power poles further apart saving costs on material and maintenance for the life of that branch of the grid. Even a lot of skyscrapers in cities use an aluminum beam up the core of the building as the main trunk feed to deliver power to each floor of the building.
In fact the advantages of Aluminum in price terms are so large for a brief period in the early 1970's it was used for branch wiring going from the breaker box to the switches and wall outlets inside homes. Unfortunately when electricians who were unfamiliar with the new wire and not trained in its proper use did not follow the now current standards and practices it lead to a number of house fires from bad wiring. As a result many municipalities passed laws or regulations forbidding aluminum wiring on branch circuits in human occupied structures. As a result you get aluminum right up to the breaker box, and in many cases to the dedicated circuits for the electric stove, water heater and drier, with old fashioned copper wire going to the switches and plugs throughout the space.
Instead of learning the lesson that new materials need new techniques and training to be used safely the municipal and sometimes state governments decided all interior customer accessible wiring had to be the same material that had been used for most of the prior 100 years. I say most of because if you ever do renovation work on a truly old house that was wired in the early 20th century you might see things that you would never see today. For example in the 1800's it was common to use 'copper clad' wiring for telegraph and telephone lines. Copper clad wire is a steel strand that has a relatively thick copper plated layer on the exterior. To the casual look it appears to be copper wire but it is not, and the current it can safely carry is much lower than the same diameter of pure copper wire. You also might come across places where they ran a few feet short of copper wire and rather than buy a new spool they just made up the distance with steel fence strand wire or barbed wire. Needless to say the tar paper sheath on copper clad wire is not a highly durable insulator, but bare steel strand wire is completely uninsulated. Now there is nothing wrong with using steel wire in your home if that is what you want to do, but because it is far less conductive than copper or aluminum you need to use a much heavier gauge wire that is much less flexible and more prone to kinks and breaks as it is fed through wall spaces or conduit.
What we need is not a 'smart grid' where individual consumer products can be cycled on and off at the direction of the central processing computer. What we need is for the consumer to have some idea how electricity works instead of it being this magical thing where they flip a switch here and a light comes on over there. Sadly I doubt we will every get that.