This is how we're going to get around power shortages in the UK look too that forward thinking country France and pipe their nuclear power in by that tunnel!..
Now we know the real reason why it was built, perhaps theres a 4th bore there somewhere;?....
and much more expensive, so people are likely to scrimp and use under-specced extensions ...
The logical extension of those arguments is to put 11kV straight into the house :-)
Extra resource use would translate to less NHS funding and more deaths, not less, so perfect for the greenie brigade. The excessive copper use would a lso mean going to ali, so lots more fires.
Electrical fires cause far more deaths than shock. One could in principle i nclude either AFCIs or a heat sensitive resistive composite wire run along all conductors plus a basic bit of electronics. When temp rises unacceptabl y the thing switches off. Its all gobbling resources though, resources that would be far more constructively be spent elsewhere. At this time going hi gher V would make more sense than lower.
NT
And these for sockets:
Not really - then it becomes equally dangerous and impractical.
I would say we might as well have 400V as 230V and more or less halve the conductor sizes. Much more than that is getting silly though.
£40 for the plugs? I have 2 in my junk box downstairs (came with some Olson strips I bought for my study.) I should put them on eBay.
Aren't we allowed to score more Darwinian selection as a benefit?
Well the higher the frequency the more efficient transformers are, and can be smaller as witnessed by switch mode supplies. I think for distribution reasons, the delivery would still be AC though. As a matter of interest, those who use the high voltage DC grids, how do they convert to AC when needed. have to be one large inverter!
Brian
Figures from an Electrical Safety Council surveys which have long left me a bit puzzled. As regards the 2.5m electric shocks, family etc I've asked (who include people in work and retired, people with young children, people in rented accommodation etc) don't seem to get shocks at that rate. So I wonder who/where they are. And as regards "serious in jury", they define that to include "severe pain" (and all whether or not medical treatment required).
No real reason why you couldn't make the channel link work using AC, there are a number of transmission lines, some with part undergrounded sections in the UK that are significantly longer overall. No true underwater AC connections though, the ones that do run underwater (on the grid system at least) all run in tunnels.
However, the impact of a single point connection and the loss of that connection was more of a concern, hence the UK - France link is comprised of 2 x 1000MW links and the AC/DC conversion process permits presettable defined levels of power transfer regardless of most external conditions so the interconnector is essentially despatchable 'generation' at the entry point to the respective countries.
There is also a degree of isolation from system disturbances when interconnecting at DC which can be very useful from a system stability point of view.
The two HVDC links to Europe, the 1000MW UK-NED and te 200MW UK-FRA are both partly underwater, the latter in operation for the last 28 years. Neither use any part of the channel tunnel.
Some, but I'm not sure exactly what proportion of UK offshore wind farms have AC substations located offshore and an AC connection to the existing grid / distribution network. I can see DC being of use in the truly offshore arrays that Germany operates that are out of sight and over the horizon but for the UK wind farms that are located much closer to shore there seems little or no point in converting to DC.
There is mention in this article clearly implying an AC connection and interconnection regime for the London Array the biggest of the white elephant monstrosities to pollute our country.
There is a 600kV 2.2GW mainly underwater DC connection currently under construction between Scotland and the Wirral to carry the output from wind generation but this is a point to point grid connection with no directly connected generation.
How are you going to phase lock the French Grid to the UK Grid?
The "length" is a red herring...
Exactly.
But the power isn't lost *in* the dielectric, its lost in driving the current down the wires *to* the dielectric.
The capacitance per kilometre of overhead lines
So, having taught grandmother to suck eggs, where is the power loss due to inductance?
How do you phase lock the French grid to the Belgian Grid to the Dutch Grid to the German one to the Swiss one etc etc. It doesn't in the main involve DC and at AC it is no real problem.
There is potentially 'as big a problem' with the UK grid system if it splits during a major disturbance into a two or more islands of load and generation. In this case (since the late 80's or so) the synchronising systems have an additional mode where they just sit there primed until the phase angle and voltage discrepancy falls with certain limits (which are deliberately set wider than for normal operation) and the breaker then closes, a successful closure could potentially take a few hours.
As the grid system operator is separate from the generation operator in the UK there is no generation intervention required as such, just switchgear that can take occasionally take a bit of abuse and generator governors that can hold a set point frequency.
P.S. There is a long established 400kV AC link between Spain and Morocco with a similar distance underwater to the UK - French link.
No, the coach driver is the son of an electrical engineer who specialised in the heavy stuff, and had been playing with electronics since he was about 11 years old.
Whenever current is passing through any imperfect conductor.
On an AC transmission line, current is constantly being drawn to alter the voltage across the line capacitance to earth. So the capacitance is the cause of the resistive losses.
Loading a cable has no effect on the phase shift you mention, unless that load is reactive, and depending on whether it is inductive or capacitive, it can then either worsen or improve the situation.
The arc *can* be drawn by using the DC charge stored in the cable. No claim was made that it ever had been drawn either deliberately or otherwise, though it's the kind of trick that installation engineers have been known to pull as a joke, or that happens when things go wrong when commissioning plant of this sort.
The greens are planning to use this effect to store energy in their proposed long distance links for their beloved European renewables Supergrid, all of which *you* have mentioned here in the past.
Should we add memory loss to your minimal comprehension skills?
You are quite right, of course. But the term "dielectric loss" is the one which CEGB trainers used to use when lecturing mixed classes of mathematicians, physicists, and all types of engineer to explain why pylons were the prefered method of transmission, with underground cables the least desirable from the viewpoint of efficiency.
It's a convenient if not very precise shorthand.
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