Uh Oh. first Bilsdale, now Kent Interconnector

There's a physical limit cause by by speed of transmission.

Bill

No it should focus various minds on how few nuclear power stations we have.

Bill

Or to put it another way, interconnects are of great use because much of the time someone, somewhere does have spare capacity. It's no accident that even though most of Europe has more interconnect capacity than the UK there are plans for new links.

I hope so. I've just taken a quick look and the offerings today seem to be at least 25% up on the standing charges I currently pay and the unit price has doubled!

But they won't be using Si diodes, probably IGBTs, hundreds of them, in parallel for the amps and series for the volts. Very low loss.

Thyristors apparently. Oddly, when grouped together for the voltage and current, the old terms have carried over and they seem to be referred to as Thyristor Valves. They are are water cooled, although the lower power ones on the first cross-channel link were air-cooled.

OK that is 99.9978% efficient then.

There are more than silicon diodes available. Active rectification allows taking advantage of the ON resistance of a controlled switch, instead of the passive response curve of a silicon diode.

In your IBM PC compatible, the ATX power supply sometimes has rectifier components that are bolted to heatsinks inside, to dissipate the heat from the method.

A heatsink to dissipate 22.5kW, would be impressively large. That's more than enough heat, to heat a home.

And if you build a "hall" around such a device, the side effects of fire can be pretty messy. A substation here which is housed in a "barn", when something in there caught fire, they were doing maintenance and repair, while wearing air packs. Not a very convenient way to work. We've had fires in some underground facilities (a popular method for housing power components in another city), and when you see pictures of what the working conditions are like, after a fire in one of those, it's like a dark, sooty, hell-hole. You can't bring enough auxiliary lighting into one of those, to see what you're doing, as everything is dirty afterwards.

A "hall" around one of these really large devices, is likely an essential part of it. But if there's a failure in there, it's not going to be the most pleasant working conditions.

Paul