Perhaps the Russians only stole generators in East Germany; West German could still manufacture them.
Not sure how that’s relevant. The first generators in Japan were purchased late 19th/early 20th century. The Russians weren’t doing much looting in Germany at that point in history.
Japan did a lot of catching up to the Western Powers in the last century and a half but they did have electricity well before the World Wars.
I had a friend that was a power plant operator. He gave me a tour in the 1980s. Back then there was a meter that they used to maintain frequency. When it dropped they would feed more coal to the boilers.
What was interesting was during a start up or shut down the turbines would hit a resonance speed that would shake the whole building.
I had believed most of them were destroyed by bombing. Thanks, Great_Antibob.
Here’s a video of a diesel generator being disconnected from the grid, allowed to speed up and be out of sync, and then being reconnected to the grid again.
Not very healthy for the poor thing.
It was part of a test to see if hackers could do damage to actual electrical infrastructure, not just temporarily turn out lights.
Connecting generators out of sync can be pretty startling.
I used to work in a CHP station at a large hospital - the deisel gennys were 3 MW electicity + 4 MW recovered heat energy - 18 cylinder prime movers.
Our auto sync system had some sort of glitch - is should not have been possible to close the breaker - but it did.
Result was a huge shock to the generator shaft, which snapped the fitted bolts on the shaft flywheel. You have to appreciate that these bolts are incredibly strong and tough - much more than anything you might see holding even castings together.
The flywheel was completely released from the coupling, so you had the generator shaft on one side of it, and the engine shaft on the other - totally decoupled.
Result was one high speed flywheel of around 1-2 tons just spinning down from 3000rpm whilst both shafts were also slowing down at different rates.
If that flywheel had moved up either shaft an inch or so it would have been riding on the very end of one shaft and unsupported at the other side, it could have wobbled over and then gone for walkabout across the generating hall.
Fortunately it spun down in place - but yu really do not want that sort of mass with that sort of kinetic energy getting loose - that is what we call - squeaky bottom time.
The Northeast Blackout of 2003 affecting a chunk of the Eastern Grid of North America was due, in part, to both automatic systems not properly functioning then automatic systems yanking equipment off line. Admittedly, some of the automatic stuff did work just fine and probably prevented more damage. The whole situation is more complex than I want to delve into in this post, but it’s an illustration that automatic systems aren’t always the answer and don’t always do what you expect or even want in a complex system.
A reason for keeping people in the loop is that in an unanticipated or unusual situation humans can often respond better than machinery, machinery being good at routine and predictable things but not so much events outside the box.
I understand that the Russians (and perhaps others) have planted kill switches in our power networks. We have done the same to theirs, and so deterrence. Were something stupid happen in either country, they might assume it was an enemy attack.
That could get nasty.
Back when I did tree work, I did a job for a guy that worked at the power company. He talked about that, and how if it were not for the quick actions and decisions of a small group of people, of whom he was one, it would have spread further.
The automatic bits are good for some things, but sometimes, they are set up for conditions that are not the conditions they are experiencing, and can do exactly the wrong thing.
Texas’ other fine attribute was that they were not attached to the country grid(s). So instead of having an external reference, they have the problem that either they turn on the entire grid one at a time, or they have to slowly match pieces of grid that are running before they can safely reconnect them. All fine and good, as long as excess load on one half of the grid isn’t waiting for the capacity on the other half to be available.
Not to mention, if things like cooling pipes etc. had burst and need to be repaired for some equipment.
I was in northern Canada once during a forest fire episode. The grid connection(s) were turned off because of fires under/near the transmission lines, so essentially we were on a mini-grid with a few generating stations and dams. An interesting side effect was that the clock radio in the room would lose or gain several minutes a day erratically, since it relied on an unreliable 60Hz.
I heard the story once, when studying harmonics in physics, about some place in Scandinavia where in the early days of radio, they build a giant wheel with magnets along the rim. As the wheel turned, the magnets passed a coil and that was how they generated LF radio frequency. This was a huge rig; as they got it close to speed on the first try, the rig started to shake. The engineer in charge recognized “we’ve just hit a harmonic resonance of the structure, add as much power as fast as you can, and it will get past that frequency and stop shaking.” So they did, and the rig stopped shaking. Once they got up to the frequency they wanted, someone asked “Ummm… how do we slow this down? We didn’t put any brakes on it…” So they evacuated the building and cleaned things up when the dust settled.
50Hz vs. 60Hz isn’t the half of it. I recall a few decades ago Japan switched to all driving on the left. Apparently when the Allied forces - the USA - occupied Japan, they were predominately on one island of the 4 and made that one right-hand drive. Japan lived with mixed driving options on different islands until they decided to standardize again. I presume after the USA destroyed much of the Japanese infrastructure in WWII, they came in after the war and in some areas installed their own US-supplied electrical supply and so that part of Japan was 60Hz while the rest rebuilt the old European generation capacity at 50Hz.
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Interesting coincidence this survivor is in Scandinavia too.
Absolutely. I didn’t have any idea how all that worked until their explanations.
ISTR that something like this possibly happened last week when ERCOT announced its big emergency- basically the distributors dropped them in a bad way, and actually caused some plants to go offline because of the way the load was shed in certain areas.
No, that’s not really correct at all. It has absolutely nothing to do with WWII at all. It’s a historical relic from several decades earlier than that.
Literally in the 1890s, Osaka (western half) got its first generator from GE, which ran at 60Hz, and Tokyo (eastern half) got its first generator from a company in Germany (AEG?) that ran at 50Hz. And the two halves of the country just kept separate standards ever since.
I’m very confused right now why WWII is even part of the discussion. It has nothing to do with the phase differences in Japan. And even granting it might be related, it doesn’t make any sense. The entirety of Japan was not literally bombed back to pre-electrical days. They had electrical generation through the entire country, even if it had been destroyed at strategic locations. Swapping phases on a grid that still largely exists would not have made any sense.
The US did not occupy one of the main 4 islands of Japan. The islands occupied by the US were the islands of the archipelago of Okinawa, that were given back to Japan in 1972 (although the US still has quite a few military bases and 26000 military personnel there). Okinawa is roughly 900 km (~ 560 miles) south of Kyushu (the southernmost main Japanese island).
Indeed, during American occupation of Okinawa, traffic drove on the right there. But it was far away from the Japanese mainland and was not of much relevance in the greater scheme of things. The vast majority of Japanese were not particularly bothered by it.
I understand at least the basics of this, but would restarting the grid actually take months? I’m not challenging anyone’s expertise here, I’m just curious if such a long timeline was really likely.
As jjakucyk said way back in post #4, large transformers and certain other equipment that are damaged will take months to rebuild. They’re custom made.
And there are hundreds of generators. In a worst case scenario and even neglecting equipment issues, it’s not so far-fetched that a full recovery would take a couple months. There are all sorts of potential setbacks that put you back at square one.
That said, partial recovery for major portions of the population could well be much sooner. A “full” recovery would get everybody with no more chance of blackouts than normal. The vast majority of Texans could well be mostly there with occasional blackouts much sooner than that. It’s not like they’d be in the dark the entire time.
And I was going to guess it had something to do with the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.
What was going on in 1890 Japan that they developed two separate systems though?
Not seeing much explanation other than two different major cities in Japan bought electrical equipment from two different sources - one European, operating at 50 Hz, and one American, operating at 60 Hz.