Nice catch, that came up in my youtube feed last night, but didn’t get around to watching it.
I watch most of his videos, so I’m sure it’s quite informative.
(But then, I’m one of those weirdos that thinks that infrastructure is sexy.)
His voice is so relaxing.
I was assuming that in a place like Japan with two different AC frequencies, that manufacturers would take that into account for domestic appliances and make them frequency-neutral. Do Japanese appliances really say something like “not for use in region A”? Or have a switch for changing regions?
(MY wife’s hair dryer died in Paris because I did not throw the 110-220 switch all the way. After it went “pop” I looked and found it was only about 3/4 the way over to 220V)
Mostly, this is true.
From what I gather, anything sensitive enough to care but without a power brick will likely have a switch to flip frequencies. But it’s a good idea to check, especially on older appliances. Newer ones are more likely to be ok.
Incidentally, this is why hotels always install hair dryers in their guest rooms. It’s a high-amp device, and 9 out of 10 travelers don’t have the first clue about electrical conversion. So it’s cheaper to buy 300 hair dryers (and 50 spares, probably) and screw them to the wall of every bathroom, than it is to have a maintenance guy sitting full-time in the basement constantly throwing breaker switches. (Or running to put out actual fires.)
PBS has a pretty good video about the Texas grid problems as well. It was interesting to hear from the CEO of CPS energy explaining some of the problems. It also warns that this isn’t only a Texas problem. Much of the first world infrastructure was designed around certain norms of wind, water, and temperature. But the “norms” aren’t normal any more.
Many thanks to Machine_Elf for the Practical Engineering video. It finally explains why the rolling blackouts weren’t actually “rolling”, but constant.
< sarcasm> Yes, I’m glad to see that it wasn’t only Texas but most other states that had significant portions of their grids knocked out due to severe winter weather for several days.
I’m happy to see that the CEO of an energy company is offloading some of the blame by pointing to winterization measures that plants and grid infrastructure in no other southern state has taken.< /sarcasm>
Weather is not uniquely a Texas problem but the political (not technical) issues exacerbating these types of weather related outages is almost uniquely a Texas problem.
Given the proliferation of devices that need converters to DC power, some are proposing that DC distribution is starting to make sense again.
https://medium.com/predict/back-to-future-dc-power-grid-65e32798b2ca
P.S. the Texas utilities collapse convinced me that storing large amounts of potable water wasn’t as silly as I’d thought.
DC is horrible for transmitting over long distances or in large quantities. Unless of course, you are using superconductors.
So, it would really only make sense on the last bit. I could see the transformers on the street rectifying to DC to provide to the house. But that’s quite a bit of infrastructure changes to be made.
Much of Amtrak’s Northeast corridor still runs on 25Hz traction power. The commuter railroads which run in the corridor (SEPTA, NJT and Metro-North) also use the 25Hz system.
No, over long distances and large quantities, HVDC is more efficient than AC. AC was originally chosen because stepping up and down AC voltages was a lot easier which made gradually stepping down voltage as it gets closer to the end user more practical. Now that DC transformers are getting cheaper, the economics of DC start to make more sense but, of course, the existing fixed infrastructure of AC makes any changeover hard to make.
But you don’t have the load evenly distributed – you wouldn’t even want it that way at all!
You have a ‘lead’ pair way out in front, which carries only a small part of the load, but leads the way for all the other mule pairs. (Just like a tractor or a semi truck: the lead wheels do the steering, but don’t provide any of the pulling power.)
Then came the ‘swing’ pairs, up to 8 of them, which did, in aggregate, most of the pulling for the wagon load.
And finally you had a ‘wheel’ pair, right in front of the driver, next to the wheels of the wagon – they did a big share of the work in getting the wagon started, but then the swing pairs carried most of the load. (But the wheel pair was even more vital in stopping the wagon!)
So your analogy is slightly flawed in that the load is NOT “perfectly evenly distributed” at all. The team had to work together to pull the wagon, but they had differing jobs to accomplish that.