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Technology Stocks : American Superconductor (AMSC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: big guy who wrote (544)	8/16/2003 10:43:12 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 973

big guy, Well reading about this outage, I see we never had the problem when we were all isolated power kingdoms. In those days we could not wheel power very far, we had no super high voltage circuits or DC curcuits. Now losses are a problem, but on superconducting DC pathways the savings in low losses overcome the cost of rectification and conversion, and in addition, give you isolation.One problem is we are all on 60 cycles, so places that connect must be perfectly in phase. Now we have computer controls to maintain phase invariance, however when we have added reactance as well as sine phase errors we cane get such complex calculations that they are hard to do on the fly and keep losses below a certain leve, due to the large size of the system. So allowing each power kingdom to exist as an island, like it was 50 or more years ago, and use DC high voltage superconductors to serve to "wheel" electricity here and there makes sense. Each kingdon sees DC coming over the border, and it makes it into AC in perfect phase with the local sine wave. This means we can have a lot more variance in the phase over large distances. Each kingdom does not care at all if it is out of phase with others. It only ships or receives DC over it's borders. The kingdoms can be fairly large as long as they are contiguous. There is some comments that a loop around Lake Erie was part of the problem. Now such a loop is about 500 miles long. Quite small compared to the wavelength of a 60 cycles sine wave. speed of light = 186,000 miles a second, so one 60 hz wave is about 3000 miles long and 1/4 wave is about 750 miles, so flow one way or the other around the lake can give rise to a phase difference and when they combine a current will flo reflecting this loss. Now I am sure they try and take that into account, but something like that seems to have caused this outage?? Others say an Ohio problem about an hur before that was improperly dealt with by human error or malfeasance caused the problem. Bill