Quarantine in the lands of Canada has officially gone on too long.Coming in here to read this dumpster fire is like....
I'm not sure we can let them back into society...
LS Tesla swap
- Thread starter carnutjw
- Start date
- Status
I'm not sure we can let them back into society...
Ive been in Cuba for 3 months now, its even worse.Quarantine in the lands of Canada has officially gone on too long.
I'm not sure we can let them back into society...
Swapped for better weather, rum, skantily clad women and cigars. Make the best of it.
Arcing is a more intense form of the process going on inside the lines. Electrical conductivity could be described as small-scale arcing, one molecule to the next. Energy is lost to heat in the process. That was my only point there, probably not well stated.
As you should know, the conductors in use are not superconductors. There are large losses to heat with any practical conductor. Over time the conductor itself is degraded.
Hard figures are difficult to come by. It's not something utilities like to talk about, I suppose. Your figure of 10-15% sounds more like what I've seen utilities specify for voltage loss; I couldn't find anything specified for wattage loss. Voltage loss does not equate with wattage loss. My figure of 75% comes from something I heard about the grid between Grand Coulee and California. I am not an electrical engineer, and cannot vouch for it. I have an old electrical engineering textbook with utility-oriented material in it, but I gave up trying to get a useful calculation out of it. As I recall, some factor was required that I had no access to.
You are correct, the microwave is not using 3000W. The microwave is using 1500W. The other 1500W is "used" between the meter and the microwave. Or so the "rule of thumb" said. I added everything up and multiplied by two, and the result seemed reasonably close to my electric bill. This was long enough ago that I'm having trouble remembering if the "rule of thumb" came with a utility bill or with an appliance, but it was one or the other.
If we accept your "maybe a couple hundred" watts of "phantom losses" for a 1500W appliance, that would be about 13%. But again, that's between the meter and the appliance. Extrapolate that to the distance from Grand Coulee to California, and then within California. Since it's a characteristic of the conductor, it will in some sense multiply with the length of the conductor.
Last edited:
I understand that voltage loss is not the same as power loss - I am an electrical engineer. Let me show you a sample calculation. We'll go from transmission, to primary distribution, to secondary. This means from the generator, through long range transmission lines, through the substation transformer, through the road-side distribution lines, to the transformer in front of your house, through the secondary wire, to your meter.
Transmission - Let's say we have 150mi of transmission lines (typical in my area). The wire is 954 AAC (all-aluminum conductor, also typical). Lets say we are moving 500A at 220kV, which comes out to about 110MW of load.
The equation for power lost to heat is P=(I^2) * (R), which is current squared multiplied by resistance. The resistance of 954 AAC is 0.119328 ohms/mile. The math comes out to almost 4.5MW of wasted energy, or about 4.07%
Distribution - Now let's say we have 10 miles of 1/0 ACSR (aluminum conductor, steel reinforced) carrying 50A @ 14.4kV. That is 720kW of load. The resistance of the wire is 0.8829 ohms/mile, and the power loss equation comes out to 22kW of wasted energy, or 3.07%.
Secondary - Let's say there is 250ft from your transformer to your meter. 1/0 Triplex wire. resistance is 0.000167 ohms/foot. The conductor is carrying 50A @ 240V, or 12kW (this is a high number - continuous load amps are usually in the single-digits or low double-digits for a typical home. Loads of 50A are usually only seen in short bursts). Wasted energy totals 104W, or <1%.
The losses add up to about 8%. This is generalizing a lot, and I have left out many intricacies of the way power is delivered. Let's just add another 5% worth of loss to the total number due to transformers, protective equipment, power factor, faults, inaccuracies, etc. Keep in mind that these are not constant numbers, either - load constantly changes. This is still only 13% of power loss from generation to consumer.
You may be thinking "well the transmission lines out West are much longer than those on the East Coast where population is dense - longer lines equal more loss". You would be correct - longer lines would equal more loss. However, the voltage is likely far higher, which further minimizes power loss. The conductor may also be even larger, which lowers losses as well.
I'm not an electrician so it's hard for me to determine how much power loss there is beyond the meter to your appliances - that is not my specialty. I would stay my previous statement and say it is only a couple hundred watts lost in the wires as heat.
You also cannot extrapolate the losses you see in the wires in your house to the losses in transmission and distribution. The voltages used in transmission and distribution are many orders of magnitude higher than the voltage in your home. It is not a linear relationship.
Hope this helps. I made a lot of generalizations but it's hard to condense years worth of necessary knowledge related to electrical engineering into a couple posts on a forum. I'm coming at you as someone who wants to share information. Any other questions, just ask - happy to go further
That's very good, thank you. From all of that, a reasonable ball park loss between Grand Coulee and the typical consumer's meter box in California might be roughly 25%. But this happens to be the inverse of what I stated (75%). So it's possible that either "my source" had it turned around, or that I myself got it turned around in my own head. Either can and does happen, lol.
The "source" was an installment of the Frontline series on PBS. Those claim to be documentaries, but I've caught them bending facts to suit their purpose, just about routinely. So I did try to do some homework on it, and like I said, got nowhere. And this was a few years ago, long enough that I don't remember when exactly.
I have another question to raise. I'll be back with that, maybe in a couple days.
The "source" was an installment of the Frontline series on PBS. Those claim to be documentaries, but I've caught them bending facts to suit their purpose, just about routinely. So I did try to do some homework on it, and like I said, got nowhere. And this was a few years ago, long enough that I don't remember when exactly.
I have another question to raise. I'll be back with that, maybe in a couple days.
Last edited:
For sure, no problem brother
I'm not familiar with West coast generation and transmission so I'm not 100% sure how you guys do things out there - in my area though, 25% losses still seems unacceptably high considering Grand Coulee Dam is the largest generating station by nameplate rating in the country (almost 7000MW!)
I would assume the conductors moving power from the dam to the consumers are very large, and thus have absolutely minimal resistance. I would also assume a much higher voltage is used, which in turn reduces the amount of current pushed through the lines.
One aspect I didn't even mention was that transmission lines are typically (always) 3-phase, which consists of a set of 3 energized phase wires and either a static line or a neutral line. So you can basically divide the load amps by 3 since you're sending it through 3 separate conductors. Even still, a generation plant this large has to have more than one circuit coming out of it - there are likely many. Depending on the number of circuits, divide the load amps even further. The point of this is to reduce losses due to current, which are the most critical part of the power loss equation (remember, its current squared multiplied by resistance, so the current is exponentially more important than the resistance of the conductor).
Maybe there are 25% losses from Grand Coulee to the consumer - again I'm not familiar with it. That just seems high to me, and I wanted tell you that we usually try to optimize the system as best we can. If I had to guess, I would say that most of the losses actually occur in outdated distribution lines that go from the substation to your home, not transmission - many of these lines are long overdue for upgrades in the country. Either way, I suppose it doesn't matter where the losses are occurring - wasted energy is still wasted energy.
Sorry for the information overload! Happy to answer the other question(s) you may have
It would help if I could remember more about that show. They made specific points, but it was long enough ago that I don't trust my memory much. Can't find anything about it on PBS, either. So overall, we're deteriorating into a very murky scenario. 
You seem to assume that all transmission lines are fairly new, but I doubt that's the case here. I know it's an issue with PG&E. It was recently revealed that some of their longer, more remote lines date back a long way, like to the early 1900s if I remember correctly. I don't remember when Grand Coulee first connected to California, but I'm doubting those transmission lines have been replaced since, for the same reasons.
But good information is difficult to find. Generation capacity is all anyone seems to want to talk about.
You seem to assume that all transmission lines are fairly new, but I doubt that's the case here. I know it's an issue with PG&E. It was recently revealed that some of their longer, more remote lines date back a long way, like to the early 1900s if I remember correctly. I don't remember when Grand Coulee first connected to California, but I'm doubting those transmission lines have been replaced since, for the same reasons.
But good information is difficult to find. Generation capacity is all anyone seems to want to talk about.
Last edited:
Oh I'm not doubting that there are plenty of old transmission lines around the country, you're right in saying that some lines built in the first half of the 20th century are still in service today.It would help if I could remember more about that show. They made specific points, but it was long enough ago that I don't trust my memory much. Can't find anything about it on PBS, either. So overall, we're deteriorating into a very murky scenario.
You seem to assume that all transmission lines are fairly new, but I doubt that's the case here. I know it's an issue with PG&E. It was recently revealed that some of their longer, more remote lines date back a long way, like to the early 1900s if I remember correctly. I don't remember when Grand Coulee first connected to California, but I'm doubting those transmission lines have been replaced since, for the same reasons.
But good information is difficult to find. Generation capacity is all anyone seems to want to talk about.
I was saying that the losses are likely worse once you get to distribution (which is also outdated). Again, not that it matters where the losses occur - I was just pointing it out.
This talk of transmission lines brings up a question on my end.
15-20 years ago I was in western ND when coal mining for energy production was big. There is not a single coal fired power plant in western ND that creates electricity for people that live outside the region.
Coal was/is loaded onto train cars and transported to the power plants in nearby states. They even went so far as to build a gasification plant that 'burns' coal into a natural gas like gas which is pipelined to the end customer.
The question was, why don't they just build a big power plant in western ND and transmission line the electricity to states/cities like Denver Colorado, Illinois, ect. The answer was the cost and inefficiency of the transmission lines. Apparently it was more efficient to train car the coal OR turn it into gas to transport it than it was to turn it into electricity and transmit 500 miles away.
Has that changed? Are there better (low resistance) transmission line materials? Has the political structure changed and they care less about efficiency and more about being 'green' for the sake of being 'green'?
At some point if solar or wind becomes the main energy source, transmission lines are going to have to get better. Putting solar panels in low population density places like the desert of Nevada and transmitting the energy to LA, putting wind turbines in rural IA and shipping the energy to Chicago and similar are going to have to become better.
Ohm's law hasn't changed. You can't 'distribute' the grid better and get rid of resistance. The ONLY thing I can think of that solves this would be superconductors and I haven't heard a squawk about using them for transmission lines. Heck, I recently heard how a number of utility companies were purchasing China made transmission lines only to replace them a few years later with US made ones because they wanted to save a buck initially and they deteriorated so quickly and had so many issues that it was cheaper to buy new stuff because the energy loss was high.
- Status
Similar threads
