[Mini Shaji Thomas] has a deeply interesting article on IEEE Spectrum detailing how the power distribution system for a city of over twenty million people went from failing to first-class. In the early 2000s, over half of Delhi’s generated power was lost to inefficiencies of all kinds, and theft. Losses were technical as well as administrative, and the rampant theft was perpetuated by “both the powerful and the powerless”. Spoiler alert: it’s a big job.
That level of loss is staggering, and caused by many issues rather than just one or two. Many of the problems tended to compound one another. For example, an effective power grid relies on balancing active and reactive power, but if that is not well managed then inefficiencies cause losses and outages that tend to lead to even more losses and outages as the system is never able to catch up to demand. On the scale of tens of millions of inhabitants, such losses are far from trivial.
There wasn’t a silver bullet solution. Modernizing and stabilizing the power distribution required technical resources, modernized equipment, political will, expert planning, a willingness to follow through, and authority.
The starting point was grim: a failing network that was constantly overloaded, poor or nonexistent controls and safeguards, inaccurate records and inefficient administration, no real means of sensing faults or inefficiencies or theft, weak to nonexistent enforcement, and an untrained workforce. Still, it could be done, and it was. While there’s still improvement to be made, revamping the system was ultimately successful.
Individually, some of the solutions were quite simple. For example, replacing bare overhead distribution wires with a system of insulated cables containing multiple conductors was not just safer and more resilient, it made it much harder for people to tap into the lines. Other initiatives like making it easier and more convenient to pay accurate bills helped, too. Turns out it’s easier to have legit customers when the product and service is reliable.
Give it a read if you have a few minutes, because besides providing a peek into the technical end of how effective power grids work, it’s a good analysis of what can be accomplished with some co-operation and a willingness to change.
We don’t need power grids, and we don’t need cities. Both are relics of the 20th century, analogous to mainframes in computing. Decentralized energy production is much more resilient.
Its also not as stable/predictable
That is entirely determined by the specific system being used, and will shift in favor of decentralized systems as batteries improve and grid infrastructure declines.
I’m not against your idea – hell, I agree – but we don’t have nearly enough rare earth metals to make this feasible. And to be fair, we’re gonna run out of rare earth before long. Especially if we keep making so much e-waste out of all this already-limited rare earth.
“rare” earth metals are plenty, just at a low concentration, and it takes much effort to concentrate those elements. What is rare is deposits where those elements are concentrated enough to make extraction viable (today) and that might change soon enough.
my sister lived off grid for several years. once you have nice batteries (her and her husband found some old forklift batteries with a couple dead cells, and hackingly bypassed them), then you can do most of your computer stuff. what it cant do is run the pumps, the heaters (of course wood stove), microwave ovens, and most other appliances (though fridges and freezers can run intermittently just fine it turns out because of how well insulated they are). since they could only afford 4 hours of fuel a day, all those things must be run in that four hour period. the pumps in particular were problematic in that you cant flush the toilets or use the water without them. they had bladder tanks but the capacity was questionable. i suggested putting a cistern tank (in tact blue barrels wash ashore all the time) in the attic or on the roof somewhere that could gravity feed the toilet for several flushes and a sink for hand washing during the other 20 hours a day, then top it off when the pumps are working (need nothing more than another ballcock valve for the auto refill mechanism). but they got divorced before that could happen.
You can make solar panels, batteries, and the associated electronics without rare earths. Silicon and sodium are cheap and abundant.
There are other forms of “batteries” to be researched more. Ie other ways to store energy other than “rare earths”. Gravity, heat, compressed air, rotating mass. Then there’s still chemical batteries that are non “rare earth” such as sodium-ion and iron-air. There’s probably more as well
Rubbish. The issue with ‘rare earths’ isn’t their rarity, it’s the refining capacity. Simply put, China started doing the refining cheaper, and everyone else stopped doing it. The raw materials are present in many places in the world, and we’re not likely to run out any time soon.
Power grids are how decentralized energy production is made resilient; otherwise there’s a single point of total failure for each consumer.
Cities have been around for millennia. They’re essential to civilization.
A single point of total failure for each consumer is better than a single point of total failure for a multiple consumers (e.g. transmission lines, substations, etc.). Cities are only essential to civilization in the absence of cheap transportation and instant communication. With both of those, you no longer need everyone to huddle together in one place to get things done.
Its really the economy of scale that a city provides. Its definitely inefficient for each individual to grow all their own food, filter all their own water, treat all their own sewage, burn all their own trash.
The city doesn’t provide it. The huge industrial farms outside of the city do.
You don’t need a city for that. I live in the middle of nowhere and work at a factory, which is also in the middle of nowhere. Trucks exist and can move things around.
Living apart from each other is also good for our mental health.
(where’s the sarcasm tag when you need it)
There: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
If you look at the crime rates inside and outside of cities, it seems that way. The best way to stay on good terms with other people is to not be near them all the time.
Or just ignore them. The good thing about a city is that it’s big enough so you don’t have to interact with the same people every day for the rest of your life.
“Cities are only essential to civilization in the absence of cheap transportation… ”
OK, so we’ll be stuck with them another few hundred years at least then.
Not only is transportation not really cheap, it also leads to pollution and congestion (you have concentrations of people needing to go to the same places of work because in reality not all work can be done remotely).
And public transportation is hell and getting worse.
And of course you need nourishment, so if you spread people out you will still need to have a place for them to shop, so you either needs lots of vehicles for supplying a lot of shops or make a big regional one where again you get a concentration of people and traffic.
And then there is fuel/gas and electricity, you need so many lines and pipes and cables and transformers and digging.
Perhaps ironically not having cities was more practical in the old days than it is now when you think about it, just by the sheer amount of people. I saw the other day that each year at this point in time the world population grows by 69 million, that’s almost one per half second I think right? And that growth will of course increase itself too.
Remove yourself from the grid, and all you do is become reliant on batteries and solar panels imported from overseas, and propane canisters.
Put yourself back on the grid and the situation is the same, just with different consumables. The real issue is the lack of local production, not whether the products are used in a centralized or decentralized fashion.
The difference is, when you’re living off the grid, those are all your problems.
Plus the irony of “sticking it to the man” by leaning on exports from the PRC.
“Production”, implies a grid that can reliably supply industrial quantities of energy around the clock to make stuff. Only around 25-30% of the electricity in a typical country is consumed by households, so individual people going off-grid doesn’t really change anything. The fundamental problem remains: where do you go to work if there’s no grid to supply the energy?
@Dude
To be honest, the PRC has done more for me than the USA has, so I’ll take that trade. The Chinese government takes my money and gives me cheap tools; the American government takes my money and wastes it completely.
Also, factories can generate their own power, just like everyone else.
They can, but that’s assuming they use fossil fuels to do it. Local renewable power without a larger grid doesn’t really cut it, unless you site next to a hydroelectric power station.
Both power generation and manufacturing tend to be at their most efficient when you make them pretty big. Photovoltaics is about the only power generation you can make arbitrarily small and still have the same efficiency as a big plant – you definitely aren’t going to get a home sized pressurized water reactor, and even wind power is cheaper if you build a small number of enormous windmills versus getting the same power from an enormous number of small windmills.
And many of the technologies for off grid living require large factories to build – with surrounding cities to provide labor markets. Not everyone in society can be an off grid farmer or remote worker – someone has got to build the solar panels, computers, trucks, etc.
Efficiency and reliability are inversely correlated, so I’ll take that trade. Also, factories don’t need a city full of people to run them anymore; I know, because I work in one. People can drive to work, so if you’ve got 50 workers within a 10 mile radius, you’ve got a factory. That’s a pretty low bar. Manufacturing isn’t as hard as people think.
this is wrong: you can easily be inefficient an unreliable at the same time
Idunno man call me a gambler but I don’t think cities are a relic that will disappear with the turn of the century
Still needs power grids.
What a daft statement. Cities are very efficient in all sorts of ways, and power grids are a very useful thing.
Whether we need power grids in the same way as we used to, or structured and operated in the same way as they used to be, is a different question.
I agree there’s a lot to be said for decentralised energy production and storage, but having a grid there to spread out loads, share resources, and add resilience is a good thing.
If we didn’t already have a grid, people right now would be arguing that we should build one.
Room-temp superconductors would be nice.
I’m sorry but if we drop room temperature that low the humans all die.
evil grin
But you can bet it is a valid solution from AI.
I thought that said room temp semiconductors, I was like I got good news for you
Well, 20 million people and it still worked, kinda? Maybe power should be free. There are some Billionaires that support such an idea. Maybe Europe would be in better shape.
Not totally believe that, but you read news like this, and makes you think. Economical growth might be better if the energy market was less complex. Privatization of these fundamental services never seem to create growth, just scarcity and profit.
“worked”
A classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Soon you’d have “entrepreneurs” running indoor weed farms or crypto mining operations which overload the infrastructure designed maybe for 1/10th the peak load. In long-term this increased power demand, repairs and maintenance costs would become unsustainable even if you are Saudi-rich in money and hydrocarbons (which India is not).
Metering does exists, so it would be possible to find such people. A utility sees meters, not people or businesses usually. The challenge is that they’ll find workarounds at the social level. They’ll pay people to sell their legitimate grid connection to them to get more meters when theirs get blacklisted.
To some degree one could argue this scenario has already happened in a simpler way with how many IoT devices and mobile apps already have terrible malware, some of which is crypto mining on it.
The bigger issue I’d see is that most people generally don’t understand the scale of work that goes into keeping a grid operational, let alone expanding it, and somehow there’s always a more knee-jerk reaction to paying taxes than paying the same bill to a company, so politically it won’t work in most countries.
I’m not sure it should be free but i absolutely agree that it’s to complex.
In fact with the rise of renewables AND storage capacity the current capitalistic/free(ish)-marked mechanisms will break down or at least make the grid far less stable/reliant.
Reasons I thin in that direction:
1. why should owners of storage capacity NOT wait until the marked price goes negative? (… and only charge while it’s negative)
2. plenty new dynamically controlled consumers (eg. EVs, washing machines, etc.)
3. fluctuating production, dark periods.
Combine all that (and more I’m sure) and I foresee chaotic dynamics that are not good for anyone.
-> I assume without some form of all-over control/rules based more on socialism than capitalism this won’t work.
-> We could get almost free electricity. Only paying for maintenance & upkeep of the grid, grid storage and grid PV & wind.
Because it may not happen, and then they’d have no electricity. Besides, as long as there is enough demand – i.e. battery owners – the price will not go negative. The present problem is that there isn’t enough capacity to accept the excess AND the production is being forced by subsidies and regulations, so the market responds with negative prices.
If renewable energy wasn’t being subsidized per unit energy produced, or forced into the grid by law like in Germany and many other countries, the negative prices wouldn’t happen because the generators would simply be shut down when they’re not needed. More likely they would never have built so many in the first place.
This problem exist because of control/rules based on more socialism than capitalism.
I don’t think you are going to convince people that the problem is working to add renewables to the grid.
There are too many downsides to old generation for people to want those to stick around.
The problem is that the “system” is failing to get rid of the old generation. It just causes huge swings in pricing and requires endless subsidies and regulation to keep it operational. Some people then get huge windfall profits while the taxpayers and individual customers get to pay extra, and the bureaucrats and administrators get more work to “solve” these issues.
“There is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
I wonder what would happen if instead of punishing people with fines state would pay them for keeping their local part of grid in excellent shape. One the whole process is gamified the economies of scale would kick-in and people would fight eachother to claim the top prize, while the side result would be the perfect electricity for everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
Once you turn a thing into a game, people start to play it…
Soon after the snakes were released, the Indians started selling ladders to people.
And hence this is how Snakes & Ladders came to be.
I admire your optimism but you have to learn that people’s nature is to be wicked, it always has been, and wishing it weren’t so or trying to ignore or deny it changes nothing
Am I the only one that gets that “horror movie” creepy feeling looking at the grid.jpg banner picture? Invasion Of the Alien Zombie High Voltage Transmission Line Masts – “Blueprint edition” perhaps?
All your ergs are belong to us
This doco is both fabulous and terrifying to watch, recommended viewing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katiyabaaz
When I was a Cable Guy, we had an old building that was split into apartments. One of the tenants was an electrician that thought he knew it all and was tapping into our lines and reconfiguring the installation leading to outages for the other customers in the building.
We would go there almost every week for the same problems after we rewired it. Over and over. We even installed one of the lockboxes that we normally use for power supplies out on the pole in the basement. He got into that, too.
Bear in mind that repeat trouble-calls were black marks on our individual techs’ records that counted against raises and promotions and could even lead to disciplinary action from on-high.
We had our customers talk to their landlord, sent notices to the building owner, all to no avail. The local police didn’t care about the theft of services. Eventually we got permission to remove the offending wiring itself. During the course of doing this, the tech pulled on the RG-6 line and a loud thud and crash was heard from above. That would have been the TV plummeting to the floor. This was in the era of the $2000 plasma TV’s, too.
Still, a week later we were back and all new wiring was installed – incorrectly.
So we went out to the pole, removed the drop to the building, put our best locking terminators on everything and told our customers and the building owner that we would no longer be providing services to the structure due to the repeated theft and tampering.
Problem solved, for us. Too bad for the five innocent customers in the building.
Oh, and I won’t say that the tech was me.
I won’t say that the tech had his supervisor standing right next to him.
I won’t say that it was the supervisor’s suggestion to yank on the line.
I won’t say that the supervisor gave the tech a fist-bump after eyeing the ceiling, listening to the chaos above.
So many types of “batteries” as listed in the article and a battery doesn’t need to store electricity. The energy can be reclaimed, storage being redistributed and relocated almost anywhere would more efficiently balance a load throughout time zones and weather. This scenario would also be more resilient under local control to hacking .