power grid

24 Articles

A Bold Experiment In A Decentralised Low Voltage Local DC Power Grid

January 18, 2017 by 29 Comments

January, for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, can be a depressing month. It’s cold or wet depending where you live, the days are still a bit short, and the summer still seems an awfully long way away. You console yourself by booking a ticket to a hacker camp, but the seven months or so you’ll have to wait seems interminable.

If you want an interesting project to look forward to, take a look at [Benadski]’s idea for a decentralised low voltage local DC power grid for the upcoming SHA 2017 hacker camp in the Netherlands. The idea is to create a network that is both safe and open for hacking, allowing those with an interest in personal power generation to both have an available low-voltage power source and share their surplus power with other attendees.

The voltage is quoted as being 42V DC +/- 15%, which keeps it safely under the 50V limit set by the European Low Voltage Directive. Individuals can request a single 4A connection to the system, and villages can have a pair of 16A connections, which should supply enough for most needs. Users will need to provide their own inverters to connect their 5V or 12V appliances, fortunately a market served by numerous modules from your favourite Far Eastern sales portal.

This project will never be the solution to all power distribution needs, but to be fair that is probably not the intention. It does however provide a platform for experimentation, collaboration, and data gathering for those interested in the field, and since it is intended to make an appearance at future hacker camps there should be the opportunity for all that built up expertise to make it better over time.

We’ve touched on this subject before here at Hackaday, with our look at the availability of standard low voltage DC domestic connectors.

Wind turbine image: Glogger (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

The Electrical Grid Demystified

January 17, 2017 by 80 Comments

Our society needs energy, and lots of it. If you’re reading this then the odds are astronomically good that you’re on a computer somewhere using energy, with the power cord plugged into the mysterious “black box” that is the electrical grid. The same is true if you’re reading this on a laptop or phone, which was charged from said black box even though it may not be connected at this moment. No matter where you are, you’re connected to some sort of energy source almost all the time. For almost every one of us, we have power lines leading up to our homes, which presumably connect to a power plant somewhere. This network of power lines, substations, even more power lines, and power plants is colloquially known as the electrical grid which we will be exploring in a series of articles.

While the electrical grid is a little over a century old, humanity has been using various energy sources since the agricultural revolution at least. While it started with animal fat for candles, wind for milling grain, and forests for building civilizations, it moved on to coal and steam during the industrial revolution and has ended up in a huge interconnected network of power lines connected to nuclear, natural gas, coal, solar, and wind sites around the world. Regardless of the energy source, though, there’s one reason that we settled on using electricity as the medium for transporting energy: it’s the easiest way we’ve found to move it from place to place.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Very Small Power Grid

July 11, 2015 by 26 Comments

If it hasn’t been made readily apparent to you by now, power grids are astonishing marvels of technology and quite possibly one of the greatest engineering feats of history. Learning how these systems work is easy in theory, but in practice you will be shot if you try to screw around with at a power station. [Tim] and [Marissa] figured there must be an easier way to learn about power grids so they made their own. It’s small, but it still has everything you’d find in high voltage power lines, minus a hundred kilovolts or so.

This mockup of a power grid simulates a power plant by taking a normal DC motor and connecting that to an alternator and transformer. This is two of the simulated generation points, with the third AC/AC power supply serving as a reference generator for synchronizing phase and frequency. It’s only 12V at 60Hz, but it gets the job done.

A power grid isn’t power plants – there’s also transmission line theory. For this, [Tim] and [Marissa] have a few boards packed with inductors to simulate power lines. There are boards for simulated loads, and synchronization systems built on the MSP430.

In the video below, [Marissa] goes over all the ins and out of the system. It’s very well made and excellent for teaching something that can’t be demonstrated without a practical example.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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