Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
current-driven electrical generation systems will be worth
another look in
five to ten years to see if any of them have
overcome the dif
culties that have led to defeat in the
past. None has, and there are only more expressions of
hope. As long as governments supply suf
cient subsidies,
there will be more attempts to harness the oceans.
.
The Electric Power Distribution Grid
Electric power is brought from the power generating
plant to the end user through a complex system of
high-voltage, medium-voltage, and low-voltage power
lines that are collectively known as the grid. The grid
was never
in the sense that a group of sophis-
ticated engineers looked over the entire country
“
designed
”
s collec-
tion of power plants and load centers and laid out an
optimized system of wires to connect them all. On the
contrary, it mainly just grew from what we had years ago
by adding a patchwork of transmission lines to get the
power to load centers that changed over time. Generat-
ing plants used to be near cities and the grid was mainly
local. Power plants were then moved away from cities as
real estate values went up, and the grid began to stretch
out. Regional power centers came like the giant hydro-
power systems of Niagara in New York and the
Columbia River of the Paci
'
c Northwest, and the grid
became regional. It was never designed to move electri-
city for long distance, but this is what it is increasingly
called on to do. It can only do it through an increasingly
fragile patchwork of interconnects where the failure of
one line can bring down the electric supply of an entire
region of the country.
