Tag Archives: power grid

National Grid has energised its 2.5km 275kV power tunnel between Hurst substation and Crayford, one of the transmission circuits in the 32.5km LPT2 route across south London. “The previous cables between Hurst and Crayford were reaching the end of their operational life, having been commissioned in 1967 and having served London reliably for decades,” according to National Grid, which explained: ...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has curated an open-access on-line library of waveforms from the US power grid for power engineers wanting to apply AI techniques to grid monitoring and control. “Researchers can search different variables, like the type of sensor or a description of the event – for example, a waveform that represents a blown transformer and its effect on ...

Having waxed lyrical about the Pelton wheels on Madira, I felt the need to post some pictures of the huge UK-made Diesel engines that supplied the bulk of the islands power for decades. The top one is a 750kW Mirrlees Bickerton & Day of Stockport diesel oil and gas oil engine with a Brush alternator, made in 1951 and decommissioned 1992 ...

I have a soft spot for Pelton wheels – those power generating turbines that need an awful lot of pressure and very little flow, and can score high 90s of percent in efficiency terms. On a visit to California a couple of decades ago, I even stood next to the 30foot Pelton wheel in the Sierra Nevadas – one of ...

Following calm weather after the summer trade-winds, X1 Wind’s floating wind turbine has been installed at the ‘Plocan’ test site off the Canary Islands. This is a third-scale model, fitted with a Vestas V29 turbine (225kW), intended to demonstrate the floating platform, dubbed X30. X30 has been developed to be towed into place by what X1 calls ‘local vessels’ and ...

Microchip is aiming at smart metering with a family of microcontrollers and a power-line communication modem IC. The processors, nominally the PIC32CXMT family, have one or two Arm Cortex-M4F cores – all get a 200MHz application processor, and some get a 240MHz metrology processing core. The PIC32CXMTSH version in particular (see diagram) gets an ‘energy metering analogue front-end’ (EMAFE) as ...

Researchers at Stanford University have modelled over-night home charging of electric vehicles and predict that it is not the correct strategy, for the Western US at least. Simulation is based on a model, revealed in March, for charging demand that can be applied to different human populations under different conditions. In a demonstration, they have now applied it to the ...

CorPower Ocean of Sweden has unveiled its first commercial-scale wave energy harvester and a concept for supporting wind turbines. The harvester, dubbed C4 and rated at 300kW, will ultimately form part of HiWave-5 Project, a wave array off the coast of Aguçadoura, Portugal. The buoys are 19m tall and 9m in diameter. Inside the thin buoyant structure (see cross section left) is ...

Need to integrate existing Modbus, IEC 60870-5-101/104, or DNP3 TCP serial devices into an IEC 61850 MMS network? Maybe for a power grid sub-station? Then Moxa’s MGate 5119 secured gateway might be just what the doctor ordered, and it can be used as a master on all the former networks, to collect data and exchange it with an IEC 61850 MMS system. Security ...

Flow batteries show promise for grid-scale storage as, like fuel cells, they decouple power output and energy storage when building a battery: the reactor is sized for power output and the surrounding tanks are sized for energy capacity. Given a low-cost working fluid and big tanks, they could store enormous amounts of energy. Seeking that low-cost fluid, MIT is proposing to ...