1GW (sic) Battery Energy Storage Systems

Absolutely. And use the energy to liquefy the CO2 thus produced!

Do you stand on street corners wearing a MAGA hat and with a sandwich board proclaiming 'The End of the World is Not Nigh'? You do seem to take every opportunity to announce your irrational belief that anthropogenic climate change is a lie.

GW power levels are normally done with an array of smaller transformers, for manufacturability, transportability, cooling and fault tolerance. You could get an idea of typical sizes by finding a large power plant with visible transformers on Google Earth and dividing plant rated power by number of transformers. Electrical World magazine used to publish project descriptions and costs now and then, but I see they are long gone.

Looks like the largest ever made is only 587 MVA at 9000 tons:

Good DC link design info:

If you want a power plant that never exports power, that's a great idea. Most people want to keep their lights on.

Increased CO2 and a warmer climate, whatever the causes, are wonderful for life on Earth, including human life.

How strange you are. Do you ever successfully design electronics?

Mine personally used to be entirely reliable after they replaced the perished 1950's rubber insulated 3 vertical strands LT with modern aluminium compound cable wiring with a steel hawser core. Prior to that the lights would flicker in storms and burning bits of rubber would fall to the ground under mostly bare copper wires as wet strips of old rubber and canvas insulation touched them with much arcing and sparking.

Apart from half a day a year for preventative maintenance where they cut down overhanging tree branches it was reliable in the old days. Failure is usually because someone has driven into a pole. Hazard of above ground cabling (which is unusual in the UK apart from rural backwaters).

However, since the latest shower cut back on preventative maintenance we got hammered when storm Arwen hit taking down several (rotten) poles. We were down for a couple of days but people around me were down for up to two weeks (not enough poles and/or people and kit to put them in). Their replace on fail policy can't cope with massive systemic failures. Same with a couple of inches of snow and UK grinds to a standstill.

In the cities mains supplies are underground and pretty much reliable apart from that infamous incident that I referred to. However, in a cold winter on a still and cloudy day the margins now are extremely tight at a level where they have to pay some bigger industrial users not to use power.

We had that too in my village. Once a tree fell on it and the steel hawser held it but permanently bent all the poles like bananas and the other time the milk tanker on sheet ice totalled a pole on one of the coldest days of the year (Sunday morning). Isolated random incident so the previous power distribution company had us back on by nightfall.

If that happened again today I expect we would get something like : "Your call is really important to us ... our office hours are 9-5 please call back on Monday with you emergency power outage <naff music>".

They are in the UK too. We don't have earthquakes (well we do notice the odd one every few years but they are tiny compared to real earthquakes).

That is what I thought. I'm trying to put bounds on the lead time. I'm more impressed with their sales pitch than I expected to be. My back of the envelope calculations suggest an air of unreality about their claimed/intended GW injection capacity. Availability of supergrid line is not in doubt two main corridors run close by. You can light up a fluoro tube stood on end under them. Indeed an artist did just that!

Granted.

You also have to possess the requisite kit to get paid for not doing it. (UK infrastructure is a complete mess after decades of under investment)

Another question for my education approximately what is the current rating of a modern UK 400kV supergrid line (I presume limited by sagging or softening from thermal expansion). Likewise for 132kV and 33kV.

Wiki says ~2GW/circuit at 400kV (seems far too low to me)?

Thanks John, but that looks a bit pessimistic.

If I read it right that's 200lb=0.1T for 1kVA so 10^5T for a 1GVA unit.

My current best guess from 4.5T for 1MVA and so 4500T for 1GVA (plus a bit extra supporting structure to deal with the extra weight).

Here is a document with typical sizes and prices for distribution transformers from 2012:

Thank you Glen that looks like just what I need.

In Louisiana, a good hurricane would take power out for a week in New Orleans, and a month or so out in the country. Volunteer linemen would fly in from all over the USA.

The 1989 quake here was a 6.9, enough to fracture brick and soft-foundation buildings, and a freeway, and a big part of the Bay Bridge. Bricks killed some people, but the Oakland freeway collapse was the nasty one. That bit of freeway had won architectural awards for the elegance of its delicate supports. We engineering students used to make fun of the architects.

I had some plaster walls crack, and a brick chimney collapse. Power was out for a day or so, so we had a neighborhood ice cream party. A mag 8 or so would be really bad, horizontal accels around 1G.

Further up, coast of Washington and Oregon, could be really bad.

There are still about a billion people in the world without electricity, which usually means no clean running water, and cooking over found wood or dung.

I wouldn't have suspected that, to have enough field near the ground from 3-phase lines way above.

I just looked up a bunch of transformer data sheets. Big oil cooled things might be a lot better.

I'd bet that there is a later issue by now.

Joe Gwinn

I can attest that it works. Been there, done that.

Jeroen Belleman

Oh goody, an assertion! Or should that be godly? You're a theist aren't you? Come on, 'Kumbaya my Lord'. You know you want to.

Yeah, loads. Never quite as good as I'd want it to be, but it sells. I have loads of gaps in my knowledge, but people here have helped a lot.

You can hear the 400kV cables sizzling on a quiet wind free day. Windy and in the right direction they can literally sing producing turbulent wakes off the round cross section. Much like some roof racks on cars do.

It is quite an eerie howl.

Not if they've got enough money to buy some roof-top solar panels and a Tesla power wall, which is quite a bit of money but in the same ball-park as a car or a truck.

Lenin had to build a national grid to offer the Russians rural electrification. You don't need to do that any more.

You can't actually liquefy CO2, unless you compress it a lot.

But that doesn't use up all that much energy compared with what you can get from burning propane to make the CO2.

If you believe the climate change denial propaganda churned out by the fossil carbon extraction industry. You've got to be a gullible idiot to fall for it, but somebody who believes that Donald Trump has "common sense" will believe pretty much anything.

He wouldn't be working at CERN if he didn't. It's an elite group.

You wouldn't get a look in.

Aeolian tone. Also Aeolian Harp.

.

.

Joe Gwinn

Brunel (father & son) tried it and gave up on the idea.

No you wouldn't because your 'phone wouldn't work at all in a power cut. of more than a few hours