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How the world’s first electric grid was built

How the world’s first electric grid was built

zdw

Comments (29)

  • culi
    Interestingly enough the Kingdom of Hawaii actually beat this. They already had electric street lights by 1881 on Maui.Hawaii has a fascinating history being the first indigenous nation recognized by Western nations (until ofc it was illegally annexed by the US to use as a base during the Spanish War). They went from being one of the most technologically advanced nations to now having 50% of homeless people in Hawaii being native Hawaiians after having their land stolen from them and forced into indentured servitude on plantations
  • floathub
    The power generated from Niagara river stations was traveling on an international "grid" between Canada and the US in the late 1890s.
  • ayeshaahmad_w
    Cold start is the grid's dirty secret — everyone assumes power comes back, almost nobody thinks about the fact that bringing a dead grid back up is one of the hardest coordination problems in engineering
  • njarboe
    Wow. Electricity prices went up 8x in Britain since 2005. How can industry there compete internationally?
  • cogman10
    If we could change grids in one way, the best thing we could probably do is switch from HVAC for transmission to HVDC.I think the ideal grid would switch from DC to AC either at a substation at central location for a community.Why might someone do this?One of the hardest problems to work through is a grid cold start. When a grid goes completely down it takes a monumental effort to bring it back up again. There's a delicate balance that has to be struck with load and other generators coming online. It's hard to do. The AC waveform is a finicky thing that gets pulled and mutilated by every motor or vacuum cleaner that starts running.With a bunch of AC microgrids joined by a DC major grid, you can completely sidestep that problem. It suddenly becomes just a lot easier to ramp up power production because the deformations to the waveform happen in small local regions, not everywhere in the grid. And further, the other plants just have to watch the DC voltage, they don't need a whole bunch of equipment around syncing with the AC waveform of the grid as a whole.
  • gotwaz
    Fragmentation is natural. The human body doesnt need all this infra and a grid operator/energy schedules to run. Cells dont bill each other if they over/under generate ATP molecules. There is no deviation settlement mech and no need for everything to sync to some arbit frequency. Watch how the grid changes post Ukraine drone wars where taking out generators, transmission lines and substations has become a fully automated process.
  • detourdog
    I think Great Barrington, MA. might also be able to claim the title of first. It seems to predate this system by a year.https://www.edisontechcenter.org/GreatBarrington.html
  • franrai
    [dead]