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 I think Poland has ordered some South Korean APR-1400 nuclear reactors recently so they are doing something about that atrocious black bar at least TheFluff fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Feb 22, 2024 |
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Feb 22, 2024 22:50
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 00:28 |
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Shooting Blanks posted:Someone may have asked this previously and I missed it, but can you expand on this? I feel like I've been hearing about great new battery technology that's just around the corner for the past 10 years - is this real, or is it more vaporware? You can buy sodium ion 18650's on Aliexpress now, and they're pretty cheap already. One thing I think might become an issue though with battery storage and solar/wind is maintaining the grid frequency. As far as I can tell the best way of doing that is just lots and lots of rotating mass. The Swedish railway has its own grid because it uses 15 kV AC with the wacky frequency 16⅔ Hz (one third of the standard grid frequency of 50 Hz, for historical reasons - Swedish rail electrified very early and high frequency AC motors were problematic at the time). Traditionally this has always been powered by feeding the normal grid power into big honking motor-generators. From the 1970's and on the Swedish railway authorities have not been buying any new motor-generators though, and instead started building solid-state frequency change facilities of various kinds. There's a large fleet of existing motor-generators of 1940's through 1970's vintage still in service though, but it was looking like these were going to get replaced sooner or later. That is, until 2023, when the railway authorities started ordering new motor-generators again, because as it turns out there's no replacement for rotating mass. From what I've heard they'll even replace some of the solid state facilities with motor-generators. Motor-generators are less efficient than solid state frequency changers and of course bigass spinning things need maintenance, but it seems we'll have to live with these things for the foreseeable future. On a side note, the motor-generators have always been on special railway cars so they can be transported. They look pretty wacky, have enormous axle loads and are limited to 30 km/h, but they are moved around sometimes. Here's what they look like:   During WW2 it was realized that these were a weak point in the railway infrastructure and so a lot of special purpose bunkers were built that they went to live in:  After the end of the Cold War these sites were all abandoned and the equipment now sits in regular trackside buildings instead. TheFluff fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Apr 1, 2024 |
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Apr 1, 2024 00:05
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