LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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Readers are encouraged to share their views on issues affecting the electric power engineering profession. Send your letters to Mel Olken, editor in chief, m.olken@ieee.org. Letters may be edited for publication.

The 1965 Blackout

Late afternoon on 9 November, as an application engineer for large power transformers at Allis Chalmers in West Allis, Wisconsin, I was having a phone conversation with someone in Boston when suddenly he said, "My God, the lights just went out as far as I can see." We were through, and I had a call waiting from a transformer field service engineer in New York City. Just as he started reading something to me, he said without any excitement, "The light just went out in this phone booth; I'll have to light a match." This was close to quitting time, and 20 minutes or so later, the first thing I heard coming from my car radio was Tom Griffin, VP Generation at Con Edison, saying, "Yes, we do have a problem." Next morning, I picked up a Con Edison engineer at the Milwaukee airport coming for a factory inspection of a transformer in the shop. He had spent the whole night on that plane sitting at the Kennedy Airport. Certainly one of those occasions where you forever remember where you were.

Stan Lindgren

Europe and Its Management of Nuclear Generation

I read the November/December 2006 issue with great interest, but I found it too focused on the United States. There was not much information regarding Europe and their management of nuclear generation. It is not only in the United States that there is a nuclear renaissance. In Europe, the emission trading scheme (ETS) is active and emissions are priced by introducing carbon emission allowances. Thus there is a larger incentive to provide carbon-free generation such as nuclear.

Other issues that are worth mentioning in the European context are the following:

  • Some counties have based large parts of their electricity generation on nuclear. For example, France generates some 80% of their electricity with nuclear power, and it is a large exporter in continental Europe. Likewise, Sweden, Finland, and Germany have substantial amounts of their electricity generation from nuclear.
  • Finland and Germany are in the world-top by running their nuclear fleet with very high availability.
  • In Sweden, there will be substantial capacity up-rates of existing nuclear plants. This might be the case for several other nuclear plants as this will make economic sense.
  • There are several plans to build new nuclear plants in the Balkan region, which will experience power shortages in a few years. Here nuclear generation is not such a sensitive issue as in continental Europe. Votes show that there is a majority for building new plants contrary to many other countries.
  • Germany may have to abandon its planned decommissioning of most nuclear plants before 2020 as they will be unable to meet their emission targets without nuclear generation.
I also missed a discussion of the prices of uranium and its impact on the power prices, for example, that most uranium is traded on long-term contracts and not in the spot market.

Tarjei Kristiansen

Editor's Response:

I agree that the issue was U.S. oriented and referred to that point in my introductory column by indicating that the PES Nuclear Power Engineering Committee is, by composition, U.S. centric. In that column, it was my intent to put the feature articles in perspective by offering a global view of the nuclear power situation. Apparently, I failed in my attempt and I offer apologies for that. IEEE P&E Magazine would very much welcome article submittals specific to non-U.S. problems and actions in the nuclear field.

Windmill Problems

The power density of the medium driving the turbine in an electric power producing unit determines the relationship between the size of the machinery and how much it produces. Water of high pressure in hydroelectric power plants and steam of high temperature and pressure in thermal plants both have much higher power density than air at atmospheric pressure and normal wind speed. For this reason, turbine-generator units in conventional power plants can have several hundred times the output of even the largest windmills and still have smaller dimensions.

In the order of a thousand large windmills with the machinery sitting on top of towers almost 100 m high are needed to produce as much power over the year as just one large turbine-generator unit in a conventional power plant. They are spread over a large area with a huge visual impact on the environment and with infinitely larger problems with assembly, inspection, maintenance, and repairs. For these reasons alone, windmills do not make much sense.

The need for large subsidies and a multitude of environmental problems other than the visual pollution are other good reasons for abandoning windmills. One such problem in Norway is windmills killing eagles along the coast. This alone has probably caused the acceptance of windmills in this country to plummet to a point where new construction has almost ceased. However, the emphasis here will be on the technical aspects.

Unreliable production due to varying wind speed is another serious problem. Windmills are also subject to excessive wear and destruction due to high wind speeds, lightning, moisture, and sometimes salt and other contaminants in the air. Stopping a windmill can not be done by turning off the wind, only by a mechanism that changes the angular position of the wings to a neutral position. If this mechanism fails or operates too slowly when the wind speed increases beyond that for which the windmill is designed, disaster is to be expected. Windmills cannot be designed to withstand runaway speed. One wing may break off and fly through the air. The huge unbalance which follows may destroy the rest.

O.W. Andersen, Norway
Life Senior Member IEEE

A Hoover History Story

I am writing to add an anecdote to the History article in the March/April 2007 issue of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine.

In the late 1950s, when the committee was purchasing the land for the United Engineering Center, they encountered an owner who refused to sell his small portion. As engineers, they researched the owner and found that he was a serious Republican. They called retired former U.S. president Herbert Hoover in Palo Alto, who was a civil engineer by training. He called the owner, who could not resist Hoover; the owner sold the land.

I enjoyed the article.

Alexander Kusko
IEEE Life Fellow