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Closing the power gap... - Printable Version

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Closing the power gap... - Anhil8tor - 08-05-2010

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates need to satisfy demand for electricity that is growing at a rate approaching 10 percent a year. Their interest in nuclear energy has in part been sparked by a shortage of natural gas, the usual fuel for electric power plants. Without enough gas, the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs have been burning oil to generate power, which is inefficient and polluting. These countries also consider themselves energy specialists and want to prepare for an era when carbon emissions may be penalized.

“There is more to this than straight economics,” said Ian Jackson, a nuclear specialist at London’s Chatham House think tank. “It is clearly about strategic energy positioning.”

Closing the power gap... - Anhil8tor - 08-05-2010

The Gulf region, which supplies 40 per cent of the world’s oil, is glutted with crude that producers cannot immediately sell, even as US and European oil has risen above US$82 a barrel.

The amount of oil in long-term floating storage in the Gulf and Red Sea is estimated at 30 million barrels, or enough to supply all of North, South and Central America for a day.

The trouble is that most Middle East crude is not sold in the Americas. Instead, it is shipped to the growing economies of Asia and, to a lesser extent, markets in Europe.

While Europe is not oversupplied with crude because of a seasonal drop in North Sea oil output from maintenance and repairs at production plants, Asia has as much as it can use.

Closing the power gap... - Anhil8tor - 08-06-2010

(Reuters) - Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang told the visiting Iranian oil minister on Friday that Beijing would maintain cooperation with Tehran on existing projects, after the United States called on Beijing to observe sanctions.

"Iran is an important trade partner of China's in western Asia and North Africa and one of the country's main oil suppliers. Bilateral economic and trade cooperation has achieved fruitful results," state television paraphrased Li as telling minister Massoud Mirkazemi.

Closing the power gap... - Anhil8tor - 08-06-2010

The Report Card for America's Infrastructure, prepared by the American Society of Civil Engineers, gives the US Electric Grid a rating of D. Its summary says the following:

The U.S. power transmission system is in urgent need of modernization. Growth in electricity demand and investment in new power plants has not been matched by investment in new transmission facilities. Maintenance expenditures have decreased 1% per year since 1992. Existing transmission facilities were not designed for the current level of demand, resulting in an increased number of "bottlenecks," which increase costs to consumers and elevate the risk of blackouts.

An article from EnergyBiz by Edwin D. Hill, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, says:

The average age of power transformers in service is 40 years, which also happens to be the average lifespan of this equipment. Combine the crying need for maintenance with a shrinking workforce, and we may find that the 2005 blackout that affected parts of Canada and the northeastern United States might have been a dress rehearsal for what's to come. Deregulation and restructuring of the industry created downward pressure on recruitment, training and maintenance, and the bill is now coming due.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Joseph Kelliher is quoted as saying:

The U.S. transmission system has suffered from underinvestment for a sustained period. In 2005, the expansion of the interstate transmission grid in terms of circuit miles was only 0.5 percent. At the same time, congestion has been rising steadily since 1998.

Transmission underinvestment is a national problem. We need a national solution. Pricing reform is an important part of the solution to this problem.

Closing the power gap... - Flumper Barflusterbutt - 08-06-2010

i wish i could find an article titled "Who Gives a Fuck" to cut and paste here.

Closing the power gap... - BIRD33 - 08-06-2010

I was thinking about uploading the PDF from "My Boring Industry monthly" for all of you to peruse.

Closing the power gap... - Flumper Barflusterbutt - 08-06-2010

When people first invented e-mail they thought that no one would need more than the 128 characters which make up the ASCII character set. (The 128 comes from 2 to the power of 7 -- hence the phrase 7 bit ASCII). Unfortunately, a binary character (needed for executable programs, word processor documents, pictures and the like) uses the full 8 bits, and unsurprisingly if you try and send 8 bits down a communication medium which only safely supports 7 then sometimes the eighth bit gets lost.

The solution is to translate your eight bit data (eg. a Word6 DOC file) into characters which only use 7 bits. You then can send the encoded file across the world wide e-mail network and translate the 7 bit file back into an 8 bit file at the other end.

Well, how do we do that? There are two main ways. The first one I will mention is the imaginatively named a-to-b. This was originally an Apple Macintosh program which (together with its sister program b-to-a) [1] few people use outside the Apple community. The more common method is uuencoding. Uuencoding (pronounced you-you-encoding) actually stands for Unix to Unix encoding, but you don't have to have Unix to use this.

You usually do something like:

uuencode binaryfilename newfilename > saveasfilename

Under DOS I might type:

uuen flumperpic.gif flumperpic.gif > flumperpic.uue

after which I get a new file called flumperpic.uue which contains:

begin 644 flumperpic.gif M"0E!8W1I;VXZ($5D=VEN#0U%52M%1E1!("A2:7-T;RD-"2T@1FEN;&%N9"!H M87,@<VEG;F5D('1H92!4;U(@86YD(&-A;B!A='1E;F0@9G)O;2!T:&4@8F5G M:6YN:6YG#0DM($9I;FQA;F0@871T96YD<R!A<R!A;B!%52!C;W5N=')Y#0DM M(%1H92!O;FQY($5&5$$@8V]U;G1R>2!I<R!.;W)W87DL('=H:6-H(&AA<R!N M;W0@<VEG;F5D('1H92!4;U(-"0E.;W)W87D@:&%S('1O('-E;F0@82!L971T
end

I can now e-mail my mug shot to anyone I want, even if it goes across dodgy 7 bit ASCII e-mail links.

Thanks.