Why We’re Building a 790-Mile Wire From Kansas to Indiana
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As a native Kansan, I can confirm that I do not, in fact, exist
As a European, I don't believe the USA exists. I believe it's a conspiracy, acting as a warning to others. There's no way a place that wild can actually be real. I mean, over 300 million and those are genuinely your two best candidates to be President? Yeah that's a TV show.
As a native Hoosier, we also, do not exist
The AI is out of control these days.
What actually happens in Kansas?
Welcome to the Wyoming club
I actually live in a town in Missouri where the grain belt express is being built through and I’m quite disappointed to learn it’s not transporting grain
I'm disappointed that it is not a high velocity pipeline for beer. Grain Belt beer was widely advertised in Minnesota when I was growing up in the 1960s. By the time I was actually drinking beer, it was largely considered over-priced watery piss. Being under-aged, we drank Hauenstein, which was cheap watery piss, which I financed by asking both of my parents for lunch money, and going home and eating from the fridge. The joys and freedom of being a latch-key kid in the 1970s!
Nor is it holding up the Midwestern Corn Pants.
@@richdobbs6595 you'd be excited to hear about the Beer Pipeline in Belgium
Yeah, we need a direct tube of grain into Anheuser Busch in STL haha
Had us in the first half not gonna lie
John Green is gonna write about tuberculosis, not leprosy
Right?
Should have had Amy research this one.
These people are NOT true John Green fans 😅
John Green was literally in one of his videos lol
Really, this needs a John Green stitch to talk about Tuberculosis.
Its more a reference to the fault (crack) in our stars (moon) where two cancer patients kiss
Hi! I'm actually one of the engineers working on this project! I'm super glad that my project is the first your channel thinks is a good idea! Some things not mentioned in the video:
the project is 600kV, which is much larger than the lines most people see everyday
It will be the first ever project that connects 4 different grid systems
It will carry both wind AND solar across the midwest as they are both large under-tapped resources in that region of the US
Also, you showed double circuit HVAC towers and called then HVDC, which isn't correct, the towers are different and even have different configurations based on the type of DC your doing. GBX for example will be utilizing 2 conductors
Thanks for the great insight.
And thanks for upgrading our infrastructure! We need it badly.
I love reading about the renewable energy sector and advances in the tech.
What do you think will work best woth solar and wind to give us reliable power 24/7?
@TommyShlong There's a lot of conversation and opinions that go into this conversation throughout the power industry, and one of the current tech utilizations is the pairing of batteries with solar and wind farms to allow for the collection of power during high production and low consumption, and to use that charge during low production to make both sources a more consistent generation curve. There has also just been a progression thru the year of being able to be more and more accurate with generation predictions based on weather as modeling has improved, as well as generation being more efficient as more R&D is invested.
One of the other challenges that is being focused on right now is around the inertia of the grid, as renewables do not produce it, and it's important for grid stability. Many renewable sources that aren't talked about as much that utilize traditional generators still which are able to be governed to keep this inertia maintained, but the variable generation wind and solar that most are familiar with use inverters, which do not have this inertia. This leads to the conversations around the grid following vs. Forming inverter tech.
Overall, we are moving towards a grid that's far more of a mixture of technologies. Also, I may be biased, but transmission is a huge bottleneck for the system that deserves way more love than it gets. Yes, mega projects like GBX will help, but overall, north America's largest machine (aka the power grid) needs to be maintained and grow to meet the ever growing demand that electrification of our lives brings. So when a new line is needing to be built near you, learn about why and teach others you know why it's important!
I was also thinking whay he showing a hvac line
@@raychillillAdd many large flywheels Or, take older generator sets and repurpose them for increasing rotational inertia.
I have always understood that high voltage was delivered by DC the video gave me the impression that it would be using ac current to a delivery the current. Is this true? And how?
I'm pretty sure an elderly couple lives in Kansas. They own a small pink dog.
Underrated comment right here
Stupid dog!
That pup has seen some shit
Some of my Swedish ancestors settled in Lindsborg Kansas. They probably did not have electricity at first. We visited there and saw Kansas' highest peak - a hill about 20 feet high.
@@8546Kencool
"Its actually 2 power grids and 1 infrastructural temper tantrum"
As someone stuck living in that tantrum I'd say thats a fairly good description. Would love a video talking about the grids as a whole and how messed up we are down here.
Watch the Well There's Your Problem episode titled "It snowed in Texas." It's a couple years old, but it has the requisite hatred of everything the fools who control that misbegotten land stand for.
This line slayed me. When they blamed part of the last major power catastrophe on wind turbines not working in freezing temperatures, "Hi, Alaska would like a word."
@@RyanTheRed907
We are Texas with a population of 31 million.
You are Alaska with a population of 734 thousand.
We are not the same.
@@jbrou123Population has nothing to do with it. The point he’s making is that wind turbines can work perfectly fine in cold weather when weatherized. They have them up in Antarctica of all places. Plus, most from fossil fuel sources failing (which makes up the bulk of energy production) and the fact that it wasn’t connected to the rest of the grid for backup power.
As another Texan, I second this request.
3:15 skin effect isn't really the limiting factor, the limiting factor is capacitive reactive power, that you need the charge the parasitic earth capacitance. That is also the reason why cables (both offshore and onshore) are DC, even at smaller distances, because the parasitic capacitances are much bigger than in overhead power lines
moreover, all the stock photos and videos that were described as HVDC lines were almost certainly the normal three-phase AC transmission lines that this project is *not* using. DC transmission lines are typically two conductors.
@@PaulFisher not always. Some HVDC-lines use a positive, a negative and a central tapped conductor (so effectivly +500kv,0kv and -500kv against earth for example). I don't know what the exact implementation in this project is, but both 2 and 3 conductors are possible
So there's no cables that are AC?
Whatever nerd
@@OllieHamonMost cables are AC, just not some of the more powerful ones.
At 3:20 you said that we make wires out of many strands to avoid eddy currents, this is wrong. Whilst we do have litz wire that disrupts the skin effect, this is due to the strands being braided, not just because it is made out of individual strands. The bigger reason why wires are made of strands is mechanical, one solid wire is stiff and hard to bend whilst stranded wire is like rope.
Ybokors; You are sort of correct, but also significantly incorrect... Yes we have litz wire (from the German word "litzendraht") and indeed litz wire may be twisted, woven, or braided but the KEY factor that enables it to reduce the increase in resistance at high frequencies caused by the skin effect is that the individual strands of litz wire are INSULATED from one another. The braiding or weaving pattern is of secondary importance. The braiding is used to cause each strand to spend equal amounts of its length in the core of the bundle or on the outside of the bundle and this causes equal impedance in each strand so the current splits evenly over all strands. The main factor in reducing the resistance at high frequencies is that the strands are insulated from each other which causes the strands to have a very large surface area relative to the mass of conductor metal used.
Also, because engineers love Twizzlers Pull-N-Peel
@@Vincent_SullivanSo, you consider 50 or 60 Hz to be high frequencies? Huh... what frequency range would you call low frequency then? But your overall point nevertheless stands. :-)
Eddy currents or skin effect is not what prevents long distance AC lines.
It is the inductance and capacitance of the wire which causes the long-distance losses in HVAC lines.
@@elgonzo7239 Nowhere in my comment did I mention 50/60 Hz. as being "high frequency". I merely wanted to point out to Ybokors that he was incorrect about what construction aspect of litz wire is mainly responsible for the improvement in performance at high frequencies. It is the insulation of the strands, not the braiding.
However, since you mention frequency... No, I don't consider 50/60 Hz. as "high frequency" however even at this frequency skin effect may still have to be considered. It would be an unusual engineering situation when designing small equipment that would justify considering litz (or other skin effect mitigation measures such as conductor foils or tubes) at 50/60 Hz. At 60 Hz in copper (yes, the material of the conductor (due to different resistivities) affects the skin depth at a given frequency) the skin depth is about 0.3" (8 mm) so the skin effect in small wires is not significant. If you are designing a power station where thousands of amps are flowing at 50/60 Hz. it is a different matter because you need large conductors! A single conductor large enough for such a current flow would suffer from skin effect even at 50/60 Hz. The usual solution in this case is multiple parallel wires or buss bars each individually small enough to not suffer from skin effect. This uses the same concept as litz but without the braiding as the inductive / capacitive effects are not significant over the short distances involved and the low frequency of 50/60 Hz.
Of course every engineering project is different, but as a rule of thumb for small devices I only start to consider litz around 10 KHz. Even then, the advantages of litz are not that significant until you get up to 20-30 KHz. There is also an upper end to the frequency at which litz wire provides useful advantage. This is caused by parasitic capacitance between the strands which starts to make the litz cable behave more like a solid wire with the attendent skin effect losses. The useful limit for litz is typically somewhere around 1 to 2 MHz.
The bottom line is that when designing a system that might possibly suffer from skin effect problems you have to consider not just frequency but also conductor size required for the current involved and the conductor material - along with all the other factors that enter into the design!
Check mate. The screen I’m watching this on is my phone. I haven’t charged that baby in 12ish hours so power didn’t recently come from the power plant
It did when you charged it.
nope the power from the airwaves that gives you the video did get made within the last few seconds so your phone has 2 power sources . one of them is in the air radiating from a cell tower.
Compared to the scale of a tree's life it was recent.
@@ronblack7870yes but the video specifically says screen, not phone.
@@ronblack7870 What IF... You just powered up a Starlink Terminal (fed by some battery/generator, "fueled" many days ago, that also charges your phone/screen).
-> In ALL cases (currently), there is a nearby (same State) ground station talking with the Starlink satellites to provide the Internet connection [at least some of the "data" is being carried thanks to energy produced by some power plant].
"This is an HVDC line" - shows an HVAC transmission line... DC has 2 bundles of wires normally not even on the same tower, AC has 3 bundles and sometimes 6 on the same tower.
Is a HVAC line how they get air conditioning across the country?
@@doomsdayrabbit4398 That's called district heating lol
Yeah but on a serious note:
HVAC = High Voltage Alternating Current
Lmao I noticed this and it annoyed me quite a bit.
Imagine making an entire video about HVDC lines, without showing a single image of an HVDC line...
ALL images of transmission lines in this video are AC lines.
@@doomsdayrabbit4398 C'mon man. You know very well they bottle that cold air in Canada and smuggle it in by labeling it maple syrup.
Slight nitpick: your explanation of why we use AC is only sort of correct. Yes, the primary reason we use it is because we can easily step the voltage (not current, even if the two are related) up and down. But this is especially useful because the higher the voltage, the lower the losses as heat. This is also why the grain belt express would be high-voltage DC and not, like, low-voltage DC.
While I don't foresee DC replacing the AC grid anytime soon, we can build DC transmission lines (duh), and we wouldn't necessarily have to have many different grids for different voltages. We can change DC voltage (with buck/boost converters) with relatively high efficiency.
In fact, inside most computers is something akin to a DC "grid". There is a DC supply, which is usually either from a battery or converted from AC. This is one voltage though, and can't be used to power everything. So we step the voltage up or down, and that way we can power many different components with different voltage needs.
It is as accurate to say that transformers step current as they do voltage, the only reason we say it steps the voltage is due to our power grid regulating voltage not current, if we build our power grid with current sources instead of voltage sources, you'd have said the opposite.
converting DC to AC at 500kv and 2000 amps is not a trivial thing. those converters are huge assemblies and very costly. AC to DC is much less difficult however.
@@ronblack7870 Lots of really big IBGTs strung together. Personally, I think mercury arc valves just look much cooler.
@@fredinit The phrase "mercury arc valves" excites the physicist in me.
@@ybokors8524 we also say voltage when specifically talking about power transmission because we want to increase the voltage (decrease current) to decrease heat loss. Sure, saying the opposite is technically correct, but then I wouldn't get to nitpick Sam.
The Grain Belt Express is slated to run through my family’s farm in Missouri. There’s been ongoing land rights negotiations for years now among many of the farmers in the area. They’re also thinking about adding wind or solar along that part of the route. It’s great to see this to know what the broader plan is.
This should have more likes
Generally what do they pay for those rights?
@@jk484 At least 8 bucks
@@jk484easily become a millionaire , depending on how much land you have.
@@jk484$3.50
My favorite fact about ac transmission lines- it's not EXACTLY 60hz in the US. it's modulated slightly by fractions of a hertz by load control algorithms, the result of which is documented in public record. The practically unnoticeable hum of the electrical grid in the audio of any vid can actually be compared to the public record of AC frequency to accurately determine the location where it was recorded. Fun!
How do they modulate the frequency on a whole grid? Or is this an unintended consequence of the variations in loading?
My favorite part of the video was when Sam said "th-cam.com/video/OfJRm0WssOE/w-d-xo.html" as evidenced by the subtitles at 2:38
Yeah, I'm confused
me too
What on earth?
For those wondering where that link takes you; it lead to a video titled "Red Letter Media Loves Rogue One!" where a guy is doing the floss dance saying in a high pitched voice "A T S Ts A T S Ts"
Maybe he's saying that "it's complicated"?
As a wind grower myself, I confirm this statement. 0:26
Wrong, you're a botted account user
@@chobies5383as a bot myself i can say no bots are present here.
@@industrial_prostitute Wrong, you're a Martian
I applaud you wind farmers being able to hang on to that slippery elusive wind!
I am a part time wind farmer. Only after trips to Taco Bell.
Theres a Dave and Buster's in Kansas City, Kansas, one in Overland Park, and a third one in Wichita. No need to ship electricity out of state!
But, as Sam said, no one lives in Kansas.
@@Brando56894 oh. I forgot.
@@Brando56894It looks like Dave and Buster do!
@@Brando56894 Then we just move the people where the power is, with the lower cost of housing those selling their homes out east can afford to build large Waco style comp... on second thought just build the wire.
Just be happy city-folk think nothing interesting is out in the country, so they don't take as much interest in exporting their particular brand of insanity ...
Another example of a super long distance HVDC line is the one that takes power generated at hydro dams in northern Manitoba, and runs all the way to... Southern Manitoba... We just spent another 10 billion dollars building the 3rd such line which is nearly 1,000 miles long.
you know a youtube channel is big when it decides to build
infrastructure
I thought the same!
That's a successful channel! Must have views in the billions...
Honestly, much better than Mr. Beast’s inane bandaid charity and dystopian desperation porn
HVDC is some fascinatingly scary stuff. Just switching it off can be a challenge, because it likes to arc across conductors a whole lot more than AC does. Switch contacts can literally weld themselves together under the right conditions.
As an Electrical Engineer living in Kansas and not planning to die in the next 15 years, it took me a second to catch on to your tongue-in-cheek style, but I really enjoyed it!
"I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
-Electrons probably
There's no place like ohm.
Quebec did this like half a century ago, Montreal pulls ~15 gigawatts of power from ~1000 kilometers north of us up at James Bay, carried by 4,800 kilometers of transmission lines, mostly 735 kilovolt AC and a bit of 450 kilovolt DC.
I really love that the lines you showed ARE AC lines. Two sets of three = double circuited three phase lines
This is 100% correct. If Kansas actually existed then Kansas City wouldn't need to be in Missouri
There’s one in Kansas, too. Or would be if it existed.
Also in addition to eddy currents generating excess heat, one reason why AC lines are limited in the length they can travel is that it's important for all generators in an AC power grid to be synchronized. And, due to the fundamental limitations of the speed of light, this means that the AC power grid in Kansas will have a slightly different AC phase than the power grid on the east coast. So, even if you could construct an AC line that could effectively transmit power from Kansas to the east coast, you would have to choose whether you wanted that power to be synchronized with the local grid in Kansas, or the local grid in the east coast, or maybe somewhere in between. Whichever you choose, you'll experience significant power losses wherever the phases are mismatched. HVDC avoids this problem entirely.
The make phase shifters for that. You build up a lot of impedance on lines over 150 miles long and cannot effectively get power to flow on the lines. This is where we would compensate the line with a capacitor bank in series to lower the impedance and allow more flow
Also transmission lines do strange things when they are 1/4 wavelength long, like making an open circuit at the load end appear like a short circuit at the source end. At 60 Hertz, 1/4 wavelength is 777 miles.
Then 1/2 wavelength is 1553 miles, so two points in the AC grid that far apart are 180° out of phase. So you see it is impossible to have entire regions of the country be exactly in phase.
(The calculations assume the vacuum velocity of light for transmission speed; in reality the wavelengths are a bit shorter.)
"Where Dave & Buster's is"
I cannot tell you how much I enjoy your videos!!
I have a bachelors and masters in electrical engineering but haven't really done power transmission stuff in 20 years. This brought back a lot of memories and I really enjoyed the way you guys presented it. Very well done and thanks for spreading knowledge and awareness of how complex the grid is and how important linemen are. In both football and electricity grid maintenance and repair
Quebec also has a HVDC line from the St James Bay to New England.
In Wyoming 10 watts are exported for every watt we consume, there's DC lines that send power south
I support increasing the taxes WY charges on that energy. Especially with the proposed line from SW WY to Las Vegas and Los Angles
@@WYO_Dirtbag yep, our energy is a lot cheaper than what California PG&E charges (I pay 0.08/kwh, CA is close to .40) and we wouldn't charge PG&E the 0.08 residential customers pay, we should be charging them a lot more with the new lines.
The fact that you can see the progress of America's civil war in the distribution of wind farms is, predictable, but also kind of interesting!
3:04 electrons are not lost during transmission. It just takes energy to move them, and that *energy* is lost as heat
Infrastructural temper tantrum, LOL, genius!
As a Missouri resident, It's quite fun staring into the Kansas abyss from the safety of our side of the border. Good video though, hope my electricity gets cheaper so I can run more lightbulbs.
I love them both. I farmed in both states.
Running a lightbulb farm.
@@brodriguez11000 I wish
"its actually 2 power grids and one infrastructural temper tantrum.." this is the line of the year 2024...
2:45 This is good comedy Sam. Made me laugh.
Half as interesting making a wire. nice.
Thank you for making this video, because I've always wondered "Wire we doing this?"
0:10
-EXCEPT IN ILLINOIS! We are cool and have RADIATION!
There are lots of places with Nuclear Power.
@@SteelOfLegend
Yeah, but Illinois is powered largely by nuclear power plants. According to a few documents I just found with a quick look up: the US's average power generation is about 20% nuclear but in Illinois it is 52%.
real
Be thankful you have it. If the loonies get their way we won’t have electricity or be able to afford it.
AND the real future of Power : Nuclear is real baseline power. Not something that depends on the sun to shine or the wind to blow.
Aotearoa NZ built its 610Km HVDC link back in 1965, to connect the massive collection of (mostly hydro) powerplants in the South island up through the island and across Cook Straight to the vastly more populated North Island
At the time that line, usually called the Cook Strait cable, was the longest, meanest, highest voltage, highest power HVDC line in the world. Crosses the road, just a couple of k’s from me. Its had A few upgrades over the years, but it’s still working just fine.
“Infrastructural temper tantrum” 😂
41.7% as interesting if you consider the advert
2:00 that’s not true, you can totally convert one DC voltage to another, the necessary technology is just more complex. Multiple grids may have been the most efficient solution to that problem when electric power was new, but not today where modern semiconductors exist.
We're being blessed with the HAI videos this week
Im so glad that hai has acknowledged kansas’s existence
😅 But not my existence within Kansas.... 🙄
Looking at the world today, let's just keep Kansas our little secret. Damn zoo out there.
@@poursomebeeronit yep, my bio teacher says that it is boring, but we get the privileges of clean air, no overpopulation, green energy hotspots, etc.
Convince the IRS and bill-collectors you all don't exist.
Growing wind is the speciality of tornado alley for sure
1:50 No? You would just need dc to dc transformers everywhere, which _exist_ (they weren't cheap in 1910 NYC, which is where your picture is from). Every computer PSU has them. MOST of the rest of the video is on point. As for infrastructure ideas, you could talk about geothermal heating and cooling for district HVAC, growing mushrooms underground, animal feed, why monorails suck vs trains, etc.
DC to DC converters are even less cheap at high voltages. Also, they're less efficient and far more complicated than AC transformers.
Technical subject, mind-numbingly boreing, hillariously delivered.
... the best!
They finally mentioned Kansas!!! I feel included finally
My electricity is generated by a bunch of solar panels about 3 feet above my head. I got about 10 feet of wire from them to my battery bank and no bills. Life is good off the grid!
Until your expensive batteries and inverter dies and you're in for a heavy bill
@@wills5482I don't have one expensive inverter, i've got several smaller ones that operate redundantly. I've been off grid for about 15 years now and every so often i buy a new one, sometimes whether i need it or not. And batteries are cheap too, i run golf cart batteries, damn near bombproof and last pretty much forever as long as you keep water/electrolyte in them. I don't fall for all that lithium nonsense, it's not like it matters what it weighs so i brute force it. Golf cart batteries can discharge for many thousands of cycles and be run down to like 6v without sulfate damage, but i've got a hard cutoff programmed for 10.5v so that never happens.
I actually do have a salvaged Tesla battery running the shop and it's solid, but might only last like 10 years, but i can't complain since it was free.
I've probably spent a few grand, idk, like $3-5k on all my solar equipment over that time and saved $15-20k so i'm fine with that. They're also not that hard to fix, inverters are fairly simple devices and usually aren't even surface mount so swapping a few capacitors, a FET or resistor is a piece of cake. I've fixed a few fried inverters because i didn't feel like waiting for a new one.
And if it REALLY comes down to not being able to restock parts after the skibidi toilet ohio rizzvasion and zombies or whatever, fine, there's no more internet anyways and i guess i'll do more woodworking and 3D printing while most of y'all got run over on day 3 of the apocalypse and are bone dust by then.
I'm not some bag of dicks with money larping on the weekend at the cabin, i'm the real deal, a mountain man who is just fine living off the land and doing everything for myself. I'm also not a douchey 'prepper', i'm not preparing, i've already living the life just fine. Truthfully the only hassles i run into is society occasionally busting my balls with stupid taxes that don't provide me with any social services and tell me how much weed i can grow in my own garden, on my own land, what i can hunt, when, and how, and other authoritarian micromanagement BS.
Like it says on the tin, No Step On Snek, all i want from the system is to be left alone, pretend i don't exist and let me live my best life without some bureaucrats busting my balls over meaningless fake nonsense. Nature, the earth, sky, sun, and rain up here is the only real truth in this world. No lies and bullshit can ever change that.
Not to be a dick, or wish harm for people, but the sooner this whole modern Roman empire v20 shitshow idiocracy thing collapses, the better for me and my mountain people.
So yeah, i got things pretty much covered, and i'm more than halfway through my playthrough at 50 years old already so it's not like i need to survive more than another 40-50 years max.
By which time the system is either still under warranty, or has lasted long enough to pay for itself.
@@TalonSvarogIt's already paid for itself 4 times over in 15 years lol. There's no warranty, or nobody to call, i just bought or found all the stuff and built it myself. Just got 3 more panels recently when i uninstalled my neighbor's old obsolete wifi tower and got to keep the panels, a wind generator, and a 20' tall steel radio tower.
My next project is building a power station, i just scored a 6.5kw generator, rebuilt it and use it on cloudy days or to run welders or 220v equipment. I'm building a soundproof shed to house it and eventually automating it to start when needed, or once every few days to keep fresh fuel running through it.
@@rustymustard7798If your solar power system is so great, why do you need a generator powered by fossil fuels being burned in an internal combustion engine?
Today's Fact: In 2001, a man named Richard Jewell was falsely accused of planting a bomb at the Olympic Games in Atlanta; years earlier, he had saved hundreds of lives by discovering and reporting a bomb at a public park in Georgia.
do you have a fact warehouse where you get those facts
@@lirachonyrin fact, he actually makes the facts in his satisfactory world.
I think there was a Dollop on this
The boy who everyone thought was a wolf due to his uncanny wolf-finding ability
He was accused long before 2001, try late 1996.
Consider Eric Robert Rudolph was charge with it in 1998.
SunZia is another HVDC project set to come online in the USA. It will move power from an eponymous massive wind project in west central NM south then west to AZ. SunZia is the largest renewable energy infrastructure project in US history.
"No one actually lives in Kansas"
Me, a Kansan: Wait. Where am I then?
You’re absolutely in OZ
@@jljordan1 That crazy movie. The only thing people think about when you mention Kansas, yet the vast majority of the film doesn't even take place in Kansas 😂
1:23 🤣 LMFAO I laughed so hard. John Oliver would approve. The more you know about Texas and its power grid the funnier that joke becomes.
2:30 If you've come within a country mile of Vlogbrothers these last few years, you'd know that Tuberculosis is one of the deadliest curable diseases that kills millions of people each year in the right now today world and also that that's like half of what John Green talks about and definitely what his next book will be about 😛
And if you're not watching the Vlogbrothers... come on Zoomers, appreciate your TH-cam forefathers!
"IF YOU'RE NOT WATCHING THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS SUPER SHOW, YOU'RE GONNA TURN INTO A GOOMBA!! "
I feel the sentence "EU privacy regulations can be hard to comply with, so a lot of American sites just block the entire continent" should ring some bells, because for some reason all the European sites don't have a problem complying. :D
On a serious note, now I understand the difference between alternating and direct current! Thanks, Sam!
Wait are you really going to build it YOURSELF?
1:58 the graphic is misleading, all these appliances use the same voltage (220 volt in europe), just have different power consumption, you can do the same with DC. What AC is good in is changing the voltage, i.e. having power lines at tens of thousands of volts (less power waste) but having household devices at 220V (safer, can realistically build devices to use)
congrats on branching out into the wire building industry, half-as-interesting-san
I live in Texas and I absolutely love your description of our power grid.
MY UNCLE, AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER
WORKING FOR REYNOLDS ALUMINUM IN RICHMOND VIRGINIA
SPECIALLY DESIGNED
POWER LINES AND TOWERS!
HIS BEST PROJECT WAS ENGINEERING A VERY LONG SUSPENDED LINE ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER FROM HELENA ARKANSAS TO MISSISSIPPI STATE SIDE!
AT THE TIME BUILT WAS THE LONGEST FREE SPAN HIGH VOLTAGE TRANSMISSION LINE IN THE USA!
I loved the tone of this video.
“Two power grids and one infrastructural temper-tantrum.” Is an accurate description.
i can’t believe half as interesting is building a highway from kansas to indiana
Stranded wires are used mainly for flexibility, ease of manufacture, and eas3 of handling. What isn't obvious is that if the strands are twisted (helical) they are more flexible than if the aren't, because twisted strands slide past each other easier than untwisted.
The opening statement in this video that "most power in the US is generated by Natural Gas and Coal" is misleading. Electricity in the US comes from the following sources:
1. Natural Gas (40%)
2. Renewables (21.5%)
3. Coal (19.5%)
4. Nuclear (18%)
5. Other (1%)
Given that information, it is difficult to justify the statement that it's "mostly Gas and Coal". Technically, it's mostly Gas and Renewables, but even then nuclear and coal are roughly equivalent.
He should have mentioned that China is the main user of High-Voltage DC lines in the world:
"In China, there are about 200 GW of HVDC cables stretching 58,000 kilometers in operation today"
The power lines have a higher refresh rate than my monitor lol
but your monitor is drawing millions of pixels each time
the faces on the electrons help a lot
Crazy that HAI is doing that!
Good thing you made this video i didn't know we were all meant to make this
As a thinking indivdual who knows a few things, I can say that the guy in this video gets almost every detail wrong yet sounds totally confident in himself, thus ensuring nobody takes him seriously.
Believe it or not but I've actually been to a Dave and Busters in Kansas (not clickbait)
That "skip to ad read" bit is actually correct
I think it fun that because of active circuits is now cheaper and more efficient to do DC-DC conversion than AC-AC.
"We're not in Kansas anymore"- The Electrons, probably
Whoever does the music for these videos deserves a raise
I love how you say "nobody lives in Kansas" while showing footage of the Mitch Mitchell floodway in Wichita, which is surrounded by urban sprawl
As a Hoosier, I’ve heard about this before, it powers our school’s AC
yesss finally a video about my old hyperfixation
Another good idea infrastructure project you should look into is the Rio Grande Plan in Salt Lake City. It is pretty interesting and could use a simple video to sum it up. Also the project could use the publicity. Check it out?
As a kansan, I can confirm, I havent seen another person anyhwere around me. These wind mills just sprang up over night one day and I never could figure out how. I asked the neighboring cows but they cant talk so no luck there.
We have some HVDC transmission lines here in Brazil and some others being built. It seems that the Chinese are good at this, because Chinese companies have won the construction contracts while European and national companies have been left with other types of transmission lines.
The Chinese are good at what's known as "tofu dregs" construction, using substandard materials and shoddy workmanship. They are also known for dominating other nations through infrastructure projects.
As someone who is a wind turbine, I can confirm that we do, infact, prefer the Midwestern plains. Though some of us like living a mile or two off the coast. We appreciate the representation.
As a Minnesotan transplanted to Pennsylvania, I’m bummed the Grain Belt Express is not for Grain Belt Beer.
Ewww. GB, the beer, is some nasty foaming water.
Your explanation was mistaken. Wattage does work. That can be roughly translated to volts times amps, or pressure times speed. So, if one goes up, the other can go down. The heat is a function of amps, so to reduce the loss to heat, increase the voltage, but with ac, it acts a little like a radio antenna, and loses power to ground. With DC, that isn't a problem, but other things are, like conversion, stepping voltage up or down, and of course corrosion of connectors.
There has been one from Delta Utah to Adelanto California for 50 years I think. Coal plant. Worked with a few guys from Delta.
there is actually a big misunderstanding in this vid. the loss to heat is pretty much a function of the voltage. The higher the voltage, the lower the loss to heat per distance and energy transmitted. The problem is, that AC has a second loss. They are basically a big radio antenna. And the signal gets stronger with higher voltage. one loss gets down with high voltage, the other one gets up. That is why there is a lower boundary on how much loss you experience per distance and energy transmitted in AC.
Base load and nuclear should be our main focus. Wind does zero for base load
"We'll all be dead in 15 years." Now that's a good one!
Not if we get our greenhouse emissions down
That John Green line was wild lmao
Great topic choice! This is a great piece of infrastructure going in. And you did very well for someone who is not entrenched in the electrical grid.
Oh jeez, so many incorrect statements and pictures. A few- none of the lines you showed were actually DC. They all had three conductors where DC lines only have two, like the HVDC line that goes from Celilo, OREGON to San Bernardino, CA. (pronounce Seh-Lie-Lo). They used to have some hella awesome mercury vapour arc rectifies that would glow purple in the converter process of the AC power from the slow moving lake (called the Columbia River) dams down to CA, and California's PV power was supposed to come north in the summer, buttttt......
This was a much better idea than the parallel high voltage AC lines that ERCOT put in Texas with Phase Shifters on each to help balance the flows, but ended up with them creating subsynchronous harmonics that causes all sorts of issue. That's okay though, cuz fawk Texas. They didn't want to play with the rest and then shat in their sandbox. Check out the Texas Railroad Commission if you want to learn why Texas has their own grid.
Also, AC doesn't push electrons, that's DC. AC more jiggles them and the power is transmitted via the magnetic fields that arise from the jiggling. Actually, very similar to what the animation looked like.
I use DC for very short distances. From solar panels to inverters.
Is sam more chaotic then normal today?
Watching the intro on mobile makes me feel so powerful
1:35 I can confirm that Louisiana doesn’t have electricity. Mississippi too. Arkansas is pretty sketchy.
Fascinating dot distribution map, "transmission lines"
Please continue to be a firehose of information about GOOD infrastructure projects, especially those on our very complex electricity grids, and what is helping or stopping more good things from happening. People need to learn about this stuff in an enjoyable and accessible way
I was stationed in Kansas once. I met both people who live there!!!
The pacific DC intertie (celilo stations are the crux) has existed for a number of years between Washington state and California. It is one of the reasons California can claim its green energy program is "working" It supplies so much hydro power to California, that if it goes out, the California grid would be severely crippled.
The transformers for the stations are not made in America and take months (over a year?) To build and are custom made for the site. They are so large, that special transport has to be utilized. (A recent upgrade for the Washington side had to have the transformer delivered by ship, up the Columbia river.)
The location of these unique stations much be a closely guarded secret, no? No. A few years ago promising electrical engineers were invited to tour the site, and the location was openly put on the web for the invitation.
Remember, our incumbent president ensures us that America has never been safer. If you believe that, don't read "Lights Out" by Ted Koppel (investigative reporter for you youngins)