Power

Why The Baldwin Centipede Broke Every Railroad That Bought It — 91 Feet Of Failure
Cab Forward

I'm watching this video about the Baldwin Centipede locomotive, and he mentions the La Vergne 608SC diesel engine and I get distracted. He don't show a picture, or at least not a good one, so I go looking and found some passable images on The Baldwin Diesel Zone. 

La Vergne 608SC
Click to embiggenate

The 608SC shows up in 1945, but the company was around for another 20 years. So what were they building? In 1964:

The last 600 series engine was built at Eddystone. Stationary 608A #7113

Eddystone, where's that? Ask Google and the first interesting thing that pops up is the Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy. Okay, a power plant is not a locomotive, but they are like brothers from different mothers, brothers under the skin, so to speak. They are both industrial power machines, which is close enough. Besides, I have a soft spot for power generating stations, so I go take a look. On Google Maps, Eddystone is a suburb of Philadelphia and the power plant looks like this:

Eddystone Generating Station
The image is about one-half mile across

The power plant is surrounded by a double set of railroad tracks and most of the land inside the tracks appears to be flat, bare ground, or maybe concrete. If this power plant was burning coal, both of those features would be useful, but there doesn't appear to be any coal. However, there are two big oil tanks.

The company website gives a synopsis:

Ensuring Grid Stability Through Fuel Diversity

Eddystone Generating Station plays a critical role in delivering reliable power through fuel diversity. Owned and operated by Constellation, this six-unit, 820-megawatt (MW) power plant is located on the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia.

Eddystone Units 3 and 4, each with a capacity of 380 MW, were installed between 1967 and 1970. These subcritical steam boiler-turbine generator units can operate on either natural gas or oil, providing flexibility based on market conditions.

Units 10, 20, 30 and 40 are oil-fueled peaking units with a combined capacity of 60 MW. They are designed to run during periods of high demand and were installed in 1967 and 1970.

Construction of Eddystone began in the mid-1950s, with the now-retired Units 1 and 2 coming online in 1960. Both were supercritical steam boiler-turbine generator units that operated on coal. Unit 1 was retired in 2011, and Unit 2 followed in 2012.

Eddystone has been in business for 70 years, and for most of that time they were burning coal. It's only been in the last 15 years that they've fully changed over to gas and oil. I wonder how much it would cost to replicate that railroad track today. Google says one to five million a mile, for straight lines on level ground. I'm gonna say 10 to 20 million for this industrial location. Is there any other commodity that could use such a setup? A grain terminal maybe? Probably not while the power plant is operating.

There seems to be some disagreement over whether Eddystone should be operating or not. There's too many competing interests and it's too far away, I'm not gonna stick my nose in there, though maybe I should. Data Centers are one of the competing interests, and there are a bunch of them being built around here. I suspect they are piggy-backing on the electrical power distribution system that was installed to support Intel's Giant Ronler Acres Microchip Foundry. They might be piggy-backing as well on the tax deal Intel got when they set up shop in Hillsboro.

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An aside: While I was writing this post I tried to copy the phrase

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

from Google's search page, but when I pasted it I got:

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

Curious as how this was being done, I used Blogger's html mode and found that pasting that line came with 3KB of html fluff. A little poking around reveals that including this little bit of text:

style="display: inline-block; transform: scaleY(-1);"

inside a <p> tag will do the trick. 

P. S. When I looked at this post on Feedly, the inverted text was not inverted.

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Horseshoe Curve Pennsylvania - on the way from Altoona to Gallitzin

The narrator in this video repeats some of his stuff a little excessively. I don't know whether he is just filling time, hoping to pound these phrases into the listener's brain, or whether he just likes the sound of his own voice. Is that even a real thing? Liking the sound of your own voice? I don't even know what I sound like, I guess my voice is acceptable. Anyway, I suspect the phrase 'liking the sound of your own voice' is just something some wag made up to describe someone who talked a lot.

The point I was trying to make is that I have seen several videos like this, and I guess I got to give these guys credit for putting together a polished video. Not everybody can do that, but I suspect some of these, especially the ones where the narrator never appears, are just having an AI read a script.

Miniature Nuclear Power

NanoTritium battery - Citi Labs

The Silicon Graybeard posted about a cube-sat using nuclear power on Wednesday. Citi Labs system 'generates continuous power from the natural beta decay of tritium'. And just how does that work?

Google says:

Direct Conversion (Betavoltaic Cells)

This is the most common and highly efficient industrial method. It uses a semiconductor junction to absorb the radioactive emissions directly.
• The Mechanism: Tritium naturally decays by converting a neutron into a proton, releasing a low-energy beta particle (a high-speed electron).
• Electron-Hole Generation: The escaping beta particle shoots into a semiconductor absorber (such as silicon, silicon carbide, or diamond). As it traverses the material, it ionizes the atoms, knocking electrons free and leaving behind "holes".
• Current Production: The internal electric field of the semiconductor’s p-n junction sweeps these electron-hole pairs in opposite directions, creating a continuous, usable electric current.

In the photo above, it looks like there is some water sediment on the circuit board, but I think it is just a reflection, not actual sediment.

Zeche Zollern Mine Museum

1900 Siemens Halske generator in the machine hall at historic Zeche Zollern mine museum in Dortmund, Germany.

Wikipedia page about the museum.

Zhangjiakou Power Station

Zhangjiakou Power Station located in Hebei Province, China

Coal fired power plant 90 miles northwest of Bejing.

U. S. Energy Consumption

Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads

Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.

Bearing Failure

The Ghost in the Gearbox: How White Etch Cracks Haunt the Wind Industry
Lubrication Explained

If you spend as much time on YouTube as I do, I am sure you have seen numerous videos of wind turbines catching fire, falling apart or otherwise failing. This guy gives us a good explanation of the root cause of these failures. The key point is that these bearings fail without any warning, no indication that there is anything wrong, and then boom! All of sudden the bearing fails and the whole thing disintegrates. The thing he doesn't talk about is just how big the loads are in wind turbine bearings and how much stress there is. I look at those things with those hundred foot long blades and I'm thinking that the loads on the bearings have got to be out of this world. So maybe we are actually going to learn something useful from this whole wind turbine / green-energy debacle.

Solar Farm

Dennis is getting a solar array installed. If you add up the numbers, I suppose they make sense. I'm not interested in having another contraption around. Contraptions break and then they need to be repaired.

Power from the Sky

The S1500, China’s new 1 megawatt flying wind turbine.

Brian Potter points to a story on Clean Technica. They seem to be planning on deploying these things in the jet stream, umpteen thousands of feet in the air.

Power

RealClear Wire has a nice story about electric power generation:

Affordable, Reliable, Clean Scorecard: Natural Gas Is Tops, Wind and Solar Are the Worst by James Taylor

I read something the other day that said the reason power plants quit using as much coal wasn't because of environmental reasons, but because natural gas was just cheaper. It's not just the cost of the fuel, it's also the cost of operating a coal fired boiler and all the structures and machinery needed to feed the boiler.

European Power Grid

European Power Grid

The link goes to an interactive map.

Via Detroit Steve

The Wild Story of the Taum Sauk Dam Failure

The Wild Story of the Taum Sauk Dam Failure
Practical Engineering

Taum Sauk? Where the heck is that? Somewhere in southeast Asia? No, it's in Missouri of all places, named for a Piankeshaw chief.

Curious place. I mean, you never see a lake on top of a mountain. The dam was originally built in 1960-62. It failed in 2005, rebuilt and reopened in 2010.

Emergency Generator

Zerohedge headline caught my eye:

Twin Hurricanes Send Generac's Portable Generator Supplies To Critically Low Levels

Well, that's not a surprise. But it got me thinking about my own situation. I'm just down the road from Intel's giant Ronler Acres plant and Intel would have taken pains to ensure that they have reliable power and so I would be protected from power outages just by virtue of being in Intel's shadow, right?

Well, maybe not. A power outage at a big wafer fab plant would cost the company a zillion dollars a nanosecond, so no matter low the odds of the power being interrupted they are going to ensure they can continue to operate, which means they are going to have emergency generators. So how many generators do they have?

Funny, no one talks about it except the EPA:

NEIC CIVIL INVESTIGATION REPORT 

Intel Aloha Campus 

Aloha, Oregon 97007

Intel Ronler Acres Campus 

Hillsboro, Oregon 97124

 

Emergency Generators and Fire Pumps Intel operates 60 diesel-fired emergency generators and 4 diesel-fired fire pumps across the Aloha and Ronler Acres campuses. The emergency generators and fire pumps are located in various buildings across the Ronler Acres and Aloha campuses. The emergency generators and the fire pumps are subject to the RICE NESHAP or the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for Stationary Compression Ignition Internal Combustion Engines (40 CFR Part 60, Subpart IIII; “NSPS IIII”). Intel operates the emergency generators for 30 minutes each month for maintenance and readiness purposes. Intel operates the fire pumps for 30 minutes each week for maintenance and readiness purposes. The emergency generators are equipped with diesel particulate filters. - page 10

NEIC is the National Environment Investigations Center.

When I was working in Beaverton, an insurance company occupied the space next to us. They kept their antique mainframe computer there. Evidently it was crucial to their business, so they had a giant friggin' Caterpillar diesel generator installed out back on its own two foot thick concrete slab. They would fire it up once a week, just to make sure it was operating. Business operates on a very different set of premises from those of a household.

We have had a couple of power outages here over the years, but none that lasted for more than a couple of hours. Of course, we haven't had any volcanoes blow up lately, but if one did I'm not sure a generator would do us any good. In any case, I'm not going to buy one now when people who really need them are having a hard time finding one. 

 

Genius Girl Repairs Generator

Genius girl repaired 150kg generator burned out a lot of parts can't be used took 3 days to rep
林果儿Lin Guoer

Seeing her pick up the generator and carry it on her back, I'm thinking something is off. Generators and electric motors are mostly steel and copper and are very heavy for their size. And then she weighs herself and the generator.

	Weight of girl + generator	136.4	kilograms
minus	Weight of girl	44.6	kilograms
equals		91.8	kilograms
times		2.2	pounds per kilogram
equals		202.0	pounds

200 pounds! She must be one tough cookie. Or did something get lost in translation? So I go looking for 20 kw generators. Everybody and their mother has generators for sale, but most of them are attached to an engine. Pulley driven 20 kilowatt generators are kind of a specialty item. This is the only one I found that did not include an engine, but did include believable specs:

IMD PTO 22/2 S AVR - 22kW Tractor-Driven PTO Generator w/ AVR (540 RPM)

It weighs 170 pounds and costs $4,300. The case for our girl's generator is much larger than needed for the size of the windings, and it is much older, so that might account for the difference in weight.

Watching her attack the stator windings with a chisel was impressive.

I thought I posted another of her videos, but I cannot find it.

Power Hungry AI (Artificial Intelligence)

ChatCPT Search uses 10 times as much power as a Google Search

From Zerohedge:

Almost two months ago, we highlighted what we called at the time 'The Next AI Trade' - that in fact it is not the tech itself, but the electrical power required to run the tech that is the limiting factor on the growth of AI (and Data Center) expansion.

These pages have been warning for years about an electric-power shortage. And now grid regulators and utilities are ramping up warnings. Projections for U.S. electricity demand growth over the next five years have doubled from a year ago. The major culprits: New artificial-intelligence data centers, federally subsidized manufacturing plants, and the government-driven electric-vehicle transition.

There is a plethora of new power lines and substations being installed around the intersection of Cornelius Pass Road and Highway 26. I've been looking for a way to show it, but it's tough. Power lines and poles don't show up well in images unless you are right up close, and if you are up close you can't see the extent of these installations. Only the plans the power company is using to build and install these things would show the true extent of the project and I haven't seen them.

Previous post about data centers (or are they AI computing centers?).

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste
Cleo Abram

Seems that recycling nuclear fuel is possible, but expensive. It doesn't help that Jimmy Carter, the jerk, put a stop to it back when he was president. That kind of forced the nuclear power business to invest heavily in using plutonium, which means we will have to exert ourselves (spend money) to go back to the older technology that enables recycling of nuclear fuel.

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

Russia has 22 nuclear power plants under construction around the world. This is just one of them. How many nuclear power plants are we building?

Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, Turkey

It is not near any major population centers, which is good from a safety stand point, but it means they are going to building some very long high tension lines to deliver the power this plant will produce.

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station

Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor, UK, still under construction - AP

Looking at the thumbnail for this puzzle, I thought it might be a stadium, but it's not. I didn't know anyone (except maybe the French) were building nuclear reactors these days, but here we are.

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is under construction in Somerset, England. The project is financed by EDF Energy and China General Nuclear Power Group. EDF is a French company. China General Nuclear Power Group is a Chinese state-owned energy corporation. Is the UK becoming a colony?

EDF has several pictures of this project. This one caught my eye:

The cranes are placing a 5,000-tonne water intake head onto the seabed

There are tunnels leading from the power plant out into the bay and the intake (and outlet) heads are placed on the seafloor to preserve the integrity of the opening into the tunnel. The concrete block suspended between the two cranes is the intake head. To give you a sense of scale of this scene, the intake head is 150 long and 25 feet tall.

PGE's New Integrated Operations Center

PGE's new Integrated Operations Center

In Portland Oregon PGE stands for Portland General Electric. In California it stands for Pacific Gas & Electric. Very annoying, you never know who they are talking about.

That's an impressive looking display. Looks like they ought to be able to control their world. Let's just hope the software wasn't written by the low bidder.

The place is surrounded by a six foot steel fence, the kind that are commonly seen around server farms. I guess it makes sense given the number of bad actors running around loose these days.

Industrial Green Energy

Aerial view of Enviva Biomass facility in Northampton County [Courtesy of Dogwood Alliance]

On one hand it seems like a good idea, on the other it just seems a little shady.

People are trying to be 'green', so they are burning wood pellets instead of coal, the idea being that growing trees suck as much CO2 out of the air as is produced when they are burned, so burning wood is considered carbon neutral. If you are one of Greta's acolytes, you might think that's a good thing.

Problem is the world burns about 8 billion tons of coal a year. I don't know if there are enough forests on the planet to compete with those kind of numbers. Whatever, demand has been growing and now there are a bunch of wood pellet factories operating in the southeast United States, cutting down forests, grinding the logs into wood pellets, and shipping them all over, including Europe.

Here's the shady part:

Biomass is contentious not just locally for the adverse impacts on those who live near wood pellet plants, but also globally for the unusual way its carbon emissions are tallied.

Under global accounting rules, emissions from burning wood are calculated where the trees are harvested, not where the material is burned.

That means countries can avoid counting emissions from their wood-fired plants while reporting the coal displaced as a greenhouse gas reduction. - Aljazerra

Wood pellets also cost more than coal:

Anthracite coal costs a lot less than wood pellets per unit of heat (BTU). A pound of Anthracite coal has almost twice the heat as a pound of wood pellets, therefore pellets have to be almost 1/2 the cost of Anthracite coal to be at the same cost per unit of heat. The cost of pellets would have to drop to $140/ton to be equal to the cost per unit of heat (BTU) of Anthracite coal that cost $250/ton. - Heet

Coal, if you buy it by the trainload, is much cheaper, like $40 per ton.

Coal

2024 Forecast Coal Production

Some people make a lot of noise about much CO2 you get from burning coal. Some parts of the world, like India and China, could benefit from just cleaning up the smoke.

Sample Layout of Emissions Controls at a Coal Power Plant

Yes, pollution controls are expensive, but they seem to work. No, they doesn't have any impact on CO2 but since we are likely to become radioactive dust at any moment, I wouldn't worry about it.