The Truly Super SupergridMany watched helplessly this past summer as St. Louis suffered through a torturous blackout and dozens of Californians died during an unprecedented heat wave that sapped electrical power and immobilized the grid in places.
Meanwhile, one of the terminals at LaGuardia Airport in New York lost power due to the heat, causing flights to be canceled. Heat also buckled the third rail on the Queens subway line, causing a power failure that forced the evacuation of 70 people.
As the heat continued unabated across much of the nation, eight square miles of Queens went dark for a week, while in California, the Fresno County hospitals were filled, and the morgue ran out of room.
While all this was going on, plans were moving forward to correct the problem permanently by creating a national supergrid to carry power to wherever it’s needed cleanly and efficiently.
More than just an electrical grid, the supergrid would also be a pipeline for liquid hydrogen, whose low temperature would cool superconducting wires able to carry unprecedented amounts of electricity without any loss to resistance and heat.
The idea of a continental supergrid was first proposed by Chauncey Starr ? one of the pioneers of nuclear power.1 Starr worked on the original Manhattan Project and then started nuclear power companies in the United States and Europe. He was the first person outside the military to build a nuclear reactor and has been a proponent of that power source ever since.
Nuclear power is at the heart of the supergrid concept. Nuclear power plants developed a bad reputation in some circles in the wake of accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But the latest technology has evolved to the point that it makes accidents like those impossible. The older reactors used water to cool the nuclear core; if the water level fell, the core overheated.
The newest nuclear power plants, called Generation Four high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors, don’t use water at all. They have a built-in feature that causes the nuclear reaction to be self-limiting. As the temperature rises, the reaction slows, eventually stopping before a meltdown could ever occur, making these reactors inherently safe. Moreover, they don’t need to be near a body of water for cooling.2
The design of the supergrid places a cluster of high-output Generation Four nuclear power plants in a central location far from urban centers ? one that can be securely guarded. The new reactors will produce either electricity or hydrogen. They will then transmit both over long distances through a “supercable.”
In addition to being highly efficient, this system will provide a ready source of fuel for hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles. Moreover, due to the time differences across the nation, high power demands could be met by shifting power from New York in the evening to Los Angeles in the afternoon.
The supergrid would also be able to store energy efficiently from renewable sources, such as solar grids and wind turbines, in the form of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a sort of chemical electricity, consisting of a single electron paired with a proton. The electron can be held indefinitely as hydrogen, or released as electricity when needed. This solves one of the big problems with today’s grid: It can’t store electricity for long periods without cumbersome, impractical batteries.
The supergrid will run through underground tunnels, making it resistant to the whims of weather and to potential sabotage. Best of all, no new scientific or technological breakthroughs are required to make the supergrid a reality. Three pilot projects are now operating, two in New York State and one in Columbus, Ohio.3
In light of this trend, we offer the following six forecasts:
First, by 2016, we foresee a one-mile-long supergrid cable project coming on line to demonstrate the proof of the concept by carrying several hundred megawatts of power. It will be sponsored by the Department of
Energy and overseen by a consortium of electric utilities. The supergrid will provide all the necessary components of a continental grid, while allowing engineers to iron out problem areas, such as fine-tuning hydrogen containment technology and developing circuit breakers that can withstand the extreme voltages in the system.
Second, once that prototype is fine-tuned and running well, a 50-mile-long demonstration project will come on line and begin relieving real bottlenecks in the present grid. Such a mid-range system could, for example, make blackouts a thing of the past in California or New York, depending on where the project is located.
Third, new tunnel-boring technology, which has already been demonstrated in New York City’s Water Tunnel Number Three and in Chicago’s Deep Tunnel Project, will gradually bring down the cost of running the supercable underground. As the supergrid expands its territory, communities will see unsightly transmission towers and wires disappear.
Fourth, the completion of the continental supergrid, like the completion of the Interstate Highway System, will span generations and will be engulfed by controversy from time to time. But the promised benefits will inexorably lead to its completion, probably before mid-century.
Fifth, once in place, the supergrid could completely free the nation of dependence on carbon-based fuels, especially oil. BMW and Mazda have already demonstrated hydrogen hybrid cars. Cars burning hydrogen will develop 65 percent efficiency, compared with 30 percent for the best cars today. Drivers will be able to tap into the supergrid anywhere just as easily as they fill up at a gas station today.
Sixth, as coal and oil are phased out as fuels, the environment will become cleaner. The health and quality of life of Americans will improve as pollution becomes less common.
And we will have a virtually limitless source of clean and secure energy by the second half of the 21st century.
References List : 1. To access the investigation of Chauncey Starr’s original proposal for the creation of an Energy Supergrid, visit the University of Illinois website at: www.supergrid.uiuc.edu 2. Scientific American, July 2006, “A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy,” by Paul M. Grant, Chauncey Starr, and Thomas J. Overbye. ⓒ Copyright 2006 by Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved. 3. ibid.
