Foggy Tuesday
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Category Archives: Energy/Technology
Right down the line
I’m trying to catch on to this photography thing, a hobby to which I’m relatively new. I’m also hoping it’ll help me in other creative work as well, since some days I think I possess the design skills of a carrot. Having a camera on hand at all times helps a person look for relationships, geometry, and perspective. In this case, I was driving along and noticed the line of towers heading southeast from 93rd Street. I figured it was worth a quick exercise in photography, so I positioned the truck just right, stood atop the cab, and this is the result. I like the line formed by the towers as they march off into the horizon. I had snow on my shoes and almost slipped off the truck, but thankfully I made the save. I try to save bouncing my head off the asphalt for racing season, when I wear a helmet!
Power lines like this are pretty wild; when I was part of the electricians’ union I got to see a big chunk of power line. They had it on display in a meeting room, with different layers peeled back. This is pretty heavy duty stuff! These big “wires” are capable of carrying a lot of electricity, and if I had to pull a guess out thin air I’d say these are probably 230kv lines.
Because the electricity generated by power plants has to travel such long distances, they step the voltage up as high as they can to prevent loss. These wires have a certain amount of resistance to them, and they are less efficient with high current than they are at high voltage. If I remember correctly, power loss is proportional to line current, but inversely proportional to the square of the voltage. So the higher the voltage, the less power loss. That means more efficiency, more generating capacity, and more money too. But they can only bump the voltage up so far before it starts to cause loss too; make the voltage too high and it’ll start to arc. It’s kind of a corona effect, and probably pretty dangerous too.
One of my favorite spots to watch Northern Lights is near one of the bigger towers north of town. On a calm night I can hear crackling overhead…talk about spooky! I also heard the same crackling while taking photos for the feds right outside a power plant. That’s not a reassuring sound, believe me. There were no visible signs of arcing in either case, but anytime you can hear electricity it’s best to move down the road a ways.
Well, I’ve satisfied two things here: I’ve geeked out and taken a photo I’m happy with. Time to go play with PJ…he’s babbling now, and he LOVES his daddy! I can get him to smile so wide just by playing with him and talking to him. On the drive home from this power line photo my mind wandered to taking him on daddy-son field trips, showing him how things work, getting him his first library card…I guess he’ll be a geek like his dad. We’ll sure have a good time though!
Blowin’ off some steam
With plants like the power station and the refinery downstream pushing warm water into the Missouri River, it’s no surprise that parts of the river don’t even freeze over. In fact, there are flocks of geese that simply don’t migrate; they just stay near the refinery and enjoy the open water year-round. I’m sure that’s why the big Tesoro sign at the entry to the refinery has a goose on it.
Power plants are really cool. I’ve seen the inside of a few, but not Heskett. Time to make some inquiries…
Separate ways
I did some extensive poking around inside almost every single powerplant in North Dakota during the summer of 2006, including standing atop one of the 23-story boilers at the Coal Creek Station. You could fit the state capitol, the tallest building in North Dakota, inside that boiler. Crazy, huh? One thing I saw that hadn’t occurred to me before was the volume of steam generated by these plants, something that many people assume is smoke. After all, that’s what a power plant does: generate steam. The steam powers the big generators, sure, but everything upstream of the generators exists solely to produce steam.
While I still think that ethanol is a waste and the numbers show it to be a thermodynamic loser, I have to give credit to the guys who came up with the idea of using steam generated by the Coal Creek Station to power an ethanol plant. At least they’re not adding to the amount of energy it takes to produce ethanol, only to get a product with 70-80% of the energy output of an equivalent amount of gasoline. And one thing that nobody’s making a big deal out of is that E85 can actually be sold as E65 in this state without running afoul of state regulations!
None of these thoughts really crossed my mind when I snapped this photo, they just popped into my head as I started typing. After a long day in the garage, I guess it was just time for a big ol’ word dump accompanied by a reasonably neat picture.
What a drag…line
Big digger
Anyway, they have a couple of trucks hold highway traffic from either direction, inch this thing across the road, and pull the mats back over to the side until they’re needed again. The whole process takes several minutes…a machine that large still moves very slowly.
I would have loved to have seen them take the big dragline crane across Highway 83 when they did that a while back…those don’t have tracks, they have giant feet that “walk” from one place to the next. Oh, and the cord is a lot bigger, too! They have a tractor dedicated just to tugging that cord around behind the dragline as it moves. Someday I’ll get pictures of that, too.
Tower City
These towers include the local Cumulus FMs, KNDX (Fox), KBMY (ABC), KBME (PBS), KXMB (CBS), KFYR (NBC), and KYYY (Y-93). Most of them are on Tokach land, except for the KBMY tower. They can be clearly seen from Bismarck and much of Mandan, unless you live below some sort of hill.
Local viewers who don’t have cable are actually quite fortunate to have the tower situation set up in such a way. Guys like me who have satellite TV and use an off-air antenna to pick up the local stations can aim that antenna once and forget about it. You see, TV antennas are quite directional in nature…and if the towers for different stations were located all over the place, you’d have to rotate your antenna to optimize your signal from one station to the next. As it stands, I just bought a rooftop antenna for $20 at Menards and mounted it inside the attic of my house, facing towards “tower city,” and forgot about it.
While out here, I saw something I don’t recall ever seeing before: a meteor streaking down out of the sky so slowly, so close to the ground, that I could actually see the wisps of flame coming off it before it disintegrated in a flash. It was amazing! There were lots of shooting stars last night, so I’ll probably be out chasing more tonight.
I just got better looking…
I got to spend much of the day in some of the clean rooms, biotech labs, an aquarium, and chemistry labs where cutting edge technology is advancing through cooperation between NDSU and private businesses. For a geek like me, this is like being a kid in a candy store.
I was hoping I’d get the suit with the little plastic helmet on it, like Dr. Evil wore in the Austin Powers movies…then I could pretend I was in this Postal Service music video, one of my favorites of the 21st century.
It was fun watching the robotic equipment print templates for tiny circuit boards, while other robots would attach the components to the board, while techs would examine finished products under microscopes. There were other guys doing microscopic alignment of templates for extremely tiny circuitry, and tons of gadgets everywhere. One of the interesting items manufactured by Alien Technologies, one of the partners here, is RFID chips the size of a pepper flake! The work on nanotechnology is wild; for example, they’re working on these nano-IC’s (integrated circuits) that are so small, you can fit a bunch of them inside the “D” stamped on a Denver-minted US dime.
There was SO much cool stuff for a geek to see here, and it’s a shining example of the enormous effort our state government is making toward North Dakota’s future development in technology and industry. More to come…
Tuesday sunrise
Where have all the towers gone?
Originally this tower had the big cone-shaped antennas that indicated that it was a microwave relay station. You can still see a tower decked out with these east of Dickinson, and I remember seeing another one between here and Fargo…but I’m not sure exactly where.
The array of antennas that currently occupy this behemoth are cellular antennas. You can determine if a tower is a cellular phone tower by these telltale antenna arrays, often oriented in a triangular pattern. Since AT&T is trying to establish a cellular presence in Bismarck, and they apparently haven’t the need for microwave equipment on this tower, cellular antennas have magically replaced those big ol’ cones. I don’t know how quickly it happened, but I noticed it suddenly. Watching them swap that equipment out would have been somewhat entertaining.
AT&T built a ton of these towers in the 1950s as part of the Long Lines project. I don’t know if this particular tower was part of that project, or at least the original phase of it. I found a map of those microwave relay sites here but I don’t have dates or other specific information to attach to this particular tower. Many of them don’t even belong to AT&T anymore…because of the logo on the side of the building I’m just assuming that this one still does.