Powerplant Control Panel Tour - Part 1 Authorized Personnel Only S4E1
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- Опубликовано: 20 фев 2024
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Black start rabbithole! Yes please
Seconded! :)
I will join you lol 😆
Yes
Abso-lutely!
MOST DEFINITELY!
This is incredible. I feel like I’m watching PBS kids, but I’m 30, and this is the greatest thing ever.
Thank you SO MUCH! :) I appreciate you! There's more episodes coming!
@@Physicsduck He stole my comment, I literally feel like an excited little kid watching Newton's Apple all over again. I'm an IT nerd but I wish so bad I could work with stuff like this.
Not gonna lie, there's just something sexy and exciting about old school meters, gauges, buttons, switches and knobs that no GUI on a computer screen can ever truly replicate.
This person gets it. :) We call it "Old School Cool".
I prefer analog to digital... With analog, after using the panel for a while, you can just glance at it to see if everything is were it's supposed to be at. That pointer should be pointing that way, this other one next to that line, etc. With digital, you have to mentally decode the values and some of them can trip you up in a scary way... It is supposed to be a 9 or a 6? Or 8 versus 0. There is a place for digital - when you have to know what the value is, not where the pointer should be. My iWatch has an analog face.
@@fredinit I was entirely confused by your post until you started comparing individual digits. Just because something is digital, does not mean it needs to show numerical digits. You can put a dial gauge on a screen just as easy as a value read-out. And then, if you ever need a more precise value for whatever reason, the digital information, in precise digital representation, will be displayed below/next to/inside of the dial.
Or, at least, it should be this way. I recognize it's often not, but that's a design decision, not a limitation of digital information.
I have to agree!!! Flew on old S-58 helos, to myself the cockpits are sexy
@@kindlinthere are places where each one has its advantages. For instance sometimes its still nice to have the needle movement of an analog meter like when troubleshooting an oscillator. Its much more intuitive to see a meter sweeping back and forth than a bunch of digits flashing. But like I said each one has its merits
“Comprehensive and incomprehensible”
Put that shit on a pillow.
This is the content my ADHD brain desires. From the constant jumps back and forth, to the constant trivia, this is perfect.
Also I'd absolutely love a deep dive on black starts!
Thank you! I'm thrilled you like the new editing style! It's a ton of work and I was worried that people would hate it. It seems everyone actually likes it. :) There's MORE COMING SOON! Thanks for being the most important part of all this! I appreciate you! :)
@@Physicsduck New viewer here, I could use slightly longer time between jump cuts, maybe with a bit more natural transitions. The cuts feel abrupt and needless sometimes.
That said, if you are just now experimenting with a new format, you'll settle into a good rhythm and figure out what works best for you. Keep it up!
@@phillyphakename1255 I concur.
My old man (RIP) was a Navy Electrician in the Royal Australian Navy, and I have heard fun tales of ship generators being dropped 180Deg out of phase when hooking up to shore power.
Shore power wins, and a generator spinning clockwise becomes a motor going ANTI clockwise... for about a microsecond, before the generator drive shaft snaps, the mounts rip and the generator is launched through three decks, and onto pier next to the ship.
That had to be one hell of a show.
Shit that is the stuff of nightmares, now I see why Chris talks about syncing to the National Grid properly. RIP to the old man by the way, just like the old boy a few doors away he was a live liney.
Interesting!
I would wonder how accurate those tales are. RAN boats at least from the early '60s had load-shed protection in the power supply circuits. They would also have been the best engineered power units at the time. Synchroscopes have existed for decades and were present in the '60s. I have worked in power generation plant rooms with late '50s equipment and load shedding was present even then. You cannot physically connect an incoming source to a mismatched alternator.
@@greywolf271sure ya can, never under estimate the power of human stupidity....i can't tell you the number of times i have been the better idiot....metaphorically , pull the wrong levers in the exactly wrong order at exactly the wrong time and boom lights and sirens....
I would pay good money to have this guy give a 1 hour tour of a power plant.
Any support is sincerely appreciated (check the link in the description to my ko-fi to help me make more videos). I'll give you a full tour of LOTS of power plants, in great detail, one video at a time. I'm already working on exactly that. Check out my recent longform video on it to get started. :) Thank you!
About the amperage - 3 phase power formula is P=√3*U*I*PF which in this case would make it P=√3*2440*46*1=194405W=194.405kW
That is, if I see the meters in video right. Still, I took readings from different times in video, so it cannot be considered exact result.
Now THAT is an excellent comment :) Thank you! There's a shot in there that shows the entire panel all at once so that all the readings match up in relation to time. That way people can check their math and be sure they got it right. :)
Also, there is a phase voltage vs line voltage argument and so on.
@@Physicsduck which now causes this armchair idiot to ask: Would there be benefit to taking Vegas Mode to level 3: A, V, kWh for each phase? (how critical is it that the 3 phases be somewhat balanced?)
Another fun one is delta-wye connections and wye-delta motor starters. It's amazing they figured that out and it can all be done with contactors!
@@Physicsduck thank you! Good thing that electricity works the same in America and Latvia. Just some parameters change.
As a someone who builds industrial control panels and also does audiovisual work, I can confirm there is indeed something sexy about control panels.
Thank you! :) I'm going to do a video about exactly that very soon. :)
I read your entire disclaimer, and I think you forgot one:
Your call will be ignored in the order it was received.
Subbed.
Hell yeah ive been waiting for this. Good to see you back.
Hey! So YOU'RE my subscriber! Thanks for watching! It's good to be back!
@@Physicsduck You was gone for a hot minute
@@Physicsduck Hey, there are at least 2 of us.......
I assure you, the past two years were the longest decade of my life. It's good to be back and I'm so very thrilled that you're here! :) Thank you!
@@Physicsduck sometimes it's good to take time off though to recoup
Black start video please! These kinds of explanations are rare on RUclips. Keep it up, looking forward to part 2!
Thank you! :) It's coming soon!
@@PhysicsduckThank You!
Fun fact, we used your videos in class of electrical engineering all the way in the Czech Republic in Europe. Really good stuff!
WHAT! That's AWESOME! I'm sincerely honoured, thank you! And hi to all the cool kids in your class! :) Děkuji!
The disclaimer is a must read 😂😂😂
The disclaimer needs its own thumbs up button!
Came here to say this. disclaimer is epic!
Disciples of the Plastic God rejoice. Chris is back to bring us new content!
lol, thank you! LOTS more coming!
Not entirely new, but we'll take it.
From a "knowledge per unit of time" perspective, that was the best damn description of power factor I have ever heard. I don't watch RUclips shorts because of reasons, but I think that part would make a very educational short.
Thank you! I really appreciate that! I tried to make it a short, but couldn't fit enough of it into the 1-minute timeframe for it to still make sense like I wanted it to. There's just too much setup required. I could do it with animation, but I'm not that good an animator. Perhaps I'll take another crack at this when my skills have improved a bit. Thank you for GETTING it though! I appreciate you! :)
Agreed. Another rabbit hole would be to discuss exactly why capacitance and inductance affect PF but in opposite directions.
I would love to see more about a black start condition. There is a black start power plant about a mile and a half from my house.
In the UK is becuase our grid completely covers the country in a single synchronous AC system and the frequency is constantly monitored and recorded you can, with a bit of analysis, use the variations in background mains hum on an audio recording of sufficient length to timestamp that recording to the second.
Only problem with that is that this is almost completely obliterated by the variation in timing of the recorder itself, from things like battery voltage drift affecting the crystal oscillator that provides a sample clock, to temperaure drift as well that make it vary. You get more of a graph of oscillator drift with time, and with analogue tape, with wow and flutter, it is even worse.
Digital the hum is hard to recover, mostly because most recorders will absolutely actively remove 50/60/100/120Hz noise with narrowband filters in the DSP engine that does the pre encoding processing, simply to reduce data use recording hum, and then your typical Frauenhof encvoding to MP3, FLAC or even AAC, will strip out all the bass noise to a great extent, unless not masked by other sound energy, so the recording will have very little data to begin with. Even if you were recording using WAV or other lossless CODEC, the data stream would have very little hum imposed on it, and if recorded off a phone line, with all the equipment along the way adding in hum, and the SPEEX codec doing serious decimation to get all this data into a single 8kbs data packet system, you will be hard pressed to get anything.
You can do it in theory, but need both a good recording, no digital to analogue conversions until the final ADC to record, a log recording using a very well disciplined ADC clock, preferably a Rubidium disciplined one, though an ovenised crystal that has been running for 1000 hours continuously is a close second, and really good dynamic range to be able to use DSP to do the narrow band filtering needed to remove all the rest. Yes there is a paper, but it is idealised, and real life is hard to actually implement.
Thats just like... Marco Reps levels of zeros right there
I didn't say it was easy 😀 I did kind of gloss over that with "a bit of analysis" which should have been a "complex piece of analysis requiring looking for a best fit taking into account variances in the recording fidelity". It doesn't always work and yes modern digital recording filters can make it harder but still often record harmonics that are usable with the right analysis. Tom Scott did a video a few years ago.
@@ThePoxun Yes I remember seeing a video from somewhere on this exact subject and it was to do with law enforcement from memory and Tom Scott rings a bell.
@@SeanBZA There's not such a big of the problem. What you need to measure from recording is the frequency fluctuations, and since they are relative - you can find the correlation between your fluctuations and grid fluctuations.
My city used to have it's own power plant
The plant could hook into the grid
They had remote control of the switches to disconnect the end of their line that connected to the Grid.
When the ENTIRE northeast went out, they opened the switches to disconnect the town from the Grid and started the plant and they were on and was the only town with power
You could see it on the satellite photo
The voltage where I live now is 123 to 124 volts on a normal day.
It can go down to 121 but that is rare
I have UPSs all over the house logging the voltage
I prefer 122 to 126
Yes, used to have Smoky Joe the Congella power plant. Gone long ago, and now is an oil depot, and a few mini factories, plus a China mall....
I lived in a place where the voltage would often peak just over 125 v, which would cause my big UPS to trip before I adjusted its settings.
Our small city also has their own power plant. Start up is 3 hours. When the 2003 blackout happened, we were without power for only an afternoon.
Why did they get rid of the power plant?
200 kW / 2400 volt / sqrt(3) (because the ammeter is measuring one leg); = "just over 48A" which is what the meter shows. There would be a further error (which will be difficult to read given the scale of the instruments) where POWER could be different than kV * A because of non-unity power-factor.
Plus, the phases are never balanced. (the enduring problem of every power company. I pay attention to it in the data center, but there's not much I can do about it.)
As a mechanical engineer who’s worked in the electrical/power distribution service industry for 10 years I appreciate your content. I never get tired of visiting power plants and learning about their controls and processes. My favorite part is just seeing the vintage equipment that they have.
Abandoned in place is a nice acronym. My whole world revolves around this type of equipment and keeping the old stuff going in some capacity or another (relay replacements, generator circuit breaker replacements, general switchgear bus/insulation replacement etc). It’s cool seeing you all still operating with all the old school tech!
Hearing you scream about kilowatt-hours is fantastic. What an absolutely cursed unit. Our new electric car rates its efficiency in MPGe, or "Miles per gallon equivalent", with is based on miles per kilowatt-hour... and my brain nearly malfunctions any time I try to determine what that actually means.
Honest question - why is it bad? I'm no EE or anything but I have actually always been irritated by some of the other alternatives like Amp-hours for battery packs. In that context I think watt-hours is much more useful than amp-hours, right? What am I missing?
I don't really get it either, but it may have to do with the fact that the Watt is defined as 1 Joule per second? So 1kWh is just one thousand Joules per second times 3600 seconds, and the units cancel out and leave you with 3.6 million Joules. Which is all fine and good, but the Joule is a very small unit for measuring the energy consumption of an average household, whereas a kWh is about the energy an average household uses in an hour according to this video, so it makes sense to me that that would be the more popular unit here
@@theWONDERFULwizbecause we already have a unit to measure power over time. It's called the joule.
No, there's one worse: the kWh/year unit. used to indicate power consumption over an average year. Now you're mixing three time magnitudes!!!
I too hate the kWh unit. It's truly cursed. My biggest beef with it is using it in reference to electric cars and charging. You see, your car might have a 70kWh battery in it. Your charger might be 10kW. So, How fast does it charge? 10kWh per.... hour... um... So it returns 10kWh of battery capacity per hour. Yeah... having "hour" as part of your actual unit is terrible. I think joules would be the better unit, as others have said. Or, maybe megajoules for battery packs. Alas, we are standardized with kWh for both batteries and the grid. I hate it.
Welcome back, Chris! Glad to see you're back to posting vids again.
AVITECH! YOU'RE HERE! OMG! THANK YOU! It's so very good to be back, and I'm glad you stuck around! :) Thank you!
0:14 This editing is like hardcore drugs to me.
Just ran into this goldmine of a channel and you’ve got me at the edge of my seat waiting for the “we’ll cover this topic in a future video” videos.
Excellent! I'm glad you're here! :) You might want to check out the Discord too, link in the description! :)
Two panels that will keep you staring for hours are the old slate-backed panel in the Worthington generator shed at the Buckley Old Engine Show (now disconnected but AIP for your staring edification) and the DC knife switch panels for the old steam DC plant in the basement of the New Yorker hotel. Which I saw a video of ONCE and never found again. Skinner Una-Flow engines. Pretty sexy.
There's a couple of the old slate panels still in use out here in the wild. I'm trying very hard to be able to get some video of them, but the security guys have a problem with that. They DO exist though, and they're STILL IN SERVICE!
More videos please! It is fascinating to see how an actual power plant works!!
Thank you! I'm glad you're enjoying them! More are coming as fast as I can make them, it takes a lot of time, energy, and money to make videos at this level. :) But I'm on it!
11:53 "Or some idiot trying to fix something that they don't really understand... sometimes that's me-" This, is very relatable.
I looked up Vegas mode and I started purring at the thumbnails. I didn't even need to click on a single video.
In South Africa, thousands of people are actively working to keep our lights off through loadshedding
Dude, I'm a freaking auto mechanic, and for some reason I find myself fascinated by this stuff.
VARs are a fantastic thing.
Former submarine electrician/electrical operator turned hydro plant electrical engineer turned power system apprentice trainer. Sometimes my ADD fights with my OCD.
V x A = W is only for DC circuits. AC changes things
Still stands. It's just the simplified version of V * A * cos (theta) = P
For DC, the trig function simplifies to 1, reducing to V*A=P
Edit: Note: Power Factor, or PF is just the calculated term of cos(theta). As DC can/is considered, in engineering terms, AC with an infinite cycle period (0 hertz). So it can be considered the voltage waveform is perfectly in phase with the current waveform. Therefore, the current voltage phase relationship has a 0 deg phase shift. Cos 0 = 1, and why the equation simplifies to V × A = P for DC.
Exactly. It's AC. And AC is "voodoo". (there are three phases, and differences in voltage vs. current vs. phase - thus "power factor")
@@jeffl4810 I think the formula you want is Active Power [W] = V * A * PF where PF is cos(phi), phi is the lead or lag angle between voltage and current. Taking the cos function of PF doesn't make sense as PF is not an angle, it's a ratio.
@Graham_Wideman the angle is the phase relationship of the voltage (hopefully) sine wave, vs the current sine wave.
A lot of ratings simplify the phase relationship by denoting it PF, which is just a factor to multiply by, of the results from the original COS(theta) term
If the current is ahead of the voltage waveform, it's called leading, (cos-90 for purely capacitive) and caused by capacitive loads. Lagging is behind, and is caused by inductive loading (cos90 for purely inductive). Purely resistive is perfectly "in phase", and has a cos0=1 relationship.
In reality, the theta will be between -90 and 90. The further away from 0 it is, the more "appernt" or "imaginary" power is flowing vs "Real" power.
There are many other things, like mechanical loading being one, that affects power factor.
Pretty much every electrical device other than old skool light bulbs and resistive heating elements (and even those often have phase controlled output mucking with power factor) has an imperfect power factor. Many loads are now required to have power factor correction circuitry in their power supplies to make the load appear as if it's resistive!
@jfbeam
Haha. No magic involved.
But it can get weird.
Complex numbers (ie sqrt (-1) ) have a practical use when calculating this stuff. It's actually kinda interesting
If you put power in the shower....to get it clean....now hang on ..i was all ways told i couldn't cook toast in bathtub 😆😆👍👍👌👌 great video 👍👍
Hey Chris, welcome back. Looking forward to your vids on power factor and the stupidity of using kilowatt hours in measuring power plant output.... :)
Thank you! :) They're coming! Scripts are already in progress on both :)
House power ratings are a strange one. And really evolving right now.
Houses with some lights, a fridge, some short use appliances, and a mix of entertainment/ IT equipment would typically draw 1-2 kW on average per day. 25-50 kWh.
But, now add in modern loads that are now mostly electric in most areas (offsets other energy sources - oil, gas, wood):
- laundry drying (3-6 kWh per load)
- Kitchen Range/cooking (1-5kWh typ per day) Note: kitchen appliances may offset range loads, transferring the energy usage to the appliances. Eg microwave, electric skillet. Also dependent on efficiency of appliances - eg induction vs simple heating elements
- Dishwasher 1-2 kWh (dependant on efficiency and incoming water temp, and machine settings)
- Entertainment and typical IT is actually pretty efficient these days. TV's and monitors are typically 30-100W, computers are 30-100W avg. Add in modems, routers, etc 10-20W avg. Stereo's are minimal, and even big surround systems are on a low duty cycle.
Cell phones, tablets, laptops, etc are almost negligible in terms of power consumption - amounting to maybe 10's of Wh's/day typically.
0.5-2kWh per day
- Electric Based HVAC
* Fans, HRV etc 3-12 kWh per day
* Heat Pumps/Air Con: 10-200 kWh per day (VERY dependent on climate, season, house size and efficiency condition)
* electric water heater 5-20kWh (very dependant on useage)
- Electric car charger. 3-10kWh per day ***Avg daily trip is ~40km, and typical electric vehicle uses 6kWh per day***
(Becoming more popular, and mandated for no more ICE cars to be sold new in 11 years)
So with modern loads, mostly HVAC related, very dependant on climate, household loads increase in the 2 to 10 times range. Avg 5-10kW or more. Consumption on the order of 50-250 kWh per day can be typical. Especially in winter in our area.
Also, strangely, many groups would have everyone believe that our grid can't handle EV's. When infact, they consume very little electricity % wise in most cases. 6kWh per day is the average per passenger EV...
Little known fact - 1L of gasoline takes about 2kWh of electricity to refine. That same 2kWh of electricity will take an EV about the same distance as the gasoline would have, and sometimes even further.
The many other electrical loads are a MUCH bigger issue to the grid. BUT electric companies will expand their generating capacity to accommodate as needed. They are in the business of selling those kWh's.
I did the math one time on phone charging, and it was astonishingly low. Something in the range of 10 dollars of electricity over the lifetime of a phone if I remember correctly.
And this miniaturization is occuring all around us. Order of magnitude reduction in cell tower power consumption (partially offset by more towers). LED lighting taking 1/6th the power of incandescent. It's like my electric bill is experiencing lunar gravity when I flick the switch!
@phillyphakename1255 yeah, it is astonishing low in most cases. Most phones only hold 10-15 Wh of energy. And that can last several days for some people. Even power users would be hard pressed to consume 10-20 Wh typically per day in most cases.
@phillyphakename1255 LED's are getting even better now!
LED's can now be had that can output on the order of 260 Lumins per watt. A typical 100W incandescent bulb puts out ~1600 W.
Using the newest LED's, that 100 W lightbulb could be replaced with just 6W of LED's. Although driver losses will probably consume another watt or two.
Seeing this video alerted me that you were back to the land of the living. Welcome back!
Thank you! :) It's good to be back!
This video was very interesting Chris! I can tell that you worked very hard on this. Really good job, the editing and video was very well done too!
Thank you so very much! This one was HARD to make, and I'm glad you appreciate all the effort behind the scenes.
@@Physicsduck Of course! I find things like this very interesting. Even though I don't know a ton about power, it's still very interesting to learn some stuff!
Chris, I don't know if you remember me but way back in 2019 I believe when you were liquidating the geek group, I went with my dad to check it out. I was only 14 at the time and found an apple II that you let me keep for free with all the applesoft books on the condition that I would actually use it. We also had a conversation about the copper wire recorder I found that they would use in WW2. I spent a couple weeks learning basic applesoft with the books you gave me and make a couple simple programs. Since then I have learned to code in java and HTML, and I am studying mechanical engineering at GVSU. I wish I knew about the geek group before it dissolved and I am glad to see you are doing good.
Delta-wye connections (GET-3388B) and wye-delta motor starters. It's amazing they figured that out and it can all be done with contactors!
Oh THANK YOU! There's my bedtime reading tonight.
My utility actually provides hourly meter readings going back a few months. With that data you can really see how much electricity usage of an average house changes throughout the day. It can be as low 0.2 kWh per hour, about 200W when nobody is home and nothing but the HVAC blower and fridge are running, and as high as 8-9 kWh per hour, 8000-9000W when doing laundry as the dryer and water heater are running.
I usually divide the total usage in a month by 730 hours (total hours per year divided by 12), which sure it's an average, but it's reasonably accurate. Because most household electric use is by high draw appliances (stove, dryer, water heater, EV Charger, etc) that only run for shorter periods compared to industrial loads that run for the entire work day, or even 24/7, it is very hard to pinpoint what the average household electrical load is. I do find that the generally accepted 1-1.25 kW per household is a good rule of thumb though.
Much appreciated. Being a retired civil engineer, I find your program fun and entertaining. Yes, I'm also a nerd at heart. Cheers!😅
From a sound engineer and a curious mind, thank you!
In another life I was a radar technician at a remote station on the Alaskan Peninsula that was of course not on any grid. It was powered by five 300kW White-Worthington vapor-phase cooled diesels, which were also the heating plant for the site. I made friends with the power plant operators so I could watch from within the control room when they did fun things. Usually it took only two of the generators to power everything, but under some conditions they had three on line. This brings back memories.
I used to overhaul aircraft generators 3 phase jobs no less. It was fun to play with the excitation
One test was to short the output with a copper buss bar and crank the output to 300% for one minute. These generators were actually three generators in one... Thanks for these videos Chris
As one of those audiophiles you mentioned, owning gear with a large amount of capacitance, I appreciate this.
A fun thing now is that I own an amplifier with an old-school choke power supply.
Used to work for a major audio lab. Our speaker test racks had massive 1:1 inrush transformers just to handle to jarring voltage drop that a dozen subwoofers barking off pink noise at high dB's would pull. Even comcert hall PA's drop into protection mode without them.
What an awesome rabbit hole I’ve discovered.
Thank you! There's over a THOUSAND videos on this channel, and plenty for you to explore. :)
Excellent! Thanks! Black start .... yes. I once had the opportunity to tour a hydro power plant under construction on the Tekeze River. I was on a self-guided whitewater rafting trip and the tour almost started by damn near floating over the top of the dam that was under construction .... definitely got the heart beat up.
Love the disclaimer. Don't love the superfluous apostrophe in "It's sad, pointless job". Also, you mentioned a few things twice, such as "Lost ticket pays maximum rate"
Sounds like you want to volunteer to help edit it. :)
@@Physicsduck I only noticed the slow-mo version afterwards. ;)
As a technical director, i don't need to look up Vegas mode.
I remember when I first saw a automation demo and the faders moved on their own.
Better yet, i remember my dad's JVC HiFi receiver back in the 90s. When you turned the volume up on the remote the knob turned on the receiver.
That was the start of my control panel fascination.
OH GOD YES !!! FINNALY AFTER 2 YEARS !! I've been waitin for agess so happy right now woot woooooot !!
I hope we'll get more of your amazing content
Thank you! The past two years were the longest decade of my life. Now we're back in action and there's LOTS of new content headed your way. :)
As a child, a young child, I was in an auditorium and started taking note of all the enormous lighting, I eventually remember telling my dad that I would like to see the switch that turns those lights on and off. Lol now I do work on draw Bridges working around a lot of very similar equipment to what you are.
It is good having Chris back to entertain our curiosity :D
Thanks Chris! Working on my second class power production worker rating as we speak, lots of Manuel starts, and more advanced learning about our units and plants. We have 6 hydros in 2 sites. 4x 2mw horizontal Francis runners from 100 years ago, 1x min flow unit which produces around 500kw and has a double runner incase of low flow we can drop it in half. Our other plant produces about 4mw and is a vertical Francis. We operate and maintain 4x 2mw catapiller diesel generators and a GE frame 5 gas turbine. Love what I do, and enjoy all your videos. Keep after it 💪
That's AWESOME! Thank you for being here! I love that you're getting into the industry and learning the trade! You're one of the COOL kids now! :) Thank you for being a part of this, and you're personally invited to the Discord! Check the link in the description for a place to come hang out with a ton of other people as weird as we are. :)
great to see new episodes chris!
Thank you! :) How do you like the new style?
Can’t speak for Steve but I like the new ones and the old ones almost equally. I think the new ones come off as more polished.
Also Blackstart plz!
I noticed in one of your earlier videos a series of 12V batteries and while not ideal could be used to blackstart site 2. Has your site ever practiced a blackstart??
if the generator is grid tied it should be powering all of the loads on the grid with its 200kw, meaning a very small potion of each load.
system losses might also mean that more local loads would recieve more of the generator output.
as far as i understand, i am prepared for correction.
3:30 when you were talking about this, in England, when there is a big football game on, say the FA cup final or England playing in a cup game like the euros at the moment, the national grid have to prepare for half time of the game because houses all over the country go and put the kettle in that small 15 minute window of halftime
niceeeee, i was sad when i found your channel a year ago or so going through you r entire catalog of videos and sad it ended, glad to see your back! you get a sub from me!
THANK YOU FOR THE SUB! :) It was a rough ride, but now that I've been to the bottom I can teach people which way is up. :)
@@Physicsduckim happy to tag along for the ride!
Dee Dee, "What's this button do?" Dexter, "Don't touch it!"
Just found this channel through shorts. Already a big fan!
Thank you! :) I'm glad you're enjoying it! :)
Chris in my old company (pre solar) in Australia for planning for new subdivisions we allocated 4 kva per house for areas that also have gas for water heating and cooking areas without gas 7 kva per house. Being a 240 / 415 volt system we can run long and large LV distributors and much larger distrubution transformers and much less of them than American 120 240 lv . Usually that equated to transformers of 500kva so 120 houses for gas areas 75 roughly for all electric subdivisions per transformer . Your little hydro plant is really only half the output of one of your distrubution transformers. Thanks for the in depth explanation of your plant I love to learn and especially love old technology systems .
Love your shirts. I work in the petroleum service industry. Just ordered the slick beaver shirt, I’ll report back if it gets me a raise.
Thank you for helping support my dopey little videos! :)
This is my first comment on a RUclips video. Love the channel!
I’m in the software engineering space now but at one point I was a maintenance electrician and had a little exposure to power generation.
This answer may have already been proposed so forgive me if I’m duplicating it. I think the meter readings can be explained by real and reactive power.
A large chunk of the loads on the grid are inductors and when your AC load is “too inductive” or “too capacitive” reactance starts to come in to play.
The meters show real power. But the generator has to work hard enough for real + reactive power.
I think utilities have large capacitor banks to account for this.
A quick google shows the math for this. If you assume 60Hz AC the math is really simple but if you drop that assumption, time to bust out the calculus.
I'm glad to see this series back! And yes, in the broadcast industry there is a lot of "abandon in place". Old frequency meters that were no longer required to be operational by the FCC is one example. The most interesting was a Khan AM stereo generator that was AIPed when the FCC gave up on "let the marketplace decide" and said "Thou shalt use C-QUAM". And another vote for a video on black start
Really enjoyed the tour, looking forward to seeing the control tour, and the black start. Be careful out there.👍
Thank you! There's more coming soon! :)
Analog meters rock. They might not be as accurate as digital ones, but the visual feedback they provide is much comprehensive to a human brain. Specially to check fluctuation. When it changes you notice not only there's a change, but also to which direction that change is happening. With a digital meter you can notice there's a change. But to see it's direction a human brain has to _process_ an integer base 10 number. If you have one or two meters this can be acceptable, but when you have to monitor a bunch of meters, I wouldn't be that effective with digital ones.
2450 [V] * 46 [A] * sqrt(3) = 195.202 [kW], you have to multiply the Volts*Amps by sqrt(3) to account for 3 phase power. All the dials agree.
These people make the world go round
I seen most of the shorts I'm happy to see them together. Thanks
Yesss welcome back!! Nice to see full videos again 😍
+1 for black start rabbithole ;)
Pretty good timing. I rediscovered your videos like a day or two ago and subscribed because I didn't know why I wasn't.
It might've been your shorts that reminded me about watching a couple of knowledgeable dudes dicking around with repairing a generator, but all I know is I Immediately went and re-watched the last few episodes of S3
I am an engineer onboard a ship. Our control panel is very similar. Consisting of 5 generators, two propulsion main engines and many auxiliary machines! Maybe in a few years I’ll move over to a stationary plant…
Awesome! I can tell you that your plant is producing as much power as three racks of "my" supercomputer draws. Round about 300 Nodes with infrastructure.
I would absolutely love the black start video!
Cheers
Heck, not only does it get better, that exploration and curiosity pays off! Im fixing cool stuff everyday, and getting paid for it, because I was curious and learned a lot about the world around me, I developed those critical thinking and problem solving skills.
I have a job that I didn't know existed a decade ago. I fix stuff that I didn't know existed a decade ago, but that gear has been kicking for longer than I have. Im exited to be part of the old gear's story, and for it to be a part of mine.
Great to have you back Captain! Love the content!
Too muc fun! I am looking forward to part 2. :)
Wow! I've just found your channel, and you've got a fan!
Your descriptions are easy (enough) to understand, and the humor makes it that much more enjoyable!
my job for years was educating teachers attending a national technical education conference in major industrial process, and the local Edison company was my great friend, taking thousands of teachers over the years. in hours long tours of gas fired steam plants and even nuclear power stations (in more sane times) and with all this YOU have the lead in understandable cogent and amusing explanations in power plant operators, ( congratulations, you have beaten 30 years of excellent educating by southern california Edison, ( and they were the best at it)
so keep it up, expand it out, rest assured in your excellence,
and you have been unofficially certified in outstanding educational abilities by the second largest school in the csu system.
now take your accolades and get going on more material, teaching is mostly a grind, with only etherial rewards.
Thank you, so very much, thank you. That means more than you might realize. I just spent the past couple years in the darkest places you don't ever want to see or know about, with a great deal of time to really focus on what I wanted to do with my life. This video is the first publicly visible tangible result of that plan.
It was only with great trepidation that I finally published it, because it's such a niche topic and I have so little credibility. Who the hell would want to hear me talk about boring silly things like powerplant engineering? How could I ever actually make it worthwhile to spend so much time, effort, and money making videos that nobody will ever want to watch? My reputation is torched, and I'll never get any kind of sponsor support to fund this, it's all on my head. So to put this out there and see that people actually like it, and to see that someone with your perspective and experience truly gets it and thinks so highly of it........that's the whole ballgame, right there.
Fifteen years I've been on this platform, thousands of videos published, and god only knows how many comments I've read. I've read comments that made me thankful, that have made me angry, and that have made me laugh.
Yours is the first one that made me cry.
Thank you, from my soul and with all of my heart, thank you.
cb
The first time I used a sound console that had a Vegas mode was in 2006. The faders were motorized and danced up and down as well.
Thank you! I'm glad you got to experience that in person :)
Oh yes, I loved the former episodes of this series, and the sounds it makes when you tie the generator to the grid.
Welcome back, Captain Boden!
Thank you! :) It's AWESOME to be back! I'm so truly thankful that you're still here! :)
Thank you for that explanation of power factor. I am a mechanical engineer that deals mostly in thermal problems, but my company makes electrically tied equipment. Another ME tried to explain it to me as apparent power vs actual power and it sounded like voodoo magic. this grounds it better.
this is all so over the top of my head and yet i find it supper interesting.
welcome back Sir.
My calculations for the number of houses supplied are based on the annual output of the small toy power plant.
The output fluctuates from 1 to 22kW throughout the year and we generate around 75MWh per year.
Based on 3500kWh/year, this corresponds to around 21 households.
But this is my way of not having to tell people that we can't even supply a toaster in the summer.
welcome back Cap. Missed you. Glade to see you back.
I loved your previous videos, can't wait for more!
I would say that the reason the Amps are "not" matching is because its actually showing the phase Amps so (P= U*I*√3*PF) 190kW / 1 / 2400V / √3 ≈ 45A
I'm most impressed by the fact that in addition to changing camera angles for different sentences, you even changed shirts. I thoughts it might have been the colour temperature between different cameras, but I verified your microphone moved 🤣
Glad to have you back!
Good eye! Thank you! It is in fact two different (but very close) shirts. I grabbed the wrong one on the second day of shooting, lol. This video was shot over several days, and you're right, EVERYTHING moved. :) There's 2 locations and 4-full run-throughs of the script for the entire video.
Whats wrong with kWh as a energy unit?
Works well IMO.
Easy to calculate, and is a standard derived SI unit.
Only needs grade 4 math - a 1kW load, for 1h uses 1 kWh. A $0.15 kWh price results in a cost of $0.15 per hour of usage.
Joules would be too confusing to most. Especially when things are listed with watts on the label.
Plus, instead of 1kWh per hour, using 3.6M joules per hour would be a strange concept for many people. Watts are hard enough for non-electrical people in some cases.
Really detailed, exactly what I want to hear about, love it. Digging this format and I'm locked in for your next videos Chris
That's awesome! Thank you! :) I was worried about making such a radical change in format and I'm really glad you're enjoying them! :)
‘Black Starts’ is an interesting yet also sensitive topic.
You’d be surprised the confused looks people will give you when explaining it takes electricity to make electricity.
Not all generating facilities are capable of recovering from a black start, in fact… most facilities are not capable of such a feat. This can be said for facilities generating under a MW and those generating into the Gigawatts.
For security and national protection reasons, generating facilities may keep their back start recovery capabilities strictly confidential.
Yes, there's some very specific guidelines about what I am allowed to share in these videos. But we'll figure it out. :)
WOW it is SO well simply explained. Can't be better :)
Great video, Chris! While I can fully sympathize with your feelings about kWh, I find them most useful in discussing energy with normies. This is for the simple fact that this is how mere mortals read their power bills.
This is especially true when comparing things like battery capacity to various fuel sources. A great example is that 1 gallon of average gasoline contains 34kWh of energy. This facilitates the comparison of various power systems without requiring everyone to learn about Joules.
An interesting video about the syncroscope would be to use a dual-trace oscilloscope showing input and output voltages and the phases.
A question I have is this: is the amount of power you can push to the grid based upon modulating the exciter? I presume that the rotation speed determines frequency. I'd not thought about this until seeing this video. Thanks!
Once synchronised power delivery is controlled by the penstock height, trying to drive the generator harder against the load of the grid, ramping up current. Excitation voltage is there to regulate power factor, trying to provide as close to unity, or slightly leading, to compensate for all those pesky inductive transformers there on the grid, and the motor loads. there is interaction between them as well, ad excitation current is a lot faster to react over the massive rotating load and penstock controls.
Joules is easier than Watt-seconds imho. It wouldn't be that difficult to switch to megajoules.
In college, I worked at a chemical plant that had its own onsite power generation. Apparently, back in the 60s and 70s, the system wasn't grid tied. The old guy who was showing me around said to get the cycles right they would try to sync the old wall clock up with a mechanical stopwatch.
what an excellent find your channel is! well done explaining such a cool, niche thing most people won’t get the chance to see otherwise.
Kudos to you for welcoming someone teaching you about something! Helps everyone interested
Its good to see you back :)
Absolutely love these videos. Shorts are awesome too.
Looking forward to the next videos. Especially the deep dive stuff!
ROFL... VAR's and Power Factor. lol I'm an operator of 13 power plants with 18 generators. I enjoyed the video.
VAR's confuses many beyond any comprehension. Good luck explaining it.
Thanks for the video. I'm going to go see the others you have.
Hey, good to hear You are back! Cheers!
Hey I was thinking about your channel a few days ago, nice to see you upload!
Check the Shorts section on here. I've been slowly ramping up making videos for a few weeks. and THANK YOU FOR STILL BEING HERE! :) I appreciate you, and your patience :)
Damn, this is good.
AFAIK, in the US and the EU there's an added goal to keep the daily average grid frequency close to nominal to keep the mains-synchronized clocks run true. This includes intentionally running above nominal to catch up. In EU this means a 10 mHz/day intervention if the mains clock at 8am is off by 20 seconds or more.
Not the case in other markets, where the nominal frequency is practically the ceiling that is not exceeded outside of emergencies.