Powerplant Control Panel Tour - Part 1 Authorized Personnel Only S4E1
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
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Black start rabbithole! Yes please
Seconded! :)
I will join you lol 😆
Yes
Abso-lutely!
MOST DEFINITELY!
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
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.
Glad to see you back. I can’t wait for Pt.2 and I’m on board for a black start video.
It's coming! and THANK YOU! :)
I work at a wastewater plant doing primarily instrumentation. We have a 6.5MW poop gas generator you'd probably find pretty fascinating/horrifying.
HES BACK !!!!!!!!!
I would say you're powering 2/3rds of the businesses and 1/3rd the houses 7am-4pm. Then in the evening through morning it's 2/3rds the houses and half the businesses, refrigerators.
8:56 just tint your electricity red and see how many homes are getting red electricity 😅
@chris Boden, any chance I could get the part # or manufacturer for that small voltage/frequency colored display??? Looks like it changes color according to how far off the mains are at! I can hear my frequency and voltage change constantly at home when the local solar farms kick in and out, was wanting a small wall mount meter I can watch during the day. Thanks and thanks for the awesome videos!!
Can you explain 3 phase and the power required/drawn by factory's please. Here in the UK we have a 240 volt 60hz mains supply.
Why do we use 240v and you in N America use 120v? Thanks from Hazelnut
Would you rather power be measured in joules?
Ah! Finally!!If I am Nicola Tesla you'd be my George Westinghouse, right? Dude, what does it take to kill a hydroelectric plant like Tesla did? Rabbit hole all the way!
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
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.
“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.
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!
When I was in high school I job shadowed a civil engineer working on a new spillway at a local damn but he could only keep me half the day. So he dropped me off at the damn and pawned me off on one of the guys. He got busy with something and let me wander around for an hour before he started his tour and explanation again. The whole day was amazing.
I read your entire disclaimer, and I think you forgot one:
Your call will be ignored in the order it was received.
Subbed.
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!
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.
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. :)
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
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 :)
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!
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!
I want to get you started on why KW/h is a bad metric, I mean the stupidest thing ever?
It's kilowatt hours (kWh), not kilowatt per hour (kW/h).
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??
The disclaimer is a must read 😂😂😂
The disclaimer needs its own thumbs up button!
Came here to say this. disclaimer is epic!
Yesss welcome back!! Nice to see full videos again 😍
+1 for black start rabbithole ;)
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
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!
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.
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.
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. :)
Much appreciated. Being a retired civil engineer, I find your program fun and entertaining. Yes, I'm also a nerd at heart. 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 :)
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?
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.
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.
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! :)
U.S Electrical Grid: Were you leading or lagging? How about generating power ON MY F***ING TIME?!?!?
We call AIP, AIS. Abandoned in situ
kVA/h are better I guess but I’m scared. My apartment is using 115W (196VA) at idle. With the fridge running 160W (230VA).
With that PF (0.59) I guess billing by kVA/h would be better and also would force me to only get devices with good PF correction. I mean which modern electronic device doesn’t use switch mode power supplies?
The cheapest I personally own was a 0.1 PF 5V USB power supply. When I found out that thing went right into the electronics recycling bin.
Yes. Please. yes.
A black start video would be wonderful.
I keep coming across the topic, and can't get enough.
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.
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
9:55 - Regarding mismatch between Volts/Kilowatts and Amps - Power Factor and reactive power?
Back of the napkin, not in the industry, hobbyist, guesstimation: about 10,000 homes from a 250kW plant. But that is raw numbers with some assumptions, not including inefficiencies and such
Well, I guess you are actually powering all households you are physically connected to, so all of them? Why would you only power 250 which exactly consume 1Kwh of power, if you could power all of them by just giving a fraction of the power to any one of them. (No engineer, just some stupid internet guy here)
kWh is not a measure of power. It is a measure of energy (Watt = J/s and Watt Hour is J/s * 3600 s -> J, which is energy)
Hi Chris, at 5.56, you closed your supply breaker when the syncro was going backwards. We were always trained to bring our generators into parallel with the oncoming generator going ever so slightly faster, so that when the breaker closed, it would snatch a bit of load. This prevented any reverse rotation of the oncoming prime mover, this is still the practice in the Royal Navy now. Is this not a concern with a hydro plant? Cheers Garry
It's a concern, but it's a matter of degrees. In this plant the generator spins at only about 200RPM, and the only thing touching it is slow-moving water. Because there's no rigid prime mover (like a big Diesel engine or a high-speed turbine and gearbox) our setup here is much more forgiving of an operator with.....less than perfect grace and poise. You're certainly correct in the RIGHT way to do it, but some things that would be catastrophic in a big teakettle plant are just a typical Tuesday afternoon at this small scale.
Thanks for taking the time to reply Chris, makes sense as you can't exactly make the water go backwards lol
@@Physicsduck
Black start walktrough, AND the KWh is stupid debate please! I would love to hear your meaning for this
1 man = 1000w so if like 1 man.1 women. And 2 kid tags is 4kw. Low revaerment. Is us it is 1700w per person in usa and 1300w in Eu. Fun things
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.
how is frequency regulated across the grid? there are clocks measuring time by the grid frequency, and some simplier computerized electronics control their clock rate from the grid, so it has to be absolutely precise.
and as i understand it, majority of the generators must change their speeds or the grid must change the load to move the frequency. is it coordinated by computers?
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. :)
An important thing to note with capacitors in electronic loads is that power factor isn't so simple as causing leading current; those caps are usually sitting on the load side of a rectifier, and thus line current is only drawn when the instantaneous line potential exceeds the instantaneous capacitor potential (and the diode drops, you pedantic pricks). This leads to the happy happy fun time world of _Distortion Power Factor_ which engineering circuits don't do dick to explain as they only ever cover displacement power factor (the 'sine of the phase angle' shit you've probably seen).
40amps is not a lot of output I would of thought it to have been more like 4000 and what if you produce 6kw for 10mins is that the same as 1kwh
Fixing things they don't understand. Add high voltage and high current..😳💀💀💀💩
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.
Real(True) vs apparent power. Watt meters measure real power. If your power factor was 1 they would be the same 👍🏻
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! :)
hi, first time on your channel but I am incredibly interested in the black start rabbithole. Thankx
#blackstart
my room alone at peak usage pulls about 3320 watts, though this is about worst case scenario :)
KW = (volts x amps x pf x 1.732) / 1000 = ( 2400 x 46 x .98 x 1.732 ) / 1000 = 187.38 ( your meter show 190Kw ) [ * 1.732 = Squared Root of 3 ]
Great video! I just wonder: why is measuring things in kw/h the stupidest thing ever?
So, if you're honest in a power plant you work at. Maybe you're speaking truth to power all day.
How many homes? Well, in my country, 1kW is the average power draw of an average home. However, with the introduction of chargers and electric cooking and heating, it's expected to go up in the next decade or two.
The power plant can also feed one EV fast charger lol.
Wait.. a few cents per kilowatt hour.. and 250 kilowatts.. the highest in the us is 44 cents per kilowatt hour..(which is in Hawaii) 24 hours in the day means 6000 kilowatt hours per day at most.. at 44 cents per kilowatt hour means at most the gross income is $2,640 a day. But the average price in the us is 16 cents which would be only $960 a day.. and the lowest price in the us(which is north dakota. Where i live actually) 10 cents would be $600 a day. And that would be running at full capacity 24/7.. which would never happen.. That all seems extremely low. I cant imagine running a power plant on onky $960 a day when you factor in the price of the building, paying employees, all the maintenance, insurance, and any other expenses.. there is not much money in that particular power plant apparently.
Brace yourself, this is gonna hurt.
We sell electricity to The Power Company(tm) for $0.065/kWH.
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.
Would like to see a video discussing the control logic the plc uses to keep the system running automatically.
Babe wake up, S4 dropped.
(snork) ROTFLMFAO
Except in California 220 can and will equal 196 #CaliforniaSucks
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.
Speaking from the utility distribution world… quantifying residential houses (or SFD = Single Family Dwellings) is commonly done by generalizing them into two silos, gas heated and electric heated.
In the conventional sense, a gas heated home may be allocated 5 kVA of transformation while an electrically heard home may be given 7.5 kVA of transformation.
Though in practice an average sized SFD with gas heat (two fridges and an electric hot water tank) can draw close to 1.75 kW over a 24 hour period.
The utilities (exempt from Electrical Code) bet on diversity and don’t need to size transformers to massive proportions that Electrical Code would otherwise dictate. Before people get all upset over this fact… keep in mind the utilities have tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of meters installed in the field and enormous data banks of consumption records to back and support their sizing of transformers using practical and historic data.
The careful thing to consider is CLPU or Cold Load Pickup. This is a measure of how much demand is placed on the system when power is restored from an outage and things like refrigerators, air conditions, hot-tubs, water tanks, furnaces… etc. are all demanding power.
For distribution transformers (generally ONAN in nature), utilities will have an acceptable overload % permitted per a unit of time given a specified cool-down period (duty cycle).
If you’re generating about 200 kW of power… you’re likely reaching out to between 95 and 150 SFDs.
Thank you SO MUCH! Comments like this from people like you rock my whole world. :) We ALL get to learn things here and I appreciate that so much. Thank you for taking the time to write that out for all these people! :)
Comon Chris, even I had emergency lights at my 23 year old gas fired power plant (Duel Alstom GT 24 with heat recovery units).
Look at you with your fancy new powerplants. The only thing that's as young as 23 years in this place is the top layer of crud and dust. This isn't a powerplant, it's Hospice for feeble old generators. They won't give me money for a BATHROOM I don't think I'm going to get emergency lights. But it's a good idea, and I'll ask the boss nicely.
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.
Im very interested to hear why kWh is a bad measurement of energy! I consider myself to be pretty familar with electricity but can't possibly think of another way of doing it. Great video.
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 👍👍
So you have to run that thing in "Auto" mode when Manuel is not on shift?
Otto takes over when Manuel goes off duty.
OMG Where the heck were you, or someone else with this much enthusiasm as you have to show this stuff in my first year electrical shop in Jr high school way back in the 1960's. And yes I did go on to become an chief engineer at a mega broadcast station. lol now I am fully retired. or retarded, I don't know the deference. LMAO Love this stuff. 👍✌
Thank you! It's a honour to have you here! :) I've been teaching science and engineering since 1994, but I didn't get my start until well after you were out of school. I'm sorry, I just didn't get around to being born until '75. ;) I'd love to chat with you and hear your stories though! Find me in my Discord and feel free to reach out! :)
im building a nuclear power plant simulator. it's (currently) a 150 MW unit with a single turbine and generator, but these vids should help me make it more realistic. thanks! :)
If you're interested in collaborating on that let me know. I'm helping a few different people on simulation projects. :)
Awsome new video STYLE !! Love it !! Btw by way of knowing the average power my home is consuming is EASY !!! Take the total kWh consumption in an entire year of your electric bill and divide it by the number of hours in a year! It's EASY !! In my case, I am living in Quebec city in a small home with confortable garage and charging electric car for 12000km/year and I get 3000W average24/7 consumption. The peak recorded on my meter was 22kW during a COLD Feb morning in witer as well. and in Quebec we have 99% hydro and the highest peak ever recorded was last winter on Feb 3 2023 with 42.7GW of real time peak power consumption for the entire province!
Am I about right that generator (8:30) can almost power 1 Tesla's V3 DC supercharger at max power transfer? If so and that generator is powered by water changing altitudes naturally, then that is some very green travel.
Yup, we just take some energy from the water as it passes downhill. :)
During the 2003 Blackout of insanity, did they have black starts? Or is that an even bigger, seperate video/issue?
That's a great question for a lot of the people in here who have been in the industry for a while. Got blackstart stories? :)
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! :)
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.
I just bought a very similarly sized and aged hydro power plant that is presently non-functioning. Many elements of my control panel look identical to yours! I'm trying to learn more about how the old control system worked as I work to design a modern replacement - do you have any resources for this? Maybe I could send you a video tour and you can comment about how antique it is!
I do consulting work to help people just like you on a regular basis. You can find me in the Discord (link in the description). Reach out and we'll see how I can help :)
‘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. :)
I thought this channel shut down because it’s been like a year since last update… now I’m checking it every couple days so I don’t miss part 2. One thing I’d really like to see at some point is the details of how the synchroscope actually works. As in the actual magnetic/mechanical method that it compares the frequency of the grid and the generator.
Hi there :) I have some most excellent news for you! Part 2 is already in production and will be out when it's finished. And yesterday a Synchroscope arrived on my workbench and we'll be doing a full detailed exploration video of that just as soon as I figure out how to make a variable phase 120VAC power supply. So that's in the works as well. :)
Wait.. you're back? Holy shit.
I saw you online on fb the other day and figured it was just someone else moderating your account.
Hi there :) It's really me, and I'm glad you're still here too! :)
In South Africa, thousands of people are actively working to keep our lights off through loadshedding