A reader writes:
After an idle evening reading the comments section (I know) on the blog of the BBC's US correspondent, Mark Mardell, I came across this ... interesting perspective.
258. At 04:12am on 09 Feb 2010, KingLeeRoySandersJr wrote:
I can answer why electrical power in most of the USA is above ground. The reason is simply in the USA power lines are carrying much more voltage and current than in Great Britain for the most part and travel greater distances. Electricity doesn't simply flow through the wire but on the outside of a wire. The circumference of the wire carries the power if it were underground much of it would be lost in the ground.Now here is something you don't know. Power companies use different transformers under different conditions. Ever plug in a device and the wire gets warm but other times it doesn't? That happens because when there is a great power demand the power companies try to fool the public that there is adequate power by simply supplying the voltage and the device works.
But this is not what they are telling you. The voltage is there but not the current the device demands in it's productive use of wattage to function. It can't obtain it on the gauge of wire it is designed for and the wire gets hot, homes burn down, lives and possession are lost! Simply because inadequate power is produced. Voltage ratings exist but only because current is decreased. This creates the illusion of adequate electrical power.
[...]
I can't identify a single thing in that comment that appears to be true. Am I wrong?
Jonathan
Yes, "KingLeeRoySandersJr" does appear to have a very independent mind. Perhaps he read something about power factor somewhere, and then took further guidance from disembodied voices.
But no, he's not wrong in everything he says. I guess, for instance, that if you were to run un-insulated power lines underground, you probably would lose a lot of power. For analogous reasons, jet fighters without windscreens do not work very well and cars without wheels have disappointing top speeds. Humanity waits patiently for the genius who can unravel these mysteries.
(Fortunately, the extra weight of insulation ceases to be a problem when you no longer have to hang your wires from poles. A lot of people find it surprising that overhead power lines are almost always un-insulated; this often seems to be because they don't know the difference between insulation and shielding. My learned colleagues at Harmonic Energy Products had this problem many years ago, and the confusion also cropped up in connection with this gloriously stupid audiophile power cable.)
The first thing KingLeeRoySandersJr says, about current flowing through "the circumference of the wire", is also not complete nonsense. He's talking, assuming he's got some connection with consensus reality, about the "skin effect", in which the higher the frequency of the AC you're trying to push through a wire, the shallower will be the depth into the wire in which significant current flow occurs. This has to do with eddy currents, which cancel each other out in the middle of the wire but increase current flow on the surface.
Some huge power-transmission lines are DC, which has an infinite skin depth, and some transmission lines for exotic applications - like particle accelerators - run at high frequencies. But changing the frequency of AC is as difficult as changing its voltage is easy, so the vast majority of high-voltage long-distance lines run at the same 50 or 60Hz as the rest of the grid. "Skin depth" - the depth at which current density is one-on-e, or about 37%, of the current density at the surface - at 50Hz is around 9.3mm for pure copper and almost 12mm for pure aluminium, unless the calculations I just did based on Wikipedia's tables of permeability and resistivity are based on subtly vandalised numbers. At 60Hz the depth drops a little, to around 8.5 and 10.9mm, respectively. If you're for some reason shifting 1kHz AC, your skin depth falls to 2.1 and 2.7mm, respectively.
Audiophile nitwits sometimes bang on about skin effect, and pay big bucks for cables with zillions of tiny separately-insulated conductors, maybe woven like Litz wire and maybe just floating around as a cloud, in order to defeat it. The theory is that skin effect increases cable resistance for high frequencies, so you lose treble - or "musicality", or "coherence", or whatever it is they've made up now - if your cables are too fat.
But even if your golden ears have the mystic ability to perceive 40kHz sound, an octave higher than the usual rule-of-thumb 20kHz upper bound for human hearing and higher still than the maybe-14kHz that's the highest most young-ish adults can perceive, skin depth in copper wire will still be around a third of a millimetre at that frequency. This gives plenty of copper to conduct your line-level or speaker-level signals, at all audio frequencies, in just about any cheap cable you care to name, and a resistance difference for 40kHz versus 10Hz of three-fifths of bugger all (a technical term), even if you hook everything up using the now-nearly-proverbial coat-hangers.
(God help me, I just searched for "skin effect" and "digital interconnect" and yes, right there on the first results page are people selling a carbon-fibre RCA cable for digital data that's supposed to be better because, among numerous other brain-hurting explanations, it ain't got no skin effect. It can be yours for a mere $US225!)
Clearly, at normal mains frequencies you need a pretty darn thick conductor before skin effect makes much difference. Big power-transmission cables are pretty darn thick conductors, though, so yes, it affects them. Most aerial power cabling is aluminium (which has higher resistance per unit area than copper, but lower resistance by weight, which is very important for cables strung from towers), but I think it's quite common for those cables to have thin steel wires in the middle to improve their strength. Steel is a pretty terrible power-transmission material, having a skin depth of less than a millimetre at mains frequencies (and yet mild-steel coat-hanger wire keeps passing those blinded audio tests!), but it doesn't matter when skin effect confines most of the current to the outer, aluminium portion of heavy power-transmission cable.
13 February 2010 at 10:29 pm
Oh wow, I was the one that sent in the email about the bullshit power cable!
Now if only someone could tell me when a surge protector stops being useful and starts getting ridiculous with its protection...
:P
13 February 2010 at 11:09 pm
High-tension power lines are actually NOT 100% aluminum, although a majority of them is. There's a steel cable that goes down the middle of the cable for strength, and the aluminum is twisted around the outside of that core.
As for insulation, when you get into the tens-of-kilovolts range, the size of the insulation seriously dwarfs the size of the conductor. A few years back, I was on a project where they were burying cables carrying three-phase 33kV. The conductor had a diameter of about a half inch, but the cable with insulation was over 3".
Indeed, when you get into high-voltage or high-current applications, things get really interesting.
14 February 2010 at 2:15 am
The overheating-wires bit is confused but there is something in reality a little bit like that. I'm not sure how much of this is actually something I read and how much is my own theorizing, but:
I've heard that some devices, if the voltage is low, will draw more current (for the same power), resulting in more resistive loss and heating of the wire. Thus a warning about connecting them through too much extension cord.
14 February 2010 at 11:14 am
My dad was an electrical engineer who worked on hydro power in Oregon. He told me that back in the 1960's they were producing more power from the dams on the Columbia River than was needed locally, so they built a transmission line from the Dalles Dam down through Oregon and Nevada to Los Angeles.
Day came when they tested it. Guy threw a switch at the Dalles Dam and fed megawatts into the line, but nothing came out at Los Angeles. Someone eventually figured out that the line was half a wavelength long, and they'd set up a standing wave.
They had to transmit DC on that line to make it work.
14 February 2010 at 7:25 pm
We will be living in the future when power transmission cables are all superconductors.
14 February 2010 at 11:04 pm
I think one of the things I love about the internet is the neverending supply of colorful metaphors. I think reading debunking posts has done more to further my expressive vocabulary than just about anything else.
15 February 2010 at 8:47 am
Many years ago, I did some architectural work for the group that runs the Australian Eastern Seaboard power grid (TransGrid, at the time). Apart from the fascinating experience of working on renovations to a 1960's-era building designed to withstand close nuclear airburst, I also got to meet some of the technicians who do this.
The mesh suit works because of skin effect, and stops induced currents in electrically conductive fibres, like your nervous system.
1 October 2010 at 5:20 am
When you fear your world falling is apart Mark Mardell you shouldn't try and put it back together. It fell apart for a reason, the pieces you used didn't fit. I wouldn't try and use another's thought for my own but I see you do. Follow the leader, not me dude, I don't go down the wrong path and use a collage of thoughts handed me because it is least path of resistance.
If you don't understand it, don't promote it. I don't needed your approval and I am not asking questions. I lay down the facts, you afraid of it or not. I don't care for blasphemous name calling especially when your without consciousness to dictate a single iota.
Brown Outs, near Brown Outs, when electric current becomes over used by a community then the cords to high current devices can become hot and a fire can be created. Play with the power equations and you learn something before you speak.
You live in your propaganda based society and I will live in the truth. I won't hurt you but your Government and Colleges will and think nothing of it, just as you have tried to do to me.
My life isn't like yours and you wouldn't have lasted even my first day on this Earth. To be very honest you have been taught what is wanted you to think, say and do. You use a very small percentage of your brain and are kept in a subconscious state in a hypnotic trance too afraid to see the world as it is, never taking even one step into it. You watch it go by and cover your eyes, stick you fingers in your ears and hold close your mouth, just as you are told.
1 October 2010 at 6:09 am
I don't care for Snipers and I don't care for Propaganda based forums. I don't work for a government, religion nor any social network. So not being employed by a government, military or social network I am not worried about dogma of the criminal world governments.
Crimes against humanity I am not going to promote nor exploit your mind. Your chemical network present in your brain can't handle it. You grab at anything to cover your nakedness.
The real world isn't made up but the world every citizen on this earth lives by is. It isn't a real world you have been subverted unto. Social structured lifetimes destroy the very instinct of life to succeed on ones own. That structure exist on the mortality of those enslaved to it. It is not there to promote anyones life but for you to put all your essence into so you can not achieve a awareness of life outside of it. You are given Idols and Gods to give your greatness to and delegate actions that a non-entity can never achieve for you. Using just a very small percentage of your brain of a collage of knowledge only to repeat from and act only upon, you are not living in a conscious state.
The use of the term Psychopath fits you and not me. I am not like you and if you were a individual no one would be like you either. Humpty Dumpty remember that rhyme. The collage you use are those little pieces but they are missing to begin with and it was meant to be that way.
Like Jesus Christ the greatness of the life in us is GOD. But if you live it by some predestined horrific account then you will fail in it and by it you are mortally wounded. It isn't wanted by society to be all you can be. It is be all you can be by it. It is imperfect and made to exploit everyone. It delegates what each should be doing to a structured society that is imperfect even against it's highest hierarchy.
1 October 2010 at 4:40 pm
I find your ideas intriguing, Mr Sanders, but I fear I would not have time to read your newsletter.
(I'm also not Mark Mardell, but we'll let that ride.)
I await with interest your opinions on the subject of the simultaneous 4 corner square that rotates to a 4 day time cube within 1 - 24 hour rotation of Earth. I'm sure you find that theory much easier to understand than do most of us.
10 October 2010 at 11:34 pm
There are two factors to the above comment one, Freemason control over powerlines and two, Powerline conditions, I will address them separately;
1. Indeed the Freemasons are involved in fraudulent activity at Utilities all over the world, it is one of their prime targets for take over and control.
2. When an electrical line, transmission or not is given more load than it can provide power for the Voltage drops forcing an increase in Amperes, this is what heats up the powerlines, transformers and end-user equipment.
In a nut-shell the above statement that I responded to had some truth to it, look-up Power Factor Correction for more details about electricity and spineless, delinquent, secret society brotherhood for more information about Freemasons'
11 October 2010 at 8:43 pm
Man, we got Poe's Law all up in this bitch now.
30 November 2014 at 1:00 pm
Aw, it's too bad your correspondent didn't continue to enlighten us. You could have found your own Francis E. Dec.