We didn’t have digital controls when they were designed, so you couldn’t use GPS or atomic clocks to synchronize frequencies, you just needed to have a single source of coordination. Those coils were manually controlled till not long ago.
Now we should be able to use some kind of small gas turbine with a igbt rig for synchronization, much like they do with wind turbines.
People often don’t appreciate how far we’ve come over the past 2 decades, and how utterly manual and brute force we were until very, very recently.
Ah makes sense, I forget how old a lot of that infrastructure is. I do a lot of work for our local ski resort, they have a 12mw generation plant for their snowmaking system that can backfeed the utility if needed, and they’re sync setup was basically two blinking lights that you had to visually time just right to close the switch and pray you didn’t screw up lol.
BTW, there was money both in 2010 and 2021-2022 that was literally supposed to replace all those linkages with something less ancient, even for small things like yours.
My understanding is the money ran out halfway or so, maybe less, and even a lot of the big stuff didn’t get done, they kept fighting on how to do it and the details, everybody wanred standardized on their system, and in the end very little actually happened.
That is hilarious, but also I can 100% picture it in my head, and it’s not that far off from what the big machines did until recently, and pretty sure some still do.
We didn’t have digital controls when they were designed, so you couldn’t use GPS or atomic clocks to synchronize frequencies, you just needed to have a single source of coordination. Those coils were manually controlled till not long ago.
Now we should be able to use some kind of small gas turbine with a igbt rig for synchronization, much like they do with wind turbines.
People often don’t appreciate how far we’ve come over the past 2 decades, and how utterly manual and brute force we were until very, very recently.
Ah makes sense, I forget how old a lot of that infrastructure is. I do a lot of work for our local ski resort, they have a 12mw generation plant for their snowmaking system that can backfeed the utility if needed, and they’re sync setup was basically two blinking lights that you had to visually time just right to close the switch and pray you didn’t screw up lol.
BTW, there was money both in 2010 and 2021-2022 that was literally supposed to replace all those linkages with something less ancient, even for small things like yours.
My understanding is the money ran out halfway or so, maybe less, and even a lot of the big stuff didn’t get done, they kept fighting on how to do it and the details, everybody wanred standardized on their system, and in the end very little actually happened.
That is hilarious, but also I can 100% picture it in my head, and it’s not that far off from what the big machines did until recently, and pretty sure some still do.