A Domestic Affair

Yesterday, three of us commissioned two new 230kV transmission lines into the Elk Grove substation, doubling the number of lines that have fed the entire region since 1990. We now have four lines and six breakers feeding the city, whose electric use yesterday afternoon was 150 MW (150,000 kW).

Last year, a particular switching arrangement led to the entire city being fed through a single circuit breaker, and had it opened or otherwise failed (which they do), well, the two transformers that feed the city would have deenergized, dropping (my guess) 55,000+ customers. So we elected to loop-in another line into the substation that used to run from Rancho Seco to Hedge -- Now we have the new Rancho Seco - Elk Grove #2 and the new Hedge - Elk Grove #2 lines, vastly increasing the dependability of serving load in my little burg.

And with all these computers (like this one), HDTVs, cellularized telephone charging units, streetlamps and indoor marijuana farms gardens, well, Elk Grove's per capita use is most certainly higher than the City of Sacramento. And wait until SMUD starts emitting greenhouse gasses on your behalf when you climb into your Nissan Leaf thinking you're producing zero emissions -- those two new transmission lines will be needed to power all our future cars from remote natural gas fired turbines...and yes, from a pittance of wind and solar, too.

The interesting news is that electric cars, if produced domestically, would have entire energy life cycles that remain domestic -- electricity is most certainly a domestic affair, as we have little need to import energy to supply the electricity. I don't think unit coal trains are coming from Canada, but I may be wrong about LNG; some may be brought in by supertanker, offloaded in Tijuana and piped to natural gas turbines generating electricity for Southern California consumers. I guess electricity is mostly a domestic affair, which is a good thing for a nation who cheerily and intentionally hollowed out its own domestic manufacturing capacity to save a few dollars on a hair dryer -- electric power cannot be outsourced.

Thus, so long as I do my job well as a protection engineer (and I think I do OK) I should have a job for life, regardless of the economic cycles around me. I think if we melted down into a depression, or if peak oil prevents perpetual GDP growth going forward, or if we grow our economy by 6% per year ad infinitium we will all still want our electricity, to some degree or another.

I have never once seen an electron. I can't even be so sure they even exist, but I do have faith that my instruments are indeed measuring something. Yes, even atheistic engineers have to have some degree of faith. I have to take the work of Maxwell and Gauss and Tesla on faith as I've never performed those experiements myself. That I engineer the movement of an invisible product and get you to send me money to buy that invisible product, well, I'm more like clergy than engineer.