lectric power system

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of a series on

Power engineering

Electric power conversion

 Voltage converter
 Electric power conversion
 HVDC converter station
 AC-to-AC converter
 DC-to-DC converter
 Rectifier
 Inverter

Electric power infrastructure

 Electric power system
 Power station
 Electrical grid
  Interconnector
 Demand response

Electric power systems components

 Ring main unit
 Grid-tie inverter
 Energy storage
 Busbar
 Bus duct
 Recloser
 Protective relay

 v
 t
 e

A steam turbine used to provide electric power

An electric power system is a network of electrical components deployed to supply,
transfer, and use electric power. An example of a power system is the electrical grid that
provides power to homes and industries within an extended area. The electrical grid can
be broadly divided into the generators that supply the power, the transmission
system that carries the power from the generating centers to the load centers, and
the distribution system that feeds the power to nearby homes and industries.

Smaller power systems are also found in industry, hospitals, commercial buildings, and
homes. A single line diagram helps to represent this whole system. The majority of
these systems rely upon three-phase AC power—the standard for large-scale power
transmission and distribution across the modern world. Specialized power systems that
do not always rely upon three-phase AC power are found in aircraft, electric rail
systems, ocean liners, submarines, and automobiles.

History[edit]
 A sketch of the Pearl Street Station
In 1881, two electricians built the world's first power system at Godalming in England. It
was powered by two water wheels and produced an alternating current that in turn
supplied seven Siemens arc lamps at 250 volts and 34 incandescent lamps at 40 volts.
[1]
However, supply to the lamps was intermittent and in 1882 Thomas Edison and his
company, Edison Electric Light Company, developed the first steam-powered electric
power station on Pearl Street in New York City. The Pearl Street Station initially
powered around 3,000 lamps for 59 customers.[2][3] The power station generated direct
current and operated at a single voltage. Direct current power could not be transformed
easily or efficiently to the higher voltages necessary to minimize power loss during long-
distance transmission, so the maximum economic distance between the generators and
load was limited to around half a mile (800 m).[4]

That same year in London, Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs demonstrated the
"secondary generator"—the first transformer suitable for use in a real power system.
[5]
The practical value of Gaulard and Gibbs' transformer was demonstrated in 1884
at Turin where the transformer was used to light up 40 kilometers (25 miles) of railway
from a single alternating current generator.[6] Despite the success of the system, the pair
made some fundamental mistakes. Perhaps the most serious was connecting the
primaries of the transformers in series so that active lamps would affect the brightness
of other lamps further down the line.

In 1885, Ottó Titusz Bláthy working with Károly Zipernowsky and Miksa Déri perfected
the secondary generator of Gaulard and Gibbs, providing it with a closed iron core and
its present name: the "transformer".[7] The three engineers went on to present a power
system at the National General Exhibition of Budapest that implemented the parallel AC
distribution system proposed by a British scientist[a] in which several power transformers
have their primary windings fed in parallel from a high-voltage distribution line. The
system lit more than 1000 carbon filament lamps and operated successfully from May
until November of that year.[8]
Also in 1885 George Westinghouse, an American entrepreneur, obtained the patent
rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer and imported a number of them along with
a Siemens generator, and set his engineers to experimenting with them in hopes of
improving them for use in a commercial power system. In 1886, one of Westinghouse's
engineers, William Stanley, independently recognized the problem with connecting
transformers in series as opposed to parallel and also realized that making the iron core
of a transformer a fully enclosed loop would improve the voltage regulation of the
secondary winding.[9] Using this knowledge he built a multi-voltage transformer-based
alternating-current power system serving multiple homes and businesses at Great
Barrington, Massachusetts in 1886.[10] The system was unreliable and short-lived,
though, due primarily to generation issues.[11] However, based on that system,
Westinghouse would begin installing AC transformer systems in competition with the
Edison Company later that year. In 1888, Westinghouse licensed Nikola Tesla's patents
for a polyphase AC induction motor and transformer designs. Tesla consulted for a year
at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's but it took a further four years
for Westinghouse engineers to develop a workable polyphase motor and transmission
system.[12][13]

By 1889, the electric power industry was flourishing, and power companies had built
thousands of power systems (both direct and alternating current) in the United States
and Europe. These networks were effectively dedicated to providing electric lighting.
During this time the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse's
companies had grown into a propaganda campaign over which form of transmission
(direct or alternating current) was superior, a series of events known as the "war of the
currents".[14] In 1891, Westinghouse installed the first major power system that was
designed to drive a 100 horsepower (75 kW) synchronous electric motor, not just
provide electric lighting, at Telluride, Colorado.[15] On the other side of the
Atlantic, Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown, built the first
long-distance (175 kilometers (109 miles)) high-voltage (15 kV, then a record) three-
phase transmission line from Lauffen am Neckar to Frankfurt am Main for the Electrical
Engineering Exhibition in Frankfurt, where power was used to light lamps and run a
water pump.[16][9] In the United States the AC/DC competition came to an end when
Edison General Electric was taken over by their chief AC rival, the Thomson-Houston
Electric Company, forming General Electric. In 1895, after a protracted decision-making
process, alternating current was chosen as the transmission standard with
Westinghouse building the Adams No. 1 generating station at Niagara Falls and
General Electric building the three-phase alternating current power system to supply
Buffalo at 11 kV.[9]

Developments in power systems continued beyond the nineteenth century. In 1936 the
first experimental high voltage direct current (HVDC) line using mercury arc valves was
built between Schenectady and Mechanicville, New York.[17] HVDC had previously been
achieved by series-connected direct current generators and motors (the Thury system)
although this suffered from serious reliability issues.[18][17] The first solid-state metal diode
suitable for general power uses was developed by Ernst Presser at TeKaDe in 1928. It
consisted of a layer of selenium applied on an aluminum plate.[19] In 1957, a General
Electric research group developed the first thyristor suitable for use in power
applications, starting a revolution in power electronics. In that same
year, Siemens demonstrated a solid-state rectifier, but it was not until the early 1970s
that solid-state devices became the standard in HVDC, when GE emerged as one of the
top suppliers of thyristor-based HVDC.[20] In 1979, a European consortium including
Siemens, Brown Boveri & Cie and AEG realized the record HVDC link from Cabora
Bassa to Johannesburg, extending more than 1,420 kilometers (880 miles) that carried
1.9 GW at 533 kV.[17]

In recent times, many important developments have come from extending innovations in
the information and communications technology (ICT) field to the power engineering
field. For example, the development of computers meant load flow studies could be run
more efficiently, allowing for much better planning of power systems. Advances in
information technology and telecommunication also allowed for effective remote control
of a power system's switchgear and generators.