Tagged with infrastructure
electric mountain
Posted November 30th, 2010 at 7:14 pm. There are 0 comments.
photo via ben cooper’s flickr
Deep inside the mountain is an 800m shaft, about 30m wide. During times of excess energy on the National Grid, water from the lake below is pumped up into the reservoir above the shaft. And when a surge of energy is needed on the grid, (say during a football match half-time), it’s released back into the lake, hurtling through the turbines and generating up to 1,320 MW from standstill in 12 seconds.
This isn’t all that surprising, after all it is how all watertowers work, but the name, Electric Mountain, the description of the semi-audible humming present at the site which is somewhere between hearing and feeling, gives the whole place a Tarkovskian type feeling of the Zone.
The wikipedia article about the Dinorwig Power Station has more details.
After we climbed out, I asked about the lake below. “You could say that it’s tidal, but with the television schedules, rather than the moon.”
Mind is blown.
via tom taylor
field guide to NYC standpipes
Posted June 12th, 2009 at 2:48 pm. There are 0 comments.
Jeff Maki has posted a field guide to NYC standpipes. These systems act like a fire hydrant to an individual building and there color coding and associated signage tell us city dwellers a bit about the fire protection in the building and perhaps more.
via infrastructurist
the future beneath us
Posted May 26th, 2009 at 3:56 pm. There are 0 comments.
The vast underground network of tunnels in New York City is the focus of an historic exhibition allowing visitors into a world unknown and featuring the much-discussed, but little understood mega-projects bringing the City’s transportation infrastructure into the 21st Century.
An exhibition at Grand Central Station and the New York Public Library highlighting the amazing mega projects that lay beneath the city streets. The website has a great selection of current and historical photos and drawings from the 8 Great Projects Under New York. This is looking like a must see for me.
NPR maps the Energy Grid
Posted April 29th, 2009 at 2:29 pm. There are 0 comments.
NPR has some very nice visualizations of the United States electrical grid, including views for solar power and wind sources, including the the below which shows the realationship between where the good wind is, darker colors, and where the power grid is, not usually all that nearby.
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