How the world’s first electric grid was built | Hacker News Reader

How the world’s first electric grid was built

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112 pointszdw35 comments

Interestingly enough the Kingdom of Hawaii actually beat this. They already had electric street lights by 1881 on Maui.

Hawaii has a fascinating history being the first indigenous nation recognized by Western nations (until ofc it was illegally annexed by the US to use as a base during the Spanish War). They went from being one of the most technologically advanced nations to now having 50% of homeless people in Hawaii being native Hawaiians after having their land stolen from them and forced into indentured servitude on plantations

Hawaiian Kingdom was only minority indigenous FWIW at the time it was taken by the US.

The plantations also pre-date the US taking them over.

  The elites promoted the sugar industry. Americans set up plantations after 1850.[44] Few natives were willing to work on them, so recruiters fanned out across Asia and Europe. As a result, between 1850 and 1900, some 200,000 contract laborers from China, Japan, the Philippines, Portugal and elsewhere worked in Hawaiʻi under fixed term contracts (typically for five years). Most returned home on schedule, but many settled there. By 1908 about 180,000 Japanese workers had arrived. No more were allowed in, but 54,000 remained permanently.[45]

At the time US took it over, those oppressed by plantation elites included the Filipino, Chinese, and other minority groups who were segregated and pitted against each other. Despite this, the Hawaiians have chosen a racist program that only lets one of the oppressed minority groups claim the Hawaiian Homelands land grants that help relieve homelessness. This despite the fact the "Hawaiian Homelands" are on state lands and not on reservation lands under which constitutional provisions like equal protection might not apply.

For quite awhile, Hawaii was also the only state in the Union I know of with explicitly racist voting laws. It was not until the year ~2000 (Rice v Cayetano) that the rest of the races on the plantations (including again chinese, filipino, etc) could vote for all the public offices (hilariously in that case RBG showed her racist colors and dissented, denying equal voting rights guaranteed under the 15th amendment).

The elections they were not allowed to vote in was for a board that managed the interests of native Hawaiians.

Those interests were the management of lands that were taken during the annexation, and later returned.

The situation is a bit more complicated than you are painting it. It is generally recognized in the civilized world that descendants of people who owned land have a claim to it, and people who aren't descendants generally don't get a say in its management.

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There may be a US-specific legal reason for why that was the 'correct' SCOTUS decision, but there is no universal moral reason for why someone who is not a member of a polity is entitled to vote for the leadership of a polity that they don't belong to, and that has no power over them. In this case, there are two separate, overlapping polities - one is the state, and another is a subset of people in a state. One has power over all state affairs, the other only over the property of the polity. Non-members getting voting rights over the latter is like giving me a say in Zuckerberg's estate planning just because I live in his zip code.

The Hawaiian Homelands are owned by the state, not the indigenous. And the office managing these affairs is a public office. The ethnic Filipinos, Chinese, whites, etc own that land as much as anyone else, and own that office as much as anyone else.

The public owners grace the Hawaiians with a racist policy allowing their exclusive use at the expense of denying persons within the jurisdiction of the state equal protections under the law. But only at the graces of the other races allowing it, and at the grace of all races voting for the office managing these affairs. I think you are thinking of something like a reservation where the Hawaiians would own that land.

I'm of the opinion there is quite the chance, just like their racist voting policies were struck down, that someday someone of the wrong 'blood' applies to use that state land and they will challenge their denial under 14th amendment. So far I don't think anyone has bothered, but it is certainly on my bucket list for when I'm retired and have the time for a pro se case.

This seems to be the timeline.

1881: The Birth of Hawaiian Electric

King Kalakaua meets Thomas Edison at his home in New York to see the incandescent light bulb in 1881. Iolani Palace becomes one of the world's first royal residences to be lit by electricity in 1886. Honolulu streets are lit by electricity for the first time in 1888. Hawaiian Electric Company, Ltd. is incorporated on Oct. 13, 1891.

Cogito on YouTube crafted a phenomenal documentary on the history of Hawai'i that I can't recommend enough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vM4MNHeZI

It covers not just the geopolitical history of Hawai'i but also its environmental and indigenous history and the ingenious land management techniques based on breadfruit and taro that they used to support a population possibly as high as 683,000 before Cook landed there.

We weren't far behind in NZ, with the town of Reefton electrified in 1888.

Sun Yat Sen, the father of China, was educated in Hawaii when it was still a kingdom (at Obamas alma mater Punahou), and famously said it was during that time that he learned what civilized governance looked like. Back then, Hawaii was seen as something akin to how we looked at Japan in the 2000s or China today. A futuristic, socialist (free education, free healthcare) constitutional monarchy that blended elements of Europe, America, and Asia into its governance structures.

Hawaii was so flush with productive sugar cane and so technologically advanced, that it was seen as a target by the American cartel there that it had to be violently toppled.

There's great movie footage of the first Waikiki electric street car heading up towards Diamond Head, taken by Thomas Edison when he visited Oahu. I get sad every time I'm on Kalakaua Avenue knowing that we could've had real public transit in Honolulu if it weren't for America.

Godalming, UK (where I live) stakes a claim for having the world's first public electricity supply in 1881. I walk past the commemorative plaque on almost a daily basis. https://www.godalmingmuseum.co.uk/articles/electricity

This seems like the earliest electric grid so far.

The power generated from Niagara river stations was traveling on an international "grid" between Canada and the US in the late 1890s.

If we could change grids in one way, the best thing we could probably do is switch from HVAC for transmission to HVDC.

I think the ideal grid would switch from DC to AC either at a substation at central location for a community.

Why might someone do this?

One of the hardest problems to work through is a grid cold start. When a grid goes completely down it takes a monumental effort to bring it back up again. There's a delicate balance that has to be struck with load and other generators coming online. It's hard to do. The AC waveform is a finicky thing that gets pulled and mutilated by every motor or vacuum cleaner that starts running.

With a bunch of AC microgrids joined by a DC major grid, you can completely sidestep that problem. It suddenly becomes just a lot easier to ramp up power production because the deformations to the waveform happen in small local regions, not everywhere in the grid. And further, the other plants just have to watch the DC voltage, they don't need a whole bunch of equipment around syncing with the AC waveform of the grid as a whole.

I grew up understanding that one of Tesla’s big innovations was using AC to transmit power distances so that there weren’t tremendous losses and line meltings or something. Can someone help me reconcile the delta between this understanding and the above comment? Was this not actually a thing? Or have we overcome it somehow?

HVDC is a miracle of modern engineering that could not have been done in the days of Tesla. It removes several sources of losses that otherwise would have turned valuable power into heat. That said, it isn't without drawbacks: the cables are quite expensive, harder to repair and somewhat fragile, and 'local stepdown' which otherwise would just be a properly rated (capacity and insulation) transformer now turns into a much higher technology exercise. HVDC is for now relegated to a long haul role not unlike oil pipelines compared to the AC network which is far more interconnected and wide spread. You are unlikely to see HVDC used for lower level distribution in the next decade, just as you are unlikely to see your local gas station hooked up to an oil pipeline.

> the cables are quite expensive, harder to repair and somewhat fragile

Nope, HVDC uses the same style of cable as AC. I'm not sure why you'd think they'd be different.

The HVDC cables that can be expensive are meant to be submerged. A feat that only HVDC can do. HVAC can't be submerged due to the capacative effect.

But otherwise I agree. It's more a pipedream for me that HVDC becomes more common place as I believe it'd make grids ultimately more stable and resilient.

Hm, yes, you are right, I must have been reading on submerged cables, but it's a while ago.

The devil is in the details here, AC tri-phase cabling can not easily be re-purposed for HVDC purposes because you only have a pair of conductors rather than three 120 degree out of phase lines. So while technically the cable itself can be the same the carrying capacity of a triple of conductors would be reduced and one of the conductors would be idle, so if this is an in-ground or overhead cable not specifically made for DC that is a lot of wasted carrying capacity.

DC is also much harder to switch than AC; the latter has zero-crossings which tend to extinguish any arcs that form, but DC will just keep going. Look at the DC vs AC ratings on switches and you'll see a huge difference.

A nice demonstration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zez2r1RPpWY

A more detailed explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQpzwR7wLeo

I take it welding is DC?

It can be either AC or DC. Aluminum TIG welding uses AC, whereas you'd use electrode-negative DC for steel or copper. As I understand it, with aluminum you need the electrode-negative part of the waveform to transfer heat to the work piece, but you need the electrode-positive part of the waveform to clear out the crud that accumulates in the electrode-negative part. Often you set a lopsided duty cycle and use different frequencies depending on how deep you want the weld to penetrate.

If you go to 100% electrode positive you tend to heat the metal rather poorly, but can turn the end of your tungsten electrode into a molten blob -- which is usually not desirable.

> With a bunch of AC microgrids joined by a DC major grid, you can completely sidestep that problem.

Not necessarily. Big local consumers will be large relative to the microgrid, which will not have a lot inertia. This is one of the things that you really notice when you go 'off grid', your grid is essentially your house and whatever else you decide to power from it and unless there are a couple of beefy motors already running starting a new one has a high likelihood of tripping the inverter, even a very beefy one. Start-up currents for larger consumers can be really high and you need a lot of inertia in your grid to overcome that.

> Start-up currents for larger consumers can be really high and you need a lot of inertia in your grid to overcome that.

This is true of an AC grid as well. Big inductive loads will often have to buy special equipment before hooking up to the grid because of their impact. It'd be the same with a DC first grid. To overcome a large startup current they'd likely need to buy a bunch of capacitors. Which, funnily, is exactly what they'd have to do to run on straight AC.

Do you have first hand experience re-energizing an entire grid, section of the power system, or individual generators after an outage?

Not a lot of people do, but you can generally read regulatory plans for how to do it. Here's the UK's: https://www.neso.energy/industry-information/balancing-servi...

There is also the new distributed restart plan: https://www.neso.energy/about/our-projects/distributed-resta...

I've done it. The larger the grid, the more difficult it is. But as long as you have fuel and an adequately maintained grid, its not as hard as some in the comments make it out to be. Better regulation would make it easier. For instance, in Singapore emergency diesel or some other method for black start is a requirement for most generation stations. The rest of the world likely has more lax requirements.

I’ve done small systems less than 2 MW with 2-3 generators, a mix of hydro and diesel, and only distribution level voltages.

It seems like you would black start some plant using its backup diesel generator to power pumps and controls, probably synchronize at least two units at the plant, then pick up some part of the transmission system. Perhaps the capacitance of the grid is and issue when it is unloaded, so the trick is to make sure enough real and reactive capacity is online for each subsequent transmission or load step. Probably a lot of transmission steps come with a significant amount of load too - not just picking up unloaded transmission lines. Sounds really fun, banging all the governors and exciters with once in a decade load steps

AC/DC hybrid transmission infrastructure defeats important fault handling and inertia characteristics you get for free out of a fully connected AC grid. HVDC converter stations cannot handle remotely the same amount of fault current that synchronized machines in an AC grid can. It's maybe 1/10th the capacity. You also don't get the same guarantees of zero crossing in a fault scenario with HVDC. If you never cross zero, it's possible some circuit breakers cannot function anymore.

DC grid conversion is much more expensive than even a large transformer.

Cold (aka "black") start is not a common occurrence. Vacuum cleaners are not much of an issue. Industrial consumers are usually mandated to sort out their apparent power factor so it's not too weird for the grid.

What does matter sometimes is phase/frequency trips. The grid frequency is an important coordination mechanism between generators. When it gets distorted by loads coming on/offline, sometimes this can cause other generators to trip out at 59/61Hz, and then you get the Spain blackout situation.

Batteries could solve this but the software/regulatory framework isn't entirely there yet. See e.g. the UK market for "fast frequency response".

I think Great Barrington, MA. might also be able to claim the title of first. It seems to predate this system by a year.

https://www.edisontechcenter.org/GreatBarrington.html

> Stanley's system was however an experimental system designed to be proof of concept. It was short lived as the weak points in the system in the system eventually shut the system down (Westinghouse's steam engine was unreliable and the Siemens generator was 'unsatisfactory').

March 6th, 1886 Stanley lit the downtown and rejoiced along with the townspeople. The system lit both businesses and the street with 150, 50, and 16 candlepower incandescent lamps. Stanley remarked how people were happy however maintained some distance from the lights as they were afraid of them!

They had growing pains but it was a grid system.

Cold start is the grid's dirty secret — everyone assumes power comes back, almost nobody thinks about the fact that bringing a dead grid back up is one of the hardest coordination problems in engineering

No it's not. It's a pain in the ass but this isn't even close to correct. There are rocket launches and nanometer scale chips being built by engineers. Firing up some emergency diesel generators and syncing loads isn't easy, but don't be silly. I'm in charge of black start for a power grid. I've done it once and not looking forward to doing it again, but I'm not stressed out about it. And I'm not super smart.

Fragmentation is natural. The human body doesnt need all this infra and a grid operator/energy schedules to run. Cells dont bill each other if they over/under generate ATP molecules. There is no deviation settlement mech and no need for everything to sync to some arbit frequency. Watch how the grid changes post Ukraine drone wars where taking out generators, transmission lines and substations has become a fully automated process.

Wow. Electricity prices went up 8x in Britain since 2005. How can industry there compete internationally?

About half of what the UK does is service industry: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/uk-trade-in-numbers...

The top item in goods exports "mechanical power generators" probably benefits as much from high electricity prices as it costs.

Pharma is mostly R&D, not linked to actual incremental cost of production.

"Services" is the laptop job class.

It's not great that electricity has shot up this much, but it mostly falls on poorer (and older) consumers, as well as a few particularly intensive and old businesses (last bits of steel industry). We need to unjam the renewables transition sooner rather than later.

Before anyone says nuclear: Hinkley Point C site license was in 2012.

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