EoW May 2010

Transat lant ic Cable

they might accept underwater power lines that draw virtually no resistance from the larger public – a bloc with a very jaundiced view of new high-voltage electrical lines of any kind. Matthew L Wald of the New York Times reported that environmentalists are mounting only token opposition to a string of projects that would bury power lines in the river- and lakebeds of the Northeast, thereby preserving trees and avoiding the necessity for huge towers. (“A Power Line Runs Through It,” 16 th March). What Mr Wald terms “a remarkably simple answer” to a famously thorny political problem has even elicited the cautious enthusiasm of some environmental groups, on grounds that the underwater power lines will advance the goal of getting the USA to use more renewable energy. Generating 20% of America’s electricity from wind, as recommended by recent studies, calls for up to 22,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines. A Toronto-based company, Transmission Developers, is seeking permits to lay one of the longest submarine power cables in the world. The 370-mile line would run from Canada, along the bottom of Lake Champlain, and down the bed of the Hudson River to New York City. It would continue under Long Island Sound to Connecticut. Mr Wald wrote, “If Transmission Developers succeeds with such an ambitious project, others are likely to study the underwater strategy to gure out just how far they can take it. Would power lines crossing the Great Lakes make sense? Could underwater cables be used to move renewable power from the windy Great Plains to cities like Chicago?” Addressing the cost of submarine power lines, Mr Wald noted ❈ that it can be lower than for land burial because the cables can be laid from giant reels, allowing stretches of more than a mile with no splices. Of course, he wrote, “The strategy is limited by the availability of rivers and lakes [that] do not go everywhere power developers would like to run new lines. Many of the country’s rivers run north or south, whereas much of the country’s power must move east or west.” But underwater lines are more expensive than lines strung on transmission towers. Mr Wald said that the PowerBridge cable cost about $600 million. Much of that – as with a $505 million, 53-mile cable under San Francisco Bay – went toward transforming the electricity from alternating to direct current. By comparison, standard lines hung on towers run from $1 million to $4 million a mile, depending on the terrain. The ❈ Times observed that nearly all submarine cables use direct current, the form of transmission widely rejected in the late 1800s in favour of alternating current. But AC lines are hard to bury because interaction between the current and the cable casing drives up the voltage.

Internet

‘Accident or not, Google was tweaked’ So declared Gady Epstein, Beijing bureau chief for Forbes, and in the matter of Google vs China the incontrovertible fact stood out from the surrounding murk. But not for long. Mr Epstein was reporting on Google’s assertion that China’s Great Firewall had blocked the Google search service. The California-based Internet search and technologies developer thereby reversed an earlier statement that a change in Google’s own search parameter had been responsible for a nearly 10-hour blackout for users in China. Whether the block was the unintended result of a tweaking of China’s rewall “remains unclear,” wrote Mr Epstein. (“Google: China’s Firewall Caused the Block,” 30 th March) Even if clarity has improved since the end of March, the prudent person will wait until the geeks sort out the question of why, on the afternoon of 30 th March in China, searches of bland terms returned error messages on Google.com.hk, in Hong Kong; Google. com, in the USA; and other international Google sites. Users in Beijing and many other major Chinese cities – including Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou – reported the same problem. The episode, though serious enough to Google users and libertarians, had its humorous aspects. During the phase of blaming its own tinkering for the block, Google implicated a search parameter that included the letters “rfa.”Thus might America’s Google have beaten the Chinese gate-keepers to the punch by inadvertently triggering the Great Firewall’s block of Radio Free Asia. Developers are discovering that putting new power lines under water can forestall the objections of environmentalists “The sh don’t vote,” said Edward M Stern, president of PowerBridge, a company that built the 65-mile o shore Neptune Cable from New Jersey to Long Island and is working on two more. One cable would bring wind power south from Maine along the Atlantic coast to Boston, and the other would connect wind farms under consideration for the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Lanai to the urban centre of the most populous island, Oahu. Even if sh did vote, Energy

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EuroWire – May 2010