On Friday, November 10, 2017 at 1:36:05 PM UTC-5, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"rangerssuck" wrote in message
...
On Friday, November 10, 2017 at 1:05:06 PM UTC-5, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"rangerssuck" wrote in message
...

Cheapest, but hardly efficient. Again, transponders would be cheap
and
could provide otherwise useful telemetry (voltage, load, etc). Our
local utility (PSE&G) has installed 200W solar panels on many poles.
Lots of poles - 40MW total. Some of these units have antennas on
them.
I don't know whether they are in constant communication to a central
computer, but if they are, they could provide some useful
information
about outages. But I don't think they use that information. They
just
wait for enough people to call and then send out a car.
======================================

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_grid
We haven't seen a quick, easy solution because the issue is very
complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadb...er_power_lines
"Deployment of BPL has illustrated a number of fundamental
challenges,
the primary one being that power lines are inherently a very noisy
environment."

This is a somewhat similar system in which independent nodes
intercommunicate over a single radio frequency using a collision
detection and avoidance protocol similar to Ethernet's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_f...raffic_control)

-jsw

Oh, fer crissake, they're just not trying very hard. Our water company
recently did a third upgrade of our meter sender. The first could be
read by a car driving by. The next could be read by helicopter, and
the current on communicates directly with a satellite, so they tell
me.

Power monitors wouldn't have to transmit a whole lot of data to say "I
am alive."
======================

They aren't going to waste money on an incomplete temporary solution.
Water meters don't need to track and report phasing and overloads in
real time or command load shedding.

As if sending managers out in cars in a storm isn't expensive or half-assed?
As I said, the solar panels they have already installed appear to have some sort of telemetry capability (I assume based on the fact that there are antennas attached). I can imagine that being useful to locating faults. Or not.

Meanwhile, in the past few years, my electric service has been much improved, since they did some pretty big infrastructure upgrades. They raised the HV on our poles from 8KV to 13KV (half the I^^2R loss). In doing that, they replaced every transformer, several poles and the substation transformers. Where my line voltage often dipped as low as 104 volts on a regular basis, it is now rock solid 117V. Even when it rains and the wind blows.

When they replaced the transformers, each had a 8/13KV switch, set to 8KV. After everything was in place, they brought in more trucks than I knew they had, so that there was at least one bucket truck for every two transformers. They shut off the power for less than ten minutes to switch every one of them. Pretty impressive.