Thread: More Apocalyptic questions: Power Grid, wind turbines, radio,

I have read the other post about apocalyptic questions and it was very helpful, I have some new questions and some additions to the ones stated in the older post so I thought I would put them all together.

Background: No atomic or energy weapons have been used.
The basic question is listed below and then there will be more background on the question further down the page that corresponds with the questions number.

Questions
1. Will a smaller towns power grid (40K pop) fail just as quickly as a cities? Will the power last longer if it is say run by wind turbines instead of coal or nuclear?

2. Once power fails does AM radio fail too? How does a broadcast starting in LA get sent to a say 50,000 station in New York to broadcast there? Is there any way a national broadcast can still go out on a nightly basis even though radio stations will be unmanned?

3. How long (assuming you have all the fuel you could ever want) would a personal generator run for before something goes wrong with it? How about a buildings generator, like a hospital assuming people are there putting gas or what not in it.

4. Solar Panels... Anyone know a good place to read up on them?

More Information
1. I also am wondering about the power grid. My story is going to take place in Central IL and there is a huge wind farm, that lets say generates the power to this town of 40 thousand people. Since it is a smaller town would the power last longer?

2. I am going to have a nightly radio broadcast that is telling people what is going on in the US and around the world. I would like to keep it on regular AM stations, since they have the largest range so more people can hear it, but I guess I could use Ham or emergency radios or I guess even satellite or CD... Not sure which is my best bet in a world that is falling apart.

3. As asked in the other post, how long would it take the bearings to fail or overheat. What kind of technical knowledge would be needed to run or maintain such equipment.

4. I have been doing some internet searches on solar panels and how they work but the sites I have found are either worthless or too technical, anyone know of any sites that has a laymen explanation to them?

Thank you for any help you are able to provide!

Very complex questions, Bob ... but here are just a few minor comments from a former employee of a huge electrical utility in Canada. You really need to ask a journeyman electrician (I'm not one!) about all this:
1. I think most of your "electrical problems" can be overcome with generators. Industrial generators are usually diesel, and so diesel fuel and a diesel mechanic are the main requirements. Of course, during maintenance time, when the generator is down, there is no electricity unless there are two, and they are taken out of service on rotations (not both at the same time).
2. Keep in minde that wind turbines are only about 15 to 30% efficient in terms of the amount of time they operate and actually generate electricity. In Canada, the electricity from these is fed into the power grid - they don't power things directly, except for very small scale stuff (like a home wind turbine).
3. Electricity from most sources passes through transformer stations so it can be converted from HV (high voltage) to LV (low voltage) before it can be distributed to the local population (e.g., to operate your toaster). Thus, the transformer station must be kept operating (requires people, electricity, and electrical maintenance workers). Transformer stations could be kept operating by diesel generators - but it's a bit of a stretch (you need an expert for this one).
4. Someone will likely set me/us straight on the AM radio questions, but, to my knowledge there is no reason why a station can't continue to broadcast (it's all transmitted through the air) powered by diesel generators. Transmitters and receivers would have to have power (diesel again). Listeners must have batteries or electricity to operate radios, of course, to hear what is broadcast (unless they have crystal radios or radios wound with hand cranks).
5. Solar panels: not sure about the efficiency of these, but at least they don't have to have continuous bright sun to function. Here is a site: http://www.solarhome.org/solarpanelsfaqs.html#faq8 It seems to say that solar panels can directly power things, but expertise in matching the outputs and loads (transformation?) would be required.
6. Here is another site you might want to look at
http://www.jouleunlimited.com/ Apparently they can produce liquid fuels of many types from only sunlight and waste CO2. Sounds like this technology could play a big part in your story - AND IN REAL LIFE!!
Good luck!

Hi Bob, I will try to keep my answers as simple as possible
1: If your town uses wind turbines then you will have power as long as there is wind to turn them.
2: In the event of a catastrophe wiping out communications SW short wave radio would be the most likely source of communications. Short wave signals travel for thousands of miles with a relatively small power source.
3:A diesel gen-set will run for years without maintenance as long as you feed it fuel and change the oil every couple of years. All hospital gen-sets are set to start in the event of power failure. All hospital gen-sets are equipped with fuel tanks that guarantee a minimum running time of 24 hours.
4:There are two types of solar panel. The first being a solar water heater. The second generates electrical current. Go to BuildItSolar: Solar energy projects for Do It Yourselfers to save money and reduce pollution a brilliant site for those who want self sufficiency

I hope this is helpful to you.
Regards Richard

Assuming you have someone that knows how to keep the generator fed is assuming that you have someone who can maintain said generator. I would imagine that electricians and mechanics would have a high-demand skill and be treated pretty well in the apocalyptic scenario.

Electric power, however, is not the end-all-be-all of humanity.

If WMDs are not responsible for the apocalypse, what is?

@seigfried007:

Hi seigfried007, you must be a Wagner and Bond fan ? as you say electricity is not the end-all-be-all of humanity. But the feeling of being independent from power companies and corporations gives you a real high! You asked (If WMDs are not responsible for the apocalypse, what is?) I can tell you that when oil supplies start to run low society will implode. The biggest weapon of mass destruction will be man himself ! All around the world farmers are being encouraged to grow crops that can be used as fuel for our cars. Historians in the future, if there is a future; will look back on our era and condemn us for feeding our cars and starving millions in the process. I will now dismount from my soapbox.
Regards Richard

Bob, while I can't claim to have expertise in these areas, as an engineering student I'm familiar enough to give some basic info that may help with a few of your questions. If you asked me in a few years, I'd probably be able to write a thesis for you

- There are two major types of power supply in a grid - baseline, and another that I've forgotten the term for but can be thought of as quick-response. Coal power stations, for example, have relatively high lag times to change their power output. If demand spikes, it'll take some time before they are able to match it. These are used for baseline supply - essentially they supply what you know you definitely need at the time. Gas power stations, on the other hand have much quicker response times, so as consumer demand fluctuates, you tend to move your gas stations with them, and gradually adjust your baseline to minimise your gas operation (gas is a more expensive fuel than coal). In grids where solar and wind power operate, they are rarely if ever the main power supply, and tend to be used to offset some of your baseline production. There's actually a point where despite having zero fuel costs, it becomes less economical to use wind or solar because of the extra rapid response capability you need to build into your network to deal with their fluctuation. Essentially, you just use as much wind and solar as you have at the time, and then run your network as per normal. Solar and wind energy in modern networks generally aren't stored for later use. The point I'm getting at here is that if your grid is running entirely on wind, it won't "last" at all, and unless by pure coincidence you happen to be generating an instananeous power that's matched to the grid load, odds are your network won't be working at all because of the failsafes involves.

- When you ask about something lasting longer because of a small population, I'm not quite sure what you're after in the answer. If you're talking about a fossil fuel or nuclear power station, if people were still running the place then they would almost certainly last longer due to fuel considerations. If people weren't running it, I imagine regardless of how big the population, they would auto shutdown fairly quickly. Bad things tend to happen when demand and supply aren't matched properly, and you build safeties into your systems for occasions where failures would damage the system. If you're talking about solar or wind, see above.

- Both wind power and solar power suffer from the rather crippling drawback of intermittent supply. If you actually want to get a city running on them, the first thing you need is the ability to store the power. This is more easily achieved with solar, as it outputs DC which can feed a battery easily enough - you need to convert your wind power from AC to DC (or adapt your generator so it outputs DC, which is probably the harder of the two options) if you want to store it in a battery. There are alternative engineering solutions to storing the power, such as a hydroelectric dam with the ability to pump water from the bottom up to the top when you're producing more power than you need, and then run the water back down later when you need more power than you are producing, but in a post apocalyptic situation that's probably not feasible to set up. Assuming you are using batteries, you're then going to need to have an inverter and transformer in order to feed it back into the system at the correct AC voltage when you need it. You also need a somewhat automated system controlling whether the batteries are charging or discharing at a particular instant, and how many batteries are charging or discharing at any given time. In other words, adapting an existing grid to use wind or solar as its sole power supply is not easy - I mean the first problem is even getting enough batteries (and I'm talking high capacity batteries here - at the very least the sort of thing an electric car would run on).

- As mentioned above, there are two main families of solar panels - thermal and photovoltaic. Thermal are the simple type that you can use for hot water at home, but can also be used to generate electricity via a conventional turbine in theory. You have some sort of liquid and some type of heat capture method. You heat the water, and move it through the system for whatever purpose you're after. The liquid doesn't have to be water - I vaguely recall reading about a power generation system based on thermal solar using molten salt. However, the most common place you'll find something like this is in solar hot water systems. The more complicated type is photovoltaic. As simply as possible, when a sufficiently high frequency of light (the visible spectrum runs from low frequency at red, mid frequency at green, to high frequency at violet, with infared below red and ultra violet above violet) hits a metal, it lets off electrons. Moving electrons are the "cause", for want of a better word, of electricity. If you put two metal plates near one another, shine light on one of them, and hook them up with a conducting wire, the electrons being emitted from the plate can jump to the other plate, travel around the circuit, and get back to where they started, which is the same effect you get if you put a power source in a circuit. Essentially, that's what a solar panel is designed to take advantage of. It produces DC current - almost unique among modern electricity sources - which lends itself towards charging batteries. Of course, you don't necessarily hook up a solar power supply at home to a battery - often your electricity supplier lets you feed excess production into the grid and they offset that amount from your bill, saving them the cost of generating that amount of electricity. Either way, to use solar power in an appliance, you have to put it through an inverter to change it into AC power, since everything is designed to take AC power supplies (even if, like computers, they then interally change it to DC).

Unfortunately, I can't really be of any assistance on the radio or diesel generator side of the story - not something I've had much to do with unfortunately. What I can tell you is that your standard electricity grid probably won't last too long without any supervision, and you've got bucklys chance of running an entire grid on wind or solar. Now, if you can find something like a geothermal experimental station that can be hooked into the network, I can believe that you *might* have a chance of getting things running. Maybe. Hopefully this has been of some assistance

One final thing @Richard, you underestimate human ingenuity I fear. If we haven't got hydrogen powered cars or vastly improved electric cars by the time we're out of oil, then human kind will have pretty much have to have just stopped progressing at some stage.

I think electricity is the most single invention/technology that has changed civilizatoin as we know it. They could do a lot of things in ancent times. There were cities in ancient times more modern than many cities in the 1800's. The single thing that prevented them from doing more is electicity.

I also think humans have a finite capacity for this kind of thing, maybe we have already reached it. We have gotten where we have today because of cumulative knowledge. Humans individually are pretty stupid. Most of our innovations have occured in the past 100 years. We actually seem to be getting stupider - on purpose.

But I'm digressing, ham radio would be an important, if not the most important means of commincation in the event of an apocalypse. I think any available energy would be conserved to utilize the communcation, it would take priority. You would by cut off by the world other wise, the most important thing would be what is going on in the world. It could mean your death or your salvation if you don't know.

I know some ham operators and they are very passionate about their hobby. The hospital I work at has a list of ham operators that work for, or can be counted on in case of a hurricaine. They have learned this by experiance, all those ways that were part of the disaster plan failed during the big ones. You would also have CB's, a lot of people have those believe it or not. I have a portable one in my truck I use during outdoor activities. Boaters would have radios as well. As generators failed, those with solar back up devices would become more and more important. Not as many people have them but they are out there.

Hammers are very important, but they still need repeater stations.

Electricity is important to modern (stupid, standing on the shoulders of giants) man, but people existed for thousands of years without it and the smart ones will continue to live without it when the stupid ones are screaming that their iPods won't charge.

Oil won't do that. We've got plenty that isn't even being tapped into because of ecological fears. Rest asured tha if we aren't independant of the plugged reservoirs when they run out, enviromentalists will die if they stand in the way of SUVs. There will be more off-shore and wilderness drilling.

However, there are already engineered bacteria that convert plant matter to crude oil. There's already a hefty percentage of ethanol in gasoline (even though it's less efficient). Lots of other things that will burn. People will get smart about engineering new sources of energy (or, more than likely, better ways of harnessing the ones we have). Might even start mining helium-3 on the moon for fusion reactors. People like electric power more than perhaps any other thing in modern life. Many people can't fathom life without it and that fear would trample any obstacle well in advance.

You're better off with inventing a disease to wipe out people if that's what you're wanting to get rid of. If you just want rid of widespread electric power, knocking off nuclear facilities is a good option because they have such great output. However, most reasonable and likely plans for apocalypse involve radiation or disease, which often go hand in hand.

I read a book years ago that was concerned with secret Russian weapons.One of them was an oil eating bacteria,it was developed to be surreptitiously (big word) introduced into the German controlled Romanian oil fields.

I am thinking now that the loss of the grid would merely catalyse a series of other events. There has been an increase in resistant bacteria lately. The logistics problems created by lack of grid, lack of communication, and other modern luxuries would facilitate an increase in these types of infections. There would be no way to manufactor the drugs, no way to test which germs are causing disease. Compound that with people diagnosing themselves and taking the wrong type of antibiotic, even more infections would result.

Actually this isn't really science fiction, I'm a microbiologist in a hospital and these dangers are very real. Bacteria are already capable of being resistant to what we throw at them, it's in their genome, just like the susceptability is. Bacteria (and other microorganisms) use substances to protect against competing strains of bacteria. They also swap dna by various methods, including phage and pili.

I have thought of the idea of extremophiles (bacteria that live in toxic conditions) somehow swapping dna with normal bacteria and aquiring their resistance. Extremophiles have thick capsules surrounding their cell walls, that's what enables them to withstand the conditions they live in. They are difficult to study because they cannot exist outside of those conditions.

If someone succeeded in growing them in the lab . . . well who knows what would happen.

Obviously the power grid thing is a tough one. It will take a lot of technical knowlege to write accurately. However, I remember reading in a Stephen King book, Bag of Bones, I believe, where he says he wants just enough information about a subject to lie convincingly. It was actually the main character of the story, but the character was a writer, so I figure its about the same thing. Good advise. Focus on the characters of the story, not how they turned on the power. It can be as easy as saying a few mechanics, engineers and electricians survived the apocalypse, worked together, and got the Power back on. This works especially well if your POV character/narrator doesn't know squat about power plants. He can say, "I don't know how they did it, but they figured out how to get the power back on. I just had my first hot shower in months and finally feel like a human being again!"

As far as the radio thing, short wave is your best bet. The can run off batteries, and can send a signal halfway around the world. The national broadcast could also be a relay of radio signals using CB radios. News is sent from one station (the main station) and then the information is relayed around the world. This could make for some interesting problems- kind of like playing the telephone game in kindergarden.