July 30, 2019
ELECTRIFY THIS
Spoiler alert: The best location for a wind farm is someplace with lots of wind — and often that means someplace distinctly inhospitable to humans, like the gusty seas or blustery plains. Large solar installations, meanwhile, are right at home in the blazing desert. But the electricity generated by solar and wind installations is needed where the people are — often hundreds of miles away, say, in a city. As the world transitions to greater and greater shares of renewable energy, the question of how to transport those electrons across the empty miles becomes only more important, joining a number of other challenges facing electrical engineers. In response, they’re increasingly looking at high-voltage direct current, or HVDC. Hasn't DC grid technology been around since Thomas Edison? Well, sure. But it still might be a key part of the electrical grid of the future.
Take that: Modern HVDC links can transmit three times as much power over the same transmission line corridor as alternating current, which is how most electricity today is transported between generation stations and the wall sockets in our homes. (Why is AC predominant? It’s a long story.) In May, GE Reports visited Stafford, a town in the British Midlands where GE Renewable Energy's Grid Solutions unit designs, tests and builds some of the most advanced HVDC systems. While there, we caught up with power guru Colin Davidson to talk us through the tech — and its unique abilities to help grid operators accommodate the changing energy mix. “HVDC is really good at integrating wind and solar power into the grid,” Davidson said. “There is now so much renewable energy in the U.K., we recently had an entire week without coal generation, which was a first.”
Davidson has worked on HVDC technology for more than 30 years — and he’s got a lot to say on the subject. Read more here.
A RENEWABLE FEAST
When Pierre Marx sat down recently to talk duck and salmon with GE Reports, it wasn’t because he was promoting the specials at Chez Pierre. The general manager for GE Renewable Energy’s hydropower business in North America, Marx was discussing challenges facing the hydropower industry today. The infamous “duck curve,” for instance, describes an energy pattern in places that, like California, are rich in solar energy: When the sun goes down, the load on the state’s other power assets rises sharply, like the neck of a duck. Hydropower can meet some of the demand, but rapidly ramping up puts a strain on aging plants. That’s where GE Renewable Energy comes in: The business is gathering data to help optimize plant operations and avoid costly unplanned outages. Plants are also facing stricter environmental regulations governing how they operate — and that’s where the salmon comes in.
Lox and dam: “We’re building fish-friendly hydropower turbines that prevent the injury and death of migratory fish caused by either passage through the turbines,” Marx said. Salmon and other fish flopping their way through typical turbines often get stunned by impact with the blades, rendering them vulnerable to predation by animals such as birds. Marx’s business is designing special blades to boost survival rates for the fish, as well as technology that ensures the water they’re swimming in has enough oxygen. “It’s great news for the fish because maintaining a high level of oxygen means good living conditions for all aquatic wildlife,” Marx said. “But it also means that our customers can operate plants that are technically efficient and environmentally friendly.”
Learn more here about how GE is helping hydropower plants adjust to a whole new way of working.
ULTRASOUND EFFECTS
What if you could design a treatment as effective as a drug, but with less risk of potential side effects? That goal has animated the field of bioelectronic medicine, which combines elements of neuroscience, molecular biology and bioengineering to tap into the human nervous system to treat disease and injury without pharmaceuticals. So far, that work has mostly involved exposing nerves to small electrical currents, delivered via implanted electrode — which can act on nerve linings to create a beneficial chain reaction in the cell. But at GE Research, scientists are investigating yet another avenue, less invasive than implants: ultrasound.
Sounds promising! Like electrical currents, the sound waves from ultrasound exert pressure on nerve cell receptors, and could hold promise as a means of treatment for sepsis and diabetes. And because they’re used so much in medicine already — to give parents a peek at their gestating baby, for instance — ultrasounds have a track record of safety. In tests on pre-clinical models, a team from GE Research, collaborating with scientists from the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, used ultrasound to achieve effects similar to drugs on the spleen and liver — with no side effects or surgery. The team published a paper on their work earlier this year in Nature Communications. “Instead of having to take a bunch of pills, you might not need any drugs,” said Victoria Cotero, a molecular biologist at GE Research. “Or maybe you take fewer drugs at lower doses, which is easier on the body. You might even be able to administer the ultrasound yourself with a home device.”
Read more here about the possibilities of ultrasound treatment. And take a deeper dive into the concepts being cooked up by Cotero and her colleagues by following GE on social media. Over the last week, the company's Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts have been taken over by GE Research scientists offering a peek into the fascinating — and potentially world-changing — work they're doing.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Bacterial Assassins
Bacteriophages — viruses that kill bacteria — are the key ingredient in a new gel created by researchers at Ontario’s McMaster University, who say it could be used to coat surgical implants, assist in environmental cleanup or serve as a “sterile growth scaffold for human tissue.”
2. Spare Throat
A new “artificial throat,” created by scientists at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, adheres to the neck like a temporary tattoo; it can measure the movement of muscles and convert it to sound for people who’ve lost the ability to speak.
3. Blood Simple
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a quick test for sepsis, an immune system reaction to infection that can lead to organ failure and death. Requiring just a prick of the finger, the test takes only 25 minutes to identify biomarkers of sepsis in the blood.
Read more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“You never know all there’s to know about HVDC. That’s the reason you get people like me who’ve blundered into this industry by accident and stayed in it.”
— Colin Davidson, consulting engineer of R&D systems engineering, GE Renewable Energy’s Grid Solutions
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.
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