November 26, 2019
ELECTRIFY THIS
It’s self-evident that the best location for a wind farm is someplace with plenty of wind, and that solar arrays are best situated where they can catch a lot of rays. This often means places distinctly inhospitable to humans — gusty seas or blustery plains in the case of wind farms, the blazing desert for solar arrays. The electricity generated by solar and wind installations, though, 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 miles becomes only more important. For an answer, electrical engineers are increasingly looking at high-voltage direct current, or HVDC. DC grid technology has been around since Thomas Edison — but it still might be a key part of the electrical grid of the future.
Electrical superhighway: 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. Not long ago, 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. Power guru Colin Davidson talked 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.
CREATIVE FORCE
Claudia Meyer grew up in Switzerland surrounded not just by nature, but also designers and engineers — her father was an architect, and her uncle worked for the French power company Alstom. In 2008, when Meyer heard that Alstom was renovating an old factory in a Paris suburb, it was only natural that she’d approach the company with an idea: How about a little studio space? Today Alstom is a part of GE, and Meyer — working out of that old industrial site — derives inspiration from a constant stream of cast-off machine parts and other resources. A number of the furniture, sculpture and installation pieces she creates ended up on display at GE sites; this month and next, though, Meyer also has artwork on display at a couple of shows in Los Angeles.
Parts and labor: Meyer breathes new life into old and scrapped GE parts, such as refashioning turbine blades into tables and seats for the company’s lobbies. “I know today you call it ‘upcycling,’” she said, “but I have been doing that my whole life.” She also “upcycles” history — taking old negatives salvaged from GE equipment and industrial sites, for instance, and mounting them onto clear acrylic sheets in evocative patterns. While she’s enamored of the past, Meyer is also intrigued by the future. She was on hand this past summer when GE Aviation unveiled the GE9X, the world’s most powerful jet engine, at the Paris Air Show. The machine is a colossal feat of engineering, sure, but it’s also a gracefully designed work of art — as Meyer surely was able to appreciate.
Learn more here about Claudia Meyer’s marriage of art and industry, and the details of her LA shows.
GIVING THANKS
An iconic Thanksgiving artwork, Norman Rockwell’s 1943 “Freedom From Want” depicts a grateful family gathered around a humble dining table and outsized turkey. Two decades before that image graced the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell was commissioned by GE to complete a series of paintings promoting the company’s Mazda electric lamps. He wasn’t the only iconic American artist whose career intersected with the iconic American company — see also: Dr. Seuss — and if he’d made his Thanksgiving painting a couple decades later, Rockwell might’ve been able to incorporate a little more of the company’s tech into it. The couple in the midcentury Rockwell painting use an old-fashioned silver carving set, but in the 1960s GE introduced a tool whose descendants will surely come in handy this coming Thursday: the electric knife.
Slice of life: It was GE engineers, in fact, who were responsible for a crucial innovation of the electric carving knife. After finding that a single blade wasn’t giving them the desired slicing action, the engineers came up with the idea of two serrated reciprocating blades powered by a 120-volt electrical motor. These days GE is concerned with blades and innovation of a different magnitude: the Haliade-X 12 MW, the world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine, whose rotor blades are 107 meters long. And GE scientists and engineers still find time to put their own creative spins on the season, including molecular biologist Daniel Collins, who is part of a team that entered the World Championship Punkin Chunkin in past years. One year, they crafted a catapult that could hurl a pumpkin through the air at almost 500 miles per hour. It sent a pumpkin flying 3,636 feet — nearly two-thirds of a mile. A century after Rockwell embarked on his career, American ingenuity goes on unabated.
Learn more here about GE’s links to Thursday’s feast.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. A Touching Development
Friends could high-five each other from halfway around the world with a new “epidermal virtual reality” system developed by researchers at Northwestern University — their thin, soft, flexible patch wirelessly transmits the feeling of touch.
2. No Time To Waste
Doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have embarked on a trial that involves placing trauma patients in, essentially, suspended animation — which could buy critical cases crucial time while surgeons repair their wounds.
3. Chuckleheads
Knock knock: Computers turned out to be even better than people when it came to predicting whether human subjects would find a given joke funny.
Learn more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“These are slides of heavy machinery, and yet the finalized artwork makes you feel light — the whole point being to show and express beauty out of most unexpected materials.”
— Claudia Meyer, visual artist
Quote: GE Reports. Image: Getty Images.
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