Storms roaming around.

[ocelotl]

Even when up here in Mexico City we're somehow protected from direct impact from Hurricanes, the whole gulf basin is still Hurricane Alley, so we all still are in the path to receive rains from those storms. As I've heard that Ida is heading northeast and landing around New Orleans as Katrina did a few years ago, I checked both SMN and NOAA about them. It seems that Ida is going to follow the Appalachians northeast and getting heavy rains all over your areas... So, just keep safe and avoid taking clothes out to dry in the sun...

[yogi]

Ida is making a right turn and going to avoid us here in Missouri. The forecast for tomorrow, Monday, is for rain but nobody is expecting a monsoon quality downpour at this time. Ida is visiting New Oleans on the exact date that Katrina did. From what I have read Katrina hit at about 125 mph. Ida is up to 150 mph. One of the major catastrophes associated with this storm is hospitals in its path cannot evacuate COVID patients. I'll be watching my news feed to see how things develop.

[Kellemora]

We are getting Warnings of the storms path here in Knoxville, with a Peak Disaster expected around 8 pm Tomorrow.
They suggest staying indoors after 6:30 pm and until after 11 pm.
Tractor Trailers are instructed to park under shelter and not get caught on the highways, because they will blow over and tie up the roads for emergency traffic.

[yogi]

Thanks for the update, Gary. I saw the projected storm path headed your way and was wondering how bad it will be by the time it gets to you. I figured the storm would die out over land, and I suppose it did a little bit. But judging by the warnings issued for Knoxville Ida still has a lot of energy left - sustained winds 39-73 mph. I also figured you would be protected by the mountains. I guess it could be a lot worse if you were not uphill.

[Kellemora]

According to our local news announcers, they are expecting Ida to be the worst hurricane that traveled this far inland and to this area in several decades. Knoxville is usually missed, for the reason you pointed out, the lay of the mountains.
Severe flooding is expected in all the low lying areas and pathways where water can settle before soaking in.
I'm glad I'm on the North side of the foothill my house resides on, hi hi.
On the south side of this same foothill, named Rodgers Ridge, they get the brunt of a storm that comes down their valley.
And of course one small foothill to our north is where the River runs through Knoxville, and they get hit pretty good down there too. But I doubt TVA would ever allow the water levels on Ft. Louden Lake to change more than 1/4 inch up or down, hi hi.

[yogi]

I'm reading stories that say Ida is the worst ever to hit New Orleans. I've also read where it's the most severe ever recorded over land. I guess you are in somewhat of a fortunate location. When I checked the weather map a few minutes ago the eye of Ida was right over your back yard. LOL Fortunately it seems to be breaking up and dispersing over a large area so that while there may be a lot of rain it's not looking to be that sever or destructive. Then again, if I don't see you here tomorrow, I'll know what happened.

[ocelotl]

Gary, hope you keep safe. Wandering around the southwest of Knox county, those hills, those trees (to me they seem oaks and redwood) , and that 115 kV transmission line seem to be OK, yet that road may be converted to the drainage stream at that particular point... Hope that if there's an energy cut somewhere along your area is promptly repaired.

* Edit *

I have to stand corrected. It seems to be a 69 kV line, according to the EIA interactive maps.

https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php

[yogi]

Juan
Thanks for the link to the energy maps. I didn't know such a service existed and spent almost an hour exploring the site. It is one of the best constructed web sites I've seen lately. The interactive maps are truly amazing as far as functionality. The legend filters have an enormous amount of information behind them. It makes me wonder how all this data was compiled.

[Kellemora]

Wow, that is an amazing map you posted. I went to the link, found my house, and followed it around my area.
It shows a lot of data, even showed the name of the mountain aka foothill we are on. Rodgers Ridge.
I have a Circuit Area Map given to me by the electric company that shows the area our feed covers.
But no detail on the wires or where they are fed from.
I spent a few hours one day using Google Maps where I could zoom in tight, and followed the wires from my house to our local substation, but from there I wasn't sure where the power came in from.
That is until a pole was knocked down and we were without power for 3 days.
So I tracked from that pole back to the substation. But it appears that pole is fed from the substation not to the substation.
So I never did figure out where the power actually comes from. Heck it could be coming from the UT natural gas steam plant.

We got one heck of a lot of rain from Ida so far, and expect more tonight.
It wasn't as bad as the newsmen predicted it would be, we never lost power this time, yet.
Knocking on simulated wood grain pressboard here, hi hi.

[yogi]

A agree that the EIA map is extraordinary in many regards. It deals with energy from several sources, not only electricity. I could not tell how current the information is, or if it is rendered in real time. But the granularity is astounding. I was looking at wild fires and discovered there is one in Illinois just across the river. It's only an area about a half mile square which is something I never expected to see on a map like this. I also looked at solar panel sources for electricity and where they are located. The one here in O'Fallon is a rarity. There are no other such sources for hundreds of miles in any direction. Like you, Gary, I found my house and located the high tension wires that cross the landscape about a half mile from here. They carry 340 KV of electricity which was revealed in a fly out when I clicked on the diagram for the wires. I had no idea the voltage on those towers was that high.

I'm glad to see that you have not floated down the hill in a mudslide. I guess you did get a lot of rain because the center of the storm literally passed right over you. Can you imagine how much worse it was when the same thing happened to New Orleans? I can't.

[ocelotl]

Yep, that EIA map is extraordinary. I also found a map that plots all energy facilities that cover the whole of North America, meaning just the US, Canada and México, and although it's not as extensive, it's quite informative.

http://gaia.inegi.org.mx/mdm6na/

[yogi]

You have a wealth of information to share, Juan. the INEGI map is pretty good, but not like the first one you posted. Unfortunately, this website for some reason cannot load the satellite view from Google but still awesome nonetheless.

[Kellemora]

Although we did get a lot of rain, it seems Ida petered out fairly quick.
We had high winds before it got here, then after it passed over, it cleared up to partly cloudy.
But it sure did bring the temperature here down to the mid to lower 60s which is odd for here.

[yogi]

I'm very happy to learn that your neck of the woods was spared from the same kind of chaos that the folks in New York and New Jersey had to deal with. If ida slowed down over Tennessee, it seemed to have picked up quite a bit of energy by the time it go to the east coast. The good news is that New Orleans didn't drown. Their levees held up after their reconstruction following Katrina. Kudos to the Army Corps of Engineers.

[Kellemora]

Yes, the valley below the foothill I live on didn't get much damage, but other areas of our city further north, got a heck of a whippin'.
Trees down, with torrential downpours caused a lot of flooded areas, and naturally the power was out.

I did learn something from our local news on Wednesday night.
The University of Tennessee has their own natural gas steam plant, and they added two new turbines to it last summer, mainly because they've added so many new buildings.
Apparently these new turbines put out much more power than their older turbine designs, and they have connected their excess output to KUB's electrical distribution to the Cherokee and South Knoxville feed. They were careful not to say they were feeding the grid, because we technically have no grid here, hi hi.

I also learned a bit more from listening to this broadcast.
Turbines have to spin at a fixed speed to ensure the line voltage is constant.
Like a car in a way, the more load on the car, or the steeper the hill, the more fuel it takes to maintain a steady speed.
Essentially, there is no such thing as unused electrical power, sorta.
When a load is placed on the turbine, the greater the load, the more fuel it needs to maintain the fixed speed.
But like a car is still burning fuel when sitting at a stop sign, even though it is not moving the car forward.
A turbine at idle is still using fuel to keep it spinning, so in that case, the is wasted fuel if nothing is being drawn from the turbine.

[yogi]

Just about every engine I can think of has a constant load just to keep the mechanisms rotating. If nothing else, there is friction that must be overcome in order to keep things humming. Some of that mechanical resistance comes from the current flow through the generator coils. Those magnetic lines of force create resistance and thus slows down the rotation speed. When that happens more fuel is needed to keep the speed constant. Putting a load on the line draws even more current, and thus uses more fuel.

Watts have an equivalent horsepower rating. Like the turbine generator the car engine has intrinsic internal resistance that must be overcome even when idling. It takes a certain amount of horsepower (work) to keep that engine turning. Moving an automobile loads the engine down in the sense that it takes a certain amount of horsepower to move a given weight a specific distance. That increased horsepower is obtained by feeding the engine more fuel.

Just for an FYI, a gasoline engine that develops 100 horsepower is the equivalent of 74.5 kilowatts. That kind of makes me wonder from where all those electric cars are getting that kind of power.

[ocelotl]

The definition of a horsepower that took place during the development of the steam engine in the late 1700's, was purposely understated. The idea was to make steam engines look more powerful than what they really were. A Draft horse can generate around 15 horsepower...

https://horsyplanet.com/how-much-horse- ... orse-have/

On the other side, in battery powered electric circuits, the battery charge is measured in Watts-Hour, meaning the amount of work that can be exerted per unit of time. Most batteries are arrangements of individual cells, thus an AA, AAA, C or D battery can be considered an individual cell, and most circuitry uses more than one cell. Optimal charge cell voltage, as well as optimal cell stored power depends on the cell chemistry and construction. Most modern arrangements use Lithium Ion cells interconnected with nickel strips or specially designed plates that must be arc welded to the individual cells according to the designed arrangement in order to assemble the battery. To protect each arrangement, the cell separation and isolation has to be taken into account so that there's some safety inherent on the assembly. There are companies that have their specially made plates that are welded to individual cells by individual wires, so that each cell within the battery has a fuse protecting the full battery from the fault of an individual cell.

Sorry I got carried away from what I was doing at my last job...

I'm very happy to learn that your neck of the woods was spared from the same kind of chaos that the folks in New York and New Jersey had to deal with. If Ida slowed down over Tennessee, it seemed to have picked up quite a bit of energy by the time it go to the east coast. The good news is that New Orleans didn't drown. Their levees held up after their reconstruction following Katrina. Kudos to the Army Corps of Engineers.

It's always good to be on the high ground, the damages are equally terrible and have to be repaired and recovered, but the problem is worse in the low areas, since floods have to be pumped out in order to repair the damages and that takes more time. This time the damage recovery from Grace in Northern Veracruz, and Nora in the Pacific coast is still quite burdening to be thinking on implementing a DNIII plan for New Orleans as happened after Katrina.

[yogi]

The planning behind the new levee system in New Orleans was calculated to withstand an event that occurs only 1% of the time. Katrina was one of those 100 year events that seem to be happening more often these days. I know nothing about civil engineering, but I read that the rebuilding of the levees was done with a very conservative statistical analysis that makes the new levees exceptionally durable; maybe something like a 500 year flood plan. The number of factors to consider are something only an engineer could understand fully. LOL

The definition of horsepower is very specific and well known in the realm of physics. It involves calories, joules, weights, time, and distances. As the linked article points out any biological horse can be more or less powerful so that something more precise had to be invented for engineering work. The numbers I quoted seem astoundingly large to me, but apparently there is nothing unusual about them in the world of science. At first thought it seems hard to believe that batteries can store enough energy to move an automobile, but I guess it all works out with the math.

And, Juan, no apology is necessary for getting carried away with the technical information. I do it myself and love to read what other people know.

[Kellemora]

FWIW: A car engine rated at 350 horsepower is really only 35 to 45 horsepower, or at least that is what the title says, hi hi.

How they measure horsepower has always been confusing to me. But I think it is the amount of energy required to lift 1 pound 1 foot. Could be 10 or 100 pounds 1 foot. I just don't remember anymore.

But as Oceloti stated, a draft horse (the animal) is like 10 to 15 horsepower, hi hi.

Don't get me going on Levee's. I've seen 150 year old houses that stood through many floods without problems, until they built a levee, and when it broke the onrush of water washed the houses away.

The thing about a levee is, you cannot put 50 trillion gallons of water into a 50 billion gallon bucket, it just won't work.
Water that would normally spread out safely over 1000 acres without damage to structures, once held back by a levee, it has to go somewhere else. That's' all and good, flood the folks on the other side of the river.
But then the folks on the other side of the river build a levee twice as high as yours so once again you get flooded on your side of the river. And/or the levee breaks and destroys everything in the waters path like the tsunami it is.

[yogi]

The levees around New Orleans are the sole reason that city exists. New Orleans is between 6 and 20 feet BELOW sea level. Without the levees, New Orleans would be a bay of sea water and not a major city. Having said that, i have often wondered why the people of New Orleans want to live there to begin with. As the sea levels rise even those levees around New Orleans will not be enough and everybody knows it. I can see people becoming sentimentally attached to a geographic area in which they grew up. But the logic behind building a city below sea level and on the coast escapes me.

And, the definition of horsepower is ...

Horsepower, the common unit of power; i.e., the rate at which work is done. In the British Imperial System, one horsepower equals 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute—that is, the power necessary to lift a total mass of 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute.

Thinking about draft horses I REALLY don't see how that definition applies. It says a 14 HP horse can theoretically lift 462,000 lbs. And, as long as we are getting into physics formulas, apparently 15cc displacement would equal 1 HP in a car engine. I am guessing that is how the DMV calculates their HP number. How GM comes up with their numbers is smoke and mirrors.

Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here you go with the exact details:

Formula for calculating horsepower

horsePOWER.JPG (14.72 KiB) Viewed 972 times